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Contradictory Woolf
Derek Ryan
Stella Bolaki
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Contradictory Woolf
Selected Papers from the
Twenty-First Annual International
Conference on Virginia Woolf
Contradictory Woolf
Selected Papers from the
Twenty-First Annual International
Conference on Virginia Woolf
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, Scotland
9-12 June 2011
Edited by Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki
CLEMSON UNIVERSITY
DIGITAL PRESS
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including The South Carolina Review and its themed series “Virginia Woolf International,”
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Copyright 2012 by Clemson University
ISBN: 978-0-9835339-5-5
CLEMSON UNIVERSITY
DIGITAL PRESS
Published by Clemson University Digital Press at the Center for Electronic and Digital
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The painting on the back cover is by Australian artist Suzanne Bellamy, entitledWoolf and
the Chaucer Horse , 2011, oil on canvas; 13 ft. by 6 ft., originally created as a set canvas for
the Glasgow Pageant production, International Virginia Woolf Conference, 2011.
The Contradictory Woolf image (front cover & frontispiece) was designed for this conference by the Scottish artist Caroline McNairn (1955-2011).
iv
Table of Contents
Jane Goldman • Preface ................................................................................................vii
Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki • Introduction to Contradictory Woolf ................................ix
Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................xv
List of Abbreviations ...................................................................................................xvi
Judith Allen • “But…I had said ‘but’ too often.” Why “but”? ............................................ 1
Michael H. Whitworth • Woolf, Context, and Contradiction ......................................... 11
Patricia Waugh • “Did I not banish the soul?” Thinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise ............... 23
Suzanne Bellamy • “The Play’s The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself.” Prologue,
Performance and Painting. A Multimedia Exploration of Woolf ’s Work in the
Late 1930’s and Her Vision of Prehistory ................................................................ 43
Marina Warner • Report to the Memoir Club: Scenes from a Colonial Childhood ............ 57
Lois J. Gilmore • “But somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry”: Bloomsbury and the
Contradictions of African Art ................................................................................. 66
Maggie Humm • Contradictions in Autobiography: Virginia Woolf ’s Writings on Art ...... 74
Amber K. Regis • “But something betwixt and between”: Roger Fry and the
Contradictions of Biography ................................................................................... 82
Oren Goldschmidt • “Can ‘I’ become ‘we’?”: Addressing Community in The Years
and Three Guineas ............................................................................................... 88
Laci Mattison • Woolf ’s Un/Folding(s): The Artist and the Event of the Neo-Baroque ....... 96
Angeliki Spiropoulou • Woolf ’s Contradictory Thinking .............................................. 101
Sowon S. Park • The Feeling of Knowing in Mrs. Dalloway: Neuroscience and Woolf ........108
Stella Bolaki • “When the lights of health go down”: Virginia Woolf ’s Aesthetics and
Contemporary Illness Narratives ........................................................................... 115
Janet Winston • Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns: Dancing To The Lighthouse .............. 122
Claire Nicholson • But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion…: Virginia
Woolf, Clothing and Contradiction ....................................................................... 129
Vara S. Neverow • Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in A Room of
One’s Own: The Truth and Consequences of Unintended Pregnancies an
Calculated Cross-Dressing .................................................................................... 134
Katharine Swarbrick • Lacanian Orlando .................................................................. 142
Jeanne Dubino • The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and Flush .......................... 150
Derek Ryan • From Spaniel Club to Animalous Society: Virginia Woolf ’s Flush ............. 158
Sam Wiseman • Ecology, Identity, and Eschatology: Crossing the Country and the
City in Woolf ....................................................................................................... 166
Diane F. Gillespie • “Please Help Me!” Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth
Press ................................................................................................................... 173
Madelyn Detloff • “Am I a Snob?” Well, Sort of: Socialism, Advocacy, and Disgust
in Woolf ’s Economic Writing ................................................................................ 181
Kathryn Simpson • “Come buy, come buy”: Woolf’s Contradictory Relationship to the
Marketplace..............................................................................................................186
Makiko Minow-Pinkney • Virginia Woolf and December 1910: The Question of the
Fourth Dimension ....................................................................................................194
v
Jocelyn Rodal • Virginia Woolf on Mathematics: Signifying Opposition ........................ 202
Amanda Golden • “A Brief Note in the Margin:” Virginia Woolf and Annotating.......... 209
Gill Lowe • “Observe, Observe Perpetually,” Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the
“Patron au Dedans” ............................................................................................ 215
Kristin Czarnecki • Who’s Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, “Nurse Lugton’s
Golden Thimble”, and the Anxiety of Authorship ................................................... 222
Claire Davison • Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron ........................................ 229
Rebecca DeWald • “A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”: Jorge Luis Borge’s
Translation of Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando ............................................................... 243
Leslie Kathleen Hankins • “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life”: Travel Films
“projected into the shape of Orlando”.........................................................................250
John Coyle • Travesty in Woolf and Proust................................................................... 259
Wayne K. Chapman • Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of “Spilt Milk”............................. 265
Sara Sullam • Figures of Contradiction: Virginia Woolf ’s Rhetoric of Genres ................... 271
Ian Blyth • Do Not Feed the Birds: Night and Day and the Defence of the Realm Act ........278
Karen L. Levenback • Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf: “A Chapter on the
Future” ............................................................................................................... 285
Cecil Woolf • Duncan Grant...................................................................................... 291
Notes on Contributors .............................................................................................. 294
Conference Program.................................................................................................. 299
vi
Preface
by Jane Goldman
B
ut you may say “Why Contradictory Woolf? Why Glasgow?” Why not? For one
thing, Contradictory Woolf, the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (but the first ever to be held in Scotland) opened the delicious opportunity for our assembling Woolf scholars to say “But” in the Bute Hall, that magnificent
Victorian chamber of intellect and scholarly debate at the heart of the neo-gothic edifice,
the Gilbert Scott Building, the centrepiece of the University of Glasgow, replete with
quads, lawns and gravel. But Woolf scholars take happy note: there is no law of trespass in
Scotland! And how splendid to have the rising and setting sun shining through the Bute
Hall’s stunningly beautiful stained glass windows, in which are depicted numerous figures, figures which, as the University website has it, “represent a wide range of characters
and subjects including writers, philosophers, scientists, theologians, saints, monarchs and
women [sic].” (Here we may say but doesn’t and sometimes mean but?) The women figures
in the eastern windows are personifications of seasons and virtues and other abstractions;
the men figures in the western are portraits of great men such as Plato, Chaucer, Thomas
Carlyle, et al. But there is one window in the Bute Hall commemorating three women
pioneers of Scottish university education, Jessie Campbell, Isabella Elder, and Janet Galloway, and it is pleasing to note that there are still blank panes awaiting stains…How
gratifying to have our Principal remind us in his welcome speech that “but” in Scotland
is also an affirmation, but! But how fabulous, too, to have on display, for the duration of
the conference at least, Suzanne Bellamy’s superb pageant painting depicting Woolf on
Chaucer’s horse with the sun streaming through its rich colours, its golden touches gleaming, while the voices in the Bute Hall for four days sang out their buts and many other
wise and contradictory words too.
Those voices (and I have space only to mention the five keynotes and must pass over
the plenary panels on bi, queer, war, and class as well as the numerous parallel panels
held in the Bute) included that of Judith Allen, author of an inspirational “but” paper
on Woolf, and now of the book Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language published by
Edinburgh University Press (2010). Teasing out the many valences of Woolf ’s but in A
Room of One’s Own, Judith at one point reeled in the submerged pun on but meaning fish,
thereby enriching still more the contradictoriness of Woolfian thought (already figured in
that work as fish). Michael Whitworth, reporting on the contradictory terrain between
text and context negotiated by scholarly editors of Woolf ’s writing (he is editing, for the
new Cambridge edition, Woolf ’s Night and Day, contradictory to the core and from the
very title) butted valiantly and brilliantly in recognition of Woolf ’s utterly unconventional
and demanding use of allusion and intertext, observations that fuelled his dialogue with
the novelist Kirsty Gunn whose plenary reading from her stunning forthcoming novel,
The Big Music, followed his paper, and buts came thick and fast. But (…have I said “but”
too often?) it was becoming clearer with every contradictory voice that Woolf ’s but is no
simple gainsaying device—argumentative yes, but dialogical, multivalent, and proliferating, and certainly not crudely reducible to the Cartesian binary—as explored by Pat
Waugh in her utterly spell-binding paper on Woolf ’s engagement with concepts of the
vii
soul, consciousness and the extended mind. But dialogical, multivalent, and proliferating
are terms that only begin to do justice to Suzanne Bellamy’s keynote pageant-play, her
line of flight out of Between the Acts, and her illuminating prefatory words, an exhilarating contradictory Woolfian event of performative, participatory scholarship that raised
the buts to the very vaults of the Bute Hall at noon on the Saturday. But in the evening
the same hall took on more intimate mood and focus as we listened intently to Marina
Warner’s compelling “Report to the Memoir Club” reflecting on the “fierce contrariness”
of the politics of Woolf ’s but in view of the patriarchy in public and private—“the scorn
of official pomp, and her daughterly ambivalence towards her father”—and opening to
a reading of work-in-progress drawing on Marina’s colonial childhood in Cairo, an eloquent, Woolfian line of flight through fact and fiction that brought new light to the Bute
Hall.
But how lovely, I thought, as we filed out for the bus that was waiting to take us to
dine, how serendipitous that the artist, and friend, Caroline McNairn, whom I commissioned to design the Contradictory Woolf conference logo and poster (and now the image
on the front cover of this volume), was the person who first introduced me to the work of
Marina Warner, when she took me to a gallery in Scotland in 1987 to hear her speak on
Nancy Spero’s goddess works…how she would have chuckled too to learn that Woolf ’s
but may be a pun on fish…but Caroline had given us Woolf with a dog…but perhaps
she and perhaps Woolf knew that but in Spanish is pero which puns on perro meaning
dog…But here the three dots mark the three steps we climbed to board the bus which was
taking us to dine, and toast Woolf with the Baillie John McLaughlin, at a civic reception
in the marbled opulence of Glasgow City Chambers which Leonard Woolf and Virginia
Woolf once visited in 1913 and where our speaker over dinner was to be Cecil Woolf, and
we had a splendid evening but!

Thank you to everyone who supported, attended and participated in Contradictory
Woolf. And very special thanks to Stella Bolaki and Derek (“I am William”) Ryan for
selecting and editing these wonderfully contradictory papers. No, but!
Jane Goldman
University of Glasgow
March 2012
viii
Introduction
by Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki
I
n her 1939 essay “Reviewing,” published as one of the Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets,
Virginia Woolf suggests that the growing trade in reviews—“those few words devoted
to ‘why I like or dislike this book’” (E6 204)—meant that authors in the twentieth
century were less sure than ever of the true opinion of their writing, and that readers were
less likely to go out and buy a particular novel or collection of poetry based on them: “The
clash of completely contradictory opinions cancel each other out” (E6 198). In her letters
and diaries Woolf also expresses a frustration with the many “contradictory” reviews of her
books, leading to uncertainty on her part about her own critical reception (see for example
L2 578, L2 587, L6 116). But contradicting the view that one contradiction negates another, the very “contradictory Woolf ” explored by independent scholars, writers, artists,
dramatists, “common readers,” and academics from around the globe (some of whom are
also, indeed, reviewers) at the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf
offered a range of fascinating new approaches to, and understandings of, Woolf ’s writings. Whether opposing, questioning, interrupting or “butting,” the rich variety of essays
selected for this volume represent the view shared by so many of the speakers in Glasgow
that Woolf ’s writing continually refuses settled readings or closed meanings, revealing
and reveling precisely in its potential or actual, subtle or forceful, contradictions. How
appropriate then that the dialogue was opened by the call for papers which, in honor of
the first sentence of A Room of One’s Own (1929), invited participants to make ample use
the word “but” at in their presentation!
How appropriate, too, that the first essay in this collection is Judith Allen’s thoughtprovoking exposition of the repeated difference of Woolf ’s “But,” as well as her parentheses and ellipses, in A Room of One’s Own, and of key terms in Three Guineas (1938)
including the word “word” itself. In this first of five plenary addresses, all included in this
collection, Allen draws on insights by Mikhail Bakhtin, Hayden White, and Gilles Deleuze in order to focus on the interaction between text and context, illuminating the complicated and contradictory celebration of words in Woolf ’s writing, and the relationship
between her “multifaceted” language and her continually multiplying readers. Michael
Whitworth’s plenary paper is also concerned with context, and he considers the stakes
involved in putting aside old copies of Woolf ’s texts for the several annotated editions,
reflecting on his own experience of editing Night and Day (1919) for the new Cambridge
UP edition of Woolf ’s writings, as well as outlining key critical strands in Woolf scholarship which relate to the question of annotation. Stressing the importance of the reader
as “maker of meaning,” Whitworth argues that the job of annotator and critic is to be
rigorous in the process of contextualization, but not to mistake such rigor with providing a definitive context. Our readings of Woolf are always enriched, Whitworth argues,
by access to further contextual information, even and especially when this information is
potentially contradictory. In her essay Patricia Waugh explores the contradictory notion
of an “embodied soul” and “grounded” thought in Woolf ’s writing, and considers concepts of consciousness and the extended mind. Waugh expertly charts the ways in which
Woolf, in her novels and essays, challenges Cartesian dualism and reconceptualises the
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soul “in the terms of the vocabulary of ‘nerves’ rather than spirit,” a soul that is “bodily,
nervy, gossipy, easily bruised and touchy.” Suzanne Bellamy takes us from plenary paper
to plenary pageant, and her shimmering script, first performed in Glasgow’s Bute Hall,
is reproduced here in full, along with an account of how her pageant was created. Bellamy’s accompanying painting, “Woolf and the Chaucer Horse,” was stunningly present
throughout the conference, and she has kindly agreed for it to be reproduced on the back
cover of this book. Further creative affinities with Woolf are evident in Marina Warner’s
plenary address which focuses on “contrariness” with respect to authority, class and the
British Empire, and which brings Woolf into conversation with Voltaire. Warner discusses
the background to her work-in-progress, provisionally titled Inventory of a Life Mislaid,
and treats us to some sparkling paragraphs from it. Taken together, the ideas, contradictions, and contexts opened up by these five plenary addresses reverberate through the
other essays contained in this volume.
Contradictions in Woolf ’s relationship to art and auto/biography within the context
of Bloomsbury are brought to the fore in essays by Lois Gilmore, Maggie Humm, and
Amber Regis. Gilmore focuses on Bloomsbury’s relationship to the African art that was
brought to England by that “contradictory and catalytic figure” Roger Fry, and that was
“by nature contradictory when de-contextualized and viewed from within Western culture.” Focusing in particular on the responses of Fry, Woolf and Clive Bell to the 1920 exhibition of African objects at the Chelsea Book Club, Gilmore demonstrates “the nuanced
contradictions about African material culture” circulating in Bloomsbury. Humm discusses Woolf ’s accounts of Vanessa Bell’s art in autobiographical writings including “Reminiscences” (1976), and in her “Foreword to Recent Paintings of Vanessa Bell” (1930), arguing
that these do not only provide representations of her sister’s art, but that “Woolf gains a
self-presence” by experiencing Bell’s art “as a fabric of sensations, activating Woolf ’s ‘being.’” The contradictions involved in writing Roger Fry (1940) provides the focus of Regis’s
paper, which shows how Woolf ’s view of biography becomes increasingly contradictory
from “The New Biography” (1927) to “The Art of Biography” (1939).
The focus on Bloomsbury also includes further consideration of Woolf and the philosophy of the Cambridge Apostles. Oren Goldschmidt contrasts Woolf ’s view of the
complex negotiation between personal relationships and socio-political community with
G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica. Woolf ’s disagreements with Moore, and her metaphorical
and syntactical play, help her “to imagine functional forms of community” which are most
importantly explored in The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938). Woolf is placed in
dialogue with Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of the “event” and Deleuze’s concept of
the “fold” in Laci Mattison’s reading of To the Lighthouse (1927). Mattison argues that in
Woolf ’s writing we find examples of “non-dialectical un/folding(s) of the neo-Baroque,”
which Deleuze discusses via Whitehead, and where contradiction stands not so much for
“notes of dissonance, but as creative, vital moments” where “order and art continually
de- and re-compose.” In contrast to this, and extending Woolf ’s “contradictory thinking” further beyond Cambridge philosophy, Angeliki Spiropoulou claims that Woolf ’s
thought is resolutely “dialectical,” and calls on a range of essays including “How it Strikes
a Contemporary” (1923) and “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925) as illustrative of Woolf
working through “oppositions between the classics and the moderns, the present and the
past, continuity and change.”
x
The relationship between mind and body continues to be an important area of exploration for Woolf scholars. Complementing Patricia Waugh’s plenary, Sowon Park asks
how the body and mind can meet across disciplinary divides between cognitive science
and literature. Taking issue with psycholinguist and cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker’s dismissal of Woolf ’s modernism, and drawing parallels between the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and Woolf ’s model of mind, Park asserts that whilst thinking
and feeling “may seem like contradictory cognitive processes” they are “reshaped into a
continuum of ‘feeling of knowing’ in Woolf.” Park makes brief reference to “On Being
Ill” (1926) as an example of Woolf writing about “mind depending upon flesh,” and
Stella Bolaki’s essay explores Woolf ’s contradictory discussion of mind and body in this
essay more fully. Bolaki points out the contradictions in Hilary Mantel’s recent reading
of Woolf ’s essay which repeats the clichéd criticism of Woolf as an aesthete while at the
same time continuing aspects of her aesthetic project. The legacy of “On Being Ill” is not
so much that it gives us access to Woolf ’s personal endurance through illness but that it
provides contemporary narratives of illness with a workable model of “translating pain
and raw sensation into verbal form.” From mind and body to thought and movement,
Janet Winston offers a kinetic reading of To the Lighthouse inspired by dance. Movement,
Winston writes, occurs throughout Woolf ’s novel “not only as something observed or
heard but also as something felt within the body,” so that even when a character like
Mrs Ramsay is stationed in a chair “her mental processes are strikingly embodied and
frequently in motion.”
Clothes, bodily pleasure and sexuality are discussed by several essays in the volume.
Claire Nicholson concentrates on Woolf ’s relationship to clothing and fashion, arguing
that “Woolf ’s perception of dress is not tailored to fit the neutral tones of ambivalence,
but is more properly suited to the bolder lines of contradiction.” Woolf ’s observations of
dress are “subtle and suffused with meaning,” but Nicholson also suggests Woolf knew
“how to indulge in sartorial pleasure, in fabric, as well as in fiction.” In her discussion of
the four Marys in A Room of One’s Own, Vara Neverow makes the case for reading the
historical Dr. George Hamilton, born Mary Hamilton, as one of the “unmentioned Mary
Hamiltons who haunt” Woolf ’s text. Whilst scholars tend to focus on the old Scottish
Ballad which was narrated by Mary Hamilton, Woolf, Neverow suggests, may have also
been influenced by Henry Fielding’s fictionalised 1746 pamphlet, The Female Husband,
in which this lesbian cross-dressing Mary Hamilton was the protagonist. Katharine Swarbrick focuses on sexuality and desire in her Lacanian reading of Woolf ’s Orlando (1928)
and Jacqueline Harpman’s 1996 novel Orlanda. Clarifying some key Lacanian concepts,
including jouissance, and countering common misuses of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory,
Swarbrick seeks to avoid “the reductive impulse to characterize masculine and feminine as
phallic/not phallic” and to complicate “attempts to see the homosexual and heterosexual
as pitted against each other.”
The relationship between human and animal, culture and nature, is of growing interest to Woolf scholars. Noting that Flush (1933) is populated by “a menagerie of cats and
lions and tigers, partridges and parrots and rooks, elephants and fish and fox, black beetles
and blue bottles, hares and fleas, and dogs,” Jeanne Dubino highlights the interconnections between species, and considers the “coevolutionary dimensions” in Woolf ’s fictional
biography. Continuing the focus on Flush, Derek Ryan brings Woolf ’s canine modernist
xi
aesthetics into dialogue with Donna Haraway’s “companion species” and Deleuze and
Guattari’s “becoming-animal.” Grounded in ordinary, domestic relations, but also reconceptualising species boundaries, Woolf creates an “open, entangled zone of human and
animal.” The crossings between nature and culture are traversed in Sam Wiseman’s essay
which focuses on “affinities and interconnections that exist between the rural and urban
spheres.” Wiseman discusses passages from Orlando, Between the Acts (1941) and “Street
Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927) in order to highlight the “modernist cosmopolitan experience” portrayed in Woolf ’s writing.
Several essays collected here explore Woolf ’s contradictory approach to social behavior and class (a theme also discussed at the conference by David Bradshaw and Laura
Marcus in the closing plenary panel “Class Contradictions”). Diane Gillespie pairs Three
Guineas with Viola Tree’s Can I Help You?, published by the Hogarth Press in 1937, in
her consideration of “rules of etiquette.” Although Woolf ’s writing has a much broader
intellectual scope, Gillespie suggests that Tree’s “personal, humorous touch” manages to
undermine “hierarchical rituals.” Discussing class and snobbery, Madelyn Detloff seeks to
account for that “irritating ‘contradictory’ Woolf who displays simultaneously class bias
and an acute understanding of the links between ideology, education, and material wherewithal.” Woolf ’s “apparent contradictoriness” where class is concerned might be the result,
Detloff argues, of an ethical distancing rather than a straightforward elitism. Kathryn
Simpson turns to Woolf ’s contradictory relationship to the literary marketplace. Simpson
complicates Woolf ’s anti-Semitism in “The Duchess and the Jeweller” (1938), and argues
that this short story “can be seen to speak of both her wariness about the wolfish greed of
the commercial world and her own Woolfishly greedy part in it.”
Reading literature and mathematics together would seem to be a clearly contradictory act, but Makiko Minow-Pinkney and Jocelyn Rodal illuminate the ways in which
these disciplinary boundaries are crossed by Woolf. Minow-Pinkney shows how ideas
circulating in 1910 of a “fourth dimension” might have influenced Woolf ’s fiction as well
as her “mischievous theory of character and cultural transition” occurring “on or about
December 1910” (E3 421). In doing so, Minow-Pinkney discusses the connections between Cubism and pre-Einsteinian fourth-dimensional theory, and notes Woolf ’s own depictions of mathematicians in her novels. Inspired by Woolf ’s practice of calculating word
count on drafts of her manuscripts, Rodal considers the “formal similarities” in Woolf ’s
writing and the mathematics of David Hilbert who was “at the very center of high modernism in mathematics” and who shares an almost identical surname with Night and Day’s
Katherine Hilbery. Woolf may have depicted mathematics in opposition to literature in
her second novel and elsewhere, but her “representations of order and number parallel and
refigure Hilbert’s philosophy of mathematics.”
Questions of authoriality and the writing process continue to be of interest to Woolf
scholarship. Amanda Golden assesses Woolf ’s practice and views of annotation. Golden
focuses specifically on Woolf ’s early essay “Writing in the Margin,” her annotations in her
copy of Agamemnon, and a depiction of annotation in the first segment of The Years, showing how Woolf ’s contradictory relationship to academia is further complicated by her
encounters with marginalia. Gill Lowe explores the effects of self-censorship—the “patron
au dedans” or “invisible censor within” (E4 75)—on Woolf ’s writing and editing. From
her very early experiences of this in the Hyde Park Gate News, Lowe highlights the ways
xii
in which “Virginia Stephen and Virginia Woolf had, recurrently, to remove unwelcome
voyeurs; to eradicate the critical voices inhibiting the writing craft.” Kristin Czarnecki sees
Woolf ’s “anxieties about authorship” in her discussion of Woolf ’s children’s story “Nurse
Lugton’s Golden Thimble” (1966). Placing Woolf in dialogue with influential essays by
Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, Czarnecki reminds us of the importance of returning to the text rather than author, the creation rather than creator.
Several papers explore cultural connections and contradictions, focusing both on
translation and on the cultural travels Woolf ’s writings take us on. Claire Davison focuses
on Koteliansky and Woolf ’s translation of Dostoevsky, assessing what exactly Woolf ’s role
in this translating process was, and how this translation differed from other English and
French versions. Koteliansky and Woolf ’s translation is “double accented” and contradictions are not resolved; they achieve what Davison terms “an avant-garde translation, an
oxymoron if ever there was one.” From Woolf as translator to Woolf translated, Rebecca
DeWald considers Jorge Luis Borges’s 1937 translation of Orlando. DeWald details how
the reception of the novel in Latin America differed from its Anglo-American audience as
a result of key distinctions between English and Spanish language systems, but argues that
a “mutually enriching dialogue” is created by the “presumed equality (rather than a hierarchy) of the original text and its translation.” In Leslie Hankins’s essay we are escorted on a
journey from literary to visual. Illustrating Orlando’s cinematic inter-texts in 1920s travel
films, Hankins shows that through the creation of “film clip portals,” Woolf “does not
simply borrow from film; she re-directs it,” offering the “gift of travel” to Vita SackvilleWest, and other readers, and adding a cinematic element to her playful love letter.
Further literary encounters are also documented in essays that place Woolf in conversation with Marcel Proust and W. B. Yeats, and in a consideration of Woolf ’s relationship
to poetry more broadly. John Coyle reads passages from À la recherche du temps perdu
alongside Jacob’s Room (1922) and Orlando, as well as Woolf ’s letters and diary entries on
Proust. Whether through a “Proustian moment” or a “travesty of one,” we find in Woolf,
as in Proust, a fascination with time, sexuality, and “metaphorical flights.” Woolf ’s encounter with Yeats (and Walter de la Mare) at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s in November 1930
provides the focus of Wayne Chapman’s essay. Presenting unpublished material by Yeats
alongside Woolf ’s diary entries and letters recounting their meeting, Chapman contextualises the conversation that led Yeats to write “Spilt Milk,” a poem that opens with a “We”
which refers to Yeats, Morrell, de la Mare, as well as to Woolf. Sara Sullam elaborates on
Woolf ’s relationship to poetry, poets and poetic forms, arguing that they play “a crucial
role in Woolf ’s literary achievement.” Considering a range of Woolf ’s essays which discuss
“contradiction between prose and poetry,” Sullam suggests that Woolf reaches a “rhetorical understanding of genres,” where distinctions between prose and poetry can never be
settled.
War continues to provide an important context for our readings of Woolf. Ian Blyth
traces some of the “darker currents” in Night and Day which reveal the conditions on the
home front during the First World War. In particular, Blyth argues, aspects of the emergency legislation introduced through the “Defence of the Realm Act” find their way into
Woolf ’s second novel, evident in “all of the surveillance and subterfuge” the characters are
involved in. War also provided the theme of a plenary roundtable in Glasgow, and Karen
Levenback’s introduction is included in this collection. Levenback shows how interest in
xiii
Woolf and war continues to grow, and she provides a summary of the contribution made
by the other members of this panel: Stuart Clarke, Lolly Ockerstrom, Vara Neverow, Eileen Barrett, and co-chair Jane Wood, whose edited collection, The Theme of Peace and War
in Virginia Woolf ’s Writings (2010), was the inspiration for the roundtable.
To end the Selected Papers we are delighted to include Cecil Woolf ’s talk, delivered
at the Conference Banquet in Glasgow’s City Chambers. Sharing some of his memories
of “the sole Scotsman in the Bloomsbury group,” Duncan Grant, Cecil at one point expresses disappointment that although Duncan enjoyed parties and dressing up, he never
saw him “in his national dress, a kilt and sporran.” Whilst there may also have been disappointment among delegates that no kilts were on show at the first ever Virginia Woolf
conference to be held in Scotland, we hope that the energy, creativity and intellectual
labour that was so abundantly present in Glasgow is captured in the essays collected in
this volume.
Work Cited
Woolf, Virginia. “Reviewing.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 6: 1933-1941. Ed. Stuart N.Clarke. London: The
Hogarth Press, 2011. 195-209.
xiv
Acknowledgments
W
e wish to thank all those who participated in the 21st Annual International
Conference on Virginia Woolf for helping to make it such a memorable occasion. Thank you to the contributors for their stimulating essays, and we would
also like to acknowledge the many excellent papers we were unfortunately unable to find
space for in this collection (the full conference program can be found at the end of this
volume). A very special thank you to Jane Goldman for being the driving force behind the
conference and for inviting us to edit this collection. Thank you to Kristin Czarnecki for
her helpful advice as we embarked on the editing process. Finally, we would like to thank
Wayne Chapman and his colleagues at Clemson University Digital Press for all their work
in bringing Contradictory Woolf to publication.
xv
Virginia Woolf
Standard Abbreviations
(as established by Woolf Studies Annual)
AHH
AROO
BP
BTA
CDB
CE
CR1
CR2
CSF
D
DM
E
F
FR
GR
HPGN
JR
JRHD
L
M
MEL
MOB
MT
MD
ND
O
PA
RF
TG
TTL
TW
TY
VO
WF
A Haunted House
A Room of One’s Own
Books and Portraits
Between the Acts
The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays
Collected Essays (ed. Leonard Woolf, 4 vols.: CE1, CE2, CE3, CE4)
The Common Reader
The Common Reader, Second Series
The Complete Shorter Fiction (ed. Susan Dick)
The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols.: D1, D2, D3, D4, D5)
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
The Essays of Virginia Woolf (eds. Stuart Clarke and Andrew McNeillie,
6 vols.: E1, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6)
Flush
Freshwater
Granite and Rainbow: Essays
Hyde Park Gate News (ed. Gill Lowe)
Jacob’s Room
Jacob’s Room: The Holograph Draft (ed. Edward L. Bishop)
The Letters of Virginia Woolf (ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols.: L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6)
The Moment and Other Essays
Melymbrosia
Moments of Being
Monday or Tuesday
Mrs. Dalloway
Night and Day
Orlando
A Passionate Apprentice
Roger Fry
Three Guineas
To the Lighthouse
The Waves
The Years
The Voyage Out
Women and Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own
(ed. S. P. Rosenbaum)
xvi
“BUT…I HAD SAID ‘BUT’ TOO OFTEN.” WHY “BUT”?
by Judith Allen
W
hy “but” indeed? Had one of Virginia Woolf ’s narrators in A Room of One’s
Own (1929) “said ‘but’ too often”? And how many times is “too often” for that
dreaded word we all anticipate, the word that may make us angry? It’s a word
that interrupts, undermines our most cogent assertions, attempts to transform our thinking,
as it proffers a differing point of view. But—to immediately express, enact, and perhaps contradict what I have just stated—it is also the word we all rely upon to implement those sometimes subversive acts. And we treasure that opportunity! The word “but,” therefore, in its
variously resistant modes, seems to me the perfectly limited yet enormously resonant entry
point for my exploration of our richly provocative conference title: “Contradictory Woolf.”
The word “but”—in addition to its varied functions in all of our dialogues—stands
as a crucial turning point in my own complicated relationship with Woolf ’s writings, and
can be traced back to my very first reading of A Room of One’s Own. In my initial experience of this text, I was captivated by the narrator’s self-conscious questioning of her own
use of “but,” partially quoted in my title: “But…I had said ‘but’ too often. One cannot go
on saying ‘but’. One must finish the sentence somehow, I rebuked myself. Shall I finish it,
‘But—I am bored!’ But why was I bored?” (AROO 104). I knew that I would go back to
this passage—as I have many times over more than twenty years—for those self-conscious
references to “but” always called for further investigation. My focus on “words” began
with an earlier close reading of the beginning of Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927). The
equivocation was palpable as I noted the words “if,” “may,” “seemed,” “perhaps,” and “but”
in the interchange between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay as they responded to their son James’s
longed for trip to the lighthouse: “Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow”; “‘But,’…‘it won’t
be fine’”; “‘But it may be fine —I expect it will be fine’”; “‘No going to the Lighthouse,
James’”; “‘Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow’” (TL 9,10,11, 26, emphasis added). This exemplary dialogue conveys the conflictual relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, expressed
by the repetitive equivocation and/or certainty of their responses. His parents’ dialogue
provides us with the contradictory yes/no, including the resistance of Mr. Ramsay’s “but,”
and Mrs. Ramsay’s retaliatory use of “but” in her attempt to override her husband’s negativity. My subsequent interest in Woolf ’s use of the word “but,” and in the political ramifications of “but,” however, did not emanate from this early reading of To the Lighthouse,
although the indeterminate language seemed to jump off each page.
The first page of A Room of One’s Own, however, was reminiscent of To the Lighthouse, permeated as it was with similar terms of equivocation: “try,” “might,” “may,”
“seemed,” and, of course, “but” (AROO 3). Interrogating “what the words meant,” there
were repetitious questions about the title, “women and fiction,” of what it “might mean,”
what the narrator “may have meant it to mean,” and offering additional interpretations
of what this title “might mean,” at least six times on that first page. The narrator seemed
to be questioning any semblance of certainty regarding “what the words meant,” for
the words “seemed not so simple” (AROO 3). But the narrator found that “the most
2
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
interesting” examination of these differing options—“inextricably mixed together”—
had one caveat: “I should never be able to come to a conclusion” (AROO 3). No “nuggets
of truth” prevailed; indeterminacy ruled. And so I forged ahead, with some trepidation,
searching for a topic for my first graduate seminar on Virginia Woolf, and kept returning to the narrator’s question: “But why was I bored”? With some semblance of relief,
it was settled: “Boredom will be my topic!” Of course, being “bored” was an important
aspect of this passage, as immediately explained by a description of Mr. A’s novel, with
“the dominance of the letter ‘I’ and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree it casts
within its shade.” Clearly, “nothing will grow there” (AROO 104). The “creative energy”
of Mr. A’s mind was blocked, expressing dryness, a distinct lack of life, and it certainly
shared much with the compartmentalized mind of the critic, Mr. B, for “his feelings no
longer communicated,” and his sentences were “dead” on arrival. There is no Mr. C in
this text, but we are directed to a very different kind of sentence written by Coleridge, for
in one’s mind “it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas” and “has the secret
of perpetual life” (AROO 105).
I began to question the relationship between the lifelessness of Mr. A’s writing and the
complex functions of the word ‘but’. But more importantly, I questioned writing a paper
on the word ‘but’? As a pre-medical student, taking mostly required math and science
courses, I spent much time looking through a microscope—exploring the building blocks
of life, the structure of cells, studying DNA, chemical formulas—and had little experience
writing papers. Given my background in science—a seemingly obvious contextual force
in my life at that time—I had questions regarding Woolf ’s intense interest in how “meanings” are determined, who has the power to designate those meanings, and what part
“context” plays in this important endeavor. I think now about those “invisible presences”
(MOB 80) that held sway in my life, although I had not yet read Woolf ’s Moments of Being, and was just beginning to think about the infinite possibilities of “context.” Always
in process—text, contexts, readers—we can only speculate about the exceptionally complicated interactions, and the role of “context” in an extremely complex reading process.
Woolf is clearly interested in context and contingency, and her writings utilise multiple
points of view, differing seasons, differing time-frames, to intentionally vary contexts,
and show contingency. Ultimately, we have learned from studies by Hayden White, M.M
Bakhtin, and others—including Woolf—that context is “undecidable” (White 186). As
readers, we are pushed to be critical thinkers, to “come to our own conclusions” (CR2
258), and to accept being in a state of uncertainty. Questions abound. What contextual
forces impact “our own conclusions,” and how conscious are we of any of this? Many of
these issues will be addressed in the latter part of this paper, for it is this undecidability
that relates to the problematics of language, the multifaceted nature of words, and our inability to “know” people, our world, or the words from which they are constructed, with
any degree of definitiveness.
Looking once again at what I have come to call the “but” passage, quoted above, I began to focus on its repetitive aspects. After five “buts” in as many sentences, I assume that
the reader of A Room of One’s Own is not so much interested in why the narrator is bored,
as why she keeps repeating “but.” Why does this essay, which, incidentally, also begins
its first and last sentences with the word “but,” seem to reverberate with its significance?
Indeed, its sentences do get finished—but with enough equivocation so that “but,” along
Why “but”?
3
with “perhaps” and “might,” becomes, inevitably, the expected conclusion—or rather, the
lack of conclusion. In fact, throughout this essay, Woolf ’s narrators inform their readers
of their difficulties, talk about their feelings, and speculate about the forms and methods
used to express their experiences. That the first word of A Room of One’s Own is “but” does
not seem mere chance, for Woolf ’s narrator in “The Modern Essay” declares that the essay
“should lay us under a spell with its first word” (CR 1 211). One does wonder, however,
what kind of “spell” is cast upon the reader when “but” not only begins a text, but is also,
in the immediately established dialogue, transferred to the reader’s lips by the narrator? By
giving this line to the reader, the narrator places herself “in the position of the one asked”
(D4 361), thus transferring a sense of uncertainty, as well as resistance, to the reader.
Interestingly, the varied definitions of “but”—including “except,” “outside,” and “on the
contrary”—to name just a few, seem to echo the marginal position of women in our
culture; and quite significantly, several of these words are used in A Room of One’s Own to
describe the woman “walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of
that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical” (AROO 101,
emphasis added). “But,” as a noun, also refers to a “fish,” which may fit in with Woolf ’s
fishing metaphor; a “but,” in Scotland, refers to the outer room, especially the kitchen of
a cottage. And, of course, to “but in” is to interrupt, interfere, or to thrust against. All of
these reverberate in some sense with Woolf ’s usage.
With the constant intrusion of “but,” the text simultaneously resonates with the
multiple interruptions in women’s lives and the resultant openness created by these breaks.
One thinks Mary Carmichael must have been using “but” to “break the sentence” and
“break the sequence” (AROO 95), for “Life’s Adventure” surely moves in this way. It
seems, very simply, that “but” will serve to negate the state of boredom which Woolf ’s
narrator both describes and questions, for “but” refuses that boredom by leaving things
open, creating new possibilities; this coincides, of course, with what Woolf considers a
necessary vitality, the essence of life. “But,” in its ambiguity, functions as a connective,
as a way of continuing and extending, although it also resists that continuity, cuts things
off, and most importantly, negates what was said before its appearance. One can assume
that something preceded the narrator’s opening word, as one always assumes with “but”
that something will follow. “But,” in its linkage with the marginality of women, serves to
enact their exclusion and oppression with its strategically placed interruptions. Leading
up to the iconic scene of refusal at the library door, the narrator’s thoughts turn to “that
wild flash of imagination” (AROO 7) in the essays of Lamb as speculation about Lamb’s
thinking regarding Milton’s possible revision of Lycidas, as well as her own thinking about
alterations of major literary works, and whether those revisions improved the style or the
meaning: “But then one would have to decide what is style and what is meaning, a question which—but here I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must
have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way…with
black gown and not white wings” (AROO 7, emphasis added). The narrator’s quest is now
interrupted by “but,” as her path was previously intercepted and diverted by the Beadle.
“But” by interrupting the sentence as well as her entrance to the library, also interrupts
her thoughts and imaginings, her intellectual curiosity, and, most importantly, her desire.
What follows “but” is the fact of her exclusion. Her imagination shrinks into the background—as does her all-important freedom. This imaginative freedom, although negated,
4
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
is, as Wolfgang Iser asserts in another context, still on the page—still visible to the reader,
and thus, still a viable option (Iser 169).
Also visible to the reader, and explicitly foregrounded by Woolf ’s various narrators
throughout the text, are ellipses and parentheses; interrupting and intruding themselves
into sentences, they call attention to the constructed nature of the text, and to the process
of writing. As the narrator poses a question regarding truth and illusion, the ellipsis takes
center stage: “Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that
destroyed illusion and put truth in its place? For truth…those dots mark the spot where,
in search of truth, I missed the turning up to Fernham” (AROO 15).
This questioning of truth and illusion is also replicated as the ellipsis blurs textual
boundaries. This mark of punctuation, the ellipsis, is talked about as if the dots which
structure it were really marks on “the road to Headingley.” That no conclusion was found
on the road to Headingley similarly blurs boundaries and calls attention to the text as a
construct. The narrator’s pursuit of truth continues with a trip to the British Museum
Library; here the narrator designates a different meaning for this particular ellipsis, this
time equating it with time, surprise, and confusion: “…the five dots here indicate five
separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment” (AROO 26). Readers may
also experience surprise at this confusing interruption of the action, for it also foregrounds
a direct question to women: “Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?” (AROO 26). This direct question, albeit qualified, serves to distance
her readers in order to gain their attention as the narrator continues to investigate her
inability to capture the “truth” about women. The clearly contradictory aspect is that “the
most discussed animal in the universe” is essentially indescribable, since “there is no mark
on the wall to mark the precise height of women” and that women are “almost unclassified” (AROO 89)—“almost” meaning “all but.” This is an important term for Woolf, as
her readers try to ascertain definitions, question definitions, and applaud the resistance
to definitions. I will add more on the problematics of “defining”—as it appears in Three
Guineas (1938) —in a latter section of this paper.
Another device which functions to distance readers by its intrusion into A Room of
One’s Own is the parenthesis. Working as an aside, it can add something new that may
seem out of place, or abruptly change the direction of the thoughts being conveyed; in
another sense, it makes what had been contextualized in a certain way suddenly become
the context for the newly added parenthetical statement. This sometimes self-conscious
disruption of the narrator’s “train of thought” also serves to disrupt the thinking of her
readers; it moves the reader off the path, as the narrator was moved off the path by the
Beadle. One is reminded of the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse where catastrophes are scattered, parenthetically, to place them in the context of another kind of
destruction; that they are mentioned as Kafka might mention them—so very nonchalantly—also serves to foreground them, to empower them. These interruptions by “but,”
and by the ellipses and parentheses, serve as a partial solution to the narrator’s boredom
with the discourse of Mr. A’s and Mr. B’s writings. Mr. B’s mind “seemed separated into
different chambers…” (AROO 105), and this lack of connection seemed to deny access
to his feelings, and in his sentences, “it is the power of suggestion that one most misses”
(AROO 105); this suggestiveness is a call for openness, for contradictions, and a certain
wildness. The “smooth lawns” (AROO 9) of the men’s colleges, perceived as lacking this
Why “but”?
5
wildness, are compared to the “wild unkempt grasses” (AROO 20) of the women’s college
at Fernham, for the roughness and disorder hold more interest. The narrator’s boredom is
also a critique of this smoothness, of the hard and the barren; these qualities are aligned
with cultural traditions that exclude women, with language and forms that cannot express
women’s lives, and with a rigidity that negates creativity; it is also a critique of an age of
“pure, of self-assertive virility” (AROO 106), of Fascism.
There is much that acts to counter the rigidity and fixity of patriarchal institutions,
the lifeless inscriptions of members of those institutions, and the “spirit of peace” which
prevails when one stays “on the paths,” or “in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge”
(AROO 6). For the narrator, trespassing, crossing boundaries, or stepping on the forbidden turf are precipitated by a degree of excitement, and by “the mysterious property” of
ideas; these thoughts “flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas
that it was impossible to sit still” (AROO 5). When intercepted and chased from the
turf onto the gravel, however, these thoughts and ideas, imaged by Woolf ’s narrator as
“my little fish”—with fish being another definition of “but”—are sent into hiding. Using “but” in exchange for “fish,” and sending it “into hiding,” reiterates the banishment
of the imagination, for in getting rid of this mode of interruption one smoothes out the
text as one smoothes out the turf. This sequestering of ideas, of imagination, where “the
roughness of the present seemed smoothed away” (AROO 6), is equated with a dull and
lifeless quality. The smooth, firm, and polished surface is reminiscent of F.T. Marinetti’s
Futurist Manifesto of 1909—with its “dreamt of metalization of the human body,” and is
equated with speed, violence, contempt for women and a repetition of the past, with war
as necessary for the health of the human spirit (Benjamin 241). To counter this stifling of
ideas, imagination, and creativity, A Room of One’s Own performs the essayistic, privileging
mobility, wandering, and the crossing of boundaries. “But” enables this activity by opening up possibilities. The desire for movement, and all that that engenders is evident in the
deprivation of this activity; even the fact that there was no “walking tour” (AROO 54) for
women contributed to the stifling of their thoughts and imaginings. And if one returns to
the varied meanings of the “gravel”—the place of her exclusion—one finds both “bewildering” and “mysterious” amongst those meanings; by making the statement, “the gravel
is the place for me” (AROO 60), she has assertively taken back—owned—her designated
place of exclusion, with its rough mystifying surface.
The privileging of movement echoes in the oscillation between the “rambling”
(AROO 83) and “strolling” (AROO 6) of the narrators and the constraints that try to
maintain the nineteenth century’s notion that women be silent and still. Subverting society’s rules, these women must take the wrong turn—as the use of “but” was responsible for
the wrong turn to Headingly—duck around the corner, and let the line of their thoughts
“dip into the stream” (AROO 5). This activity is both their resistance, and their tactic for
survival. The desire of a narrator to “expose what was in her mind to the air” (AROO 19)
expresses her need for freedom. As the narrator thinks about the mysterious qualities of
the mind, and just how it functions, she simultaneously enacts this process before her
readers; her readers/audience watch her as she thinks about the mind thinking, and her
tentative conclusion regarding this state of the mind is “that it seems to have no single
state of being.” Most importantly, it “is always altering its focus, and bringing the world
into different perspectives” (AROO 101).
6
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
Woolf ’s narrator constantly speculates about the reader’s response to her assigned
topic, and her own effectiveness with the assignment. In her attempt to “show how one
came to hold the opinions one holds” (AROO 4), to show the process of her thinking,
Woolf ’s self-consciousness regarding language, punctuation, changes of narrative voice,
and changes of scene becomes a prominent strategy. This self-consciousness produces an
interesting effect on her readers, for it both engages them and distances them, continuing
the oscillating movement that repudiates—in yet another way—the rigidity and fixity of
forms, institutions, people, and the language used to construct them.
This distancing of the reader has some resonance with Bertolt Brecht’s “estrangement effect.” One of the important goals of Brecht’s “Epic Theatre,” which relates to
many of Woolf ’s novels1—and particularly to A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas—is
to have her audience discover the conditions of life. Sallie Sears sees aspects of Brecht’s
“Epic Theatre” in the context of the audience of Miss La Trobe’s play in Between the Acts
(1941), and finds that “it is predicated upon the assumption (so crucial to modernists like
Brecht, Artaud, Peter Weiss) that an audience that sees deplorable truths, hitherto unconscious, hidden, or denied, will not only deplore, but seek to abolish the circumstances that
brought them into being” (Sears 229). This takes place through an interruption of happenings (as Woolf ’s narrator is interrupted when she opens the door of the library, or the
text is interrupted by “but,” by a parenthetical comment, or a reference to punctuation).
The narrator also periodically interrupts her own narrative in order to undermine the illusion her audience has accepted. To accomplish this, the narrator simply points out to
the reader that she is creating scenes and fictionalizing, thus causing them to acknowledge
that the impervious boundary between fact and fiction is not so easily discernible. Like the
songs, captions, and exposed stagecraft of Brecht’s “Epic Theatre,” Woolf ’s use of “but,”
the ellipses, the parentheses, and the other self-conscious references to the text function
to impair the illusion.
Calling attention to the constructed nature of the text, to words as words, and to
what may have been withheld, serves to distance the readers—to make them, at times,
spectators or outsiders—thus enabling them to critique those institutions which continue
to structure and have power over their lives, and perhaps to enact some necessary resistance. In their repeated use of “but,” Woolf ’s narrators did enact this necessary resistance,
and it was interesting to explore the manuscript versions of A Room of One’s Own, along
with the Typescript excerpts from Women & Fiction, when finally published in 1992.
Referring to Kipling’s books which “puzzled” Woolf ’s narrator, she went on to call him “a
man of undoubted genius,” and stated that “nothing can surpass his vividness,” but she
definitely had a “but” to intrude on this positive description: “But—were ‘buts’ beginning
again? What did I mean by ‘but’ this time?” (Women & Fiction 189). These questions
about “but” are clarified as the narrator continues to discuss the works of Galsworthy as
she finds that “it was precisely the same ‘but’ that had interposed itself between me and
Mr. Kipling” (189). She found that she was “saying ‘but’ then to the emotional values. The
sentiment of these famous writers seemed to me sentimentality; their reality to me was
unreal” (189). She was clearly an “outsider” to these works, and found that “it is no more
possible for me to write an intelligent criticism of their books than to write intelligently of
the Boat race, when I do not know bow from stern or cox from stroke” (190). Difference
was paramount, and this is clearly established in Three Guineas as the need for resistance
Why “but”?
7
becomes evident as the “daughters of educated men” (a term defining women in relation
to men, which in this and its variant forms is repeated over 100 times) work to transform
the language of patriarchy, assess their need to stop repeating the words and methods of
their brothers, following the procession of their fathers and brothers, or being educated
in their brothers’ schools.
Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own both expresses and enacts its cultural critique by making certain that its readers not only see the significance of the women of their culture as
“outsiders,” but also appropriate that position for themselves. In Woolf ’s 1938 feminist
anti-war polemic, Three Guineas, she also utilizes her textual strategies for this purpose,
but also has her narrator create an “Outsiders’ Society.” There is no desire to “merge our
identity in yours; follow and repeat and score still deeper the old worn ruts in which society, like a gramophone whose needle has stuck, is grinding out with intolerable unanimity
‘Three hundred millions spent upon arms’” (TG 105). Staying “outside,” they infuse that
society with their values, for the “Outsider’s Society” will not “fight with arms.” We find
that “the very word, ‘society’ sets tolling in memory the dismal bells of a harsh music: shall
not, shall not, shall not. You shall not learn; you shall not earn; you shall not own; you
shall not—such was the society relationship of brother and sister for many centuries” (TG
105). As the word “society” is repeated eleven times on this page, and the word, “inevitably” is also repeated, we gain a sense of the certainty—the rigidity —of society’s sanctioned operation: “Inevitably, we ask ourselves, is there not something in the conglomeration of people into societies that releases what is most selfish and violent, least rational and
humane in the individuals themselves? Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you,
so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the
will” (TG 105, emphasis added). I certainly noticed the repetition in Three Guineas with
my first reading, but it took many close readings to gain a sense of the extent of Woolf ’s
use of the rhetorical device of repetition in this text (Caughie 116).
Interestingly, this ongoing discovery of repetitive words and phrases—after multiple
readings—is responsible for my decision to focus my latest paper on an iconic passage, the
contested scene of the burning of the word “feminist.” What was so interesting about my
latest re-reading of Three Guineas was the realisation that Woolf ’s narrators do not simply
allude to and repeat many significant words defined by those in power, but repetitively
refer to these words as “words”: “the word ‘patriotism’” (TG 9), the “word ‘influence’”
(TG 17), the “word ‘free’” (TG 101), and the “word ‘society’” (TG 105). This distinction
is significant—in ways reminiscent of Rene Magritte’s “Pipe” painting—as it interrogates
the problematics of representation, of definition, addressed so self-consciously in Three
Guineas. As Laura Marcus notes, Woolf “emphasises the written nature of her text and the
politically loaded nature of words” (Marcus 227), for these words convey the multifarious
constructs we designate as “meanings.” Within this framework, the burning of the word
“feminist” remains, not surprisingly, fraught with controversy—and perhaps, like so many
words throughout this text, difficult to “define.” Interestingly, the word “definition” also
permeates this text, for there are repeated attempts to “define” words, and to express the
complex difficulties of such an endeavor.
After multiple readings of this scene of burning the word “feminist,” I was struck by
the heretofore “unseen” repetition of the word “word,” twenty-five times in this paragraph;
the word “feminist” is to be destroyed because it is “an old word, a vicious and corrupt
8
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
word,” a “dead word” that is now “obsolete” and “without a meaning” (TG 101). As I
explored the various words that were repeated, I read the narrators’ commentary about
“repetition,” “education,” “history,” as these subjects were interrogated. It was not surprising that many of these repeated words such as “education,” “society,” “influence,” and “atmosphere,” resonate and interact with each other, and with what is generally construed as
“context,” as they each serve to illuminate the gendering of “difference.” In my exploration
of “difference,” I examined the interaction between “context,” “difference” and “repetition.”
Theorists of language, culture, and history, such as Bakhtin, Hayden White, and Woolf, to
name a few, have offered interpretations of “context” that serve to illuminate the relationship between “difference” and “context,” and are so important to their mutual interaction
with “repetition.” Before I elaborate on this significant relationship, I will briefly review
some approaches to “context” that elaborate on this term’s infinite possibilities.
As Mikhail Bakhtin asserts: “The meaning of a word is determined entirely by its
context; in fact, there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage.
And importantly, contexts do not stand side by side…as if unaware of one another, but
are in a state of constant tension, or incessant interaction and conflict” (Bakhtin 79).
Woolf ’s memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” begun in 1939, delves into the perceived contexts
that have shaped the writer we have come to know as “Virginia Woolf,” and highlights
those “invisible presences”; these include the influence of her mother, along with “public
opinion; what other people say and think; all those magnets which attract us this way to
be like that, or repel us the other and make us different from that.” Seeing herself “as a fish
in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream” (MOB 80), resonates
with both the power and the inscrutable nature of “context.”
That Woolf ’s narrator speaks of “invisible presences” and “cannot describe the
stream” is not far from the tagline of the web-site, “War in Context.”2 The tagline, “With
Attention to the Unseen,” also resonates with Hayden White’s view of the changes taking place in our ongoing reinterpretation of the conception of context: “The text-context
relationship, once an unexamined presupposition of historical investigation, has become
a problem…in the sense of becoming ‘undecidable’, elusive, uncreditable…And yet this
very undecidability of the question of where the text ends and the context begins and the
nature of their relationship appears to be a cause for celebration, to provide a vista onto a
new and more fruitful activity for the intellectual historian, to authorize a posture before
the archive of history more dialogistic than analytic, more conversational than assertive
and judgmental” (White 186). Repetition is intricately connected with context and hence
with difference. With each repetition, an incremental change takes place, altering the
meaning in some substantial way—creating difference. It revitalizes and reinvents the
word—as it is simultaneously interpreted by different readers in different ways; it is this
aspect of language—its multifaceted nature—that Woolf ’s writing enacts. Repetition enacts a sense of continuity, of movement, even as the contextual changes interrupt with difference. Gilles Deleuze, in introducing “repetition” in Difference and Repetition finds that
“repetition and resemblance are different in kind—extremely so” (Deleuze 1), as he begins
a study that reflects on the works of many well-known thinkers on this complex subject.
In this mode, Deleuze provides a significant part of David Hume’s thesis: “Repetition
changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it.” He finds that “Hume’s famous thesis takes us to the heart of the problem,” for
repetition “does change something in the mind…and this is the essence of modification”
Why “but”?
9
(Deleuze 90). For Deleuze, “repetition” encompasses “difference,” and “is not the same
thing occurring over and over again” for there is “variation in and through every repetition.” Relating to the mysteries of context, repetition also functions “to affirm the power
of the new and unforeseeable.” As “a creative activity of transformation,” it aligns the
“new” with creativity, and, importantly, finds “convention and habit destabilized” (Parr
223-25). For Nietzsche, according to Deleuze, “heterogeneity arises out of intensity,” and
calls forth “a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity” while it “works as a possibility for reinvention” (Deleuze 136). Within this repetitive mode, words placed in new contexts are
continually transformed, reinvented, and have new life.
The “ashes” from the “cremation” of the word “feminist”—a Phoenix-like symbol of
regeneration—to be stirred with a ‘goose-feather pen,’ clearly suggests the possibility of
creating “new words” (TG 101-2). But the suggestion that women “follow your methods
and repeat your words…is not true. The two classes differ enormously” (TG 17). Clearly,
“though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes” (TG 18), and construct
different answers. In ways similar to the function of the word “but,” Woolf ’s narrators can
suddenly undermine a statement made within a sentence, or a few paragraphs down, or,
as in the case of Three Guineas, about 34 pages later. As “but” undermines and resists, so
Woolf ’s narrators remain unreliable and surprising. Perhaps Woolf likes them to be a little
wild. Irony frequently rules. In this case, it relates to the burning of the word “feminist,”
why this word needs to be destroyed, and Woolf ’s narrator’s statements regarding her
suspicions of labels, for “they kill and constrict” (TG 137-8).
As we look back from the vantage point of 2011, we are still grappling with the problematics of language, the dissemination of information from television, radio, newspapers,
blogs, social media, mainstream media, alternative media, wikileaks and government leaks
(which may be newspaper leaks). Virginia Woolf ’s writings about words both express
and enact her politics, while questioning the language used to communicate to the public. Woolf, like Walter Benjamin, looked back, and as Angeliki Spiropoulou makes clear:
“Woolf is well aware that how the past is represented is a major stake in the feminist and
wider political struggle,” and “leads her to criticize official historiography for its exclusionist and silencing effects” and seeks to develop “an alternative historiography which would
do justice to the oppressed and the defeated” (Spiropoulou 3).
In the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, the uprisings known as the “Arab
Spring,” the “Occupy Wall Street” and worldwide “Occupy movements,” and too many
wars and struggles to mention, we look back to Woolf ’s narrative commentary regarding
the “300,000,000 British Pounds” (TG 8) for arms, repeated seven times in Three Guineas,
and the repetition of the unseen photographs of “dead bodies and ruined houses” (TG 11)
of children killed in the war in Spain (1936-39), and speaks of the “horror and disgust”
(TG 11) of these photos. Woolf ’s relevance to the world today is always coupled with the
question of how she would respond to the drone strikes, the new weaponry, the violence,
and the language used to communicate these horrors. What would she think of social
media? Blogging? With the “Occupy” protests, would she find that “remaining outside,
but in co-operation with its aims” (TG 143) the best answer? Of course, “answers” are
problematic—as Woolf ’s narrator expresses on the first page of Three Guineas.
Looking back to Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, a work written in 1922, and in
Leonard and Virginia Woolf ’s library, I think his words would echo today: “Words, like
10
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images today, another tomorrow. There is no certainty whatever that that the same word will call out exactly the same
idea in the reader’s mind as it did in the reporter’s” (Lippmann 42). We can say, as Woolf ’s
narrator says in Three Guineas: “Things repeat themselves it seems. Pictures and voices are
the same today as they were 2,000 years ago” (TG 141). As I reflect on Virginia Woolf ’s
expression and enactment of her important ideas regarding language, I think she would
simply echo the words the late Tony Judt conjured up when asked about his epitaph: “I
did words.”3
Notes
1.
2.
3.
For other discussions relating Brecht’s “Epic Theatre” to Woolf ’s novels, see Bishop; Johnston.
See warincontext.org
Historian and public intellectual Tony Judt died 6 August 2010 at age 62. In an obituary in The Guardian
on 7August 2010, entitled: “Tony Judt: the captivating wit and intellect of my friend and teacher”, Saul
Goldberg related Judt’s answer to a question regarding his choice for his epitaph. Tony Judt simply said he
would want it to read: “I did words.” I thought of Woolf.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, M.M. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Boston: Harvard UP, 1986.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Bishop, Edward L. “The Subject in Jacob’s Room.” Modern Fiction Studies 38.1 (1992): 147-175
Caughie, Pamela. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Athlone Press,1994.
Foucault, Michel. This Is Not A Pipe. Illustrations and letters by Rene Magritte. Trans. and ed. James Harkness.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
Johnston, Georgia. “Class Performance in Between the Acts: Audiences for Miss LaTrobe and Mrs. Manresa.”
Woolf Studies Annual 3 (1997): 61-75.
Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Marcus, Laura. The Cambridge Companion to Woolf. Ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, Cambridge: CUP, 2000.
Parr, Adrian, ed. The Deleuze Dictionary. New York: Columbia UP, 2005
Sears, Sallie. “Theater of War: Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts.” Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant. Ed. Jane
Marcus, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983.
Spiropoulou, Angeliki. Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin. London:
Palgrave, 2010.
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957.
——. The Common Reader First Series. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 19771984.
——. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
——. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc, 1966.
——. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1955.
——. Women & Fiction. The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own. Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum. Oxford:
Shakespeare Head, 1992.
WOOLF, CONTEXT, AND CONTRADICTION
by Michael H. Whitworth
T
wenty years ago Virginia Woolf ’s oeuvre expanded significantly. Of course between her death and 1992, many essays had been published posthumously, as
had letters, diaries, and autobiographical writings. But 1992 saw the arrival of
ten new novels by Woolf, maybe twenty. In addition to the plain, unannotated editions
that many of us had first read, whether published by the Hogarth Press, Penguin, Grafton,
or Harcourt Brace, there appeared affordable annotated editions from Oxford University
Press, in their World’s Classics imprint, and from Penguin, as Twentieth-Century Classics. (Excellent annotations have also appeared in the Shakespeare Head and the Hogarth
Definitive editions, but, as editions intended for the scholarly library market, these did
not have the same impact as their paperback counterparts). In addition to Mrs Dalloway
(1925), by Virginia Woolf, we discovered two new novels, Mrs Dalloway with annotations
by Elaine Showalter, and Mrs Dalloway with annotations by Claire Tomalin; in 2000
followed a fourth new Woolf novel, Mrs Dalloway with annotations by David Bradshaw.
I suspect I was not alone in having mixed feelings when I began to teach and to write
using the new texts. While the dominant feeling was one of delight and excitement at having such a resource to use and to share with students, there was also a sentimental regret at
the practical nuisance of having to lay aside familiar copies, unannotated by any scholarly
editor, but full of one’s own underlinings and marginal comments. There was also embarrassment at realising that one had not asked the kinds of questions that the annotators had
asked, that one had not read Woolf ’s novels as carefully and as thoroughly as they deserved.
But more importantly, there was a worrying suspicion that annotation was not pure gain;
that there was a more complicated economy at work in which, by gaining a sharper sense of
Woolf ’s historical referents, particularly in relation to the topography of London, one lost,
or at least found it harder to focus on, Woolf ’s artistry, her formal patterning. The older
Mrs Dalloway could be understood in the terms of high modernism, or the New Critical
construction of it: it was characterised by echoes and anticipations woven through the text,
producing a complex spatial form, and that spatial form served to remove the events of the
novel from the concerns of the everyday world. The newer Mrs Dalloways seemed to be
closer to realist or naturalist masterpieces, characterised by intense attention to the specific
details of urban life, particularly topography and toponymy. Should annotators in some
way restrain themselves, or alter their focus, in order to preserve those formal qualities? Or
might the palace of wisdom be reached via the road of excess?
In thinking about annotation, I would like to emphasise three major strands in Woolf
criticism. One, text-focused, is concerned with formal patterns within the text; New Critical. Woolf was accepted so late into the canon that her novels were not worked over to the
extent as Eliot’s poems or Joyce’s fictions, but there are nevertheless significant examples of
critics working within a largely formalist framework, and some were very perceptive readers
of Woolf. In the period 1941 to 1975 the relative paucity of background material (diaries,
letters, etc.) forced them to focus on the text. Another strand, starting later, is concerned
12
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
with Woolf’s political objectives: primarily feminist, but also, slightly later, taking in broader
social politics and anti-imperialist agenda. A third, later still, attempted to return her texts to
their historical contexts. A significant moment for this strand was Alex Zwerdling’s Virginia
Woolf and the Real World (1986), though of course the earliest of its chapters had appeared in
the late 1970s. These strands are not mutually incompatible—one can be formalist-feministhistoricist, for example—nor is this analysis intended to be comprehensive.
While the three approaches need not be incompatible, institutional politics has meant
that in practice they often are. One phase of such disputes came in the 1970s and 80s
when those who subscribed to the idea of the transcendent art-work were confronted with
critics who saw literature as having political motivations and immediate political relevance.
The dialectic between political relevance and historicism has been very neatly described by
Jonathan Dollimore in his Radical Tragedy: the demand from students in the late 1960s
that literary studies be made “relevant” to the pressing political issues of the moment raised
the problem of whether, if the historical and cultural otherness of literary works were dissolved in “relevance,” there was any merit in studying them; the rise of historicism, in
Dollimore’s account, is the next turn of the dialectic (Dollimore xlviii-l). For the last ten
or fifteen years, various kinds of historicism appear to have been in the ascendant; going
further back, the New Historicism in early modern studies paved the way for the return of
less-theoretically inspired historicisms, including some that were explicitly opposed to literary theory and new historicism. It is notable in early modern studies that, while historicism
still appears to be an immensely productive critical mode, there has been a reaction against
it. This is apparent in the book series “Shakespeare Now,” published by Continuum, and
in the attempted recuperation of the pejorative term “presentism” as a label for a critical
project (Fernie). Even as a fully annotated edition of Woolf appears, in the form of the
Cambridge Edition, there are signs of a reaction against historicism in Woolf studies.
In this context, what does contextualisation mean as a practice in editing and in criticism? I would like to consider some of the choices faced by the annotator and critic, and
how they relate to the possible conflict of critical modes. I will give five examples, three
drawn from my editing work on Night and Day (1919), and two from critical considerations of Mrs Dalloway.
The first instance concerns what looks like a topographical allusion. In chapter 18
of Night and Day, as William Rodney and Katharine Hilbery return from Lincoln to the
village of Lampsher, they decide to stop the carriage and walk the last two miles.
About two miles from Lampsher the road ran over the rounded summit of the
heath, a lonely spot marked by an obelisk of granite, setting forth the gratitude
of some great lady of the eighteenth century who had been set upon by highwaymen at this spot and delivered from death just as hope seemed lost. In summer
it was a pleasant place, for the deep woods on either side murmured, and the
heather, which grew thick round the granite pedestal, made the light breeze taste
sweetly; in winter the sighing of the trees was deepened to a hollow sound, and
the heath was as grey and almost as solitary as the empty sweep of the clouds
above it.
Here Rodney stopped the carriage and helped Katharine to alight. (ND
249)
Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
13
Is there a deeper reason why Woolf has her characters alight at this particular monument?
Were her readers in 1919 supposed to recognize the obelisk of granite as a reference to a
particular place or to a type of place? The topography is that of classic realism, mingling
actual places (Lincoln) with imaginary ones (Lampsher), and at this point on the road
between the two we may not know whether we are in the actual or the imaginary.
Readers who have used Julia Briggs’s 1992 edition of the novel may feel they know the
answer, but for my own annotations I decided to begin as if I were the first person doing the
job. Various internet searches led me to a monument in Wiltshire known as the Robbers’
Stone. The monument has an inscription explaining its origins: the stone commemorates
the occasion when a man, Mr Dean of Imber, was attacked by four highwaymen; during
the pursuit of the highwaymen, one of them dropped dead, and the other three were captured and sentenced to transportation. Another lesser-known monument marks the place
where the highwayman died, and while the first cannot be called an obelisk, the second
has at least the right proportions (Bradley 256). Clearly, however, the narrative inscribed
on the Robbers’ Stone does not exactly correspond to that on Woolf ’s Lincolnshire obelisk.
The Robbers Stone is also not in Lincolnshire, and it seems that Briggs, in making her
annotations, felt that if there were a real precedent for the granite obelisk, it ought to be
in that county. Her annotations suggest that the model is the Dunston Pillar, a so-called
“land lighthouse” built by Sir Francis Dashwood in 1751, about six miles south of Lincoln
(Briggs 446). When first built it was 92 feet high with a 15 foot lantern on top; in 1810
the lantern was replaced by a statue of George III, itself later removed. Though the Dunston Pillar did not mark the gratitude of any person for deliverance from highwayman, an
early twentieth century guidebook describes the heath as “a lonely tract where inhabitants
had not only been murdered by highwaymen, but had even been lost in the storms and
snow-drifts on the desolate and roadless moor” (Rawnsley 167) ; the Pillar provided travellers with a much-needed point of orientation. Again, the Pillar fails to match Woolf ’s
obelisk in several respects: it is not a memorial to a specific incident of robbery; it is not
an obelisk in form, and it is far taller than anything we might call an obelisk. Its status as a
land-lighthouse, however, is suggestive when we consider Ralph Denham’s later image of
the Hilberys’ house as a lighthouse, a beacon of culture in the “trackless waste” (ND 418).
However, while that association may have been in Woolf ’s mind, her transformation
of the Dunston Pillar completely obscures it. Moreover, so far as I can see, neither the
Stone nor the Pillar relate to a story that might inform the narrative at this point. Both
might be sources, but Woolf isn’t alluding to them in the conventional sense. Nevertheless,
I would argue that it is valuable to have an annotation pointing to both of them, because
it prevents the text being tied too rigidly to either.
But, while disconnecting the fictional pillar from any single referent is interpretatively liberating, the implicit decision—that the real-world referents are the focus of investigation—needs to be called into question. The dominant expectation of annotations
is that they will relate a particular phrase to a particular phrase, event, place, person, or
object. What’s harder to annotate, though not impossible, are the passages where a whole
narrative unit resembles one in another novel; or, even more abstractly, where it suggests a
general type of narrative unit. I wonder if readers unfamiliar with Night and Day might be
persuaded that the passage above came from an obscure novel by Thomas Hardy. The elements are all distinctly Hardyean: a heathland; a couple whose relationship is in trouble;
14
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
a place or object that carries strong associations with the past; a melodramatic narrative
recalled at an awkward moment. Even the pathetic fallacy of woods that murmur and
trees that sigh recalls Hardy, most obviously The Woodlanders. It is possible to point out
this sort of family resemblance between narrative units, but in scholarly annotation it is
not frequently done. The reasons why not are obvious enough: there is a potential loss of
rigour; annotation could turn into a belle lettristic compendium of resemblances which
seem insignificant to all but the annotator. But the consequences are a schism within
criticism: those who read with an eye for literary lines of descent might feel that they are
reading a different book from those who annotate with an eye on the particular.
The problem of annotating a single phrase in isolation may also be brought into focus by my second illustration, Night and Day’s single allusion to the idea of the unearned
increment, and its more dispersed references to notions of national efficiency. The phrase
arises as Katharine Hilbery reflects on the family’s failure to complete a biography of Richard Alardyce. In a subtle and condensed metaphor, it seems to Katharine that “Their increment became yearly more and more unearned” (ND 35). The concept of the unearned
increment dated back to the political theory in the 1870s, and became more prominent in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the state became more involved in creating infrastructure such as gas supplies and sewerage systems (Whitworth, Virginia Woolf
37-8). In 1891 J. A. Hobson provided a pointed example from the Lancashire town of
Bury: the municipal authorities had wanted to raise sixty thousand pounds from the rates
to provide sewage-works; although such improvements would have provided some benefit
to all the town’s inhabitants, the benefit would have been felt disproportionately by the
dominant local landowner, Lord Derby, because the “ground value” of his land would
have greatly increased (Hobson 195). What Katharine implies, then, is that the value of
Richard Alardyce’s poetry has continued to rise, in spite of the his daughter’s neglect of
the estate; the value of literary works might rise because of the work of other authors who
continue the tradition, or because of the works of critics who maintain interest in them.
One could annotate this passage in several different ways. There is a personal, familial
aspect to the phrase. When Adeline Virginia Stephen was born, her god-father, James Russell Lowell, had sent Leslie Stephen the following doggerel verses; they were later quoted
by Maitland in his Life and Letters. Having wished the newborn girl health, wealth, and
wisdom, and her father’s wit, Lowell wishes that he inherit her mother’s beauty:
Now if there’s any truth in Darwin
And we from what was, all we are win,
I simply wish the child to be
A sample of Heredity,
Enjoying to the full extent
Life’s best, the Unearned Increment,
Which Fate, her Godfather to flout,
Gave him in legacies of gout.
(Lowell, qtd. Maitland 319)
If I have understood the verse correctly, Lowell is not particularly discriminating about
the concept of Unearned Increment. He seems to conflate one’s ancestral inheritance
Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
15
with one’s inheritance from the wider community, as if one’s Darwinian heredity were
not different from one’s social and cultural inheritance. While it is true that one has not
earned what one inherits from one’s parents, that inheritance is not the same as the unearned increment. However, Lowell’s misunderstanding is not so much the problem as
the danger that the biographical annotation might seem sufficient. Yet really at this point
annotation, being tied to the particular annotated item, cannot give a full sense of how
many different elements in the text tie together. I have discussed the unearned increment
in relation to the novel elsewhere (Virginia Woolf 37-38), and at an earlier Virginia Woolf
conference (“Night and Day and National Efficiency”). There are several other phrases in
the novel, and semantic fields that are in themselves unworthy of annotation, that gain
in significance once the unearned increment comes to light. It is significant that Mary’s
conversations with Ralph dwell on such topics as “the taxation of land values,” because
such taxation was often proposed as a corrective to the unearned increment. Behind this,
it is worth noting that one of the models for Mary may have been Margaret Llewelyn
Davies, and that her brothers were all involved to some extent in The United Committee for the Taxation of Land Values, formed in 1908; in 1910 her brother Crompton
was one of its secretaries. The language of organization and efficiency in the novel also
becomes more significant in the light of the unearned increment theme, the two being
linked by the theme of national efficiency. Mrs Hilbery’s unco-ordinated attempts to
write the biography without a central plan resemble the unco-ordinated institutions of
the decentralized or small state. Katharine, on the other hand, is “resolved on reform”
(ND 36). Ralph Denham is also characterized in terms of efficiency: when he decides to
discourage Katharine by inviting her home to meet his family, and he justifies the move
by seeing it as a “courageous measure” that might “end the absurd passions which were
the cause of so much pain and waste” (394). It is unlikely that any annotator would
annotate “reform” and “measures,” but their derivation from political discourse is not
without significance. I would hope that by annotating “unearned increment” I might
sharpen a reader’s awareness of the political dimension, and that political associations in
other words would thereby become clearer; but in this territory the annotator and the
contextualizing critic part company.
My third set of examples raises the question of whether annotation can ever be a
systematic activity, and of what its limits might be. In the United Kingdom, the requirements of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) are that research projects be
articulated in terms of a key research question which is to be investigated in the light of a
research method and a research context. In this context, compared to projects that have a
sophisticated argument to advance, the practice of annotation can look unsystematic and
unscholarly. On every page the annotator needs to respond to whatever difficulties the
text has to offer, and to be wary of apparent simplicities that conceal underlying obscurities. When I applied for a grant for my work on Night and Day, the best I could offer the
AHRC was to say that I would be examining every phrase in the novel, and asking what
associations it might have held for Woolf ’s earliest readers. However, such a proposal
sounds impossibly unfocused and open-ended when confronted with a quasi-scientific
demand for method, and so I humbly suggested that proper names and place names
would be priorities. In practice, I have found that one also investigates places that are not
named but which might have been recognisable to the original audience: so, for example,
16
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
when Katharine goes to buy a map on Great Queen Street, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields (ND
465), one needs to determine if there were any such map shops. (In fact there were not,
but there were on nearby Long Acre.) The investigation of the granite obelisk, while not
beginning with a specific place name, is a related kind of investigation.
Specific places, phrases, and events are important to the way that Woolf makes
meaning, but they are by no means the whole story. Any realist novel makes meaning
by reference to known social semiotics, and this remains true even for modernist novels
which have shattered the stable perspectives of realism. Night and Day, for example,
is full of references to clothes. What does it signify that one character wears a plumcoloured velveteen dress (78), that another is dressed like a Russian peasant girl (376),
that another has a yellow scarf twisted round her head (60)? What does it signify that
William Rodney wears a faded crimson dressing-gown (70), and later wears light yellow gloves (179)? Night and Day is also full of references to other forms of domestic
decoration and display: what does it signify that the Hilberys do not have a tablecloth
on their table (97) and the Denhams do (399)? Why is there so much attention to the
physical fabric of books, and what do the different bindings signify? Our attention is
drawn to this by Mrs Hilbery’s complaint that the present generation don’t print books
as well as the Victorians (13), and we see at various points William Rodney’s Baskerville
Congreve (70), and hear remarks about cheap classics, gold-wreathed volumes, pocket
Shakespeares, and lemon-coloured leaflets (19, 103, 157, 269). Such references point
not to another text, nor to a place or place name, but to a cultural system of signs:
what matters here is not the text of Shakespeare, but the cultural practice of producing
and carrying pocket-sized editions of his works. We are all aware what it might mean
in a Victorian novel for a respectable person not to wear a hat out of doors; or, more
scandalously, for a woman to have her hair down; and we are sometimes aware that less
practiced readers might need reminding of it. But there are codes in Victorian novels
that are more obscure, and when we come to early twentieth century fiction, the process
of recovery becomes still harder: social codes were less rigid, they were, quite probably,
faster changing; and we have had less time to undertake the work of reconstructing
them. Roland Barthes once wrote of “the reality effect” being created by any of those
descriptive elements within a novel which could not be subsumed under one of his
analytic codes (Barthes 141-8). The reality effect is a concept which is very reassuring to
the exasperated and exhausted annotator. It raises the possibility that the yellow gloves
might be nothing more than gloves that happen to be yellow. But until one has explored
every last possibility of there being some lost social semiotic at work, one cannot ascribe
the yellow gloves to the reality effect.
In the case of William Rodney’s light yellow gloves, it is possible to note Alexandra
Orr’s 1891 biography of Robert Browning, in which a description of the young poet
is quoted which describes him as “just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured
kid-gloves and such things” (Orr 92-3); Woolf was later to draw on this biography for
Flush (1933), though it is not essential to a note to assume that Woolf had read it. The
difficulty with stopping there is that Orr’s association of lemon-coloured gloves and dandyism might have been peculiar to the 1830s and no longer valid in the 1910s; moreover,
lemon-coloured might not signify the same as light-yellow. And, even if those problems
could be ignored, to provide only one annotation risks implying that the gloves create
Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
17
a particular link between William Rodney and Robert Browning. Fortunately Google
Books, though unhelpful when it comes to differentiating editions and imprints of books,
does allow one to search for phrases. (Or did: Google’s right to the texts it has digitised
has been disputed during the period of my research). By these means I was led to Gilbert
Cannan’s Three Pretty Men, published 1916 and so exactly contemporaneous with the
composition of Night and Day; in it, Clarence Wilcox, an actor, draws on “a pair of light
yellow gloves” (Cannan 77). At one level that tells us almost nothing: it displaces us from
the problem of understanding how “light yellow gloves” signified onto the problem of
what “actor” might signify. That might be seen as a disappointment, but, just as failing to
identify a single model for the granite obelisk might be seen as a kind of success, so too
might acquiring slightly too much information about yellow gloves. We can complete
the note with a forward reference to Woolf ’s short story “The Duchess and the Jeweller”
(1938), in which Oliver Bacon not only possesses yellow gloves, like William Rodney,
but also a crimson dressing-gown (CSF 249). This connection sets up all sorts of curious
echoes: Woolf ’s characterisation of the jeweller places strong emphasis on clothes and appearances, as if they are there to conceal his poor origins; so there is a kind of theatricality
about him. And Bacon’s reflection on his once limited ambition, to sell “stolen dogs to
fashionable women in Whitechapel” (CSF 248) also returns us to the orbit of Flush. In
spite of those interconnections I don’t propose that the third source or analogue imposes
closure on the question. We are left with the suggestion that light yellow gloves might be
worn by men who are dandyish, or theatrical, or suspiciously ostentatious, but that does
not necessarily mean that William Rodney is: indeed, that background might emphasise
the extent to which he is not those things. And while those contexts might raise questions
about the glove wearer’s sexuality, it would not, in this instance, be helpful to annotate
as if there were a one-to-one code at work: codes do not make meaning in the same way
as systems of signs, and, even if yellow gloves were used as a sign of sexual preference, to
treat them as a code would be to lose their evasiveness. There is a contradiction involved in
annotation: one needs to clarify the text, especially by recovering lost historical significations, but one must stop short of interpreting, and must allow the reader to continue to
be the maker of meaning.
To explore this kind of contradiction further, I’d like to turn to two examples from
Mrs Dalloway. The first concerns the scene where Rezia is in Regent’s Park with Septimus:
“I am alone; I am alone! she cried, by the fountain in Regent’s Park (staring at the Indian
and his cross), as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to
its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had
no names and rivers wound they knew not where – such was her darkness” (MD 20-21).
There is a faint echo of Heart of Darkness here, which we will have to ignore: I would like
focus on “the Indian and his cross.” As several editions now note, this refers to a structure
in the park known as the Readymoney fountain, which dates from 1869 (Bradshaw 172;
Beja 150). The relevance of this goes beyond knowing where Rezia is supposed to be at
that particular moment. The cross can itself be treated as a text. Most straightforwardly, it
has a text on it. When it was erected it carried a plaque explaining that it was: “the gift of
the Cowasjee Jehangheer Ready-Money, Companion of the Star of India, a wealthy Parsee
gentleman of Bombay, for the protection enjoyed by him and his Parsee fellow-countrymen under British rule in India” (“New Drinking-Fountain” 152). What we have in the
18
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
passage concerning Rezia is an almost paradigmatic case of a Woolfian character glancing
at an object while thinking about some other topic. Such objects may seem arbitrary or
even incongruous, but on further investigation they turn out to be readable in ways that
hold hidden relevance to the character’s situation.
The Readymoney fountain is more complex than most, because it has the potential
to contradict other glimpses of the British Empire that we find in Mrs Dalloway. Parsees,
followers of the Zoroastrian faith, had been persecuted in Persia/Iran since the twelfth
century, and there was a wave of emigration to India in the mid nineteenth century.
Many Parsees did well in the British and Portuguese colonies in India, “playing the role
of entrepreneurs and mediators between different vested interests” (Nanavutty 98-99).
Jehangheer’s success, and his gratitude for British imperial tolerance and protection, contradict the novel’s more dominant note of criticism of Empire, one in which it consists
of “Conversion,” of “dashing down shrines” and “smashing idols.” What might Rezia be
thinking as she looks at the drinking fountain? Is she thinking of the similarity between
herself and the Parsees, strangers in an alien culture? Does that thought then lead naturally to the thought about the Romans? Or is she thinking of the dissimilarity between
the Parsees’ relatively strong economic and cultural position, and her more marginal one?
As well as reading the text that was literally placed on the fountain, we might also consider the design of the drinking fountain as a text. While its appearance is broadly that
of a “Venetian” gothic, when one looks more closely the “eastern” decorative element
that conventionally forms part of Venetian gothic is here more pronouncedly Indian; the
fountain is a strange hybrid of traditional English market cross with elements that might
have been read as exotic. In looking at the fountain, is Rezia comparing her own peculiar
cultural position to its?
I do not want to resolve these questions: rather, I would like to treat this experience
as typical. Placing a word, phrase, or whole novel in context does not necessarily have to
narrow its meaning. By identifying the drinking-fountain, we know more or less exactly
where Rezia is at this moment; but we do not know exactly what she is thinking. We know
exactly what text appeared in the plaque on the fountain, but knowing that does not determine the different ways it might be interpreted, nor does it determine how its presence
in Mrs Dalloway might be dealt with.
The second example from Mrs Dalloway concerns Lady Bruton’s cry of dismay, “Ah,
the news from India!” Commenting on this phrase, Alex Zwerdling goes on to quote some
headlines from The Times in June 1923: “The Times in June 1923 was full of ‘news from
India’ sure to disturb someone with her values: imperial police ‘overwhelmed and brutally
tortured by the villagers’ (2 June); ‘Extremists Fomenting Trouble’ (23 June); ‘Punjab Discontent’ (29 June)” (Zwerdling 121). Quoting news headlines is a fairly common means
of providing a thumbnail sketch of the context for a given text. It certainly keeps us close
to texts, but we need to ask which texts. Why choose the Times? In this particular instance,
the fact that Lady Bruton has been engaged in writing a letter to that newspaper may
seem like sufficient justification. However, from what we learn of Lady Bruton’s politics,
she was probably far more likely to have sympathised with the conservative imperialist
Morning Post. I suspect that there was an element of convenience involved in Zwerdling’s
procedure: at the time he was writing, microfilms of the Times were far more readily available than those of other publications. If we were to take Virginia Woolf rather than Lady
Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
19
Bruton as the object of our inquiries, we might choose a different source. Woolf ’s diaries
for 1920-1924 contain references to a huge range of newspapers: the British Weekly, Daily
Express, Daily Herald, Daily Mail, Daily News, Labour Monthly, Morning Post, Pall Mall
Gazette, as well as the Times. If we were to turn to the Nation and Athenaeum, which
Maynard Keynes’s consortium acquired in 1923, we would find coverage of India that
was slightly more receptive to Indian nationalism. In saying this, I do not wish to suggest
that, because of its Bloomsbury connection, the Nation and Athenaeum is the “correct” or
“proper” source. Lady Bruton would be unlikely to turn to it as a source of news. Rather
I would suggest as an ideal for annotation and contextualization that a clash of views and
opinions makes for a truer and fuller context.
The remarks about annotation so far could be true of any writers, and many of them
could be true of any modernist writers. Is there anything distinctive about Woolf ’s relation to context, and might this affect the way we deal with annotation and contextualizing reading? One way of approaching this question would be to consider Woolf ’s own
remarks on historical context, and in particular her relation to Leslie Stephen, but such an
approach would not immediately tell us anything about Woolf ’s novels. For that reason, it
is important to ask whether there are any distinctive formal features of Woolf ’s novels; any
good answer would acknowledge that Woolf developed a distinctive form of free indirect
discourse, though it would also have to acknowledge the immense formal variety of her
writing practice. What I have to say starts from the mode that is faintly visible in The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day, and which reaches its fullest form in her novels of the
1920s; which disappears for The Waves (1931) and is visible in modified forms in Flush,
The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941).
Firstly, and at the risk of stating the obvious, Woolf very rarely employs an omniscient narrator, and when she does, she hardly ever uses it to state facts directly. She
does not have a narrator who might describe calico, or cancer; nor a narrator who might
explicitly historicize the action; she does not have an historian-narrator who might state,
for example, that “it was in this year that the Royal Commission on Shell Shock published
its report.” One could imagine such a sentence in Thomas Hardy’s novels, and just about
imagine it in George Eliot, but never in Woolf ’s fiction. In the context of her realist forebears, her most famous sentence of this sort, “On or about December 1910” sounds like
a parody of historicizing narration.
In the absence of such an omniscient voice, our knowledge of the external world is
filtered through characters’ minds, and so it is filtered through sentences that combine the
internal and the external. Woolf ’s use of the present participle is particularly interesting.
A common kind of sentence in Woolf runs something like this:
X, Y, and Z, thought someone, doing something in relation to something external.
In one of the earliest examples, Woolf explicitly remarks upon the incongruity, and thus
holds the internal and the external apart from each other:
It was while she held a photograph from the Greek in her hands that she exclaimed, impulsively, if incongruously:
20
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
“My oysters! I had a basket,” she explained, “and I’ve left it somewhere. Uncle
Dudley dines with us to-night. What in the world have I done with them?” (ND
140)
A few years later, in Jacob’s Room (1922), the incongruity of internal and external—in this
case, an action—is not remarked upon:
This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention. Perhaps, as Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough. Our fathers at
any rate had something to demolish. So have we for the matter of that, thought
Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. (190-91)
In the absence of a remark, the combination of elements becomes a riddle of sorts, and in
the instance from Jacob’s Room, the riddle is not hard to solve: that which Jacob wishes to
destroy is the outlook of the new populist newspapers like the Daily Mail.
In other instances in Jacob’s Room, Bonamy thinks about whether Jacob will marry
Clara, while “pausing to watch the boys bathing in the Serpentine” (211), an external context that clearly signals Bonamy’s sexuality. Elsewhere in the same novel, more cryptically,
Fanny Elmer thinks about life:
“One’s godmothers ought to have told one,” said Fanny, looking in at the window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand—told one that it is no use making a
fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it now, looking at the large
yellow globe marked with steamship lines. (238)
The globe and the steamship lines have some sort of connection to Jacob’s long absence—
Fanny has been sustained by picture postcards for two months—but also hints at the
world being larger and more complex than any individual can imagine.
In Mrs Dalloway, there are instances where the sentence structure is more complex,
and some external phenomena are folded into the characters’ thoughts. For example, Mr
Bentley at the end of the aeroplane scene:
Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought
Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his
house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian
theory—away the aeroplane shot. (MD 24)
Of course Woolf does a great deal of the boring realist work of getting from lunch to
dinner, but it is not the distinctive characteristic of her writing. The present-participle
method allows her to be so slyly allusive. She establishes riddles in which we need to
ask whether there is a relation between the internal thought and the external object of
perception; and, if there is, whether there is some kind of causality involved. The indirectness of the method can create a situation in which over-specification of context, lengthy
Woolf, Context, and Contradiction
21
description of what Woolf left unstated, can look clumsy and overbearing; but such specifications and descriptions are presupposed by the text, and necessary to the interpretative
process. As the example of Mr Bentley reminds us, annotations might be necessary both
for the contents of the thought and the external world in which it is placed: an annotator
would probably give notes for Einstein and Mendel as well as for Mr Bentley’s location,
Greenwich. I do not wish to claim that only one half of the construction is the province of
the annotator. Rather, what’s important is the way that the construction reminds us that
thought always occurs in a context.
What kinds of things impinge on the consciousness of the character? It is worth
remarking that in Woolf the external world only rarely consists of forces that might immediately threaten the material well being of a character. The present-participle verb is
very often looking or watching: verbs of detached observation rather than engagement;
Mr Bentley rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich is about as engaged as it gets. Although
Woolf is profoundly concerned with death, she was apparently not interested in narrating
what we might call “matters of life and death,” or even matters of material well-being. If
Bonamy is entertaining sexual thoughts about the boys in the Serpentine, then he might
end up fleeing the country or in prison, but Woolf does not pursue those sorts of narrative. The closest Woolf comes to the more melodramatic mode of life hanging in the
balance comes with the deaths of Rachel Vinrace and Septimus Warren Smith. Other
deaths happen offstage, and what interests Woolf are the consequences for the survivors.
But those philosophical and narrative preferences mean that the sorts of things that might
come to light in the course of contextualising investigations do not have immediate narrative consequences.
At the same time, Woolf has an overarching interest in power relations and in the
ways that hegemonic worldviews manifest themselves through ideology, through institutions, and through social practices. Inequalities of power have material effects on the way
her characters’ lives are lived, and we are reminded of those inequalities by the material
landscapes that her characters inhabit. Reading Mrs Dalloway, we are in no doubt that
London is an imperial metropolis, and it is clear enough how that imperialism has impacted upon Septimus’s life, and, with a little more thought, on Clarissa’s and on Peter’s.
So the relation of the contextual to the question of power is nearly always at one remove,
displaced away from plot and event and into the world of image. But that displacement
is not a deletion.
So while context matters for all authors, it matters particularly for Woolf because she
is concerned to establish a dialogue between inner and outer; if our picture of the outer
world of her time has become faded or torn, we cannot re-establish that dialogue. Or, to
change the metaphor, if the past is foreign country and we have forgotten how to speak
the language, contextualization provides a phrase book and a grammar. I have suggested
that Woolf ’s novels are often interrogative, posing questions to the reader; it is not the job
of contextualization to solve those riddles, but to enrich them. Having too much information, and providing annotations that are potentially mutually contradictory, is positively
desirable: it might define certain boundaries of possibility and by implication might exclude certain identifications, but within the boundaries, it keeps open the free play of the
text. Moreover, as the example of the land lighthouse suggests, backgrounds unearthed by
these investigations create new rhymes and patterns.
22
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
It may sound as if I propose that we align ourselves with Mrs Hilbery and her inability to settle on any single account of Alardyce’s life. There is certainly something attractive
about Woolf ’s description of Mrs Hilbery’s unsteady spells of inspiration, and the way
they “flickered over the gigantic mass of the subject as capriciously as a will-o’-the-wisp,
lighting now on this point, now on that” (ND 35). There is certainly something attractive
about the idea of annotations that flicker in this way. But they need not be capricious in
the selection of subjects or in the texts that are found for them. They can be steady and
illuminating without compromising the flickering and indeterminate quality of Woolf ’s
works. It is possible to use “context” much as Foucault described the use of the concept of
the author: as a principle of thrift that aims to stop the proliferation of meaning (Foucault
209). But a return to the full historical context, invoking texts beyond the primary text,
can also unearth associations and implications which complicate meaning; furthermore, it
can place the primary text in dialogue with its contemporaries and forebears. Though the
factual scholarly apparatus of historical criticism sometimes appear to suggest authority
and closure, historicism can reopen texts, and that reopening can place the past in new
dialogues with the present.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
141-8.
Beja, Morris, ed. Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. Oxford: Blackwell for the Shakespeare Head Press, 1996.
Bradley, A. G. Round About Wiltshire. London: Methuen, 1907.
Bradshaw, David, ed. Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. Oxford: OUP, 2000.
Briggs, Julia, ed. Night and Day, by Virginia Woolf. London: Penguin, 1992.
Cannan, Gilbert. Three Pretty Men. London: Methuen, 1916.
Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.
Fernie, Ewan. “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism.” Shakespeare Survey Volume 58: Writing about
Shakespeare. Ed. Peter Holland. CUP, 2005. Cambridge Collections Online. CUP. 20 December 2011
DOI:10.1017/CCOL0521850746.017
Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. Harlow:
Longman, 1988. 197-210.
Hobson, J.A. Problems of Poverty. London: Methuen, 1891.
Maitland, F. W. The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth, 1906.
Nanavutty, Piloo. The Parsis. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1977.
“New Drinking-Fountain in Regent’s Park.” Illustrated London News, 55, no. 1552, 14 August 1869, 152, 160.
Orr, Alexandra. Life and Letters of Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder, 1891.
Rawnsley, Willingham Franklin. Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire. London: Macmillan, 1914.
Showalter, Elaine. Introduction and Notes. Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, ed. Stella McNichol. London:
Penguin, 1992.
Tomalin, Claire, ed. Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. Oxford: OUP, 1992.
Whitworth, Michael H. Virginia Woolf. Oxford: OUP, 2005.
——. “Night and Day and National Efficiency.” Unpublished paper presented at the Thirteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, Smith College, Massachusetts, 5-8 June 2003.
Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. Ed. Kate Flint. 1922. Oxford: OUP, 1992.
——. Mrs Dalloway. Ed. David Bradshaw. 1925. Oxford: OUP, 2000.
——. Night and Day. London: Duckworth, 1919.
Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
“DID I NOT BANISH THE SOUL?” THINKING OTHERWISE, WOOLF-WISE
by Patricia Waugh
If I weren’t so sleepy, I would write about the soul. I think it is time to cancel that
vow against soul description. What was I going to say? Something about the violent moods of my soul. I think I grow more & more poetic. Perhaps I restrained
it, & now, like a plant in a pot it begins to crack the earthenware. Often I feel
the different aspects of life bursting my mind asunder. (Virginia Woolf, Diary
Saturday 21st June, 1924)
One great use of the Soul has always been to account for, and at the same time to
guarantee, the closed individuality of each personal consciousness. The thoughts
of one’s soul must unite into one self, it was supposed, and must be eternally
insulated from every other soul. (William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890,
1:349).
Thinking Souls in Fictional Worlds
T
he aim of this essay is to develop an argument that Virginia Woolf banished the
soul as what James calls the “closed individuality” of personal consciousness, in
order to retrieve it, through her fiction, as something more closely resembling
an enactivist, extended or distributed idea of mind. Part of her strategy for re-fashioning
mind involved the laying bare of the assumptions and limitations of metaphysical dualism
and the development of narrative techniques and a language for its deconstruction. This
is not to claim that Woolf succeeded in overcoming dualism, nor that, in the end, a more
“distributed” idea of mind would, necessarily, provide a foundation for a new conception
of the soul. But at the very least, she hoped to prevent the disappearance of the soul or
its shrinkage into the biological reductionisms of her own time. “The thoughts of one’s
soul must unite into one self ”: fiction, as a medium for thinking selves into existence, and
thinking about selves thinking, is where this argument begins.
Working on To the Lighthouse, Woolf fantasised about writing a novel that might
transfer thinking directly onto the page, a novel “made solely & with integrity of one’s
thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they become a work of art” (D3 102).
She immediately dismissed the fantasy: words would intrude, exert their own pressures,
deforming thoughts. But the niggling question of how you might catch and tell a thought
remained. For Woolf, the novel is human life as poetry, a place where human life’s ordinary rhythms and processes of thinking might be poetically distilled and understood:
as imagining, inferring, deliberating, deciding, remembering, forgetting, day-dreaming,
planning, intending and problem-solving. But a novel is more specifically a process of
thinking into being an imaginary world. Reading a novel may feel more like an experience
of inhabiting the percepts of real and embodied minds, than of looking in, with the eye
of the mind, to a flickering realm of passing thought. Woolf most often records her own
24
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
experience of thinking and of thoughts as physical presences, looming out of shadows and
streaking with effervescent brilliance across her mind, writing in her diary, for example on
3rd March 1920 how: “numbers of old clothes in my dirty clothes basket—scenes I mean,
tumbled pell mell into my receptacle of a mind.” Lily Briscoe’s vertiginous thinking, as she
stands transfixed, abortively trying to will Mr Ramsay’s austere table into a clear mental
picture, is suggestive of Woolf ’s own sense of the overwhelming effort required, “that razor
edge of balance between two opposing forces” (TTL 296), to preserve, but discipline into
coherent shape, the dynamic and contradictory flow that is thought becoming the form
of an imaginative world. For novels must give thoughts anchor, local habitation. So, reviewing Forster’s Aspects of the Novel in 1927, she notes approvingly his insider knowledge
of “what a muddled and illogical machine the brain of a writer is. He knows how little
writers think about methods…how absorbed they tend to become in some vision of their
own…untidy and harassed people who are scribbling away at their books” (E4 458). But
he is criticised for his vision of a novel, “‘sogged with humanity.’” For should “life,” his
ultimate value, be “absent in a pattern and present in a tea-party” (461). In a novel, “life”
is things emerging out of thoughts, but also things, shaped into and held in a formal pattern immaterial as thoughts.
The novel is often defended as an important source of empathetic understanding that
facilitates our ability to “step into another’s shoes.” But meta-representational activity—
imagining the “inside” of the mind of another—is just as often about trying to work out
the other’s intentions from their external behaviour, for some purpose of our own. We do
it all the time; Woolf ’s characters do it all the time: watching, inferring, observing gesture,
movement and facial expression, picking up a shift in tone of a voice or a departure from
habit. But her characters also try to picture what is in the mind of the other. For Lily, this
act, picturing Mr Ramsay’s imaginary table, for example, is as difficult as the process of
transferring her own mental “picture” onto canvas: the blank stare of the canvas is like the
blank slate of another mind: “in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas…
the demons set on her…and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any
down a dark passage for a child” (TTL 34). The demons are thoughts, her own and yet
voices from elsewhere, doubts: “women can’t write; women can’t paint.” Similarly clamorous voices assail her as she struggles to picture Mr Ramsay’s table, so that: “to follow her
thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s
pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting,
contradictory things” (43). A myriad possibilities “danced up and down, like a company
of gnats, each separate, but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net—danced
up and down in Lily’s mind” (43). As solid as things one minute, thoughts are mercurially
out of the window, the next: “her thought which had spun quicker and quicker exploded
of its own intensity; she felt released; a shot went off close at hand, and there came, flying from its fragments, frightened, effusive, tumultuous, a flock of starlings” (43-4). Mr
Bankes comes running in, shouting “Jasper!”; Mr Ramsay starts to boom “tragically” how
“Someone had blundered!”; the “shot,” which seems to have detonated out of Lily’s brain, is
discovered to have been fired by the Ramsay’s son. But for a moment, it seemed as though
Lily’s thoughts had germinated, explosively, into things, metamorphosed with magicalrealist panache into the flock of frightened, tumultuous and effusive starlings. But so they
have: for the power of poetic language lies in its capacity to overcome the dualist either/or
“Did I not banish the soul?”
25
and to present the world aspectivally as a “seeing as.” We do somehow “see” in the imagination Lily’s thoughts as a flock of birds, as we “see” the poor starlings, flapping in a black
whirl of wings, as thoughts whirling out of the enclosed globe of Lily’s mind.
In the short quotation at the beginning of this essay, William James suggests how
thinking and thought are traditionally bound up with the idea of a personal soul. The
unity of the soul is believed to arise out of the mental substance of thought: “the thoughts
of one’s soul must unite into one self.” The boundedness of consciousness, the idea that I
am in my head, is assumed to provide the location for the private self that is “guaranteed”
by the soul. In a secular context, the soul is mostly used to underpin the cherished idea
of the privacy of consciousness and the integrity of the individual self. Souls were always
individual substances, bounded and discrete, unified in themselves, but discontinuous
and separate: like a line of telegraph poles (or gig lamps) vanishing into the all-embracing
still point and presence of God. Once the frame is secularised, what still remains is the
translucent capacity of the soul to know itself, but to remain “insulated,” opaque and mysterious to the other. Within this dispensation, Lily will never “see” Mr Ramsay’s table, just
as she will never peer into Mr Ramsay’s soul. Woolf knows the difficulty: in her essay “On
Being Ill,” she notes that “we do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others” (E4
320). For in Woolf too, souls are somehow like, and somehow bound up with, thoughts.
But they are rarely the kind of thoughts regulated by a methodical sorting machine, a
demon that, unlike Lily’s, is somehow pitched at a higher level, and brings thoughts to
account for themselves in logical identity parades. In Woolf, the soul is never orderly,
never bounded and hierarchical, and is violated precisely by those who try to impose on
it—the Holmeses, the Bradshaws, the Brutons—the kind of measured calibration broadly
understood as “method.” To protect the soul, therefore, and to preserve it, Woolf will
need to rewrite it, by rethinking thought. “Consciousness,” as “the closed individuality of
each,” subtended by an idea of thinking as the guarantor of a privatised integrity that sets
off thought-substance from a thing-substance, the mental from the material, will need to
be overturned, chased out of the window, at least.
In her essay “Montaigne” (1925), written as she was composing Mrs Dalloway, Woolf
offers her most extended reflection on thoughts and thinking. She begins by noting the
difficulty of catching thoughts, for “the phantom is through the mind and out of the
window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound
darkness which it has lit up with a wandering light” (E4 72). Montaigne’s achievement lies
in his unique ability to resist “the pen [as]…a rigid instrument” and so to “communicate
a soul” in all its contradictions. Woolf implies that in his writing thinking is conceived
as an activity extended into an instrument of writing that also shapes the thought, like
seeing Lily’s brush as a metronomic extension of her hand or the power of the whiteness
of the blank canvas that compels the intensity of her gaze. Thinking is not simply in the
head: the pen has its own proclivities, “all kinds of habits and ceremonies of its own…
changing the natural stumbling trip of human speech into the solemn and stately march
of pens” (72). Neither is Montaigne’s ability to catch the phantom an effect of secluded
introspection in the “inner room of our tower”: for Montaigne’s thinking follows the
exuberant restlessness of one who can lay “hold of the beauty of the world with all his
fingers.” Flickering, multiple, serendipitous, “the soul…always casting her own lights and
shadows,” is viewed in all “her duplicity, her complexity” (78).
26
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
Woolf is beginning to lay out the terms of her resistance to the traditional idea of the
soul, but she is also beginning to suggest why prose fiction might accommodate its overcoming. Already in 1917, she had praised Dostoevsky for his ability to “follow the vivid
streak of achieved thought,” whilst conveying the “dim and populous underworld” from
which it emerges (E2 85). Woolf conveys Dostoevsky’s picture of the soul as more Leibnizian, than Cartesian, a bounded entity still, but its capacity for clarity of thought arising
from a region of “minute and obscure perceptions” which is its soil (Leibniz 374). In the
later essay, “Modern Fiction” (1925), Dostoevsky is reinvoked. Comparing Joyce to the
Edwardian “materialists,” she praises Joyce’s “spirituality” and his concern “at all costs to
reveal the flickering of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain”
(E4 161), but that word “brain” is indicative. “Brain” in Woolf is almost always associated
with logical or algorithmic thinking, with the technical and intellectual. Writing of Mark
Gertler in a diary on 18th September, 1918, for example, she notes his “intelligence,” but
reflects that he will need a “rupture of the brain” to become a real painter. “If we want
understanding of the soul and heart,” therefore, we shall need to turn to the “inconclusiveness of the Russian mind” (E4 162). Fiction has “no method,” she concludes, “everything
is the proper stuff of fiction” (164). Interesting that Woolf rejects “method” and admits
only “stuff” that is inclusive and admits everything for she echoes, but inverts, the terms
in which Descartes laid out his ideas on thinking and the soul in the Meditations on First
Philosophy (1641) and the Discourse on Method (1637). In the 1637 text, Descartes affirmed his existence as “a substance whose whole essence or nature is to think and whose
being requires no place and depends on no material thing” (32). In The Meditations, he
believed that through the application of a pre-emptive and methodical doubt, extended to
all material things, including his own flesh, he was able to affirm the reality of at least one
entity, his existence as a substance without extension, a thinking thing. From that Archimedean point, he then proceeded to establish the existence of God and to re-establish the
reality of the material world of extended substance. And so a new soul is made possible:
the modern bounded consciousness, the thinking private self, enclosed unto itself within
the substance of its thoughts.
Slippery Souls, Thoughts as Things and Thinking as Walking
Lily’s thoughts metamorphose into things, but Woolf ’s have brought into existence
Lily’s world. Descartes may categorically separate the substance “thought” from the substance “things,” but the ontology of the novel’s world teasingly confounds such categorisation, providing a peculiarly appropriate medium for rethinking thinking. Orhan Pamuk
argued in his Norton lectures of 2009 that the novel’s defiantly anti-Cartesian nature
allowed it to keep alive thinking about the “grand narratives” of life, increasingly abandoned by technical philosophy: “the art of the novel relies on our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory states…developing the habit of reading novels, indicates
a desire to escape the logic of the single-centred Cartesian world where body and mind,
logic and imagination are placed in opposition. Novels are unique structures that allow
us to keep contradictory thoughts in our minds without uneasiness, and to understand
differing points of view simultaneously” (Pamuk 33). Woolf ’s 1927 essay “Poetry, Fiction
and the Future” (also “The Narrow Bridge of Art”) is her own sustained defence of the
“Did I not banish the soul?”
27
novel in such terms and it is the novel, she claims, rather than poetry, that can most effectively reflect the contradictory nature of the modern mind, “full of monstrous, hybrid,
unanalysable emotions” (E4 429). For it is “as if the modern mind, wishing always to
verify its emotions, had lost the power of accepting anything simply for what it is” (434).
The novel, democratic, adaptable, impure, is most satisfactorily able to express this “great
freshening and quickening of soul” in its essential incompleteness and indeterminacy,
where “every moment is the centre and meeting point of an extraordinary number of
perceptions which have not yet been expressed” (433).
Between the early twenties and thirties, there are an extraordinary number of references to the soul and to thinking, in Woolf ’s writing. But in that most free-style of thinking genres, the diary, there appears an insistent refrain expressing regret over an earlier
unarticulated promise to “banish the soul.” Paradoxically, of course, the decision to banish
the soul, like the instruction not to think the proverbial elephant, keeps the soul squarely
at the forefront of consciousness. On February 19th 1923, she writes about how it would
interest her “if this diary were ever to become a real diary: but then I should have to speak
of the soul, & did I not banish the soul when I began” (D2 234). A paragraph on, the
question of the soul returns: “in scribbling this I am led away from my soul, which interests me nevertheless. For it is the soul I fancy that comments on visitors & reports their
comments, & sometimes sets up such a to-do in the central departments of my machinery
that the whole globe of me dwindles to a button head” (235). This seems more the stuff of
comic book metamorphosis than any theological orthodoxy. The soul that is traditionally
the seat and guarantor of the individual bounded consciousness is now a chatterbox that
has a devastatingly disturbing effect on “the central machinery” (presumably her nervous
system) and reduces “the whole globe of me,” her interior sense of selfhood, perhaps, to
a button-head, something that fastens together a garment, a covering for the body. Is
Woolf coyly reviving an older, pre-Cartesian hylomorphism, the soul as container of the
body, but also contained by it? Possibly. But in the terms of the vocabulary of “nerves”
rather than spirit, for this soul is bodily, nervy, gossipy, easily bruised and touchy. A few
sentences on, and more reflections on social comings and goings, soul is back again: “Soul,
you see, is framing all these judgements, & saying, this is not to my liking, this is second
rate, this vulgar; this nice, sincere, & so on. My soul diminished, alas, as the evening wore
on” (236). So, a soul that appears to harbour violent moods, has devastating effects on the
nervous system, is one minute standing back in judgement and the next tossing round
gossip and tittle-tattle. This is a slippery soul, indeed. On Saturday 27th February, 1926,
Woolf wrote, “As for the soul, why did I say I would leave it out? I forget. And the truth
is one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling,
at Grizzle, at the cheaper beasts at the Zoo which are exposed to the walkers in Regent’s
Park, & the soul slips in” (D3 62). We are looking in the wrong place: if you want to find
the soul look outward and not in. Slipperiness is all. Indeed, partying at Garsington, she
writes, on 4th June, 1923, of: “Thirty-seven…people to tea, a bunch of young men no
bigger than an asparagus; walking to & fro, round and round; compliments, attentions,
& then this slippery mud—which is what interests me most at the moment…I want to
give the slipperiness of people like Ott; I want to give the slipperiness of the soul” (D2
243). Now slippery as mud under one’s feet, the soul is most likely to turn one upside
down. Woolf is being mischievous, of course. But not simply mischievous. As ever, there is
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
method in the madness, though hardly of the Cartesian kind. And that surely is the point.
For what Woolf is defying in her inimically playful fashion, is the closed idea of consciousness and of thinking which no longer seems appropriate for the nervy, contradictory and
distributed soul that seems the expression of the modern world in which she lives.
What are some of Woolf’s strategies for overturning the old soul and introducing the
new? Woolf will use the language of fiction to achieve a philosophical intervention. She
undoes Cartesian closure by drawing out its contradictions. First, the idea of thoughts as
things, overturning the basic Cartesian opposition using a kind of Swiftian reductio ad absurdam, where she subjects the spiritual ideal of introspection as “looking in” to a mechanical
operation of the spirit that brings the individual soul off the production line of the material
brain. If thoughts and things are claimed to be substantially distinct, then she will make
thought into things and things into thought. Writing to Clive Bell in 1908 (as she laboriously worked her way through G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica), she complains how she has
“split” her “head over Moore every night, feeling ideas travelling to the remotest parts of my
brain, and setting up a feeble disturbance hardly to be called thought. It is almost a physical
feeling, as though some little coil of brain unvisited by any blood so far, and pale as wax, had
got a little life into it at last; but had not any strength to keep it. I have a very clear notion of
which parts of my brain think” (L1 357). Some years later, in a review essay of a biography
of Theodore Roosevelt for The New Statesman, entitled, “Body and Brain” (1920), Woolf
reflects that “very little is known of the interaction between mind and body. The mind is
treated as a separate and superior organ attached to an instrument which is, happily, becoming obsolete” (E2 224). Again it is the material brain that takes on the former attributes of
the soul, but it is a brain still somehow severed from a living and breathing body, “centred in
the head; the body is merely a stalk, smooth, black and inexpressive.” She wonders whether
this is simply because “decency requires that a man’s body shall be cut off from his head by
collar, frock coat and trousers.” Other essays Gothicise the materialist turn: in a piece entitled “Pictures” (1925), comparing the visual skill of the painter with the modern novelist’s
capacity to turn an inward eye on the contents of the mind, she imagines following a train of
feeling, for this is how the writer sees, into the deep tunnel of obscure feeling, until “we can
scarcely follow any more, were it not that suddenly, in flash after flash, metaphor after metaphor, the eye lights up that cave of darkness, and we are shown the hard, tangible, material
shapes of bodiless thoughts hanging like bats in the primeval darkness where light has never
visited them before” (E4 244). This somewhat erratic mind’s eye, which “sees” thoughts as
bats, and thoughts as gnats, turns up again in “The Sun and the Fish,” this time as a rather
grotesque giant “nerve which hears and smells, which transmits heat and cold, which is attached to the brain and rouses the mind” (E4 519). Woolf is asking the question: where,
“inside” this newly materialised mind, is the soul to be found? She plays amusingly with
fashionable metaphors of brain “localisation”: the idea that particular functions of mind
can be located in specific places in the material brain, an idea introduced in the nineteenth
century with the neurological investigations of Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke. Woolf intuits
that neurological reduction of the mind to a brain is simply an inverted Cartesianism that
saves the Cartesian soul as bounded, integral and private, by substituting for it the material
brain now opened up by the tools of the neurologist rather than those of the metaphysician.
As we shall see later, Woolf’s fears about how the traditional soul is taken over by the material
head-pieces of the new tribes of soul-doctors, statistical methods, experts in the “dark places
“Did I not banish the soul?”
29
of psychology” (E4 162), neurology, neurophysiology, psychophysics, and other varieties
of bio-medical intervention, is most forcefully expressed in Mrs Dalloway. William James
too had written of the way in which the new mechanistic philosophies of the body and the
bio-medicalised sciences of the brain threatened to establish a “medical materialism” that
might eventually replace metaphysics with science. For abolishing the old soul might simply
see its transfer to the new brain sciences in a new metaphysics of materialism, flattened into
patterns of neurons firing across an “integrated” nervous system. Without a philosophical
defence of something like “consciousness” as the expression of a soul, wouldn’t character, as
ethos, and self, as depth and autobiographical richness, be at risk of reduction to the rattlings
of the chains of a species of “conscious automata,” where mind is simply an effect of nervous
response to environmental prompting (James, Principles 1:453)? How might one relinquish
the Cartesian version of private consciousness, without rendering up and sacrificing the
integral beauty of the soul with its associated qualities of depth?
Gilbert Ryle asked the question of Rodin’s thinker: what is going on as thinking
takes place? What is he doing, as he sits there, immobilised, with downcast eyes and furrowed brow: an icon so familiar as to seem parodic? As well as representing thoughts as
things, Woolf ’s writing is full of bodies that think. Of all Woolf ’s characters, Mr Ramsay
comes closest to the Rodin-style professional thinker: “What a face” thinks Lily, “What
had made him like that? Thinking, night after night, she supposed—about the reality of
kitchen tables…until his face became worn too and ascetic and partook of this unornamented beauty which so deeply impressed her…he must have had his doubts about that
table, she supposed; whether the table was a real table; whether it was worth the time
he gave to it; whether he was able after all to find it” (240-1). Few of Woolf ’s characters
think like Mr Ramsay, trying to get to the letter R, with his thoughts ranged like keys on
a piano, but even for Mr Ramsay, struggling to frame in his mind’s eye an austere table,
the activity of thinking and the substance of thought mingle indistinguishably and emerge
seamlessly out of physical movement through space: the rhythm of gesture, relations with
others, the shapes and borders and horizons that encircle and support his body and his
proprioceptive sense of himself, his changing moods, the triggers to memory from his
feelings and perceptions, his constant watching and observing of his wife watching and
observing him, trying to infer from her bodily position what she in turn is thinking and
inferring about him, her mind flowing through his own, like the internalised speech and
inner dialogue that echoes and picks up the voices of those around him, the books he
has read. Never is thinking, even for this most professionally devoted thinker (with his
“extraordinary mind”), a bounded, static, one-track, or solitary occupation. For Woolf,
neither Descartes, nor Rodin, got it quite right.
He looked; he nodded; he approved; he went on. He slipped seeing before him
that hedge which had over and over again rounded some pause, signified some
conclusion, seeing his wife and child, seeing again the urns with the trailing
geraniums which had so often decorated processes of thought, and bore, written
up among their leaves, as if they were scraps of paper on which one scribbles in
the rush of reading—he slipped, seeing all this, smoothly into speculation…All
this would have to be dished up for the young men of Cardiff next month, he
thought; here, on his terrace, he was merely foraging and picnicking (he threw
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
away the leaf that he had picked so peevishly).…Hours he would spend thus,
with his pipe, of an evening, thinking up and down the lanes and commons,
which were all stuck about with the history of that campaign there, the life
of this statesman here, with poems and with anecdotes, with figures too…He
reached the edge of the lawn and looked out on the bay beneath. (69-71)
Mr Ramsay’s thinking is a kind of walking, just as Lily will think later in the novel,
“It was an odd kind of road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further
and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea”
(265). But is it because Mr Ramsay keeps turning back, Orpheus-like, to watch his wife
in her beauty, to be warmed in the circle, that no one hears his music, or is it because he
is too concerned with fame, legacy and reputation that—unlike Lily, who cares not at all
what happens to the painting and is ambivalent about marriage—he never seems to get
far out enough to see the table close up? Daily, he walks through trails laid by his former
thoughts, going over the same ground, deepening the same furrows in field and brow. But
is thinking possible at all without well-trodden paths, or boots, or familiar rhythms, to
provide the unheard background tune, the necessary attunement, for improvisation and
originality? Lily’s picture, made out of the “residue of her thirty three years,” emerges out
of the rhythm of her brush, dictated by the hedge and then, as she dips into her past, letting it come, emptying herself of conscious thought, feeling the “jar on the nerves” and,
almost in trauma, the dissociation, the trance-like state that opens up the picture gallery
of her past in episodic memory. Peter Walsh’s thoughts take a stately turn towards Empire, the step of his brain shifting gear and interrupting his buccaneering fantasy of going
off-track in London as the boy soldiers march past with rigid military syncopation. The
rhythms of places, spaces and bodies organise the field of thinking. Where does movement
end and thinking begin? The pause, the conclusion, the slipping into, the foraging and
picnicking describe language, thinking, walking, at one and the same time. The geraniums
that have adorned thought now bear its impress, as if Mr Ramsay had written thought
directly onto their leaves. The familiar landscape through which he walks though is “stuck
about” with old thoughts, as if his mind had turned inside out to be caught in a net. The
landscape is his memory. Even his pipe, attuned to the rhythms of the moving body, and
the body’s rhythms responding to its inhalation, clears a channel in the brain that ends in
thought. But how do we separate thinking from moving, from the body and the earth,
from accoutrements and instruments? Thoughts, things, movements, the mind, body and
environment, are knitted, like the brown stocking, into the texture of a field of thought.
What Matter, Who Minds: Russell, Moore, James
The resources of the novel offered Woolf the means to suspend, complicate, and challenge the dualistic picture, whilst negotiating a path clear of reductionist materialism, on
the one side, or a cosmic idealism, on the other. She wanted to challenge the opposition
between an objectivist truth (as facts or logical relations), recoverable thorough a strict
scientific “method,” on the one hand, and a subjectivist “meaning” (values and affections),
requiring an “inward” turn, on the other. Woolf saw this kind of “looking out” and “looking in” as two sides of the same coin, locked in agonistic limitation; she resented being
“Did I not banish the soul?”
31
set up as a writer whose fiction was “inward” just because she criticised “materialists”
for counting buttons on a waistcoat. For such a judgement, with its implied distinction
between minds and bodies, thoughts and things, assumes that the metaphysical frame
of her fiction is Cartesian and dualist. This doesn’t require a philosophical account: such
distinctions, that thoughts are “inside” and the world “outside,” seem indubitable; the
most sophisticated literary distinctions between “modernism” and “realism,” barely resist
their force.
Woolf professed no philosophical position, as such. Is it therefore because her work
gives off the odour of the metaphysical, and abounds with references to souls, mind,
brains and thinking, that philosophically-inclined critics have so often tended to read her
within the frame of a metaphysical dualism, despite all the evidence to the contrary? The
robust defence of Woolf the realist began with S.P. Rosenbaum’s “The Philosophical Realism of Virginia Woolf ” (1971), Alex Zwerdling’s Virginia Woolf and the Real World (1986)
and, more recently, but with different inflection, in Ann Banfield’s magisterial study of
Woolf ’s relations with the metaphysics of Cambridge Realism, The Phantom Table (2000).
Rosenbaum’s influential essay, however, set her up as a thinker and a writer in almost
classic terms of Cartesian method. He reads her novels as entirely “organised around private souls” (Rosenbaum 334), “a collection of individuals essentially alone” (334), “each
central consciousness is isolated with its own frigidity, madness or sentimentality”; and
for each novel, “the logical independence of what is perceived from the action of perceiving can be applied to distinguish self from consciousness of self ” (350). In Jacob’s Room,
“epistemologically, the dualism of mind and body in the novel is unmistakable…Jacob’s
consciousness is so difficult to apprehend not only because of its unity, transcendence,
and privacy, but also because of its transience. The room as symbolic of consciousness
is so appropriate here because consciousness dies; things like rooms and shoes endure…
The quest for the mysterious and transient consciousness of another is bewildering if not
futile, and these are the conditions of our love and perceiving” (329-30). Could there
be a closer reiteration of the soul as a Cartesian consciousness than here? Jacob’s Room is
undeniably a novel that plays, often comically, with the question of epistemological limits
and their relation to fictional form. An implicitly female narrator, discovering herself endlessly locked out of the various exclusively male haunts—colleges, libraries, bedrooms and
the like—registers the barriers of gender, culture and class as complications of any pure
epistemology. But how does that make the room a “symbol” for the private consciousness and a confirmation of the substance dualism of thoughts and things? Why should
an evidently political and epistemological critique be assumed to be subtended by an
ontological argument? On numerous occasions, Woolf expressed her dislike of “symbols”
and the way “everything seems to suffer a curious magnification. Nothing exists in itself
but only as a means to something else. The solid objects of daily life become rimmed with
high purposes, significant, symbolical” (The Captain’s Deathbed 86). If the room becomes
a symbol, the solid objects dissolve. But this is a novel that opens with a view wavering
in a blur of tears and sorrow and proceeds with a small boy, overwhelmed with panic,
mistaking a rock for his nanny: surely Woolf ’s technique is closer to the expressionism of
Proust for whom art “alone expresses for others and renders visible to ourselves that life of
ours which cannot effectively observe itself ” (Proust 300). For Woolf, though, the imagination, as part of ordinary thinking, confers on us all such artistic powers of perception.
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
For the world shows itself forth to us within a frame of value, feeling and purpose. Like
Mr Ramsay’s boots, Jacob’s shoes exist in numerous perspectives within a dynamic field of
cognition, just like the steeples of Martinville. And if, as Woolf argues in “Fiction, Poetry
and the Future,” her novels are committed to conveying a sense of the extraordinary number of perceptions that remain unexpressed in any one moment, surely what fascinates in
Jacob’s Room is that objects acquire their solidity through their defiant indeterminacy, the
many possibilities of their showing forth. Like the soul in all its contradictions, objects
are solid precisely because they are shifting. This does not require that they are “symbols”
for something else.
More recently, Woolf ’s modernism has been reconciled with the metaphysical realism
of Cambridge, circa 1910, later repudiated by the logical positivists for its idealist leanings. The affinities between Russell’s project and those of Woolf are more evident than
Rosenbaum’s preference for a reading of Moorean influence. Like Woolf, Russell was also
struggling to give an account of knowledge which could move beyond the old dualism of
mind and matter or subject and object, inspired by specific discoveries in the new physics of his day. His solution is to dissolve subjectivity altogether as the idea of a mind or
a soul and to create a space which he calls “privacy,” a perspective beyond the dualism of
mental and physical and representing the kind of virtuality which would be described by
physicists such as Heisenberg and Bohr. From this perspective can be inferred the world
of being, of logical relations, of mathematics. Woolf ’s writing is undeniably full of images
that resonate with Russellian metaphysics: both are fascinated with the idea of knowledge
as a momentary illumination fading away into darkness, thresholds around which things
gather and then fade into the wastes of unoccupied time and space. But set her evident
concern with pattern, abstraction and logic against the moment by moment concrete
images of characters thinking, observing, and inferring other’s thoughts through bodily
gesture and customary rhythm, the preoccupation with emotion as the fundamental vehicle for the sense of reality, the continuous awareness of bodily sensation, the minute and
ongoing regulation of the body through a kind of pre-reflective feeling. Strict comparisons
with the preoccupations of Cambridge Realism risk underplaying her novelist’s art. And
something else might slip out of the picture. It is the soul again. In Russell’s philosophy,
there is no longer even a consciousness, let alone a soul. In Woolf, the soul is banished to
be resurrected in different guise.
I want to take a rather different approach and suggest that Woolf is more interested in
the idea of an embodied soul and a more contradictory and wayward, though biologically
grounded idea of “ordinary” thinking, than the “extraordinary” formalism of Russell’s
logic. Woolf surely discovered her metaphysics through the experience of creating fictional
worlds and characters rather than thorough close study of logical atomism and logical
empiricism. We have seen how she provides an often playful subversion of the Cartesian,
but her fiction also offers a post-Cartesian working through and performance of an idea
of mind that is close to current developmental systems theory in biology, and the enactive, autopoetic, extended or distributed mind. In some ways, this is hardly surprising: the
roots of these recent movements of thought originated in Woolf ’s own time as a marriage
of psychology, philosophy and neurology; they have returned in the last twenty years in
our own ‘naturalist’ turn. We seem to be entering the era of a new “biocultural” and ecosocial thinking: the awareness that human and natural worlds are integrated, emergent
“Did I not banish the soul?”
33
and complex systems that cannot be understood, like body and mind, or thinking and
things, in isolation from each other.
This more complex and dynamic idea of mind is now at the heart of some of the most
interesting and challenging developments in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science. They are theories that challenge the terms of Cartesianism, but without emptying
out depth, interiority, autobiography. The philosopher Andy Clark, for example, has defined the “extended mind” as an outgrowth of a developmental systems biology where
“thinking” is viewed as a process that, far from taking place simply in the enclosed parameter of the brain (as the correlate of the unextended Cartesian mind), actually extends out
into “the structure and physics of the environment, the biomechanics of the body, perceptual information about the state of the agent-environment system, and the demands of the
task.” Cognition is therefore a complex and dynamic field of processes (Clark 8). Thinking
is not simply the individual’s private and internal mental manipulation of symbols but is
“meshed” with a substrate of embodied sensorimotor capacity, a body entangled with an
environment, a history, and other mind-body-environment complexes (or what are usually thought of as “other minds”). Neural activity is embedded in a dynamic system that
informs an ongoing bodily schema, silently and implicitly orienting a core sense of self
through feeling, sensation, perception, in relations of nearness, distance, depth, surface,
here and now, and here and there. This provides our most fundamental sense of being
in the world, a world of constantly changing and shifting relations where responses to
environmental change alter the rhythms of the organism that in turn reshapes the environment as an “ecological niche”. This idea was first adumbrated by Jacob von Uexkull in
1909 as the theory of the Umwelt (see Bethoz and Christen). It is how Woolf experienced
the modern world, as “an age clearly when we are not fast anchored where we are; things
are moving around us; we are moving ourselves” (E4 429).
The paired quotations at the outset of this essay are a suggestive coupling. For Woolf ’s
project to revision the soul chimed with that of William James, the key source for the
current anti-Cartesian turn in psychology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and
social thought: the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2000), the neo-phenomenologist
Sean Gallagher (2006), as well as Thomson (2007), Maturana and Varela (1987), Alva
Noe (2009) and, with the help of intermediaries such as Bergson (1944), Durkheim and
Ribot, Janet and Munsterberg (2009). Other contemporary theories committed to breaking down, in various ways, the Cartesian legacy, and drawing on James and Bergson, are
Bruno Latour’s actor network theory (2005), Randall Collins’s interaction ritual chains
(2004), and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic conception of thinking and thought
(2004). Indeed, the terms and expression of Woolf ’s preoccupations resonate so closely
with James’s, that one wonders why the similarities between their two enterprises have
been so conspicuously ignored. Reading James, we even find a philosophical style close to
the language of fiction, metaphorical, concrete, grounded in the senses; reading Woolf,
we find an interest in the soul and thinking that philosophically close to James’s desire for,
but awareness of the difficulty of, breaking the Cartesian mould: “the sensation that we
are sealed vessels afloat on what it is convenient to call reality; and, at some moments, the
sealing matter cracks; in floods reality” (MOB 142).
Woolf ’s affinities with phenomenology have sometimes been observed; more than
any other British or American thinker of the time, it was through James and the huge
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network of his cultural influence that European phenomenology filtered at all into the
British intellectual scene. It was James’s “neutral monism” that briefly influenced Russell before the more behaviourist The Analysis of Mind (1921). James’s announcement, in
“Does Consciousness Exist?” (1904), that “the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded” (249), was no sudden volte-face, but had steadily grown out of twenty
years of mistrust of the term. And by consciousness, he means the bounded privacy of
the Cartesian soul. His earlier, seminal, Principles of Psychology, upheld an, albeit uneasy,
mind-body dualism in which “consciousness” already begins to appear as “the faint rumour left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy” (“Consciousness,”
249): soul now requiring scare quotes. James’s radical bodily account of emotion and its
role in conferring the feel of the real, displaces the primacy of any purely “logical” account
of rationality as the means to confirm our knowledge of the world (“Emotion”). James
brought feeling and knowing and mind and body into a new relationship of homology. In
1904, he spelt out what seems to have been implicit in his work from the beginning: that
“though ‘thoughts’ and ‘things’ are names for two sorts of object,” the relation has long
been “off-balance,” and it is time to declare that there is “no aboriginal stuff or quality of
being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts
of them are made” (“Consciousness,” 248-9). Instead of substances, he discusses thoughts
as enactive processes involved in knowing. Suggestively, he considers that thoughts, and
not thinkers, think, but thoughts that are somehow enmeshed with a world and bodies
and other thinkers. And like Woolf, too, he knew that any attempt to undo so fundamental a concept as consciousness in its Cartesian (or Kantian) manifestations, has to recognise that “whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles
must still provide in some way for that function being carried on” (249). In seeking to
challenge the bounded unity of the soul, neither James nor Woolf is likely to have wanted
to reduce the mind and the self to Russell’s “subjectless subjectivity” because of its closeness to the behaviourist picture of the self as a shifting and reactive bundle of nerves with
neither agency nor will nor interiority. But if the self is conceived as a distributed soul,
part of a “network” or “field” or dynamic bio-cultural system where agency exists but is
distributed and not simply located in an enclosed consciousness, where do we locate the
feeling of selfhood, the sense of continuity through time and of being a person?
Thinking as Sewing: Hats, Gloves and Threads
Neo-phenomenology, as well as the contemporary cognitive neurosciences, owes
much to James: on emotion, temporality, the idea of the horizon of experience, the perceptual field, the importance of custom, habit and rhythm and the central role of emotion and feeling in the flourishing and the disturbances of self. For the operations of this
distributed or extended mind involve ongoing, moment to moment, affective relations to
the world, feelings that, although not necessarily felt in the body, provide the medium of a
perceptual relation to the world, a background mood or “Stimmung” through and against
which the world is constituted or “shown forth” or emerges. The world is never an inert
entity upon which I gaze, knowing as its faithful reproduction as a set of internal symbols.
As the world changes, the body in the world, the lived body, reorients itself; small disturbances, perturbations, register the shifts and eddies of the flow. If feeling, mood, remain
“Did I not banish the soul?”
35
broadly constant, I ride eddies and turbulence, stay afloat, and the world flows: it is what
Woolf refers to as the “fluidity of life” (TTL 245). If moods and feelings shift, however,
or in affectively heightened moments of perception, even if unperceived or unfelt in the
body, feeling as a medium of perception may deliver the world in a radically different
hue: perhaps a world that now appears to have retreated behind glass; or whose colours
seem bleached out or unusually vivid; suddenly backlit or drained of light; a world where
objects may suddenly stand out, stark and altered, bereft of context, obtruded and abandoned by the rhythms of habit. Changes in affective rhythms, barely discernible to consciousness, may register instead as changes in the world itself, “the leaden circles dissolved
air,” in its relations, in formerly implicit metaphysical frames which may now be brought
into explicit focus so that world appears like a framed picture and the self a spectator,
viewing from outside the frame, “Beauty the world seemed to say” (MD 59). Similarly, an
event may trigger the return of the past, an emotionally charged memory that diffuses the
emotional tone of the past into the present. So Clarissa, trying to will the return of the
feeling associated with Sally Seton remembers “going cold with excitement and doing her
hair in a kind of ecstasy.” But she stands outside the experience, looking on, until now,
undoing her hair, the touch of the pins the gesture, suddenly transports her into the first
person again, inhabiting the world of the past, for “now the old feeling came back to her,
as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing table” (29).
Spatially as well as temporally, the world is constantly shifting and reconstituting its
relations. Sometimes near, even too close, claustrophobic and stifling, the world may suddenly become far out and distant. So Septimus, who believes his reason to be intact, but
cannot feel, is a relic, staring back, on the edge of a lost world, whose spectacular rituals,
written in the sky (the crowds stare up at the sky-writing plane) cease to mean: “he looked
at people outside…his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then that he
could not feel” (75). The conventional beauty of the world shimmers distantly behind
glass, while a new and sublime power strings the nerves of his body over rocks in a desert,
ravelling them through the universe, promising a new and terrible beauty, a message only
for him. Losing the threads of attachment to the world, like Peter Walsh wondering off
the beaten track, he feels a wild excitement, but whereas Peter is brought back, falling in
step with the military parade, Septimus floats free, so that Rezia must “put her hand down
with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down, transfixed” (19).
Rosenberg argues that “Mrs Dalloway is organised around private souls” (334). But
Rosenberg is imposing the authoritative voice of the Cartesian, with its frame of stasis
and fixity, one that tempers the force of Woolf ’s social and cultural critique, her concern
with the collective as well as the solitary soul. Surely Mrs Dalloway is organised as well
around the distributed mind of a collective and public soul, a vast neural network of
forces, threads and pulsions, the soul of a new age of crowds and uncertainties and the
infiltration and management of the private? Even the narrative voice takes on the shifting
quality of the group, echoing and mimicking tones and hues of standard perceptions, restless and moving, built out of the minute trails, the skeins, habits, rhythms of custom that
enter the body, echo in the mind, leaden circles dissolving into air, circulating rumours.
Through these incantatory voices, a conventional society is chanted into being, one poised
on the edge of something darker still: the march of bio-power, “health is proportion,” the
terroristic intentions of conversion—Miss Kilman’s, “the soul and its mockery she wished
36
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
to subdue” (106). This is the dawn of an age that will marry the crowd with the machine,
impose statistically calculated “norms” and measurements, and construct, through scientific calibration, the deviant and the abnormal. New bio-political forces attach themselves
insidiously to the invisible threads and networks of customary divisions and hierarchies.
The new “border cases” circle like ghosts amongst the powerful and the toadies and hangers-on: the lower middle class clerks, the mothers of Pimlico, the war veterans who have
seen too much horror, the vulnerable old and poor, the refugees and returning exiles, like
Rezia and Peter, who gather, on the edges, looking in, knowing themselves to be outside
the tribe, carrying knives, waiting to be cut and sliced, endeavouring to read the codes, the
writing on the sky. Woolf wrote how “I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I
want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense” (D2 248).
She builds the rhythm of this distributed mind as a collective life lived in the shadow of
death, a world recovering from war but where a new and deathly bio-politics shadows and
ripples through the porosity of every individual’s mind. Everyone “hears voices.” Unexpressed thoughts magically take on the properties of speech while speech enters the mind,
echoes, and spills out, to slip in elsewhere. Characters “went in and out of each other’s
minds” (53): the mind is a whispering gallery. Thoughts are voices heard outside as well
as inside: “I am alone! I am alone!”, “Horror! Horror!”, “Richard! Richard!”, “No! No! He
cried! She is not dead! I am not old!” (43); objects strangely transmogrify in new contexts,
“knobs” begin as railings and end as knees (35). Boundaries between inside and outside,
thoughts and things, merge as complex “actor networks,” to borrow Latour’s term, performing the endless minute, crowded dance of modern life.
Mrs Dalloway is both a novel and an anthropological study of the social rituals of
groups, those ceremonial aspects of cultural life that, according to the social theorist,
Randall Collins, are “the lenses through which we see the very structure of consciousness” (374). The novel is structured around a series of what he calls “interaction ritual
chains,” emotionally charged and ceremoniously ritualised collective gatherings, events,
occasions, which are emblematic and memorialising, inducing a symbolic charged attentiveness and shared gaze, enchaining the group through the gathering and amplification
of feeling. The car that leaves its “slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat
shops and tailors,” that causes ladies to pause in their trying on of gloves: to feel “something had happened. Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration;
yet in its fullness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in all the
hat shops and tailors” shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of
the flag; of Empire…the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something
very profound” (15). Writing about Montaigne whilst working on the novel, Woolf was
thinking there too about the meaning of beauty as custom, ritual, and ceremony: its
power to protect against the new violators of the soul, and its dangerous availability for
collusion with their forces. Nothing has only one meaning. But opposed to ceremony in
its beautiful garb is the terrible beauty of the mad soul, strung out on a rock, with all its
nerves and sympathies peeled open, a protest against the “death of the soul” (50): Clarissa’s absorption of herself as the wife of Mr Richard Dalloway, social hostess, wearing
her body like rigid armour underneath the fluidity of the dress that she feels she inhabits,
stage-managing life as if a spectacle, making it up and loving it, but feeling so spread,
“Did I not banish the soul?”
37
distributed, there is a nothing at the heart of it, only the absence in her of “something
central which permeated” (26).
Except, disconcertingly, hate: it is Clarissa’s hatred of Miss Kilman, of the idea of her,
the rasp on her spine, the shock that remains like a rusty spike in the soul, that restores to
her a feeling of her own ipseity, the feeling of being, anchored in and held by the world.
Septimus too, hears a voice that “rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his
brain waves of sound, which, concussing broke” (19). Violent shocks, trauma, jolts, hitting up against something hard, an over-tuned world registers sensation as vibrations that
flow through the body. Such sensations are rarely held as a deep or lasting feeling unless
harnessed to the ceremonial use of beauty to induce patriotism, membership of the tribe,
deference, awe and respect. Woolf undoes Descartes’ soul but recognises too that Kant’s
aesthetic of the beautiful may be put to dangerous uses in an age of mass politics, the age
of crowds: for beauty binds and seduces through a million invisible threads and vibrations.
But Woolf provides her own shocks and surprises too, upsetting the rhythmic tone of lyrical expressionism with forays into Restoration and eighteenth-century styles of satire and
Restoration comedy, using their tricks with socially ritualised objects and double entendres, like the china scene of The Country Wife (1675) or the scissors of The Rape of the Lock
(1717). For the technique of transfer between things and thoughts, as in the “threads” that
weave class identifications and mend party dresses, are also shown to be concrete agential
forces in social symbolic exchange. Hats communicate inclusion, or otherwise, in the
shared traditional rituals of the group: a tilt speaks volumes, as in the awkward encounter
between Clarissa and Hugh Whitbread. Feeling too the chill corporate atmosphere of the
hotel confiscate his sense of his individuality, Peter Walsh finds himself thinking: “These
hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats
on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people’s noses…
the next visitor a joint of meat” (131). Septimus’s one moment of sanity and expression
of pleasure, though, occurs when he loses himself with Rezia in the mutual sewing and
making of Mrs Peters’ hat. In their mutual flow of activity and concentration, he shares
Rezia’s joy at the beauty of ribbons and textures, his hands caught in the unself-conscious
rhythms of making, his mind shaping its soft materials, his body brought back to earth.
But Rezia is called away (the arrival of Holmes) and Septimus floats away, outside the
frame of the picture, back into the strange landscape where objects, a sideboard, bananas
loom, where sounds fade out and the world slides behind glass. “He was alone, exposed
on this bleak eminence, stretched out” (122). He jumps.
Gloves are emblems of elegance, social propriety measured as aesthetic value. Metonymically, they stand in for Clarissa herself, in Elizabeth and Miss Kilman’s outing to the
teashop. Like Lily’s sense of knowing Mrs Ramsay by looking at the twist of her glove, but
without knowing that she knows, Elizabeth deploys the glove as a strategy to cover her
embarrassment at Miss Kilman’s crude table manners. Simultaneously, through her fort
da gesture of dropping and retrieving the glove, Elizabeth reaffirms her class identification
with her mother. Miss Kilman, greedily and nakedly fingers the two inches of éclair, eats
and “wipes her fingers,” and registers, silently, as the “thick fingers curled inwards,” the
pain of Elizabeth’s betrayal. As Miss Kilman’s unrefined and large hand clutches at air,
Elizabeth’s, suitably sheathed and gauntleted, set off on their adventure across London.
Objects as well as people think, think in people. One of the most amusing episodes in the
38
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
novel, with its echoes of Alexander Pope, is Peter Walsh’s arrival at the Dalloways as Clarissa sits sewing her dress for the party. Here knives and scissors take the stage, facilitating
a gestural exchange that puts their polite social talk sous rature, as objects extend the emotions of defensiveness, jealousy, and rancour into the world. Like duellists flashing their
swords, a serious but ritualised game, Peter and Clarissa go at it with knife and scissors,
in an edgy pas de deux:
“And what’s all this?” he said, tilting his pen-knife towards her green dress.
He’s very well dressed, thought Clarissa, yet he always criticises me.
Here she is mending her dress, mending her dress, as usual, he thought…
for there’s nothing in the world so bad for some women as marriage, he thought;
and politics; and having a Conservative husband, like the admirable Richard. So
it is, so it is, he thought, shutting his knife with a snap.
“Richard’s very well. Richard’s very well. Richard’s at a Committee,” said
Clarissa. And she opened her scissors (35).
The Souls of Boots: To the Lighthouse
“What I thought was this: if art is based on thought, what is the transmuting process?” So wrote Woolf as she was working on To the Lighthouse (D3 102). In this novel,
Woolf set out to address the burning question, posed but never answered in Mrs Dalloway:
in banishing the Cartesian soul as the bounded space of a private consciousness, how do
you account for and defend the integrity of the self? Woolf explored that apparent loss of
centre by writing a novel about the transmutation of grief into the form of a work of art.
In To the Lighthouse, memory is central to both the poetic process and the recovery of the
‘lost’ centre. Memory might therefore be the final ingredient for recovering and securing
a weighted and profound sense of “me,” as an individual soul. Indeed, Ian Hacking has
suggested that for the sciences of mind too, in the early twentieth century, memory, as
an entity available to psychological investigation, became a way of “rewriting the soul”
(Hacking, 1995). As Woolf wrote in “A Sketch of the Past,” “the present when backed
by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you
can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye” (MOB 114). In
Woolf, the self, an always moving point, is also a trail, storing up and laying down selected
moments, a self making itself into a soul, shoring up and accumulating the deposits of
its affective life. In To the Lighthouse, memory works conspicuously through the tense of
future anteriority: one after the other, characters self-consciously frame experiences into
“scenes” in order to lay down in repositories, their personal archives of experience. Memory acts as artist and curator at once, shaping, discerning, and selecting. As Lily re-fashions
her memories, painting, dipping down with her brush, she also realises, the pictures were
there, “had stayed in her mind almost like a work of art” (249). Each character reaches
out to hold moments in the present as they flow into the past. Mrs Ramsay is continually
concerned with how things might endure, annoying her husband with her belief that their
children will never be so happy again but will need to draw on their store of childhood
memory: “Children don’t forget, children don’t forget” (101). Mr Ramsay constantly ponders his legacy and how his work will be viewed in fifty years. Has it all been worth the
“Did I not banish the soul?”
39
effort? Only if the future keeps it alive. In presenting memory as a forward moving but
always already retrospective knowing, Woolf builds a store against the riskiness of living.
Reversing the teleological shape of memory, so that the present is always already opening
out into the future as a moment of the past to be looked back on, the self protects itself
against the risk of a traumatic forgetting that would leave it, like Septimus, at the mercy
of the roar of outside forces.
Woolf establishes personal memory as a kind of decentred centre of an extended
mind that allows that mind to become a soul. In so doing, she also offers her own “distributed” account of the creative process. In this novel, she challenges the view of creativity
as a teleological process that involves the transference of an already formulated mental
“vision” onto or into a suitably receptive material medium, realised as “design.” This is the
conception of the creation of art that reaches back to the poetics of Aristotle and forward
to Romantic and Idealist theories of inspiration. A version of the dualist account of the
soul, this phantom too is as hard to chase out of the window. Even in so evidently a (dialectical) materialist thinker as Marx, in the creative act, the mental is still separated from
the material and a bounded conception of mind defines the human essence:
A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee
would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best bees is that
the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the
end of every labour process, a result exists, which had already been conceived by
the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects
a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realises his own purpose in
those materials. (Marx 284)
The emphasis on Lily’s “vision,” her preoccupation with transferring her mental “picture” onto the canvas, might suggest that Woolf is endorsing the traditional account of the
creative process. But it is only when Lily abandons this perspective that she completes the
painting. The abandonment is gradual: first the thinking through on a humble tablecloth
with a salt cellar; then the crucial emotional negotiation with Mr Ramsay’s boots; and
then the trance-like state of dissociation in which she allows memories to rise, herself and
the world stripped down in a kind of phenomenological reduction. Indeed, the stripping
down begins from the moment of her return to the house. Feeling everything “queer” and
asking “what does it all mean?”, Lily rebukes herself, reflecting “what a catchword that was,
caught up from some book, fitting her thought loosely…a phrase to cover the blankness of
her mind until these vapours had shrunk” (225). She makes a decision then to resume the
painting, but “she could not see the colour; she could not see the lines” (231), because Mr
Ramsay’s demand for sympathy intervenes; his self-pity “poured and spread itself in pools
at her feet” (236). Lily draws back, primly drawing “her skirts a little closer round her
ankles, lest she get wet” (236). But looking down, she sees the boots: “sculptured; colossal;
like everything that Mr Ramsay wore” (237) and, in a curious reversal of Mrs Ramsay’s
magic (that had transformed the pot of meat—while they were all talking of boots—into
something that “partook of eternity”), Lily is enraptured by the boots, though ashamed
because Mr Ramsay has “asked her to solace his soul” (237). In the moment of shared and
40
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
delighted attention, however, Lily’s appreciation of the robust workmanship of the boots
and her sense of Mr Ramsay’s delight in that appreciation, allows her to recognise his view
of himself as a steadfast worker in the Guild of Thoughtcraft, toiling in his boots across
rugged landscapes, to inch thought forward even a step. The image of the table comes at
last: “austere, something bare…it was uncompromisingly plain” (240). Lily and Mr Ramsay have travelled to “the blessed island of good boots” (238) and found peace at last and,
though she may not quite stand in his shoes, she catches a glimpse of his soul, in the boots,
and at last sees his table squarely standing in her own mind. A lifetime of philosophical
doubt now stands out for her, etched in the furrows of his face. All his gnashings and wailings assume a sudden poignancy. For she sees that their lives have shared a joint venture:
letting go of the world to risk standing on a ledge, in a strange place, to pursue something
vastly difficult, without ever knowing why. Now though there is no way “of helping Mr
Ramsay on the journey he was going” (239): he is setting sail out to sea. His thinking is
not her thinking: but his methodical thinking-as-walking is as present to her in his boots
as the “residue of her thirty three years” is present in her painting.
So Lily returns again to her easel and takes up her brush “with a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back” (244).
Gradually the brush, her arm, their relation with the canvas, seem filled with an intention
that is theirs and not hers, “so pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical
movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all
were related” (244). Now on a precipice, “drawn out of gossip, living, out of community
with people,” the canvas stands in the foreground while, at the fringes of her awareness,
the boat fades out into the horizon. Lily has a “few moments of nakedness when she
seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body” and, like Mr Ramsay, “hesitating on some
windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt” (245). She asks
herself, “What was the problem then? She must try to get hold of something that evaded
her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her now when she thought
of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful phrases. But what she wanted was
the jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything…It was a miserable
machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke
down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.” But Lily’s vision of Mrs
Ramsay, her own picture, refuses to come until, allowing the memories of her to rise up
unwilled, scene after scene, she realises that no one had ever seen Mrs Ramsay: all they
had seen and worshipped and bowed down to was an icon of beauty in a green shawl.
“She saw, through William’s eyes, the shape of a woman…She was astonishingly beautiful…But beauty was not everything—it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled
life—froze it” (273). Not until Lily has stripped Mrs Ramsay of her iconic status, stripped
away the conventional reverence for female beauty, its bedazzling aura, its ceremony, does
the felt presence of Mrs Ramsay return. Then suddenly: there she is, “on a level with the
chair, with the table” and in the ordinariness of the woman before her, Lily suddenly sees
what she has never realised before: “her perfect goodness” (310). For the old aesthetic Idealism has also been broken up, fled with the Cartesian and the Kantian souls, for beauty
is no longer simply translatable into truth or goodness. Modern art must instead expose
its abuses and ceremonial uses that play dangerously on the emotional force of such assumptions. Were it not for Mr Ramsay’s boots, Lily would not have had this vision either:
“Did I not banish the soul?”
41
one not just personal, but terrifyingly political in its ramifications. In other writings of
the period, Woolf suggests the need to strip away conventional images of beauty and of its
complicity with social forces of convention and consensus. As in the essay on Montaigne,
and in “Fiction, Poetry and the Future,” she suggests that the modern soul, contradictory,
loving and hating, beautiful and ugly, is most completely assayed in the form of the novel.
This thinking into being of the work of art has involved adjusting all the relations of body
to brush or pen, canvas and page impelling attention, the eyes moving from the horizon
to the edges of a lawn or a room, the process of dipping the brush or the pen into the past,
calling up and reconfabulating its meanings. The transmutation that has turned thought
into a work of art is also the process that has changed life in bringing forth the work. For
in the words of Evan Thompson: “the roots of mental life lie not simply in the brain, but
ramify through the body and the world beyond the surface membrane of an organism,
and therefore cannot simply be reduced to brain processes inside the head” (Thompson
ix). Even Marx was wrong: mind, intention, “vision,” are not the cold blueprints of an architect, purely mental acts of initiation, but a living bio-culturally distributed process that
emerges through a complex autopoetic emergence out of the mutually interconnected
relations of body, mind and world. The process is never-ending and always incomplete.
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“THE PLAY’S THE THING BUT WE ARE THE THING ITSELF.”
PROLOGUE, PERFORMANCE AND PAINTING.
A MULTIMEDIA EXPLORATION OF WOOLF’S WORK IN
THE LATE 1930S AND HER VISION OF PREHISTORY.
by Suzanne Bellamy
PROLOGUE
I
nspired by the experimentation in Virginia Woolf ’s creative work in the last years of
her life, my project takes three interlocking pathways: performance, painting and exegesis. In previous writings and artwork I have based my exploration of Woolf as artist
in the idea of synaesthesia, the multiple forms of perception she fuses in the text. Her
unfinished novel Between the Acts (1941) is a consummate statement of this method, with
performative, visual, voice, documentary and sound structures. I do not read the Between
the Acts text as a final work, and I read it as more than a finished work, because it opens so
powerfully into an emerging form, not informed by nostalgia or elegy but nevertheless an
encounter with the prevailing revivalism of the 1930s decade. It can be seen as a response
to the parochial, a loving gesture to kindle creative survival in hard times.
My methodology forms a triple creative process of interconnected languages. Reading Between the Acts and Woolf ’s other works of the late-30s period, while working on
my large canvas, and simultaneously developing the pageant play script, I was hoping to
tap into my own synaesthesic pathways as writer, artist and researcher. At the same time
I was reading within the large body of scholarship on the novel and the period, as well as
researching medieval manuscripts, the Luttrell Psalter, the Holkham Bible, Chaucerian
text and early woodcuts, the Ellesmere text of Chaucer, all examples of text/image fusions
which I wanted to create on the canvas. The canvas draws on typographical and mythological material, rural landscape, local history, elements of the novel and the pageant, held
within an illuminated manuscript.
The creative process was slow to evolve. Things really started to happen once I had
suddenly seen in my mind Woolf riding the Chaucer horse with her hand out in that
familiar pointing gesture, the iconic Chaucer image. Early medieval texts all incorporated
images on and through the page, fusing text and image without privileging or enforcing
separation. I wanted to bring back image to the combination of forms, and then extend
that into the performance work.
The conference theme “Contradictory Woolf ” proved a perfect synthesizing template.
How am I defining contradiction in this project? As a way of seeing a process, a dialectical
movement, creative and intellectual, which brings order through embracing complexity
and the unknown outcome of experiment. Comic form works well with contradiction, as
Woolf ’s own pageant well displays. The comic played many parts along the way from the
gentle whimsy of the painting to the panto-like satire of the script’s new characters.
Why Chaucer not Shakespeare? Woolf ’s invocation to ANON, her drawing on archaeology, prehistory, the fossil record layered into consciousness, contemporaneous time,
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
fracturing memories, sediments, also invoked an older form of storytelling, not dominated
by the creator of the text but brought forth from the spirit of the creative community itself,
authored in an older dynamic of the role of the artist. Folded into this are Jane Harrison’s
ideas of Greek renewal, and the complex idea of finding some new pathway by encountering archaic sources. The unending, open-ended and unfinished nature of Between the Acts
seems in this context very deliberate. Alexandra Harris’s book Romantic Moderns, and the
works of Angeliki Spiropoulou and Joshua Esty were very timely for me in considering Between the Acts and Woolf ’s late writings, through ideas of rural and folk revival, modernist
exploration outside the city, spectacle, fascistic and nazi-style rallies and local theatricals in
the late 1930s. Woolf was working with awareness of experiments by Edith Sitwell and E.
M. Forster, the urgency of collecting fugitive local custom and practice, reaffirming deep
cultural traditions in the face of impending invasion and the erosion of place, memory and
story by development, ecological change and political crisis. Tensions between tradition
and modernization, always present in Woolf ’s own love of place, are now inflamed by the
imminent threat of obliteration. Sitwell’s performance work Façade, which Woolf attended
in 1923, was structured a bit like Miss La Trobe’s pageant, with three sections, past present
and future, jazz and ragtime elements, music by William Walton. E. M. Forster’s pageant
England’s Pleasant Land, first performed in Surrey in 1938, used a meadow, a microphone,
trees, lake, manor house, soldiers, pigeons, and was unrehearsed, with music by Vaughan
Williams. Published by Hogarth Press in 1940, it was activist based, supporting the preservation of the countryside and preservation societies. As Marlowe Miller and Joshua Esty
both show in their work on pageant history and power, the tradition of the pageant was always used by the ruling class to reinforce its power and the idea that nothing ever changes.
In this argument, the artist can only encode rebellion within the form, metaphorically
leaving town once the play is done. After the critical responses to Three Guineas, Woolf may
well have seen her position in this way, as artist on the run.
The Chaucerian mode, the pilgrimage, the idea of what happened along the way being more important than the destination—all these ideas resonate strongly with Woolf ’s
essayistic journey, whether to Canterbury or to buy a pencil, and calling forth Montaigne,
so that process is all, setting off is the way, not knowing where one is going makes the sanest pathway. As Gertrude Stein had said, if you know where you are going, why go there?
Melba Cuddy-Keane tells us that each genre in Woolf was a distinctive mode of
thought, and yet Woolf moved more and more into that multiple mode in her late works.
What appears as a contradiction is in fact an embracing of the deeper knowledge of where
ideas come from, leaving the shore of certainties, carrying tools of trade and making one’s
way with intent. Neither forward no backward, but in, down and through, the journey
unpacks the present moment in transition. This is a whole different way to be creative, a
summation of Woolf’s own pilgrimage through all her texts. There would have been more to
come, and there was never a formal ending. How typical of her!!! She is behind the bushes…
Between The Acts focuses ideas about Woolf ’s life as an artist, her creative process and
her ideas about that process. In my reading, Miss La Trobe does not fail in her work, but
it is her feeling of severe judgement and failure that drives her to continue to create, in the
remnant world where she finds herself. This is what artists often feel, a profound discontent with the work, and it is how Miss La Trobe generates her vision to its next form, her
separateness allows her work to flow. She embodies creative edginess and risk. I do not see
“The Play’s the Thing BUT…”
45
her as Woolf or Smyth or any figure, but she is given a deep presence in the text which
resonates for artists in hard times.
Being new, holding memory, embodying history—all these apparent contradictory
ideas co-exist in the works of the late 1930s. Renewal, finding new plots, making change
happen within the continuum of life, these goals form the great contradiction of art practice,
risking loss to take energy and sustenance from the deeper levers of continuity. Finding new
plots, exploring new forms, accessing memory and trusting that everything is still there,
source and community, how to get back to those renewal places, these themes recur in the
late works. In hard times, artists can find themselves working with inadequate resources, a
form positioned at the edge of ritual and improvisation, the deep past and the moment of
the present, an eruptive juxtaposition of memory and spontaneity. This spirit is captured in
the processes of the pageant form. It represents well the contradictory position of the creative
artist, and also invokes this as an ancient role. The role of calling to renewal is a core part
of the work. All these ideas are present in the unpublished text of ANON, and Woolf ’s new
idea of writing a Common History Book, with a Chorus of Pilgrims with the Song Making
Instinct. Between The Acts is underpinned with these passionate projections.
I had written and produced a pageant inspired by Woolf back in 2001, the Twelfth
Night Mongarlowe Pageant, performed in the little village of Mongarlowe where I live, in
southern NSW Australia. Held on the actual Twelfth night after Christmas, and based
on the Twelfth Night drama of shipwrecked confused couples and identities, it is set in a
post-colonial Australian village. The core structure is about a dispute between Chaucer and
Shakespeare over the power of storytelling and the danger of creating actors on a stage, as opposed to written characters in the text— issues of control of the story. Central to the drama
is the Miracle Play idea of confronting and unleashing MISRULE and then re-establishing
order. The pageant shipwreck drops the characters from a boat into a new unknown culture
where they proceed to lose their minds and memory, are confronted by chaos, but regain
their old/altered identities, and order is restored albeit in a new environment. The dispute
between Chaucer and Shakespeare goes on as the only actual dialogue throughout, as each
writes/speaks aloud and changes the story as the actors try to keep up with the drama. At
a crucial point the actors go on strike, the playwright’s nightmare. A juggler keeps balls in
the air throughout, creating the idea of fate and chance. A Virginia Woolf persona wanders
through the scene making notes. The project was unrehearsed and improvisational with a
narrative and script based in a loose story, told to the players earlier in the day. Once cast and
costumed they were instructed to react to the situation, listen to the dialogue and create their
parts. There was a large audience of locals and invited guests and their various dogs who were
given a Programme and a ticket (not the dogs) and proceeded to erupt and interact with
the scene, blurring the boundary between audience and players. This was the Programme:
TWELFTH NIGHT PAGEANT
Presented under the auspices of The University of Mongarlow
A Production of the Medieval Fool Masque TWELFTH NIGHT.
Prologue : On the 6th January, sometime between 1401 and 1601, a ship founders off
the coast of Illyrium Mongarlis. Three couples are rescued by the good folk of a nearby village
and manorhouse. The couples have temporarily lost everything, including their memories
46
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
and their identities. Two bards discuss how to stage such an event, and how it all comes right
in the end. As with all pilgrimages, some things are lost and others found, folly and misrule
are allowed their day, and the wheel of the year turns. Principal speaking parts: Geoffrey
Chaucer, writer and minor trade official, William Shakespeare, writer and sometime actor.
A Note on Language and Community: This period saw the fusion of many great
Romance traditions, from the Roman De La Rose, the Norman lyric traditions, Latin,
Anglo-Saxon and local dialects of the Celts, which developed right through to the time
of the Elizabethans. Many people were beginning to find new voices and tell stories. The
Twelfth Night Pageant is dedicated to Anonymous and The Common People whose lives
are always in the Storm, and who keep alive the Spirit of Humour.
The End
The experience of this first Pageant experiment informed my approach to the Glasgow
Pageant. I learned that it is impossible to script a pageant in any really formal way, and
that it is always deeply about what actually happens on the day. My favourite moment
back in 2001 was when I stood in front of the players just before we began (I was playing Chaucer) and said “Ladies and Gentlemen, have we all read the script?” “No, no…,”
they all happily answered…like cockatoos and parrots, chirping with excitement at being
dressed up, they didn’t even care. Once in costume, they just didn’t worry. The fact we
had had no rehearsal was a plus, so that the only structured dialogue was between the
writers, Chaucer and Shakespeare. My only instruction to the players back in 2001 was to
listen and follow the direction of the writers Chaucer and Shakespeare. And so they did,
more or less, and it was wonderfully funny. If the juggler dropped her balls or batons, we
all stopped and said “Too Bad,” thus allowing the role of fate and bad luck. In the 2011
Glasgow experiment of course there was a more formal script, and my only additional instruction was to use all the space, keep moving, and feel free to improvise and repeat their
lines when moved. They did have scripts, they had all read them through at least once, and
there was some creative improvisation.
I realized in 2001 that I was really the only one who knew what it might be about and
what was happening, and that there were as many versions and experiences as there were players and also audience. The audience could not help feeling they were part of it even if they
just sat there. The visual continuity in the scene makes that link. Children, dogs and noise
interrupted the scene, it is still talked about as a legend in the village, along with the founding
of the University of Mongarlowe. In contrast in Glasgow, there was an informed audience
who knew the novel and the Between the Acts pageant and would be alert to the experiment.
A whole new mix of experiences were made possible by that ambient circumstance.
Writing the Glasgow script was in part an exercise in editing, and in shaping, but
principally it was a decision that this was in fact not a repeating form, which is why Woolf
subverted the traditional pageant idea and allowed Miss La Trobe to write a new one.
What is a pageant? It is a present-time performance of a repeating form where there is a
presumption of the familiar. The right spirit was to do it as Woolf did it, not to repeat.
There had to be a new production, a movement away from the past, allowing her novel
characters to become a new pageant. A pageant is based in real time with real people. That
is its power, a trope on not repeating the most repeated of theatrical forms. The influence
of Stein is strongly here, and in the act of changing, the idea of repetition is subverted.
“The Play’s the Thing BUT…”
47
In Between the Acts that pageant is drawn forth out of a vanishing world, with villagers whose names are in the Domesday Book, at a time of modernization and development
and possible complete obliteration from foreign invasion. Change is everywhere, but it is
the nature of that change that is at issue, violent and sudden or creeping and pernicious.
What will survive all this? How to participate? Woolf ’s pageant embodies the great paradox of combining repeated certainties and historical clichés with spontaneous improvised
and unrepeatable expressions of the present moment, injected through Miss La Trobe’s
transgressions. For me to repeat or re-enact her pageant would be to miss the point about
the real drama of creating a village play, what happens on the day, on the way to the play,
during the play, the ambient landscape. I abandoned any idea of staging her pageant and
made a script using the voices of her characters and some of her last works, folded into our
present, here now in Glasgow, Bute Hall, 2011.
What we never see and yet is there all the time are village players, a chorus of medieval
pilgrims weaving in and out of the trees, contradictory voices, but in the end all sound
melding together, a gigantic ear attached to a gigantic head as Mrs Swithin sees it.
Sound, ambient and intentional noise, music are all important in Woolf ’s pageant.
I wanted to have live sound, mechanical, not CDs and recordings, to play the music and
make the noise…being then improvisation, a once only moment. Jazz forms, silence,
breaking the rhythms, disruptive noise.
Because the key to Woolf ’s pageant is the invocation of the Present Moment, we as
Woolf ’s ongoing international community became the next layer of performance. We enact the new conference pageant every year, we have our repetitious rituals and our one-off
moments, our eccentricities, our power structures and our secrets, papers and panels, auctions, dinners, readings, new editions, changing fashions, turf wars, virtual community,
the list, pilgrimages to holy sites, a mix of rites and traditions. Our annual pageant performs a ritual of consciousness, re-engagement with the text, unfolding the words within
new technologies, defining the lines of engagement and transgression. This becomes then
also our annual pageant as Conference, an Invocation of community.
As Melba Cuddy-Keane says, the characters at the play are also the characters in the
play, inhabiting a site in-between. And so the reading audience shifts and becomes the
subject, between two worlds liminal and uncertain. Contradictory community of voices,
humans and animals, forming a soundscape folded into a community ritual and in the
hands of a modernist experimental practitioner, Miss La Trobe.
Miss La Trobe is Batty aka ‘Whatshername’. Her relationship with her Audience is
always in tension, they are distracted, they have singular and group confused responses,
no meaning can be decided upon, she fears that she loses them, all is illusion. This is a
relationship in constant tension, distraction. She worries that “illusion fails.”
*A comment on creating the character of Queenie Leavis, the Caterpillar, in the Pageant. Her role in the pageant is intended to be more like panto, like the Dame. A complex
scholar, Q D Leavis did have a critical conversation with Woolf on issues of education,
class and women, and there is a generational tension between them, as with Muriel Bradbrook. However her critical role as part of the Leavisite formation of a dominant canon
was somewhat destructive to Woolf ’s legacy for a time, and so I enjoyed the moment to
have some sport with her, and all with her own words.
48
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
THE PAGEANT
SCRIPT 2011
Written and Produced by Suzanne Bellamy
COMMENTARY
First production was in the Bute Hall, University of Glasgow, June 2011.
The script was collaged from a number of Woolf texts, including the 1941 novel
Between the Acts; the Letters of Virginia Woolf Vol 6; The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol 5;
“Craftsmanship” (1937) in The Essays of Virginia Woolf Vol 6, edited by Stuart N Clarke;
“Anon” and “The Reader,” as edited by Brenda Silver in “Virginia Woolf ’s Last Essays,”
Twentieth Century Literature 25:3/4 (1979): 356-441, and spoken by The Narrator, Anon,
and Miss La Trobe; plus the various other characters from the novel Between the Acts. Text
for the characters Queenie Leavis, Gertrude Stein and Michel de Montaigne were sourced
from their own writings as listed in the Works Cited, and from Frank Bradbrook, “Virginia Woolf: The Theory and Practice of Fiction.” The Modern Age, edited by Boris Ford.
London: Penguin, 1961. 257-269. The two plays within the play, “Where There’s A Will
There’s A Way”, and “They want plots do they?” were written by Suzanne Bellamy.
Noise and Sound play a large part in Woolf ’s pageant. In this production the jazz
interventions were played on the saxophone by Robbie Goldman of Edinburgh and the
Noise and Percussion Section was provided by Kathryn Simpson of Birmingham using
a children’s keyboard with frog and bird sounds. The general conference audience was
encouraged to participate with cow mooing and booing sounds.
CHARACTERS AND FIRST CAST
Staged in Bute Hall, University of Glasgow 11th June 2011
NARRATOR: Krystyna Colburn
MISS La TROBE: Suzanne Bellamy
ANON: Suzanne Bellamy
MRS SWITHIN: Gill Lowe
Mrs MANRESA: Jane Goldman
QUEENIE LEAVIS: Jane Goldman
WILLIAM: Derek Ryan
BART: Derek Ryan
REV STREATFIELD: Mark Hussey
AUDIENCE of 4: Jean Moorecroft Wilson, Cecil Woolf, Diane Gillespie, Leslie
Hankins
GERTRUDE STEIN: Janet Winston
COL MAYHEW: Cecil Woolf
ISA: Judith Allen
MONTAIGNE: Judith Allen
SOUND: Robbie Goldman (sax)
NOISE: Kathryn Simpson (percussion, keyboard)
“The Play’s the Thing BUT…”
49
Stage Notes. The four stage members of the Audience were seated at an angle on right. All
other characters moved about in the stage space, visible at all times. Sound and Noise were visible at rear left. The Narrator wanders in a wider arc, around stage and through the audience.
Props and Costumes. Characters wore their names on cardboard signs around their necks,
hats and pearls were principal accessories, in addition to mirrors, and Mrs Manresa’s makeup.
All read from scripts.
The Pageant Begins
ANON(Suz) It was a summer’s night. A cow coughed. A bird chuckled. BUT don’t bother
about the plot, the plot’s nothing.
NOISE + Sax (Kathryn and Robbie) …
ANON (Suz) Now its early morning. Mrs Swithin drew the curtain in her bedroom. Her
favourite reading: An Outline of History. Thinking of Rhododendron forests in Piccadilly. The iguanodon, the mammoth and the mastodon, from whom we descend.
MRS SW (Gill) I’ve been nailing the placard on the barn for the Pageant. If its fine they’ll
act on the terrace.
NAR (Kryst) Every summer for seven years now Isa had heard the same words. Would it
be wet or fine: and every year it was—one or the other.
MRS SW(Gill) How did we begin this talk? The Pharoahs, the dentist, Fish…Oh yes,
you ordered fish. Mrs Manresa, if it comes to a pinch this afternoon, will you sing?
MRS MAN (Jane) This afternoon? Is it the Pageant?
MISS LaTR (Suz) The very place, that’s the place for a pageant. Winding in and out
between the trees. There the stage; here the audience and down there among the bushes a
perfect dressing room for the actors.
NAR (Kryst) Where did Miss La Trobe spring from? She had been an actress. Very little
was known. She used rather strong language. She had a passion for getting things up.
Nature had set her apart from her kind…the actress in her bed…
MRS SW(Gill) One year we wrote the play ourselves. People are gifted—the question is, how
to bring it out? That’s where she’s so clever—Miss La Trobe. Of course there’s the whole
of English Literature to choose from. But We remain seated. We are the Audience.
NAR (Krys) Words this afternoon ceased to lie flat in the sentence.
MRS SW(Gill) We haven’t the words—we haven’t the words. Behind the eyes, not on the
lips: that’s all.
BART (Derek) Thoughts without words – Can that be?
MRS MAN (Jane) Oh what fun. A little bit of everything. For myself, I can’t put two
words together, once I hold a pen.
MISS LA TR(Suzanne) It has the makings…it has the makings.
NAR (Krys) Another play always lay behind the play she had just written…Vanity made
them all malleable. They squabbled, but she kept out of it. Don’t worry about the
plot, the plot’s nothing…
MRS SW(Gill) We have other lives, I think, I hope…We live in others. We live in things…
BANKS (Derek) I’m William, I’m William…
MRS SW (Gill) (sings) Come and see my sea weeds, Come and see my sea shells, Come
and see my dicky bird hop upon its perch.
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
NOISE and MUSIC ( soft Sax)…
NAR (Krys) Then the play began. All looked at the bushes.
AUDIENCE It’s begun. Scenes from English History…
MISS LA TR (Suz) Blast ‘em. Music!!
NOISE continues…Sax, soft, other sounds…
NAR (Krys) The villagers were singing, but half their words were blown away.
MISS LA TR (Suz) O, the torture of these interruptions.
MRS SW (Gill) Sorry I’m so late. What’s it all about? That’s England in the time of
Chaucer I take it. The Canterbury Pilgrims? Look!!!
NAR(Krys) The wind blew away the connecting words…
MRS MANR (Jane) Scenes from English History. Merry England. Ambitious, ain’t it?
MRS SW (Gill) We’re only the present…
AUDIENCE (4 voices) What comes next, a tableaux? Was it the Globe Theatre? A scene
from a play? What a cackle, what a cacophony. Nothing ended…
ANON (Suz)
THE FIRST PLAY WITHIN THE PLAY
(A Bloomsbury Soap Opera)
“Where There’s A Will There’s a Way”
Virginia was in love with Madge, Janet, and then with Vita, and lives with
Leonard. Vanessa is in love with Roger, lives with Clive who’s in love with
Mary, Lytton’s in love with Ralph whose in love with Carrington, who’s in
love with Lytton, Duncan is in love with Bunny who marries Angelica but
no one tells Angelika who her father is, and now Vanessa is in love with
everyone, and Vita loves Hilda and various other women, and Virginia outs
her in a novel, but its all in the end not a problem. The End. This part takes
place behind bushes.
NAR (Krys) Did the plot matter? It was only there to beget emotion. Only two emotions:
love and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot. The plot’s nothing—verbiage, repetition. Peace was the third emotion. Love Hate Peace. Three emotions
made the play of life. It didn’t matter what the words were, or who sang what. Round
and round they whirled, intoxicated by the music.
SOUND –MUSIC (Sax and other ambient sound)
MISS LA TR (Suz) Curse. Blast. Damn ‘em.
NAR- MEGAPH (Krys) Interval!! —She had agreed to cut the play here. Dispersed are
we!!! (three times)
AUDIENCE What was in her mind, eh? What idea lay behind, eh?
NAR (Krys) Giles Oliver took the short cut to the Barn. Couched in the grass was a
snake, choked with a toad in its mouth. The snake unable to swallow, the toad unable
to die. Birth the wrong way round. He stamped on them. Action relieved him.
NAR (Krys) In the barn, the villagers hung back.
MRS MANR (Jane) It’s all my eye about democracy
NAR (Krys) Isa and William were in the greenhouse. They knew at once they had nothing
“The Play’s the Thing BUT…”
51
to fear. They could say whatever came into their heads.
WILLIAM (Derek) I’m William
ISA (Judith) I’m Isa
NAR (Krys) The future shadowed the present. The Audience was assembling again—
Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Behind the tree
Miss La Trobe gnashed her teeth, crushed her manuscript. Every moment the audience slipped the noose.
NOISE Music Sax and keyboard
AUDIENCE Another scene from another play, I suppose…All that fuss about nothing…
NAR (Krys) People laughed. The voice stopped. But the voice had seen, the voice had
heard. Miss La Trobe for a moment glowed with glory.
MISS LA TR (Suz) Louder, louder…(Music) Louder, louder….
NAR (Krys) The words died away. The Audience sat staring at the villagers whose mouths
opened, but no sound came.
MISS LA TR (Suz) This is death
NAR (Krys) Suddenly cows took up the burden. From cow after cow came the same
yearning bellow. The whole world was filled with dumb yearning…It was the primal
voice. The cows annihilated the gap, bridged the distance— filled the emptiness,
continued the emotion.
NOISE- (Kathryn and Robbie) Mooing. EVERYONE MOOS
GERT STEIN (Janet) A Cow Is A Cow Is A Cow. But is a Cow?…
MISS LA TR(Suz) Thank Heaven
MRS MANR (Jane) If she’d put it all in, we should have been here ‘til midnight.
MRS SW (Gill) Actors show us too much. Oh Miss La Trobe, I do congratulate you. Ever
since I was a child I’ve felt…what a small part I’ve had to play. But you’ve made me
feel I could have played…Cleopatra
NAR (Krys) “You’ve stirred in me my unacted part”, is what she meant, “You’ve twitched
the invisible strings.”
AUDIENCE (Jean) What’s her game?
COL MAYHEW(Cecil) Why leave out the British Army eh? What’s history without the
army, eh?
AUDIENCE (Jean) Cheap and nasty I call it.
MRS SW (Gill) The Victorians…I don’t believe that there ever were such people. Only
you and me and William dressed differently…D’you get her meaning??
NAR (Krys) They were all caught and caged, prisoners watching a spectacle. Nothing
happened.
MRS SW (Gill) And after that, what?
WILLIAM (Derek) Present Time, Ourselves. I’m William
ANON (Suz)
THE SECOND PLAY WITHIN A PLAY
TITLE : “THEY WANT PLOTS DO THEY?”
In which three Euros are exchanged, and a panel of writers and public intellectuals debate spectacle and propaganda in a CNN/BBC Hardtalk
52
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
co-production. They dissect Dominic Straus-Kahn, Arnold Swartzeneger,
Vladko Mladic, Sylvio Berlusconi, and the Saudi Royal Family, with references to the IMF, the World Bank, Fukushima Radiation spread, the killing
of Osama Bin Laden, the Global Financial Crisis, the bankruptcy of Europe,
Climate Change, and the Royal Wedding. They Twitter Throughout. The End.
All this takes place behind the bushes.
AUDIENCE (Jean) What’s the object of this entertainment?
AUDIENCE (Cecil) A fund for installing electric light in the Church. All our village
festivals end with a demand for money. Nothing’s done for nothing in England.
NAR (Krys) All their nerves were on edge. They sat exposed. They were neither one thing
nor the other. They were suspended. How long was she going to keep them waiting?
The Present. Ourselves.
AUDIENCE (Jean) But what could she know about ourselves? It was ridiculous. What’s
she keeping us waiting for?
MISS LA TR (Suz) Try ten minutes of present time, swallows, cows. Reality is too strong,
curse ‘em.
NAR (Krys) Oh to write a play without an audience Panic seized her. This is death…And
then the shower fell, like all the people in the world weeping. Then it stopped. Nature
had once more taken her part.
NOISE + SAX +banging Start waving the Mirrors
AUDIENCE What’s her game? Tin cans? What’s the notion? Mirrors—Ourselves!! But
that’s cruel, to snap us as we are, in parts. What about the army?
NOISE and Mirrors
NAR(Krys) Mrs Manresa powdered her nose.
COL MAYHEW (Cecil) The play’s over I take it –
NAR/MEGAPHONE (Krys) Let’s break the rhythm and forget the rhyme. O we’re all
the same. How’s this wall to be built by orts, scraps, and fragments like ourselves?
REV STREATFIELD(Mark) What message was our pageant meant to convey? I have
been asking myself. I confess I was puzzled. Each is part of the whole…Yes, that occurred to me…We act different parts but we are the same. Nature takes her part. Surely we should unite? Thirty six pounds ten shillings and eight pence has been raised…
But there is still a deficit of one hundred and seventy pounds odd. And now…a vote
of thanks to the gifted lady…who wishes it seems to remain anonymous.
NAR (Krys) Twelve aeroplanes like a flight of wild ducks came overhead…God Save The
King
Robbie (Sax) plays God Save The King…some audience stand, confusion.
NAR(Krys) The actors were reluctant to go. Each still acted the unacted part conferred
by their clothes.
AUDIENCE I thought it brilliantly clever. Did you understand the meaning? Well he
said she meant we all act all parts…
AUDIENCE (Jean) Oh my dear, I thought it utter bosh.
COL MAYHEW (Cecil) Why leave out the Army, if it’s history?
AUDIENCE But you’re being too exacting….After all, remember, it was only a village play.
“The Play’s the Thing BUT…”
53
They should have thanked the owners.
When we had our pageant the grass didn’t recover ‘til autumn.
The very latest notion, so I’m told is, nothing’s solid…
Crepe soles? So sensible.
What a dither! Nobody seems to know one car from another.
Dear me, the parking arrangements are not what you might call adequate.
NOISE. Car Horn. General Sound Chaos
GERTRUDE STEIN (Janet) A cow is a cow is a cow. But is a cow ?
NAR (Krys) The pilgrims had bruised a lane on the grass. The lawn would need a deal of
clearing up.
MRS SW (Gill) Oughtn’t we to thank her?
AUDIENCE (Cecil) Thank the actors, not the author.
NAR (Krys) At last Miss La Trobe could say to the world ‘you have taken my gift, and
then the triumph faded. Her gift meant nothing. Then something rose to the surface— What would the first words be? The words escaped her. Words of one syllable
sank down in the mud. The mud became fertile. Words rose—words without meaning—wonderful words. She set down her glass. She heard the first words.
NAR (Krys) Down in the hollow at Pointz Hall…the play still hung in the sky of the
mind—Hadn’t she for 25 minutes made them see?
ANON (Suz) Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came
out from the bushes?
MRS SW (Gill) England was a swamp. Thick forests covered the land. Birds sang…Then
the curtain rose…
ANON (Suz) It’s an age when we are not fast-anchored where we are; Things are moving
around us; we are moving ourselves.
NAR (Krys) Now the EPILOGUE began
QUEENIE LEAVIS (Jane) But it’s all just a conversation between her and her friends.
MONTAIGNE (Judith) No man is free from speaking foolish things, but the on it is
when a man labours to play the fool. But what do I know?
QUEENIE(Jane) But she has enjoyed the relaxing ease of an uncritical, not to say flattering social circle. She’s suffered no worse injury from mankind than a rare unfavourable
review. There’s no reason to suppose Mrs Woolf would know which end of the cradle
to rock or the pot to stir. Its self-indulgent, self-righteous sex hostility!!! As my friend
Frank Bradbrook says “In Between the Acts there are signs of tiredness, her genius has
burned itself out. The heart has gone out of her work. A minor talent…”
WILLIAM (Derek) I’m William
MONTAIGNE (Judith) The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of
grammar. But what do I know?
ANON (Suz) Having this moment finished the Pageant, my thoughts turn to the next
book, ANON it will be called. The desire to Sing. Only when we put two and
54
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
two together, two pencil strokes, two written words, two bricks, do we overcome
dissolution and set up some stake against oblivion.
NAR (Krys) “Did I tell you, Ethel, I’m reading the whole of English Literature through.
By the time I’ve reached Shakespeare the bombs will be falling.”
ANON (Suz) “Make notes. Allegory. Chaucer. Did Shakespeare read Chaucer? If we
could see the village before Chaucer’s time, we should see tracks across the fields joining manor house to hovel, hovel to church. The track between the houses in the village has been grown over, like the track along which the pilgrims road to Canterbury.
No-one rides that way now. But before Chaucer’s time it was trod daily…to the old
graves, to the Stones, to the tree, to the well. Enacting their ancient parts.”
NAR (Krys)There never was, it seems, a time when men and women were without memory. There never was a young world. That is the world beneath our consciousness; the
anonymous world to which we can still return. The voice is still the voice of Anon.
ANON (Suz)In the old days when English was a new language, writers could invent new
words and use them…How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they
survive, create beauty, tell the truth. Words are the wildest freest, most irresponsible
most unteachable of all things…They live in the mind…they believe that one word
is as good as another, they hate being useful, they hate making money. For it is their
nature to change…When words are pinned down they fold their wings and die. Our
unconscious is their privacy. Our darkness is their light.
Here are we, Ourselves, in Glasgow in 2011, the present moment. The mud
became fertile. Words do not live in dictionaries they live in the mind. The truth they
try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided. Thus
they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; unintelligible
to one generation, plain as a pike staff to the next…We are not fast-anchored where
we are; things are moving around us; we are moving ourselves. Pilgrims are we.
NOISE + Sax + Multiple Voices. General Instruction to all cast to repeat segments of
their script over and over. A general cacophony, crescendo then drawn to a close
by Miss La Trobe.
The end of the pageant
THE PAINTING
“Woolf and the Chaucer Horse.”
Canvas dimensions: 4m by 2 m.
Researching illuminated manuscripts and Psalters opened the vision of the written
page to the visual world that has always been there for me in Woolf as a reader. The page
drips with image and interaction with other form, and as a writer of that tradition she
embodies that now invisible world. Woolf says in ‘Anon’ that the printing press ultimately
took that rich layered other dimension away, but she is still soaked in it in her visual invocations, in her synaesthesic imagination.
I started working on the painting as I was reading the scholarship around Between the
Acts, the late 1930s and Woolf ’s last writings. Seeing her riding on Chaucer’s horse, as the
Chaucer of her times, came visually first then all else flowed from that. The Chaucerian
trope of the stories wrapped within the journey infuses all Woolf ’s work, as also in the essayistic form itself, street haunting being an expression of the pilgrim’s way. The painting
“The Play’s the Thing BUT…”
55
is as much an illuminated manuscript as a map…as a collage of layered memory, where
everything happens and all at the same time, as in the novel. In harmony with the 1930s
rural revivalism and sensitivity to possible loss of cultural heritage, the spirit of continuity
is challenged by the threat from the planes and the coming war. But the land itself holds
the dream of a common culture which is soaked in Nature and wild forms, animals, birds,
structures and sounds.
Some images swirled around in my head for weeks but never made it onto the canvas
much as I tried to force the issue. The old wall and the ladder, the horse with the green
tail, Sohrab the dog, the greenhouse, Mrs. Swithin’s hammer, and also Mrs Swithin’s crisscross letter (a term from ancient manuscripts), imps elves demons and mirrors, all the
flowers, cars, the barn, the pub, the megaphone, Giles feeling chained to a rock, the white
lady—those never made it but are in there somehow. But the stegasaurus and the mammoth made it and the fossils, the Roman roads, the planes, the pond, the house (taken
from Vita Sackville-West’s book on English Country Houses), the cows, the Ouse and the
map of the Sussex coast, and then the Celtic maze which held it all together. The maze,
the Chaucerian horse, and the lines of the Prologue were the moments that gave it all a
structure. The idea that words came from hearing birdsong drawn from the core of the
maze holds the centre.
There are several examples of doubling and tripling images, as for example with the
Uffington White Horse, the Guernica Horse and the Chaucer Horse. Also the Circle of
Birds and the formation of Lancaster Bombers over the English Channel are contrary
formations. There are the South Downs, the coastline, the map of Sussex, Lewes and
Rodmell, the River Ouse and tributaries, Prehistory, Mastodons, Cars and Roman Roads,
images improvised from medieval illuminated manuscripts. I used the Ellesmere text for
the lines from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Painting those five lines of Middle
English straight onto the canvas, with my laptop propped open at the online site of the
Ellesmere text, was a special deep thrill. (See color reproduction on back cover.)
The painting was planned to act as a set canvas behind the pageant performance, but
that proved to be technically impossible. In the end it hung in the Bute Hall below the
stained glass windows, close to the window of Chaucer. The light streamed through the
image of Woolf on her horse, the Chaucer of her times, and all was well.
Works Cited
Allen, Judith. “Those Soul Mates: Virginia Woolf and Michel de Montaigne.”VirginiaWoolf: Themes and Variations. Selected Papers 2nd Annual Woolf Conference. Ed. Vara Neverow. New York: Pace UP, 1993. 190-199.
Bartlett, Robert. Medieval Panorama. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001.
Bradbrook, Frank. “Virginia Woolf: The Theory and Practice of Fiction.” The Modern Age. Ed. Boris Ford.
London: Penguin, 1961. 257-269.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Prologue. The Ellesmere Text. Huntington Library Press, 1995.
Clarke, Stuart, N, ed. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol.6. 1933 to 1941. London: The Hogarth Press, 2011.
Coghill, Nevill. Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. London: Penguin, 1977.
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. “The Politics of Comic Modes in Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts.” PMLA 105:2 (1990):
273-285.
Delsandro, Erica. “‘Myself—it was impossible’: Queering History in Between the Acts.” Woolf Studies Annual 13
(2007): 87-109.
——. “Woolf ’s Heart of Darkness : Nature and Natural History in Between the Acts. Kentucky Conference
Paper, 2010 (private copy from author).
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
Esty, Joshua.D. “Amnesia in the Fields: Late Modernism, Late Imperialism, and the English Pageant Play.” ELH
69:1 (2002): 245-276.
Forster, E. M. England’s Pleasant Land. A Pageant Play. London: The Hogarth Press, 1940.
Harris, Alexandra. Romantic Moderns. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2010.
Herrin, Judith. A Medieval Miscellany. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Facsimile Editions, 1999.
Hussey, Mark, ed. Virginia Woolf. Between the Acts. London: CUP, 2011.
Kelley, Joyce.E. “Virginia Woolf and Music.” Virginia Woolf and The Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 2010. 417-436.
Leavis, Q. D. ‘Caterpillars of the Commonwealth Unite!’ Scrutiny 7.2 (1938). 207-214.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Charro and Windus, 1996.
Maika, Patricia. Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts and Jane Harrison’s Con/spiracy. Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1987.
Miller, Marlowe, A. “Unveiling ‘the dialectic of culture and barbarism’ in British Pageantry: Virginia Woolf ’s
Between the Acts.” Papers on Language and Literature 34:3 (1998): 134-161.
Sackville-West, V. English Country Houses. London: William Collins, 1944.
Silver, Brenda. “‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’: Virginia Woolf ’s Last Essays.” Twentieth Century Literature 25:3/4
(1979): 356-441.
Spiropoulou, Angeliki. Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Stein, Gertrude. Composition As Explanation. Hogarth Essays. Second Series. London: The Hogarth Press, 1926.
Stewart, Victoria. “Q. D. Leavis, Women and Education Under Scrutiny.” Literature and History 13:2 (2004):
67-85.
The Holkham Bible, A Facsimile. The British Library, 2007.
The Luttrell Psalter, A Facsimile. The British Library, 2006.
Turner, Kay (ed). Baby Precious Always Shines. Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B.Toklas. New
York: St Martin’s Press, 1999.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Oxford, 1973.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. London: The Hogarth Press, 1941.
——. “Craftsmanship” (1937). The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol 6. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. London, Hogarth Press,
2011. 91-97.
——. “The Leaning Tower” (1940). The Moment and Other Essays. London: Hogarth, 1947.
——.“Montaigne.” (1925) The Common Reader 1. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4. Ed. Andrew McNeillie.
London, Hogarth Press 1994. 71-81.
REPORT TO THE MEMOIR CLUB:
SCENES FROM A COLONIAL CHILDHOOD
by Marina Warner
V
irginia Woolf ’s celebrated opening rejoinder, “But, you may say,”, anticipates an
as yet unspoken objection, forestalls opposition, and summons an unseen reader
or audience, whose thoughts and words she is confident she can know almost
before they do. In fiction, the writer projects herself into the minds of her characters and
thinks with them, ventriloquising beyond her own boundaries; likewise, in such polemical
and confessional writings as A Room of One’s Own (1929), someone is lurking at the edge
of Woolf ’s consciousness, as she bends over her paper, composing: the implied recipient
of the letter, the imagined reader, hostile or otherwise whom she is engaging, interrupting,
cutting short.
The famous essay began as talks, and although her real-life interlocutors were her
hosts, the fellows and students of Cambridge women’s colleges, she is addressing over their
shoulders other unnamed and unseen presences: imagined fathers and brothers, rulers
and taste-makers and power-brokers, who assume there is no connection of her subject,
“women and fiction” with property, power, independence and laws.
That many words exist for types and degrees of contradiction—rebuttal, refutation,
rejoinder, retort, even refusal—and that so many are explicitly forms of speech rather than
action (even Bartleby’s silence must be broken by utterance, by his mild but steady contradictoriness), reveals how the critic and writer’s task often takes place within existing circuits of value, the logos which they (we) struggle to reshape through a counter-utterance,
a counter-script. Contradictoriness also holds “contrariness” within its compass, on either
side of the central syllable, “dicto,” I say. It is Woolf ’s contrariness, rather than her contradictoriness that I want to look at, though the two concepts intersect, as noted.
And I want to look at her contrariness from two points of affinity that I have felt
from the first moment I encountered her voice. Both affinities arise from the questions she
puts about authority and class and English history and the ways the personal and public
interconnect—through fathers, especially. How values are passed on from a standpoint
of unexamined and effortless authority, how those values grow in a deposit of layer upon
layer of English historical self-importance, these are the disturbing areas of inquiry, still.
Even as I write this, these comments seem so out of date: Britain is unrecognisable. Yet I
still fear this inheritance as Victorians feared syphilis.
In “The War from the Street” (1919), Woolf extends a striking, self-wounding, cold
picture of humanity as a mass of jelly to evoke her horror of unthinking consensus: “Soon
your mind, if one may distinguish one part of the jelly from another, has had certain
inscriptions scored upon it so repeatedly that it believes it has originated them; and you
begin to have violent opinions of your own…so that there is a very marked sameness
throughout the jelly” (E3 4). Her metaphor is one of her culinary flourishes, but it also
evoked, to my ears when I heard Pat Waugh quote it (in her plenary lecture at the Glasgow
conference), the jelly of bone marrow, stem cells, DNA, and Woolf ’s excoriation touched
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
my live fear that I too have been inscribed and the script has sunk all through my jelly
without my being aware of it, making me part of thoughts and values that are not my own
but come from the cellular mitochondria of my father and his tribal loyalties.
There is a famous predecessor of Virginia Woolf ’s “But”: an objection that does not
provide an opening of a piece of writing, but the tipping point of the story. In this earlier
text, which is a story and a fable by an acerbic, combative and oppositional critic of power,
one of the most celebrated of contrarians, the speaker raises his voice, puts in his “But”
against the assertions of no less an authority than an angel of the Lord, who has explained
to him the arrangements of Divine Providence, arrangements which naturally suit the
interests of many powers in place.
Voltaire is not commonly linked to Woolf, which is an oversight, as she frequently alludes to him, and the two share many of the same targets, not least the absurd arrogations
of power.“Zadig, or Destiny” is one of the earliest of the short fables which established
Voltaire’s huge readership in his own time and his lasting importance today. It was written
in 1746-7 and published in l748, over a decade before Candide (1759); in many respects,
it meditates on the themes that Candide explores with even more pointed wit: the workings of Providence, predestination and free will, despotism and venality, corruption, public
abuses and hypocrisies personal and other. Towards the mid-point of his misadventures the
innocent and virtuous hero meets an old Babylonian hermit who “wore a white and venerable beard that came down to his waist. In his hand he held a book” (Voltaire 165-168; see
also Warner 273-7). The old man offers it to Zadig to have a look. It is “the Book of Destiny,” he tells him, and it will guide Zadig out of his woes, as long as he submits to whatever
the hermit asks him to do, unconditionally over a period of three days. Zadig agrees.
Incomprehensible and unspeakable things start happening: on the third night, for
example, their host is a philosopher who treats them to wise conversation and generous
hospitality, but in the morning the hermit wakes Zadig early, tells him to start moving,
and burns down the kindly sage’s house. As the hermit’s behaviour grows ever more erratic, Zadig cannot help himself and cries out against it. “‘You promised you’d be more
patient,’ the hermit interjected.” He explains that everything he has done he has done
for the best: for, after “Providence” burned the house to the ground, the owner found
heaps of treasure buried there, and “the young man, who’s just had his neck wrung by
Providence, would have murdered his aunt within a year, and you within two.” As the
hermit is expounding his meaning, Zadig notices he begins to change: into an angel, with
“four beautiful wings and a majestic body that was radiant with light.” His companion
turns out to be none other than the angel Jesrad, who then closes his prophetic disclosure
of the predestined future with the solemn axiom: “There is no evil from which no good
comes”—foreshadowing the Panglossian optimism of Candide.
It is at this juncture that Zadig can no longer help himself, and refuses to submit,
unquestioningly. He lets out a single word, “Mais…” (But…), and then goes on, “what if
there were only good, and no evil at all?” Jesrad explains that there is an inscrutable order
behind all things, and no such thing as chance. “‘Feeble mortal,’ he cries, ‘cease to argue
against that which rather you should worship and adore.’” Again Zadig cannot contain his
sense of contradiction, and blurts out, “‘But…’”
“But,” that nearly wordless objection to the exhibition of Western metaphysical
rationality, is spoken by a stock ingénu from Oriental fabulism, the hapless put-upon
Report to the Memoir Club
59
hero. This type of Everyman from the Nights acts as Voltaire’s alter ego and mouthpiece.
Through fantastication taken to extremes of preposterous unlikelihood, Voltaire’s contes
set the reader on the ground of skepticism, dissent—and laughter. Here is reason used
to dissent, to inquire, to contradict. This is considered a classical position of enlightened Western discernment, the sceptic’s wisdom, the vitality of the independent mind.
(It is worth underscoring that it was shaped by the encounter of the West with the East:
straining credulity to the point when sheer entertainment ends and invigorating inquiry
breaks out characterizes Shahrazad’s strategy as she goes on spinning a yarn night after
night to save her life and the life of all her fellow victims.) Virginia Woolf ’s ironies also
target acceptance of the status quo as somehow ordained by nature or god; inequalities,
social violence, military folly preoccupy her, especially when she tackles the specifically
male-made responsibility for the evils of injustice, inequality, violence, and war. Her witty
puncturing of pretension is moved by a Voltairean spirit of reason, while her supremely
stylish sentences are recognisably sharpened on the whetstone of eighteenth-century esprit. Orlando, in its festive, comic orientalism, nods in the direction of “Zadig,” Candide
and other performances à l’orientale in Voltaire’s contes philosophiques.
Woolf was more open to turning her contrariness against herself than the French
enemy of unreason. “Am I a snob?” Virginia Woolf asked in a piece to the Memoir Club
in December l936.1 She answers herself in the affirmative, and promises to explore the
question—to examine her conscience. But she does so glancingly and allusively, with so
many vignettes and sallies about friends and hostesses and their delusions and fancies that
her wit at others’ expense dissolves her self-inculpation, and another dazzling performance
as satirist and social chronicler of mores overtakes her intention to confess.
I have always feared that I am a snob, but a snob deformed by the stamp of colonial
ambivalence, the creep and cringe of those exiled from the metropole blended with the
brutal superiority of the official, governing class. (In my childhood in Egypt, the British
were officially “protecting,” not governing.) I’ve also been afraid throughout that at some
deep level of my being, I’ve been marked by my early years, and shall betray my childhood
saturation in derring-do adventure and empire yarns, in G. H. Henty and Rider Haggard,
in The Prisoner of Zenda and the Hornblower books in John Buchan and Captain Marryat,
literature I devoured as a child bookworm from the shelves of my father and his parents’
bookcases, stories in which the world is English (the term British wasn’t in use then) and
the villains are foreigners, “natives” of Smyrna, Samarkand, Calcutta, Khartoum—Orientals, a term which covers Jews and Arabs almost regardless. Or they’re generically “Indians,”
and indeed the breadth of this term, embracing peoples from the North to the South Pole,
the Caribbean to the subcontinent, discloses the blanket sense of otherness that issued from
the vantage point of imperial London to demarcate most of the rest of the world. The question I put to myself isn’t so much “Am I a Snob?” as do I see with “the eye of the Empire”?
Later, in Three Guineas (1938), Woolf savaged the members of historic institutions—
the army, the law, the academy—for their heedless assumption of legimitacy and rightthinking. She vituperates in pictures: word pictures of the ruling class, of the culprits, the
bewigged and bedizened men responsible, and photographs of establishment and empire
on display, silly ornamentalism masking unapologetic and complacent influence: Encaenia at Oxford, Black Rod leading MPs into parliament, and a Chelsea pensioner, wearing
a cuirass of medals.
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
Here Woolf is being contradictory and contrary at once—this decorated veteran
looks abashed by his conspicuousness, and to my eyes at least, his eyes have slid sideways
as if disowning the heavy panoply of glorious and deadly deeds which loads down his
narrow chest, his slight shoulders. He has trimmed his moustache carefully and polished up those medals, but it’s not impossible to sense something hovering beside him,
a ghost, a sound of a cry as someone is hit, the artillery, a rat, more rats. Woolf asks:
“What connection is there between the sartorial splendours of the educated man and the
photograph of ruined houses and dead bodies? Obviously the connection between dress
and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers” (TG
180). Her argument then opens out, to connect those gleaming festoons on the veteran’s
chest to the restrictions on women’s education and public activity, on access to influence
and positions of responsibility. It is a famously stirring tirade, seventy years on, and in a
world in continued upheaval from leaders’ bellicose and financial excesses, the grief and
rage and hope against hope of Three Guineas still strike home, with the rawness of truthtelling disregarded, even if Woolf ’s remedies are fanciful and impracticable, and women
in power have notoriously collaborated with abuses—even exacerbated them (think of
Margaret Thatcher, Rebekah Wade).
While Woolf ’s partisanship spoke to me powerfully in the Sixties when I first began
reading her, her personal writings, published more recently, created another bond. The
year after Three Guineas, her thoughts were still turning to the question of the patriarch,
both the one she knew and the general, allegorical figure of male power: “it was the
tyrant father,” she writes about Leslie Stephen in “Sketch of the Past,” “the exacting, the
violent, the histrionic, the demonstrative, the self-centred, the self pitying, the deaf, the
appealing, the alternately loved and hated father—that dominated me then” (MOB 123).
I recognised this, and I recognise, too, the underlying current that flows between Leslie
Stephen and male authority, even though he was individually an unusual Victorian in
many ways, not at all a routine upholder of Establishment rules. I also recognise the next
picture she gives us in her memories of him: “It was like being shut up in the same cage
with a wild beast. Suppose I, at fifteen, was a nervous, gibbering, little monkey, always
spitting or cracking a nut and shying the shells out, and mopping and mowing, and leaping into dark corners and then swinging in rapture across the cage, he was the pacing,
dangerous, morose lion; a lion who was sulky and angry and injured; and suddenly ferocious, and then very humble, and then majestic; and then lying dusty and fly pestered in
a corner of the cage” (123).
Discomfort, unease, constraint, suffocation, these almost capture the sense of oppression I felt with my father, a man also given to rage and then to bouts of abject remorse, who also kept everyone around him, most particularly my mother, in a fever of
anxiety that a spark might fly at random and his ready fury catch alight. And then, in
the name of righteousness, railing that things were to be done this way, that only ignorant fool women could fail to understand how matters stood in the world and what the
done thing was, he would explode and as quickly subside, leaving everything undertaken
around him—the walk, the meal, the drive in the car, the outing to the theatre, the proposed new dress—wrecked.
In relation to these two currents in Woolf ’s fierce contrariness, the scorn of official
pomp, and her daughterly ambivalence towards her father, I am venturing to set out some
Report to the Memoir Club
61
work-in-progress from a book I’m writing, inspired by the years 1947-1952 when I was
growing up in Cairo, just before the Egyptians refused to allow foreign interests to run
one of the country’s most lucrative assets, the Suez canal. It’s a novel, because I need the
freedom to enter characters’ thoughts and feelings, and I want to write dialogue; besides I
was a small child at the time and so my memories, though vivid, are fragments.
This is the background:
My father Esmond was the son of the cricketer Sir “Plum” Warner, in his day a man
much loved and very famous: his wedding, in l906, to a port and gin heiress was treated
like a national holiday and the list of wedding gifts fills two ledgers with a copperplate
inventory, packed with silver pepperpots and tortoisehell toilette boxes and other vanished
necessities of Edwardian society. My father was brought up rich but become poor—or
comparatively so—for reasons that will be told later in the book—a sad tale of blackmail,
celebrity, and coverup which, unlike the pepperpots and tortoisehell toilette cases, remains
very familiar today even if the exact circumstances of fear and exposure have altered.
During the war, he was a staff officer under “Monty” (whom he adored) fighting in
Eighth Army in the North Africa campaign and then on into Italy. During the liberation
there he met my mother, Ilia Terzulli, and they were married. My father’s Anglicanism
gave such grievous anxiety to her local parish priest that he would not conduct the ceremony in her parish church, and it took place in a notable’s private chapel (for a brief
moment after our mother’s death, my sister and I thought this might not have been quite
regular, and she might not have been legally wed at all).
The end of the war found him in India or Ceylon and he had to wait for transport
home; it took a while as there were so many other demobbed troops. He came back on
the Queen Mary with thousands of other soldiers, and found himself thirty-six years old,
without settled profession or job, alongside millions of men in a similar position looking
for work in a world shrunken by war. Because he had enjoyed Cairo during the Africa campaign, because he was a book lover and a wide reader and a high-spirited traveller, he suggested to friends that he open a branch of their business in Cairo to serve the English and
French communities. The cosmopolitan character of Egyptian society was famous, then.
The friends were David Smith, the owner of W.H. Smith, the retail book and newspaper business, and his partner, Michael Hornby. It was with Michael that Esmond set
out in early l946 to recce Cairo as a business opportunity. They sailed from Marseilles after
a flutter in Monte Carlo; the boat ran out of petrol in mid-crossing…but that’s another
story.
Inventory of a Life Mislaid (the current working title) is based in memoir but freely
treated. It takes the form of lists, such as the vocabulary my mother had to learn to
become the wife of an Englishman who considered himself a gentleman, a lexicon that
Woolf would have recognised, in a fine fury, I hope; the bills of lading of the goods my
parents brought with them to set up house in Cairo; the ingredients and recipes she
learned to cook to conform to his taste; and the products, equipment, and perquisites of
an English household abroad after World War II.
In early 1947, the things thought necessary for setting up a home under British protection in a distant place where certain standards had to be kept up included silver and
silver plate—lots of it: dredgers and ewers and cream jugs and small “muffineers.” The
first entry in the inventory of their shipment to Cairo is “13 silver inkstands, 1 broken.”
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
It then continues:
snuffers
a punch ladle
paper knives (7)
sealing wax holders
pincushions and tea strainers.
a snuff case
a bridge box
wine labels (12)
tea caddies
silver button hook and shoe lift
combination tantalus frames
The last entry reads “2 doz cheese, and 2 doz table knives.”
The whole list closes with the words: “All in 14 parcels.”
Far more than a heap of tableware, more than a young married couple’s first property,
was bundled up in those 14 parcels. A way of life, a time of history, a class and its expectations, a man and his self-image, a handbook of social conventions and an identikit portrait
of my father that flooded me with conflicted feelings—somewhere between amazement at
how things were and how they have changed, embarrassment at the assumptions behind
that journey into Egypt, and of course a sharp sense of absurdity and pathos.
Also, my mother is absent from this list: when she arrived in London alone after the
war, she brought almost nothing with her—she came from Southern Italy where there are
no snuff boxes or combination tantalus frames—or at least not in her modest widowed
mother’s flat in Bari.
I am trying to open into stories from the inventory. This is from the section called
“An Englishman’s Thesaurus”:
Patum peperium, or Gentleman’s Relish
At tea-time, on the tea trolley which her parents-in-law had given her, with its
double shelves and extensible trays, she laid out the afternoon meal, one unknown in
Italy, on linen mats of drawn threadwork, and from the fridge, took out the heavy round
white pot in which this necessary teatime treat was sealed like a expensive cosmetic or an
even more precious salve. The jar reminded her of Mary Magdalene and the expensive
ointment she used so prodigally to soothe Jesus’s dusty feet, but Francis was like the
apostles and didn’t like luxuries wasted. The relish was applied in tiny amounts, and it
could indeed last for years without turning or fading in potency. Its authenticity was
certified by the band of paper which wrapped it round, on which the ingredients were
inscribed. Beata did of course try it, and she tried to like it, and she grew to tolerate it
especially when dabbed on
Crumpets
then it functioned like a sprinkling of salt and pepper. If spread more lavishly, Patum
peperium had a bracing effect, as if potash or gunpowder had been pounded with spices
Report to the Memoir Club
63
in a mortar and then lit; the mixture exploded against the roof of your mouth and the
cavities of your nose and eye sockets. Francis showed her how to prong crumpets on to
a toasting fork, as he had done for Ronnie when he’d fagged for him at Eton, and hold
them against the fire, where thin blue flames hissed as they licked up through three pillars
of fossil skeletons and kindled them to a soft coral glow. If there were extra, they could be
kept warm in the silver muffineer, under a dome of silver stood on the hearth.
No pasta in Bari came close to this chewy sponginess, though just like the crooked
anatomy of the gas fire’s columns, the macaroni, pappardelle, and orecchiette which she’d
help Lucia press out between her fingertips from the dough spread on a clean cloth laid
out on the ironing board, were holed and crannied with curly involutions for sauce to
coat and dribble through. But butter, which her husband longed to melt through the
toasted crumpets’ runnels in those post-war years of tight rationing was not used in her
own country’s cuisine. And olive oil was not to be had either, not in Hampshire in l945-7;
rationing was tight.
Horlick’s
She was expecting her first child—“expecting” was one of the idioms then in use
(some of their friends congratulated her on being “in the family way” or laughed, happy
to hear that she had “a bun in the oven.” It wasn’t polite to be “pregnant.” Horlick’s was
recommended. Francis first made it up for her one evening on the Rayburn, heating
Carnation condensed milk from the small flat tin he’d punched with his army knife, and
watching with satisfaction when she sipped it and found she liked it.
“Just what the doctor ordered,” he said, contentedly. “That’ll put some flesh on your
bones. My bird. My little bird-boned darling. My linnet.”
In taste Horlick’s resembled orzata, cereal, comforting, the air of the fields and the
turned earth spiralling in the steam. There was also Ovaltine, very like, but more expensive. The hot drinks helped her through that first English winter, 1946, one of the harshest
on record.
Trumper’s Bay Rum
This was a little more familiar, being a version of the hair lotions used by barbers in
her home town, and to palm something of this sort on to your hair to keep it smoothed
down was a local custom. But her husband’s preferred version smelled different from the
pomades her father and other men in her youth had used to train their moustaches as
well as control their hair. Bay Rum was not hair oil, she learned. Hair oil was foreign,
and attracted malign comments (greasy, sleazy, caddish, vulgar). Bay rum was clean and
manly. Nothing suspect about it. It came from Francis’s barber’s, and when he went up
to London in his continued search for employment, he’d turn up at Trumper’s in Curzon
Street for a shave and a trim; the establishment had managed to stay open right through
the war and the bombing (Mr Albert and Mr Towne being too old to join up), and he’d
be bound to cross paths there with a chum or two, and see if there were any tips on
stocks, or horses, or wines: M’tutor from the old school had written to him in June l945
and the letter had caught up with him in August:“I am staying at my flat,” he’d written,
“wh. is barely habitable owing to enemy action,” but he had managed to enjoy some
fine wines laid down before the war, and he’d passed on news of his latest flutter in the
64
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
currency markets, urging Francis to buy South African gold as soon as the government
allowed it:
“I think you might buy a few more Blyvoors, & perhaps Crowns. I am only telling you this because I know you’re interested. But if you see a good profit anywhere, take it—in my opinion, though a good broker friend always says ‘hang
on.’ Our expected boomlet has not yet developed.
Cura ut valeas.
Yours…CMW.”
It was from Trumper’s that Francis had bought, with money his mother had given
him for his twenty-first birthday, a pair of twin mahogany brushes with his initials on
them. He’d pour some of the barber’s special preparation into the palm of his left hand
before patting it into his hair; then he’d take up the brushes, one in each hand, and attack
his head with vigorous strokes, even though he had very little hair left from the red-blonde
curls still invoked in his passport on the page under Marks of Identity. Bay Rum (with
one eighth oil) was a “scalp stimulant,” though nobody mentioned baldness. Baldness was
unspeakable in those times, as a petticoat showing shamed a woman, let alone bad breath
or underarm sweat. Beata learned always to use the word “perspiration,” and she belonged
to an era when the inside of her blouses and dresses were stitched with “dress shields.”
One time, when they had been to a supper dance in Cairo at Shepheard’s, I think it
was, New Year’s Eve 1948, a footman came and with a small bow whispered to her,
“The chef would like to thank you for your congratulations in person in the kitchen.”
Beata was surprised, and as her lips parted to exclaim that the message couldn’t be for
her as she had not thought to congratulate the chef, though he did indeed deserve such,
even as these words were forming on her tongue, she caught a slight widening of the pupils in the messenger’s eyes, and it stole the breath from her speech, and her head nodded
in response, that she would follow him.
She put on a brave smile as she passed knots of other guests some at the small round
tables, some standing waiting for the band to begin the next set, many of them in cone
paper hats, and the drifting smoke from their cigars and cigarettes wreathed about them.
Where was Francis? She hadn’t seen him for some time, she realised; she had been dancing,
with Paolo and with Saddiqi Pasha and with Ben Mendelsohn, one dance after another,
because Francis would dance but he liked her to dance more, and positively encouraged
her to take better partners than himself. He was a poor performer, he’d say with a guffaw,
but then she knew he preferred to play cards.
So she followed the footman out of the ballroom and into the corridor past the door
to the card room and down more of the corridor till they reached a pantry and there was
Francis sitting on a chair groaning, his tie pulled out of his stiff collar and everything,
everything undone.
“Thank God you’ve come, baby,” he said. “Take me home.”
She fled to him and then turned to the man who’d been with her, but he’d been replaced by two others, the doorman and one of the hotel front of house staff, maybe the
suffragi, she realised, because both of them in full hotel uniform with tall turbans and long
maroon coats. She began crying, as Francis muttered choppily at her,
Report to the Memoir Club
65
“Oh don’t cry baby, don’t cry, just get me home.”
“We’ve told the driver to come round to the back entrance,” one of the men told her.
“We can leave through the kitchen.”
“What happened?” She cried.
“Bloody fool, can’t count to thirteen.” He was trying to shout, she could see that, but
the words came out in a kind of croak instead.
“Oh, it’s just the gentlemen’s ways,” said the footman. “Nothing to worry about.”
She tried to tidy Francis a bit before they hauled him to his feet, a dead weight, his
head rolling as he moaned again.
Back at the flat, she woke Abdul and Mohammed and brought them downstairs in
their pyjamas to give her a hand with bringing Francis home.
They too did not seem surprised or perturbed, and this reassured her. Perhaps, growing up among her sisters with her mother a widow, she just didn’t understand much. She
thought Francis would explain, but he never mentioned it, though he did keep away from
the card room for a while.
When he went out for an evening’s game, he’d add the bay rum to his hair as the final
stage of his toilette, and when he kissed her good night, saying, “I shan’t make a late night
of it, but all the same, don’t stay up, darling,” she caught the scent from his hair, and it
smelled like her mother’s linen cupboard, where she used to lay cut branches from the bay
tree to keep away moths. In the mornings, when she was making their beds—Francis and
she had twin beds from the very beginning of their marriage, and she would air them each
day by pulling back the covers and lifting the pillows and beating them, as was the custom
at home—she would know which pillow was his from the laurel aroma hanging round it.
Note
1.
Laura Marcus, during the ‘Class Contradictions’ panel at the Contradictory Woolf conference, discussed
this essay most illuminatingly.
Works Cited
Voltaire. Candide and Other Stories. Trans. and ed. R. Pearson. Oxford: OUP, 2006.
Warner, Marina. Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights. London: Chatto & Windus, 2011.
Woolf, Virginia. “The War from the Street.” 1919. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew
McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1988.
——. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Ed. Morag Shiach. Oxford: OUP, 2000.
——. “Am I a Snob?” Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Pimlico, 2002. 62-77.
——. “Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Pimlico, 2002. 78-160.
“BUT SOMEBODY YOU WOULDN’T FORGET IN A HURRY”:
BLOOMSBURY AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF AFRICAN ART
by Lois J. Gilmore
F
etish or art? Ethnographic or fine arts museum? Artist or savage? Aesthetic or magical? Conscious or unconscious?—such are the many contradictions of African art.
Bloomsbury’s encounter with African art is deep and complex if one traces the references here and there in the experiences and writings of the various members: the African
objects on the window sill in Duncan Grant’s bedroom at Charleston (photo number 80,
Anscombe 154) echoes in the paintings of Bell, Fry, and Grant; Omega; Fry’s multiple
writings on Negro art, Virginia Woolf ’s thoughts recorded in her biography of Fry, her diary, and her letters;1 or even in the eye-popping ivory bracelets worn by Nancy Cunard on
the social periphery of Bloomsbury (Gordon 46, 86, 92). Indeed, in her biography of Fry,
more than once Woolf mentions Fry’s “trophy of cotton goods from Manchester suited to
“untutored negresses” (RF 152) and Fry’s moves from house to house with “Chinese statues, the Italian cabinets, the negro masks” and with the “negro carvings” (RF 225, 255).
And he would explain that it was quite easy to make the transition from Watts to
Picasso; there was no break, only a continuation. They were only pushing things a
little further. He demonstrated; he persuaded; he argued. The argument rose and
soared. It vanished into the clouds. Then back it swooped to the picture. And not
only to the picture—to the stuffs, to the pots, to the hats. He seemed never to
come into a room that autumn without carrying some new trophy in his hands.
There were cotton goods from Manchester, made to suit the taste of the negroes.
The cotton goods made the chintz curtains look faded and old-fashioned like
the Watts portrait. There were hats, enormous hats, boldly decorated and thickly
plaited to withstand a tropical sun and delight the untutored taste of negresses.
And what magnificent taste the untutored negress had! Under his influence, his
excitement, pictures, hats, cotton goods, all were connected. (RF 152-53).
And certainly images of African art embedded in works like The Voyage Out (1915),
The Waves (1931), Orlando (1928), and “the very fine Negress” of A Room of One’s Own
(1929)2—all these instances—suggest some importance attached to these artifacts of
“primitive” culture. The contradictions of African Art run through the 20th century and
include the problematic use of language to examine the topic in words like “primitive,”
“tribal,” “Negro” art, or art nègre. Contradiction is embedded in attitudes toward things
African and things “Other” that occupy a complex place in the history of Bloomsbury.
Some points I wish to suggest, however incompletely, are that African art is by nature
contradictory when de-contextualized and viewed from within Western culture, that African art is constructed within hegemonic attitudes toward the primitive; that the pivotal
moment for the introduction of African art to the West came from the interest of French
artists and collectors and was brought into England with the enthusiasm of Roger Fry,
The Contradictions of African Art
67
a contradictory and catalytic figure, and that ambivalence and ambiguity characterize
Bloomsbury attitudes.3 First, questions necessary for some kind of understanding of African art and its relationship to the cultural context of early 20th century Britain and ideas
of the “primitive” must be raised. I will focus primarily on Fry and the 1920 writings
about The Chelsea Book Club show of African objects, the first in England, because both
Fry’s and Clive Bell’s responses clearly illustrate the nuanced contradictions about African
material culture. Finally, the radiating responses to African objects among members of
Bloomsbury further insist on the argument of ambiguity and ambivalence.
In the early 20th century Paris was the epicenter of the new movement toward modern art. Incorporating the “primitive” within Western art was a revolutionary act by
Picasso and others in Paris (Green 121). Critics cite the ideology of nineteenth century
Britain, the exhibition culture putting Africans and others on “display” (Coombes 85),
the growth of anthropology, the construction of the “Other” from what Edward Said
calls a “huge library of Africanisms” (67), and the culture of Western art based on the
standards of Greek art as the highest level of achievement. Painters of the Royal Academy, critics, and other painters worked within this context of British art, which operated
under what Frances Spalding calls “mimetic veracity” (128-30). Into this climate came
the explosion of the first and second Post-Impressionist Shows at the Grafton Galleries. Members of Bloomsbury were intimately connected with the extraordinary “hubbub” (Woolf ’s word) generated (RF 153): Fry, the moving force for both shows (C.
Bell, “Roger Fry” 189) coined the term “post-impressionism” (Spalding 126), Desmond
MacCarthy was secretary for the 1910 show, Leonard Woolf operated as secretary for the
second show, and several visited the gallery. The two post-Impressionist exhibitions introduced the primitive elements of modern painting to the people of Britain, and many
critics have paid attention to how Africa was incorporated into these paintings in the first
show of “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” in 1910.4 The Second Post-Impressionist
Exhibition in 1912-13 of English, French, and Russian artists aroused horror, contempt,
and discussion, and yet was a success (Spalding 154). Beyond Edward Said’s seminal text
Orientalism, critics have argued that the “‘other’ is always distant as well as different, and
against this difference the characteristics of self and society are formed and clarified,”
which in the history of conquest constructs a child-like “noble savage” producing “primitive art,” a Western construct (Hiller 12). It is generally agreed that attitudes toward the
primitive are rooted in the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.
In the “Editor’s foreword” to The Myth of Primitivism, Susan Hiller articulates the critical
problem of perspective: “Western Artists are…[the] beneficiaries [of colonial conquest
and expansion] because it has enriched our concept of art, increased our store of visual
knowledge, and added to our repertoire of formal means. But artists are also the victims
of this legacy, because we have inherited an unconscious and ambivalent involvement
with the colonial transaction of defining Europe’s ‘others’ as primitives, which, reciprocally, maintains an equally mythical ‘western’ ethnic identity” (1). It is important to
understand that African art was viewed only through European eyes, usually juxtaposed
against European art. Writing on the affinities between the Cubists and the “rediscovery
of African art as truly great,” Ladislas Segy identifies the concept of plastic structure and
the “spirit, the underlying ideology, not merely African but universal,” as well as (1) the
creative will-to-form based on the desire for the expression of individual truth, (2) the
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
reaction against prevailing schools, (3) the desire to “express” an idea instead of “perfecting” the medium, (4) the desire to express a conceptual rather than visual image, (5) and
the abandonment of representational or symbolic imagery for direct statement (118119). Segy’s lucid list affirms features that resonate with Fry’s formalist theory.
The first show of African sculptures from Paul Guillaume’s collection (pieces from
the Ivory Coast and Gabon) occurred in 1913 at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery on Fifth
Avenue in New York. Organized by Marius de Zayas, it caused a sensation, not altogether
negative (Paudrat 153). Pieces from Guillaume’s collection were later shown in London
1919-20 at the Chelsea Book Club. Here, the advertisement for the exhibition contains
Fry’s startling claim that “Some of these are great sculpture—greater, I think, than anything we produced in the middle ages.”5 Charting a space for the 30 pieces “from Paul
Guillaume’s collection” on display (Green 127), Fry raises questions about the relationship of African art to Western art and articulates a value for them in the first of several
articles and reprints in which Fry revisits the significance of art from Africa over the course
of his lifetime. African pieces had been on Fry’s radar because of his interest in the French
post-Impressionists and his familiarity with artists and collectors of African masks and
sculptures like Vlaminck, Picasso, Derain, Apollinaire, art dealer Paul Guillaume since the
First and Second Post-Impressionist shows in London 1910 and 1912. In 1919 Fry and
Angela Lavelli saw Guillaume’s collection of African art in Paris (Spalding 213). Spalding emphasizes Fry’s role in bringing an appreciation of African art into England and the
subsequent shock engendered (217-18).
I think the articles appearing in The Athenaeum during 1920 are particularly important
in that the contradictions play out for the members of the public (subscribers) interested in
art. Fry’s essay, later collected in Vision and Design, speculates about the importance of the
figures by comparing them to Western art. Although he locates what he calls the “source of
culture” in Greece and Greek art6 and repeats imperial attitudes toward the “other,” namely
“the Congolese’s ignorance and savagery,” Fry grants them power and artistic achievement:
“It seems unfair to be forced to admit that certain nameless savages have possessed this
power not only in a higher degree than we at this moment, but than we as a nation have
ever possessed it. And yet that is where I find myself ” (“Chelsea” 516). He cites “complete
plastic freedom” (the ability to conceive form in three dimensions) as the highest achievement. Fry supports his claim for these nameless “savages” who are identified as “negro
artists” by the end of the piece, critically examining such points as plastic form, degree of
representation, the plane of the mask, emphasis, vitality and potency. While Fry applies
Western criteria to the valuation of pieces, he nonetheless identifies two factors crucial for
the production of culture which “identifies civilized peoples,” only one of which is missing.
He notes that the first factor “the creative artist” is present, but the second factor “the power
of conscious critical appreciation and comparison” is absent (“Chelsea” 516). In another
essay for a 1933 exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, Fry would again examine the issue of
the creative artist and his relationship to what Fry calls “classical beauty.” Lamenting the
inability of those in the west to “divest ourselves of the missionary attitude of past times,”
Fry argues for the “remarkable gifts of the negro sculptor” from whom “we have much to
learn from the ‘poor heathen’s untutored mind’” (“Lefevre” 289-90).
Fry’s special achievement was to open a dialogue in England about what constitutes
art and whether the pieces of African art belong in that context. Christopher Green in
The Contradictions of African Art
69
Art Made Modern locates what he calls Fry’s “pan-cultural openness” in notions of the
“‘primitive,’ the ‘savage,’ and the child-like” which undercuts “existing conventional hierarchies” (127). It should be noted that Fry’s article appeared in the magazine section “Fine
Arts,” which certainly emphasizes the value of what Fry sees in the exhibitions. When he
describes the change effected by the experience: “we stand naked to the blast” (“Chelsea”
516), he claims a role for African art in the powerful changes occurring in European art
during the early twentieth century.
Woolf ’s response to and reflection on the show at The Chelsea Club indicate her
ambivalence, while she acknowledges some power in the object to affect her. She notes in
a letter to Vanessa Bell, dated 15 April 1920:
There is a good deal doing in the art world. A show of Negro carvings at the
book club—the X group—pictures in Shaftsbury Avenue, and the entire works
of Bach played; Beethoven next week. I went to see the carvings and I found
them dismal and impressive, but Heaven knows what real feeling I have about
anything hearing Roger discourse. I dimly see that something in their style
might be written, and also that if I had one on the mantelpiece I should be a
different sort of character—less adorable, as far as I can make out, but somebody
you wouldn’t forget in a hurry. (L2 429)
Her diary entry further constructs the disturbing aspects of the pieces: “The day before
I went to the Niggers’ show in Chelsea; very sad impressive figures; obscene, somehow
monumental; figures of Frenchmen, I thought, sodden with civilization and cynicism; yet
they were carved (perhaps) in the Congo 100’s of years ago” (D2 30).
Clive Bell’s response to the exhibition at The Chelsea Club in 1920 follows the lines
of Fry’s but with reservations because he “means to keep his head” (“Negro” 247). Locating the discovery of Negro art in Paris with painters Picasso, Derain, Matisse and
Vlaminck who began to collect pieces around 1905, Bell acknowledges the role of Fry’s
friend and dealer in African art Paul Guillaume in acquiring “first-rate things” but also
identifies “the group of artists, critics, and amateurs” as being what he calls the “most sensitive in Europe” (“Negro” 247). Refusing to either treat African art with “contempt” or
to “over-praise,” Bell steers between the contraries in his evaluation. In many ways Bell’s
view reflects the ambiguity and ambivalence of others, not only members of Bloomsbury,
in addressing the fundamental questions swirling around what was happening in Paris as
artists struggle toward modernity and the practice of incorporating “primitive” influences
in the works. For Bell, Negro art is “entitled to a place amongst the great schools, but
that it was no match for the greatest” (“Negro” 247). While granting “exquisiteness of
quality” and noting that “the thing is alive from end to end” (“Negro” 247), Bell cites the
lack of creative imagination, self-consciousness, and provenance: “only when you begin
to look for that passionate affirmation of a personal vision which we Europeans, at any
rate, expect to find in the greatest art, will you run a risk of being disappointed” (“Negro”
247). One limitation comes out of imperial discourse: “Savages lack self-consciousness
and the critical sense because they lack intelligence. And because they lack intelligence
they are incapable of profound conceptions” (“Negro” 247), but Bell sees the influence
of Europe as the end: “whenever the modern white man has been busy they [the arts] are
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extinct” (“Negro” 248). Once all of the external elements used to judge a work of art are
stripped away, there remains what is for Bell of the highest importance: “the one thing
that matters—aesthetic significance” (“Negro” 248). In the end Bell can only present the
“[nigger] sculpture” —like it or dislike it—to be judged on its merits. Bell’s careful negotiation of attitudes toward African art is set up by the introductory paragraph which notes
the several exhibitions7 that have induced the curious to ethnographic collections in the
British Museum where a variety of people view the “relics of a civilization they helped to
destroy” (“Negro” 247). It seems that Bell’s consideration of African art cannot be judged
on its merits without empire, and although he writes that he likes the change, Bell’s use of
terminology signifies his ambivalence. Certainly, a letter to the editor on August 27, 1920,
protests Bell’s use of terms “Negro” and “nigger” as an affront to the “intelligence and
race-pride of several million of your fellow-subjects in the British Empire” (Harris 284).
Although the letter writer praises Bell’s “serious, well-reasoned and critically inspired”
writing, she sees the terms as objectionable and in bad taste. I believe this letter illustrates
the variety of issues embedded in any consideration of African art at this point in time.
Drawing a similar conclusion, Green sees Fry transcending the limitations of this baggage
by “undercutting existing conventional hierarchies” (127), but Fry does so without questioning at any level the logocentric and Eurocentric idea of civilization” (128). Reminding
us that Fry could easily connect African art with children’s art as “an especially obvious
and objectionable mark of colonial paternalism (130), Green, too, sees the contradictions
rooted in the ideologies of “primitive” and “civilized.”
Two years after Fry’s death, the collection Last Lectures includes a later version of
Fry’s essay on Negro art which revisits and extends Fry’s admiration and validation of the
art by focusing on the analysis of particular pieces.8 Couched in the racialized, simplistic,
Frazerian, anthropological ideas of the “Negro mind,” Fry, nonetheless, transcends the
limitation of cultural theory to recognize African art’s value to modern art and, as Green
argues, is responsible for his opening of the canon; “his pan-cultural openness…undercut
existing conventional hierarchies” (127). Indeed, Kenneth Clark’s introduction reminds
us not only the West’s general response to the pieces but also Fry’s:
Negro art provided in concentrated form the qualities which Fry most admired.
To him these nameless, dateless masterpieces were as near as anything could be
to his “ideal construction,” a perfectly pure work of art. They have, he says, the
same sort of control of the expressive elements of plastic form as the musician
has of the relations of notes; they have delicate tact and restraint; they have
sensibility and vitality in the highest degree. Nothing shows more clearly the independence of his aesthetic judgments from all associative and literary elements
than this impassioned admiration for the art of a people with whom he can have
had no single idea or association in common. (xxv)
Clark goes on to recognize Fry’s earlier claim in the 1920 advertisement. Clark writes:
“The very existence of these sculptures depended on beliefs and emotions which he must
have regarded as mere madness, yet their forms spoke to him more intelligibly and persuasively than the sculpture of his own contemporaries or of fifth-century Greece” (xxv).
Clearly, the contradictions persist.
The Contradictions of African Art
71
There is no question that Virginia Woolf was aware of African art during the early
years of the twentieth century: her friendship with Fry, her readings of Fry from “Bushman” on, and her documentation of the incident of the power of the African mask and
Josette Coatmellac’s suicide said to have related to an African mask Fry had given her.9 It
is equally clear that Woolf ’s response to the pieces was also ambivalent and ambiguous.
The other painters associated with Bloomsbury were, too, affected by Fry’s enthusiasm
and interest in African art. Richard Shone in The Art of Bloomsbury locates Fry’s influence on Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant around the period of the two post-Impressionist
shows 1911-1912: “his ceaseless activity changed forever Bloomsbury’s hitherto culturally
restricted profile (16). He sees Bell’s work as having greater affinity to the work of French
and German contemporaries and Grant’s work of 1911-12 revealing “the impact not only
of the Post-Impressionists but of his discovery of Byzantine mosaics, Romanesque decoration and African sculpture” (74). The Bells traveled to Paris with Fry, met Picasso and
Matisse (Shone 16-17), and Vanessa records a visit to Guillaume’s gallery in the Faubourg
St. Honoré (V. Bell, Letters 238-39). Critics note that the early post-Impressionist shows
and the visits to Paris suggest some unconscious appropriation of what she had seen in
paintings, such as “The Tub” (Giachero, location 1720).
So what do the contradictions of African art mean to Bloomsbury? I believe that
this attention changed their perspective forever. Fry revisited what he called Negro Art in
Last Lectures and Transformations. In his examination of the Burlington Magazine, Colin
Rhodes argues that the interest in “primitive” art came from the validation of expression over technical mastery, the idea that the “primitive,” ahistorical products are situated
outside of art-historical discourse and could infuse life into “degenerated” civilization
allowing renewal (99-100). Fry, making use of the comparative method juxtaposing European art vs. Africa art, never challenges “the notion of ‘civilisation’” (qtd. in Rhodes102),
but it seems clear that the perspectives Fry opened up could not be contained in spite
of Torgovnick’s harsh judgment of his limited vision (97). Indeed, the contradiction of
how African artifacts should be valued and interpreted, whether they are locked into the
colonialist, racist discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and whether they
are to be viewed in the context of ethnographic or fine arts museum moves forward to
the 1984 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York with the “Primitivism”
in 20th Century Art: Affinities Between the Tribal and Modern” exhibition, where tribal
works are juxtaposed with pieces by Matisse, Picasso, and others in an effort to understand the “Primitive sculptures in terms of the Western context in which modern artists
‘discovered’ them” (Rubin 1). Rashid Arareen in “From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts” argues
the conflicting point of view that sees the exhibition and definition of “primitive” as part
of what he calls an “imperialist enterprise” (164), further complicating the relationship
between the West and African art. Again, in 1993 on the occasion of a new exhibition
entitled “Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals,” Susan Vogel, Executive Director
of The Museum of African Art, reflects on the “three participants in the life of African art
transposed to the West: the art object itself, the African artists and users, with their ideas,
and the Western audience and presenters, with theirs” (12-13). While the ambiguities
and contradictions continue, Vogel acknowledges the importance of events early in the
twentieth century, those involving Fry and Bloomsbury discussed in this paper. Although
she does not mention Fry or Bloomsbury, Vogel reminds us that contemporary African
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
artists and ideas “now attract and surprise with the power that African sculptural forms
did in the early century” (13).
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
See Gerzina’s list of instances/references in Woolf ’s work.
See Marcus.
A note on terminology: unfortunate terms deemed offensive today were used in much of the writing during the early twentieth century. Since the contested term reflects imperial discourse, I will use the term
African art whenever possible.
According to Spalding: “listed in the catalogue were thirty-five Gauguin oils, twenty-two Van Goghs, and
twenty-one Cézannes” (126).
Advertisement, The Athenaeum, 23 April 1920, p. 530.
Fry, “Negro Art at the Chelsea Book Club,” The Athenaeum, 16 April 1920, p. 516.
The Chelsea show in 1919 and the show at the Trocadero in Paris, Autumn 1919.
According to Clark, none but the first lecture had been prepared for publication before Fry’s death, and the
slides had to be found/reconstituted (Preface, v).
See D2 303; L3 110, and Caws and Wright 311.
Works Cited
Anscombe, Isabelle. Omega and After: Bloomsbury and the Decorative Arts. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985.
Araeen, Rashid. “From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts.” The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art. Ed. Susan
Hiller. New York: Routledge, 1991. 158-82.
Bell, Clive. “Negro Sculpture.” The Athenaeum, 20 August 1920: 247-48.
——. “Roger Fry (1866-1934).” Cornhill 993 (Autumn 1952): 180-97.
Bell, Vanessa. Sketches in Pen and Ink. Ed. with Afterword by Lia Giachero. NY: Random House, 1998. E-book,
version 1.0.
——. “To Roger Fry.” 24 March [1920]. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. Ed. Regina Marler. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1994.
Caws, Mary Ann, and Sarah Bird Wright. Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends. Oxford: OUP, 2000.
Coombes, Annie. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination. New Haven: Yale
UP, 1994.
Clark, Kenneth. Preface and Introduction. Last Lectures. 1939. By Roger Fry. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. v-vi;
ix-xxix.
Fry, Roger. “Indigenous American Art.” The Athenaeum, 9 July 1920: 55.
——. “Negro Art.” Last Lectures. 1939. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. 75-81.
——. “Negro Sculpture at The Chelsea Book Club.” The Athenaeum, 16 April 1920: 516. [Collected as “Negro
Sculpture” in Vision and Design: 65-68.]
——. “Negro Sculpture at the Lefevre Gallery.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 62 (June 1933):
289-90.
——. Vision and Design. London: Chatto & Windus, 1920.
——. Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art. 1927. NY: Chatto and Windus, 1968.
Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook. “Bushmen and Blackface: Bloomsbury and ‘Race.’” South Carolina Review 38
(2006): 46-64.
Giachero, Lia. “To Daylight from Darkness: Vanessa Bell as an Artist.” Afterword. Sketches in Pen and Ink. By
Vanessa Bell. Kindle e-book. Location 1720.
Gordon, Lois. Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist. New York: Columbia UP, 2007.
Green, Christopher. “Expanding the Canon: Roger Fry’s Evaluations of the ‘Civilized’ and the ‘Savage.’” Art
Made Modern: Roger Fry’s Vision of Art. Ed. Christopher Green. London: Merrell Holberton, 1999. 119-32.
Harris, Vivian. “Negro or ‘Nigger.’” Letter. The Athenaeum, August 27, 1920: 284.
Hiller, Susan, ed. The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Marcus, Jane. Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2004.
“Negro Sculpture.” Advertisement. Athenaeum 23 April 1920: 530.
Paudrat, Jean-Louis. “From Africa.” “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. Ed.
The Contradictions of African Art
73
William Rubin. Vol. 1. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984. 125-75.
Rhodes, Colin. “Burlington Primitive: Non-European Art in the Burlington Magazine before 1930.” The Burlington Magazine 146 (Feb. 2004): 98-104.
Rubin, William. “Picasso.” “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. Ed. William
Rubin. Vol. 1. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984. 241-343.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Segy, Ladislas. African Sculpture Speaks. 4th edition enlarged. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975.
Shone, Richard. The Art of Bloomsbury. London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1999. [On the occasion of the exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London. 4 November 1999-30 January 2000]
Spalding, Frances. Roger Fry: Art and Life. 1980. Norfolk, UK: Black Dog Books, 1999.
Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1990.
Vogel, Susan. “The Museum for African Art: The Second Beginning.” Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and
Reveals. Ed. Mary Nooter. Munich: Prestel, 1993.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harcourt, 1957.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNellie. New York: Harcourt,
1977-1984.
——. Roger Fry: A Biography. 1940. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Troutman. New York: Harcourt,
1975-1980.
CONTRADICTIONS IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
VIRGINIA WOOLF’S WRITINGS ON ART
by Maggie Humm
“Do you think we have the same pair of eyes, only different spectacles?” (L6 158).
T
his very well-known question, posed by Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, is not a
simple one.1 Issues of how the arts and the visual in general were perceived, and
employed, by the sisters, bear heavily on all their auto/biographical encounters.
Reading Virginia’s accounts of art, particularly descriptions of her sister’s art, is also to read
a palimpsest of Virginia’s anxious feelings about self representation. This is of particular
importance in any examination of modernist writing since, although modernist literature
was initially characterised as a movement from outside to inside (Meisel), new modernism is a continuum of theories about representations of subjectivity in both visual and
narrative practices.
Woolf, as we know, had an “abiding obsession” with autobiography, just as the autobiographical “is never far from the surface of modernist writing” (Albright 1, Saunders
12). Woolf ’s own inter-weavings of the autobiographical with narrative have been the
focus of many critics, although this epistemic community has mutated over the years.2
Woolf certainly places the subjectivity of the narrator/Woolf at the heart of her critical
writings. I would argue that Woolf ’s haptic self is most prominent in her accounts of
her sister Vanessa Bell’s art. Virginia Woolf ’s writings on art often create a kind of prosopopoeia – coming to know herself, her identity, by constructing figures of artists and
artistic events, for example in “The Royal Academy” (1919). But while “The Royal Academy” shows Woolf abjecting her fears, her writings on Vanessa show Woolf constructing
a more complex identity. From the momentary rupture in Woolf ’s description of Vanessa
in “Reminiscences”(1976), to the very brief “It is strange as one enters the Mansard Gallery…” (1924), and to the “Foreword to Recent Paintings of Vanessa Bell” (1930), Woolf ’s
empathetic understandings of Vanessa’s art, reveal Woolf ’s developing sense of “being.”
Woolf did, after all, entitle her autobiography “A Sketch of the Past” (1976), the piece
was written at Vanessa’s request: “Nessa said that if I did not start my memoirs I should
soon be too old,” and “A Sketch” foregrounds Woolf ’s aestheticizing of life events (MOB
64). Just as in “A Sketch,” Woolf ’s art writings address the issue of the self ’s representation. But when writing about art, Woolf does not describe paintings as purely reflecting
a narrator’s emotions. Narrators’ reactions to paintings in Woolf ’s art reviews are not the
same as Woolf ’s aesthetic “shock” moments in her autobiography, for example, “seeing
this light” of waves breaking “behind a yellow blind,” and the crocus by the door at St.
Ives (MOB 64). When writing about art, descriptions of paintings seem to offer Woolf a
different kind of subjectivity. Her imaginary portraits in art—her prosopopeia—are not
conflicted but more embodied.
Woolf drew her aesthetic strategies from many sources both past and contemporary.
The Stephen family tradition of biographical writing, with her father as founder of the
Contradictions in Autobiography
75
Dictionary of National Biography from the year of her birth 1882 to 1891 was an early
influence. Woolf ’s great aunt Julia Margaret Cameron’s portraits, which hung in Gordon
Square and were published with introductions by Woolf and Roger Fry, showed Woolf
how to construct subjectivities in imaginary moments carefully posed and performed.
By 1905, Woolf owned Walter Pater’s collected works, and Pater’s The Renaissance models aesthetic portraits betraying Pater’s self-conscious self-references (Saunders 43). Woolf
thought Pater “the writer who from words made blue and gold and green” (E3 182-3). Although Woolf did write disparagingly about the art critic Vernon Lee, Woolf owned Lee’s
works and Lee’s Laurus Nobilis (1909) combines aesthetic critiques with self impressions.
Woolf ’s contemporary sources included, pre-eminently, her Bloomsbury friends. Following the Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, they championed Cézanne, for whom
representation was no longer photographic but induces affect in spectators. Art theorists
offered Woolf critical methods which combined aesthetic and personal reflections, for
example, Julius Meier-Graefe and Bernard Berenson. There are similarities, too, between
Henri Bergson’s notion of “reflective perception” and what Jane Goldman has called
Woolf ’s “doorstop model” of aesthetic experience, and Bergson shaped art practice at the
Slade attended by Vanessa (Goldman). Woolf read and owned many biographies of artists
including the lives of William Morris, Delacroix and Cézanne, and art critiques by other
modernists, for example Ezra Pound’s Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. Woolf ’s consistently
shared these reflections with Vanessa, while buying Vanessa’s paintings, textiles, ceramics,
book jackets and decorations.
Woolf ’s differing autobiographical selves are visible throughout her writing in the
interfaces3 of her diaries, letters, and novels. But the aesthetic portraits Woolf creates of
Vanessa’s art are the space of a more embodied response to selfhood as well as the space of
a different kind of rhetorical response to autobiography. And it is Vanessa and Vanessa’s
art which seems to trigger Woolf ’s haptic subjectivity most of all. Woolf wrote extensively
about her sister the artist in “Reminiscences” which interweaves biography with autobiography. Begun in 1907, “Reminiscences” followed Woolf ’s imaginary historical figure in
her 1906 “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” and, as Anna Snaith points out, Woolf
incorporates autobiography into fiction from the beginning of her career (“My Poor Private
Voice”). Although “Reminiscences” is largely a naturalistic account of shared family events,
moments of rhetorical rupture break into the narrative at points when Woolf remembers
looking at Vanessa. In “the dark land under the nursery table,” a common trope in many autobiographical fictions from Charlotte Brontë to Simone de Beauvoir, Woolf joining Vanessa, “drifted together like ships in an immense ocean” (MOB 29). Woolf evokes “strong
passions” and Vanessa “passion for art” in innumerable aesthetic associations of “smells and
flowers” (MOB 29). The possibility of writing autobiographical referential bodily sensations first captured here momentarily by Woolf, and triggered by Vanessa, are in stark
contrast to the high Victorianism in Woolf ’s descriptions of her mother going “through
the shadows of the Valley [of Death] nobly free from all illusion or sentiment” (MOB 33).
While not overtly autobiographical, the visible traces of Virginia’s own portrait are
nonetheless evident in her other writings about Vanessa, if we look through the bifocals
of psychoanalytic and genetic criticism. Genetic criticism does not regard the published
essay as an author’s final intention and purest outcome, but as a “necessary possibility,”
still in tension with the material multi-layers of its genesis (Deppman et al. 11). In this
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schema, Virginia’s self-projection onto a published portrait of Vanessa is caught up in
her contemporaneous writings about Vanessa. Portraits are always autobiographical. The
writer who portrays an individual knows that individual intimately, experiencing the person’s very contours. Such intimacy with Vanessa is a constant in Woolf ’s letters, diaries
and contemporaneous materials.
More than other approaches, feminist autobiographical criticism (and more recently
queer autobiographical criticism) went to the heart of these issues, particularly in the
1990s, by suggesting that generic features should not be seen as bounded. Rather, they argued, we should track autobiographical movements through what might be contradictory
texts, recognising the difficulty of pointing to any single individual “author.”4 So rather
than reading Woolf ’s diaries and letters as “ur” texts, as transparent windows onto Woolf ’s
“real” feelings, far better, feminists would argue, as genetic critics do today, to look at the
interfaces Woolf makes between her different forms of self-representation whether art
review, diary or photography. In her writing Woolf selectively refigures differing aspects
of Vanessa, creating a Vanessa who exemplifies many of Woolf ’s perceptions. Looking at
some of these accounts as a palimpsest of submerged identities and paratexts highlights
important aspects of Woolf ’s self.
The most authoritative accounts to probe these issues of cultural interfaces and auto/
bios between the two sisters are those of Diane Gillespie.5 From the pioneering The Sisters’
Arts through to her recent “Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Painting,” Gillespie expertly
demonstrates, in detailed scholarly analysis of Bell’s paintings, that the “aesthetic interactions” of the sisters provide a context for Woolf ’s writings (“Woolf, Bell, and Painting”
122). As Gillespie points out, Virginia created Vanessa in part as the fictional characters
Helen Ambrose, Katharine Hilbery and Lily Briscoe. In turn Bell’s painting Mrs Dalloway’s
Party may have been a visual impetus for the closing scene of Woolf ’s novel. The sisters’ mutual photographic enthusiasms can be viewed as overtly autobiographical (Humm Snapshots). I will follow Gillespie’s lead, but looking at Woolf ’s writings on art, not so much as
a source of images or fictional and non fictional themes for Woolf ’s other published work,
but rather as autobiographical resonances with Woolf ’s contemporaneous writing.
Before examining Woolf ’s later accounts of Vanessa’s art, it is instructive to look at
earlier art reviews in which Woolf explores imaginary portraiture. Woolf ’s subjectivism is
particularly visible in her review of the Royal Academy’s 1919 summer exhibition. Woolf ’s
attack on the Academy’s subject pictures mirrors Roger Fry’s 1919 denigration of “ordinary historical pictures” and she cites Fry in the conclusion of her review (Fry 71 and see
Humm “Editing”). But more revealing of Woolf ’s feelings is her creation of narrator and
spectators’ exaggerated reactions to John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed in the exhibition
when “the great rooms rang like a parrot-house with the intolerable vociferations” (E3
93). Woolf ’s rhetorical construction of narrator alienation betrays an anxiety formation in
her own sense of artistic sensibility. By abjecting onto the narrator aspects of her still unformed artistic understandings, Woolf is able to displace her more conventional liking for
subject pictures (as evidenced in her contemporary letters). Art reviews, in other words,
were spaces for Woolf of self construction.
By the time of her biography of Roger Fry, Woolf could confidently forefront her artistic sensibility and read her own life from the visual surface she creates of Fry. Originally
intending to dedicate To the Lighthouse to Fry, Woolf wrote to him that “you have I think
Contradictions in Autobiography
77
kept me on the right path…more than anyone” (L3 385). In Roger Fry, rather than analysing Fry’s published works (most of which Woolf knew and owned), she describes attributes
of Fry’s aesthetic sensibility identical to her own. Fry’s room was a muddle of “old newspaper cuttings,” a congenial environment for Woolf who collected cuttings in scrapbooks (RF
92). Woolf praises Fry’s holistic aesthetic, which included the domestic arts, and Woolf recreates Fry as a theorist/practitioner creating art for a common viewer, as Woolf was herself.
But it is in her reviews of Vanessa’s art that Woolf is able to be more complicit, to make
direct, unmediated responses, and thus create herself. In “Pictures and Portraits” Woolf
touches on her theme of woman and art by denouncing the National Portrait Gallery for
lacking a portrait of Mrs John Stuart Mill (E3 163-6) Four years later in the brief “It is
strange as one enters the Mansard gallery…” Woolf openly praises Vanessa’s art. The brief
paragraph appeared in the “From Alpha to Omega” column in the Nation & Athenaeum
and reviews the twenty-first exhibition of the London Group at the Mansard Gallery in
October to November 1924 (E3 448-9). While John Maynard Keynes’s earlier Preface to a
London Group exhibition at the Mansard Gallery simply presented an argument for investing in art, Bell’s work impacts directly on Woolf ’s aesthetic senses (Keynes 296). “Mrs Bell
illumines a whole wall, in spite of the drizzle outside, with a flower piece in which every
rose seems instinct with brilliant life, yet seized in a moment of intense stillness” (E3 448).
Woolf ’s ekphrastic description of Bell’s paintings is intense. Woolf ’s self is totally
involved in Bell’s visual appeal and matches Roger Fry’s claim that “art arouse emotions in
us by playing upon what we may call the overtones of our primary physical needs,” and
Woolf ’s Hogarth Press published Fry’s The Artist and Psychoanalysis also in 1924 (Fry 37).
In what art historians now call “relational aesthetics,” that is public art in dialogue with
spectators, the physicality of Vanessa’s art embraces Woolf ’s whole sense of being. Again
in 1924, Woolf had invited Vanessa to decorate 52 Tavistock Square joining the paintings
and textiles by Vanessa that Woolf already owned.
It is instructive to contrast Woolf ’s eager embrace of the aesthetic moment in looking at Bell’s art, with her very hesitant public self-representation in speaking about the
London Group. Woolf addressed the Group at a dinner in March 1924, on the retirement
of its president Bernard Adeney. Osbert Sitwell, who also spoke at the dinner, describes a
very different Woolf with “pitiable nervousness…her distress was obvious” (Sitwell 20).
As joint editor of Art and Letters, an organiser of exhibitions and owner of an extensive
modern art collection, Sitwell was well placed to judge the value of art criticism. While he
sometimes disparages Bloomsbury in his autobiography, calling the group the “Bloomsbury junta” to whom a “correct tone” was “like giving Hitler the salute or wearing a
green turban,” Sitwell thought Woolf “notable beautiful” (Sitwell 18-20). Sitwell calls
Woolf ’s speech a “superb display of art,” a major rhetorical performance (18-20). Unlike
her speech in March, Woolf ’s review of Vanessa paintings in October is not performative,
engendered by distress, but a dynamic conformation of being as Derrida says “as if the
force of the image has to do less with the fact that one sees something in it than with the
fact that one is seen there in it” (Derrida 159).6
The self-critical, interrogative self, so much a feature of Woolf and her narrators, is
much less evident in Woolf ’s accounts of Bell. Often it is as if Bell’s art helps Woolf away
from the split self of literary modernism to an encounter with affect and selfhood. This is
particularly visible in Woolf ’s “Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell,” the catalogue
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
of Bell’s exhibition at the Cooling Galleries in February to March 1930. At first glance the
published “Foreword” seems objective and mediated by Woolf ’s critical self, particularly
in contrast to the earlier manuscript version. Surprisingly for such a short essay, Woolf
made many changes and revisions. The main changes are the deletion of some direct commentary on Bell as well as a diminution in Woolf ’s use of the I-form. Also, in the public
piece, Woolf recreates/performs Vanessa in the historical and gendered moment in which
the sisters were immersed. How then can we read a text which deletes some personalisations as an “autobiographical” piece? How can such an essay be autobiographical in the
sense of affect? I think autobiography is present in the reflexive interface of Woolf as
narrator with Vanessa as “a portrait” making a shared response to visual representations.
The Holograph Notebook of the manuscript is dated June 18 1929 and the published
“Foreword” the 4th of February 1930. There are many disparities and overlaps between the
two versions.7 As noted, a distancing is introduced into the published “Foreword”: syntactically (“proper” becomes “altogether to be commended,” E5 137), in persona (Vanessa
Bell becomes Mrs Bell except for Woolf ’s revealing placing of Vanessa Bell into a canon
of women artists), in emotional characteristics (Bell’s “stubborn” becomes “something
uncompromising,” E5 138), The personal pronoun “I” becomes “one” at moments (“I
have read it in the newspapers” to “one has read,” E5 138). Yet the autobiographical does
surface. Woolf ’s reflections are moved from the manuscript margins into the public light
(“the group of women is silent,” E5 139) and the art works are described in much more
embodied detail (with more “naked girls” and “naked boys,” E5 138) supported by the
introduction of more convincing precision (“a hundred painters” becomes “ninety-nine”
(E5 138). One key change is ideological with the insertion of a more intense patriarchy
(“the father objects to” becomes “her father would have died” (E5 137). Most importantly,
Vanessa’s expertise is enlarged, and diminishing comments, such as “we could fancy that
Mrs Bell had never read a word of Shakespeare,” are deleted. There are very vivid descriptions of Bell’s choice of coloration “all the blues and greens” (E5 138-9). “Blue and Green”
(1921) is, of course, the title of Woolf ’s most significantly imagistic short story.
Woolf does not simply copy from manuscript to text, nor simply expand and amplify
the manuscript. Both texts are improvisations around the theme of identity: Vanessa as
a painter and Virginia as a writer. The autobiographical is a trace. This is most evident
in the way in which the “Foreword” is shaped by spatial metaphors—of Woolf herself
“pausing upon the threshold” (E5 137). Goldman has highlighted the aesthetic significance of Woolf ’s “threshold” moments. In the “Foreword,” I would argue, such moments
are autobiographical in a Lacanian sense. That is, the portrait that Woolf is hesitant to
draw of Vanessa, by delaying her own entrance, instantiates “want” in Lacanian terms.
Woolf ’s gaze at Vanessa’s paintings maps the intimately private onto the public in a social
setting. In the opening paragraphs, Woolf ’s switch from associating the personal “I said”
and “woman,” to “one must go into the gallery,” might seem less personal, less autobiographical. Yet this transition enables Woolf to claim universality for Bell and women’s art
in general, and for her own point of view as a woman spectator. “What is there here to
intimidate or perplex? Are we not suffused, lit up, caught in a sunny glow?” (E5 138).
Thus the vividness of colour and bodies in the paintings creates in the narrator/Woolf
a desire to know, to become the “Other.” In Woolf ’s descriptions of Bell’s paintings there
is present Woolf ’s entitlement as sister, to Bell’s embodiment. The published “Foreword”
Contradictions in Autobiography
79
then, represents the subject’s achievement of subject-hood in a chain of artistic signifiers
overcoming absence. In addition, perhaps Virginia is springing Vanessa from the social
script that prohibits a female delight in gazing at naked bodies (and certainly prohibits
a female delight in scoping female bodies), in order to free herself from this script. “She
[Vanessa] has looked on nakedness with a brush in her hand” (E5 138). In the sisters’
taking of family photographs there are similar moments where the sisters share the photographic gaze to create identities in order to move beyond the paternal/maternal home
(Humm Modernist Women 19 and 81).
Genetic criticism’s similar focus on intimate features of contemporaneous works helps
to highlight this autobiographical permeability.8 If we place the “Foreword” in Woolf ’s
contemporaneous writings, refusing to see the published text as “final,” then the interface
of auto/bios is more evident. In the year leading up to the “Foreword” Woolf was writing
very self-reflexively about Vanessa and about issues of colour and auto/bios. The Reading
Notebooks also show, as Brenda Silver points out, “the diversity” of her “reading at this time”
including autobiography: Fanny Burney’s diaries (Silver 75). Woolf ’s six weeks in bed from
January to March 1929 are directly present, Silver argues, in Woolf ’s note on Burney, “she
wrote this after many days in bed” and by aligning Burney’s illness with her own (Silver
82). Illness always stimulates the need for autobiography because illness disrupts the linear
direction of a life and heightens the need to reconstruct one self as well as images of others.
In Woolf’s contemporaneous diaries and letters Woolf dealt directly with Vanessa’s image and with the visual. In December 1929 immediately before the “Foreword,” Woolf
thanked Vanessa for “the lovely smokey blue cat’s eyes pair of brooches” which “conveyed
the chill and fervour of your eyes to me” (L4 119). Earlier that year, meeting “Nessa in Tottenham Court Road” they shared “that wash of reflection in which we both swim about”
and she felt that “I am more full of shape & colour than ever” (D3 219). In April Woolf
worried she was to “forget the fictitious self…I can see my famous self tapering about the
world” (D3 222). But by June 1929, with Vanessa in Cassis, Virginia delighted in Provençal
colours “Duncan in his blue shirt…black & white butterflies” (D3 232). In September 1929
Angelica was sent to boarding school leaving Vanessa “a painter on her own” and Virginia
projects herself into Vanessa’s body feeling that when the sisters visited Angelica together,
“Nessa will hold her very tight to get the sensation of her child’s body again” (D3 255, 261).
The “Foreword” revels in these kinds of embodied coloration “naked girls crouched
on crimson cushions…the lustre of grass and flower, of the glow of rock and tree…a
sunny slow…temperate warmth…surrounded by vineyards and olive trees” (a painting
which Diane Gillespie expertly analyses) like the Provençal landscape Virginia had shared
with Vanessa that year and the surrogate experience of seeing/holding Angelica’s body
(“Foreword” 138 and Gillespie “Godiva”). Of course Woolf is describing the content and
features of Vanessa’s paintings in the exhibition, but her decision to choose particular
features of the paintings inevitably reveals her own feelings. Psychoanalytic theory would
characterise Woolf ’s choice of colour terms and features of embodiment, in her manuscript and published descriptions of Vanessa at this time, as possessing a lexical function.
That is, Woolf ’s constant remaking of her own sensations in descriptions of Vanessa’s
art is what the psychoanalyst and writer Christopher Bollas calls “mnemic objects”—a
projection of self-experience (21). Similarly in the draft “Foreword” Woolf wrote for the
catalogue of Vanessa’s exhibition in February 1934 at the Lefèvre Gallery, Woolf describes
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“voyaging in a colour” with Vanessa (Holograph 1934), while in the same year refusing to
be painted for the National Portrait Gallery. Woolf ’s descriptions of objects in Vanessa’s
paintings enable the symbolic repetition of the self. Adding genetic criticism’s focus on
similar attributes of semiotic language allows us to read the overlapping diaries/letters, not
as transparent autobiography but as traces of Woolf ’s self-making.
Woolf’s constant attention to Bell’s art is not a simple attachment or literary re-presentation of Bell’s work. Woolf gains a self-presence through her descriptions of Bell’s forceful
imagery. Woolf experiences Bell’s art as a fabric of sensations, activating Woolf ’s “being,”
perhaps beyond any modernist analysis. Clive Bell, Virginia noted, thought “my soliloquies,
trains of thought, are better than my silhouettes” (D5 275). But the vividness of Woolf ’s “silhouette” of Vanessa in the “Foreword” and other writings, cannot be divided from Woolf ’s
sense of identity, and the subjectivity of her own autobiographical “soliloquies” and interfaces. Bell’s art allows Woolf to remove the spectacles of modernist subjectivity, and to experience an empathetic somatic being, indeed one with the “same pair of eyes.”
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
A short section of this essay appeared in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, No. 79, Spring 2011. My thanks to
Gill Lowe and Vara Neverow for permissions, and for scholarly editing of that piece.
See Hussey (1986), Minow-Pinkney (1987), Porritt (1991), Little (1996), Snaith (2000) Briggs (2005),
Light (2007) Fordham (2010) among many others.
I take the term and usage from Smith and Watson’s Interfaces. My piece here is a brief sketch from a larger
project of genetic criticism of Woolf ’s writings about art.
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s several collections remain the most authoritative accounts of feminist
autobiographical criticism. Approaches to visual autobiographical writings include Heron and Williams
(1996), Hirsch (1997), Meskimmon (1996) and Rugg (1997). An excellent account of more recent queer
autobiographical criticism is Johnston (2007).
This is not to overlook the important work on Woolf and the visual by other Woolf scholars, most notably
by Goldman (1998).
Derrida also argues that autobiography effaces the “I” in the sense that the autobiographical “I” is about
memory and naming.
Page numbers for quotations from the published “Foreword” are listed. The manuscript has differing page
numbers. Its typed frontispiece paginates the manuscript draft as 53-69, but the CD-ROM paginates as
29-37. To avoid confusion I have omitted manuscript page numbers since the manuscript is easily viewable
on the CD-ROM.
See Fordham’s authoritative account.
Works Cited
Albright, Daniel. “Virginia Woolf as Autobiographer.” Kenyon Review 6:4 (1984): 1-17.
Bollas, Christopher. Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. London: Allen Lane, 2005.
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and Woolf. Oxford: OUP, 2010.
Fry, Roger. “Art and Science.” Vision and Design. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.
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——. “Godiva Still Rides: Virginia Woolf, Divestiture and Three Guineas.” in Woolf and the Art of Exploration.
Eds. H. Southworth and E. K. Sparks. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2006, pp. 2-27.
Contradictions in Autobiography
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——. “Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Painting.” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed.
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Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Post-Memory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema. New Brunswick NJ:
Rutgers UP, 2003.
——. Snapshots of Bloomsbury: the Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers
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——. “Editing Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Virginia Woolf and the Royal Academy.” Woolf Editing/Editing
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Great Britain, 2007.
Little, Judy. The Experimental Self: Dialogic Subjectivity in Woolf, Pym and Brooke Rose. Carbondale IL: Southern
Illinois UP, 1996.
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J. H. Dettmar. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 79-91.
Meskimmon, Marsha. The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century. New York:
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Porritt, Ruth. “Surpassing Derrida’s Deconstructed Self: Virginia Woolf ’s Poetic Disarticulations of the Self.”
Women’s Studies 2 (1991): 323-38.
Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.
Saunders, Max. Self Impressions: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford:
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Silver, Brenda. Virginia Woolf ’s Reading Notebooks. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1983.
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Smith, Sidonie and Watson, Julia, eds. Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.
——. Eds. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
——. Eds. Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Snaith, Anna. “My Poor Private Voice”: Virginia Woolf and Autobiography.” in Representing Lives: Women and
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Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London:
Hogarth Press, 1975-1980.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979-1985.
——. Moments of Being. 2nd ed. Ed. J. Schulkind. San Diego: Harcourt, 1985.
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——. Roger Fry. Ed. D. F. Gillespie, Oxford: Shakespeare Head, Blackwell, 1995.
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N. Clarke. London: Hogarth Press, 2009. 137-142.
“BUT SOMETHING BETWIXT AND BETWEEN”:
ROGER FRY AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF BIOGRAPHY
by Amber K. Regis
I
n March 1940, Roger Fry received its first bad review. Having read the typescript,
Leonard accused Woolf of employing the “wrong method”: “Its mere anal[ysis], not
history. Austere repression. In fact dull to the outsider. All those dead quotations” (D5
271). When the biography was published four months later, it received positive notices
in the press, but Leonard’s judgment has prevailed and persists in varying forms to this
day. In a recent history of biography, for example, Nigel Hamilton surveys the critical
tradition and concludes that Roger Fry is “not only the worst book [Woolf ] ever wrote,
but a complete failure as a biography” (162). This failed reputation is borne out in current publishing trends: Roger Fry remains absent from the Penguin and Oxford Classics
list, and although Vintage reproduces the text as part of its Lives series, this is a facsimile
reprint without a critical introduction or editorial apparatus. Scholars working on the biography must therefore depend on Diane Gillespie’s excellent Shakespeare Head edition,
for elsewhere it is erased from the canon of Woolf ’s major works.
For her part, Woolf was suspicious of Leonard’s judgment. She failed to satisfy his
demand for “history,” but she considered this a result of “dissympathy” (D5 271). Leonard’s assessment reveals a tension between his expectations of formal biography and the
methods employed in Roger Fry. He demonstrates “a lack of interest in personality” (D5
271), and here Woolf invokes the terminology employed some thirteen years earlier in
her essay “The New Biography” (1927). In pursuing the “rainbow-like intangibility” of
personality, Woolf suspects that for Leonard, Roger Fry lacked the “granite-like solidity”
of truth (CE4 229). But subsequent critics have accused Woolf of failure on different and
contradictory terms. Catherine Parke, for example, though she concedes the biography
employs “unconventional digressions,” insists on a return to tradition. She accuses Woolf
of reverting to practices previously rejected and satirised in Orlando (1928) and Flush
(1933), to “conventional narrative[s]” that “[survey] the familiar topics of Victorian biography” (77). Thus, in contrast to Leonard, Parke depicts the biography’s failure as a result
of too much granite and not enough rainbow.
Roger Fry, it seems, is caught in a double bind. But one further, alternative reading
might help unpick such contradiction. Elizabeth Cooley does not challenge the dominant
narrative of failure, but she does offer a more complex explanation. Roger Fry, she argues,
is “a peculiar double failure”: Woolf not only “[fails] to produce the Victorian’s ‘two fat
volumes’,” she also “[fails] to allow her invention and intuition free play” (81). As such,
Roger Fry satisfies neither traditionalists nor seekers after innovation; it is neither a Victorian “amorphous mass” nor a “new” modernist biography (CE4 231). Here I want to
explore the contradictions in Woolf ’s theorising of biography as shaped by the experience
of writing Roger Fry. This paper will reconsider her apparent retreat from biographical
experiment, and will question the evidence and accusations of failure that haunt the biography’s critical legacy. Drawing upon the work of Woolf ’s final biographical subject,
“But something betwixt and between”
83
I suggest new contexts for reading her method and practice. In short, the contradictory
responses evoked by Roger Fry are the necessary accompaniment to Woolf ’s ongoing concern with the genre of biography and its potential to depict a vital, mutable subject.
Art vs. craft
Evidence for the failure of Roger Fry is garnered from Woolf ’s letters, diaries and her
autobiographical “Sketch of the Past” (1976). Writing is “donkey work” and “sober drudgery” (D5 133); it is an appalling “grind” (D5 138), forcing her to “grumble; and sweat”
(L6 284). Work on “Sketch” is begun as a “holiday from Roger,” from the “horrid labour”
that makes Woolf “sick” (MOB 78, 87). These difficulties and frustrations are typically
used to explain the apparent change of heart in Woolf ’s later theorising of biography. In
1927, while at work on Orlando, she celebrated the potential of the “new” biographer,
a literary alchemist blending the elements of granite and rainbow, fact and fiction: “He
chooses; he synthesises; in short, he has ceased to be the chronicler; he has become an
artist” (CE4 231). In 1939, however, while at work on Roger Fry, Woolf published a new
essay, revising her position. In “The Art of Biography,” the incompatibility of fact and fiction is reasserted and the biographer is robbed of his status as an artist: “And thus we come
to the conclusion, that he is a craftsman, not an artist; and his work is not a work of art,
but something betwixt and between” (CE4 227).
“The Art of Biography” is thus a contradictory essay, a fact signposted by its title—a
seemingly perverse choice, when one considers its conclusion. To follow Woolf ’s logic,
the biographer is a craftsman and his work is a craft. Again, this fits with the evidence of
diaries and letters. As Woolf composed her life of Roger Fry, she made increasing use of
craft metaphors. In a letter to Ethyl Smyth, for example, she described her work as “a piece
of cabinet making,” claiming to have “learnt a carpenter’s trick or two” (L6 381). This
transition from art to craft can thus be linked to the “grind” and “drudgery” of writing
the biography: the negotiations with relatives and friends, Woolf ’s reticence over sexual
matters and professional disputes, and the troublesome organisation of factual material.
These difficulties seem to conspire against her, preventing her from creating an artwork:
as a formal biographer, Woolf had become a craftsman. But “The Art of Biography” is
also a playful and ambiguous essay. So too is Woolf ’s craft metaphor, and this becomes
clear if we attempt to follow her logic a little further. The biographer is a craftsman, so his
work must be a craft; the craftsman is distinct from the artist, so his work must be distinct
from…what? Here we must stop and pause, for the biographer’s craft is displaced and
located at some unnamed, liminal point “betwixt and between” the poles of art and some
unnamed other (CE4 227). “The Art of Biography” is not, therefore, a straightforward
retraction of the biographer’s claim to be an artist. Significantly, craft is not the antithesis
of art, and the line demarcating one from the other is indistinct and left unclear.
If we concede, however, that Woolf ’s experience writing Roger Fry had an impact on
her theorising of biography, then Fry must provide a significant context for understanding
her adoption of this ambiguous craft metaphor. In particular, can Fry’s involvement with
the Omega Workshops shed any light on biography as a craft? Woolf immersed herself
in Fry’s public and private writings as she prepared and compiled her biography. In her
chapter on the Omega, Woolf makes use of material from Fry’s essay “Art and Socialism”
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
(1912) in order to contextualise her account of the “young artists” who were to make
“chairs and tables, carpets and pots that people liked to look at” (RF 151). Her selections
emphasise Fry’s belief in the positive combination of art and craft, for example: “Ultimately, of course, when art had been purified of its present unreality by a prolonged contact
with the crafts, society would gain a new confidence in its collective artistic judgment”
(qtd. in RF 151). Fry paints a bleak picture of the contemporary art scene: debased at the
hands of snobbery and commercial trade, the artist is subject to market forces, producing
work to order and selling beauty “as the prostitute professed to sell love” (qtd. in RF 151).
He is thus a “pseudo-artist,” his work being imitative and beholden to profit (qtd. in RF
151). Craft, however, provides a means to purify art of “unreality,” its restorative function
providing the impetus behind the Omega.
In his “Prospectus for the Omega Workshops” (1913), Fry imagined the separation
of art from craft in terms of “divorce”: an artificial division “to the harm of both” (198).
Increasing professionalization had robbed art of “vivifying contact with practical needs,”
while the mechanization of craft, bringing with it cheap and uniform production, had
served to strip quotidian things of beauty (198). But what might the combination of
art and craft produce? Fry claimed the Omega would “[substitute] wherever possible the
directly expressive quality of the artist’s handling for the deadness of mechanical reproduction”; the workshops would enable artists and craftsmen to create, to “employ their power
of invention with the utmost freedom and spontaneity” (199). In short, the works of
the Omega would be paradoxical and oxymoronic, embodying creative utility, functional
beauty and—to return to Woolf ’s own ambiguous binary—artistic craft. One significant
result (and something to bear in mind as we consider Woolf ’s later theorising of biography) was that each product would be different, imperfect, unique. In his “Preface to
the Omega Workshops Catalog” (1913), Fry celebrated the company’s rejection of “shop
finish” and “the pretentious elegance of the machine-made article”—the production line,
with its imitation and regularity, was exposed as a “humbug” (201). There was to be
no fixed rigidity of form or appearance; each product would reveal necessary man-made
variations. And yet, paradoxically, these products would also cohere, unified under the
Omega trademark. In a letter to George Bernard Shaw, Fry described the mark as a guarantee of the Omega’s “exclusiveness,” in opposition to the mechanised craft industry that
would inevitably cannibalise their success (197). Emblazoned on each individual product,
the mark— “Ω”—was thus a symbol of diversity and belonging, of difference and unity.
But what does this mean for biography as a craft? In an early caricature of Victorian
biography, Woolf appears to share what Allen McLaurin has called Fry’s “anti-professional
feeling” (6): “The Victorian age, to hazard another generalization, was the age of the
professional man. The biographies of the time have a depressing similarity; very much
overworked, very serious, very joyless, the eminent men appear to us to be, and already
strangely formal and remote from us in their likes and dislikes” (“A Man With A View”
29). For Woolf, the nineteenth century heralded the professionalization of biography. As
such, the form was reduced to an industry of imitation, kept in a state comparable to the
profit-driven art world derided by Fry. The resulting biographies find their counterpart in
the work of Fry’s “pseudo-artist”—both demonstrate a “depressing similarity.” And here
we might return to “The Art of Biography” with its recurring motif of solidity and death.
Demonstrating the same “deadness of mechanical reproduction” bemoaned by Fry in the
“But something betwixt and between”
85
Omega Prospectus, Victorian biographies are likened to “wax figures…carried in funeral
processions through the street—effigies that have only a smooth superficial likeness to
the body in the coffin” (CE4 222). To thus purify biography of unreality (to adapt Fry’s
phrase), the biographer must evince the principles of the Omega; he must combine craft
with artistic freedom, creating a work that is imperfect, imprecise, yet coherent.
However, one further contradiction may be introduced. While still at work on Roger
Fry, Woolf delivered a BBC radio broadcast, entitled “Craftsmanship” (1937), as part of
the Words Fail Me series. In yet another example of titular contradiction, Woolf declared
that language was no fit medium for craft. Burdened with connotations of utility, the
term was “incongruous, unfitting…when applied to words” (DM 126). “Words shuffle
and change,” we are told; they are always provisional, mutable, and thus should never
be crafted into fixed positions, fixed meanings (DM 127). To attempt this, as a writer or
reader, is to be an “unreal” specialist, to engage in “word monger[y]”—something akin,
once again, to Fry’s “pseudo-artist” (DM 129). What then for the biographer as craftsman
whose necessary medium is words? Do his works “pin…down” the “useful meaning”?
And, as a result, do they “fold their wings and die” (DM 132)? Is the craft of biography
doomed to fail, or could Woolf ’s “something betwixt and between”—her refusal to pin
down the meaning of craft—signal a possible solution?
Language is certainly no fit medium for the uniform, imitative craft that fixes meaning, and here one is reminded of Victorian biography and its “depressing similarity.” But
Woolf ’s emphasis on provisionality in “Craftsmanship”—on the meanings of words that
“shuffle and change,” catching a “many-sided” truth (DM 131)—suggests that language
can indeed be the medium for a literary equivalent of the Omega—for an imprecise,
imperfect and variant craft. But what kind of biographical subject would be produced by
such craftsmanship? In Woolf ’s Roger Fry, can we see this craft in practice?
Crafting the biographical “outline” in ROGER FRY
There is a growing body of scholarship that recognises extraordinary, sometimes novelistic moments in Roger Fry. Woolf ’s only biography proper, it seems, was not so formal
after all. Thomas Lewis contends that the work succeeds in “[capturing] the essence of
[Fry’s] personality,” despite the biography’s “remarkable lack of detail—certainly no biography contains fewer dates than this one” (317, 319-20). Diane Gillespie identifies
Woolf ’s use of “motifs that unify her vision of Fry’s life.” These “images and scenes” recur
throughout, such as the red poppies in Fry’s childhood garden, or the decorative top of a
Roman pillar lying half-buried in the sand (Introduction xxiv). Similarly, Lorraine Kooistera identifies a range of structuring, “thematic motifs”: “the individual against the herd,”
“the unknown-stranger-met-by-chance,” and Fry as a “divided self ” (34). Kooistera also
explores the use of “dramatic” scenes or “vignettes,” moments that “resonate” in the biography, enabling Woolf to “[sketch] in [character] with broad strokes” (30, 29).
These “broad strokes” and extraordinary moments suggest a method comparable
to that proposed in “Craftsmanship.” Fry as biographical subject is multiple; he is never
definitively fixed or finished. For, we are told, “Roger Fry was a man who lived many
lives, the active, the contemplative, the public and the private,” and he lived them “simultaneously” (RF 160, 161). The disorder of Fry as subject is best encapsulated by the
86
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
image of his scattered traces: “The muddle in which these old newspaper cuttings lie is
perhaps symbolical—they are mixed up with passports, with hotel bills, with sketches
and poems and innumerable notes taken in front of the picture itself ” (RF 92). The
“muddle” of Fry’s disparate writings—the paper counterpart to his “many lives”—seem
to embody the man himself. Indeed, Woolf refuses to order this chaos. In the biography’s
final chapter, where we might anticipate some form of resolution, we are presented instead with a broken, disconnected narrative. Taking her cue from Fry’s 1926 collection
of essays, Woolf called this chapter “Transformations”: a “fitting title for […] the change
and experiment” of Fry’s final years, depicted in a series of fifteen snapshots, producing
“a rapid and fragmentary sketch” (RF 198). In the penultimate section of “Transformations,” Woolf stands back and observes her subject, attempting to “stress the pattern of
the whole” just as a critic, like Fry, might observe a work of art (RF 242). But Woolf does
not offer any conclusive statement or final judgment. Instead, she uses Fry’s own words,
taken from his essay “Retrospect” (1920), to articulate her refusal: “Any attempt I might
make to explain this would probably land me in the depths of mysticism. On the edge
of that gulf I stop” (qtd. in RF 244). Though Woolf may identify the “shapes” and “patterns” in the biography as art work—those thematic motifs and dramatic scenes, identified by Gillespie and Kooistera, which make her subject cohere—she insists that Fry
remain multiple and mutable; he is allowed to “shuffle and change,” like the meanings of
words in “Craftsmanship.” Fry is always provisional; he is not, therefore, the product of
mechanised reproduction, of the “depressing similarity” of Victorian biography; he is the
product of a vital and imaginative craftsmanship.1
I am suggesting, therefore, that we read Woolf ’s quotations from and allusions to
Fry—her often unidentified borrowings from his work—as a form of metacritical commentary on her biographical method. For example, we are told that Fry “would have
refused to sit for the portrait of a finished, complete or in any way perfect human being,”
and evidence is produced in the form of his critical response to contemporary portraiture (RF 240). John Singer Sargent is reduced to “a précis writer of appearances” whose
“portrait of Sir Ian Hamilton made him exclaim, ‘I cannot see the man for his likeness’”
(RF 88). In sympathy with Fry, Woolf attempts no perfect portrait in her biography, no
detailed or exact likeness. And thus, to return to “The Art of Biography,” we can see her
method emerging. Though granite and rainbow, fact and fiction, seem more incompatible
than ever, this does not put an end to experiment. Rather, biography must be prepared
“to admit contradictory versions of the same face,” to “[hang] up looking glasses at odd
corners” (CE4 226). Like the Omega artists and craftsmen, the biographer must eschew
fixed and rigid form; he must eschew prescriptive detail; he must give us instead “the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders” (CE4 228). And yet, just as
Omega products were made to cohere under their shared trademark, so the biographer
must “[shape] the whole so we perceive the outline” (CE4 227). Diversity and mutability
must be sustained, yet the biographical subject must cohere. Significantly, this notion of
an outline returns us to the model of active readership put forward by Woolf in her essay,
“How Should One Read A Book?” (1932). Readers of biography, like readers of novels,
must become a “fellow-worker and accomplice” (CR2 259). While the biographer must
“stimulate the imagination,” the reader, in return, must complete and fill the outline (CE4
227). And here we might forge a connection backwards to Orlando, a work celebrated for
“But something betwixt and between”
87
its engagements with biography, receiving praise where Roger Fry is censured. But here
too is an outline, where “a reader’s part” is to “[make] up from bare hints dropped here
and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person” (O 70). Woolf ’s
theorising in “The Art of Biography” thus revises and extends her earlier work. But if the
craft of biography is to shape an outline, what then might this outline look like? Roger Fry
provides us with a glimpse, and the outline is “contradictory, of course” (RF 239).
Note
1.
Diane Gillespie has identified Woolf ’s use of historical provisionality in “The Art of Biography.” Biographies are written for a particular audience, at a particular time. As such, their subjects alter and change
along with this shifting context (“Texture of the Text” 94).
Works Cited
Cooley, Elizabeth. “Revolutionising Biography: Orlando, Roger Fry, and the Tradition.” South Atlantic Review
55.2 (1990): 71-83.
Fry, Roger. “Omega Workshops Fundraising Letter.” A Roger Fry Reader. Ed. Christopher Reed. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996. 196-197.
——. “Preface to the Omega Workshops Catalog.” A Roger Fry Reader. Ed. Christopher Reed. Chicago: Chicago
UP, 1996. 201.
——. “Prospectus for the Omega Workshops.” A Roger Fry Reader. Ed. Christopher Reed. Chicago: Chicago
UP, 1996. 198-200.
Gillespie, Diane F. Introduction. Roger Fry: A Biography. By Virginia Woolf. Oxford: Blackwell-Shakespeare
Head, 1995. xi-l.
——. “The Texture of the Text: Editing Roger Fry: A Biography.” Editing Virginia Woolf: Interpreting the Modernist
Text. Ed. James M. Haule and J.H. Stape. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002. 91-113.
Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brief History. London: Harvard UP, 2007.
Kooistera, Lorraine Janzen. “Virginia Woolf ’s Roger Fry: A Bloomsbury Memorial.” Woolf Studies Annual 2
(1996): 26-38. Lewis, Thomas S.W. “Combining ‘The Advantages of Fact and Fiction’: Virginia Woolf ’s
Biographies of Vita Sackville-West, Flush, and Roger Fry.” Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays. Ed. Elaine K.
Ginsberg and Laura Moss Gottlieb. Troy: Whitson, 1983. 295-324.
McLaurin, Allen. Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved. Cambridge: CUP, 1973.
Parke, Catherine. Biography: Writing Lives. London: Routledge, 2002.
Woolf, Virginia. “Craftsmanship.” The Death of The Moth and Other Essays. London: Hogarth, 1943. 126-132.
——. “The Art of Biography.” Collected Essays. Vol. 4. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967. 221-228.
——. “The New Biography.” Collected Essays. Vol. 4. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967. 229-235.
——. “A Man With A View.” Contemporary Writers. Ed. Jean Guiget. New York: Harvest-Harcourt, 1976. 2832.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vol. 6. London: Hogarth, 1980.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew McNeillie. Vol. 5. San Diego: Harvest,
1985.
——. Roger Fry: A Biography. Ed. Dianne F. Gillespie. Oxford: Blackwell-Shakespeare Head, 1995.
——. Orlando: A Biography. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Oxford: OUP, 1998.
——. “How Should One Read A Book?” The Common Reader. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. Vol. 2. London: Vintage,
2003. 258-270.
——. “Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Pimlico, 2002. 78-160.
“CAN ‘I’ BECOME ‘WE’?”:
ADDRESSING COMMUNITY IN THE YEARS AND THREE GUINEAS
by Oren Goldschmidt
I
n a note she wrote while working on To the Lighthouse (1927) in 1925 Woolf made
an intriguing link between the forms of individual life and the state of international
affairs: “How much more important divisions between people are than between countries. The source of all evil” (Dick Appendix A. 12). This amplifies, and perhaps reverses,
a connection she had touched on in The Voyage Out (1915), where Rachel Vinrace finds
Richard Dalloway’s mechanistic conception of the state to be a failure because it does
not touch “the mind…the affections” of the isolated individual (VO 63). The 1925 note
makes a more direct, if still enigmatic, link between personal relationships and political
and social issues, but the connection between the two becomes most important for Woolf
in the 1930s when she is thinking through feminist and social ideas in The Years (1937)
and Three Guineas (1938). My focus here is on what turns out to be an intriguing point of
chiasm between Woolf ’s accounts of the personal and the social. The logical and linguistic
aporias that surround the idea of meaningful interpersonal connection, and the rich set
of metaphoric and syntactic moves through which Woolf engages with them, are reflected
and transformed in her later attempts to imagine functional forms of community.
The importance of personal relationships is a recurrent idea in critical discussions
of Bloomsbury, and G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) is often cited as a manifesto
for its emphasis on love and friendship.1 The influence of Moore and Principia Ethica on
Bloomsbury is well attested. For example, Leonard Woolf talks of being “permanently inoculated with Moore and Moorism” (Beginning Again 24) and Maynard Keynes lists himself, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, and Saxon Sydney-Turner among others
as early devotees of Moore’s philosophy. Keynes characterises what Bloomsbury drew from
Moore as a feeling that: “The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and one’s prime objects in life were love,
the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these
love came a long way first” (Keynes 251). Moore’s position on the importance of love, and
of personal relationships more broadly, is developed in section 122 of Principia Ethica:
It will be remembered that I began this survey of great unmixed goods, by dividing all the greatest goods we know into the two classes of aesthetic enjoyments,
on the one hand, and the pleasures of human intercourse or of personal affection, on the other.…I think it may be admitted that, wherever the affection is
most valuable, the appreciation of mental qualities must form a large part of
it.…Admirable mental qualities do, if our previous conclusions are correct, consist very largely in an emotional contemplation of beautiful objects; and hence
the appreciation of them will consist essentially in the contemplation of such
contemplation. (251)
“Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
89
Woolf read Principia Ethica in 1908, writing in her diary of “climbing Moore like some
industrious insect, who is determined to build a nest on the top of a Cathedral spire” (L1
340). At one point in her reading Woolf writes of how “a string of ‘desires’ makes my head
spin with the infinite meaning of words unadorned” (L1 340); she is referring to section
13 which is the heart of Moore’s argument against the “naturalistic fallacy,” and where
sentences like this are to be found: “But it is also apparent that the meaning of this second question cannot be correctly analysed into ‘Is the desire to desire A one of the things
which we desire to desire?’: we have not before our minds anything so complicated as the
question ‘Do we desire to desire to desire to desire A?’” (67). Whatever additional meanings Woolf spun out of Moore’s unadorned “desires,” she managed to identify the philosophical significance of this section, its role as a key move in Principia’s argument, and
when the book makes its famous appearance in The Voyage Out it is this argument against
naturalistic definitions of “good” that she quotes (though this time in its more intelligible
summary at the beginning of section 14, “Good, then, is indefinable”).
Woolf continued to read Principia Ethica through August of 1908 (10 pages nightly,
as she wrote to Saxon Sydney-Turner on the 10th), finishing it on the 29th, when she wrote
to Vanessa: “I finished Moore last night; he has a fine flare of arrogance at the end—and
no wonder. I am not so dumb foundered as I was; but the more I understand, the more
I admire. He is so humane in spite of his desire to know the truth; and I believe I can
disagree with him, over one matter” (L1 364). Woolf does not tell Vanessa what her point
of disagreement with Moore was in the letter. However, while she does not refer directly
to Moore’s idea of personal relationships, she did write to Lytton Strachey in May 1912 of
her frustration at the “unreal loves” of the Apostles,2 and in The Voyage Out she seems quite
deliberately to pick a quarrel with Moore’s analysis of love as “the appreciation of mental
qualities” (Principia 251). This is most clearly evident in a conversation between Terrence
Hewet and Evelyn Murgatroyd:
“I’ve cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them,” she said. “I suppose I’m
too fastidious. All my life I’ve wanted somebody I could look up to, somebody
great and big and splendid. Most men are so small.”
“What d’you mean by splendid?” Hewet asked. “People are—nothing
more.”
Evelyn was puzzled.
“We don’t care for people because of their qualities,” he tried to explain. “It’s just
them that we care for,”—he struck a match—“just that,” he said, pointing to the
flames. (VO 200)
Moore’s theory is directly contradicted here: Hewet argues that “we do not care for people
because of their qualities” and this is reiterated later when he considers his love for Rachel
and finds that “he could not analyse her qualities” (258)—he gets as far as the fact that
she is punctual but cannot establish whether or not she likes to answer notes. Not only
is Moore’s idea of personal relationships based on mental qualities disputed and gently
mocked here, his whole ontology of distinct individuals with sets of determinate qualities is rejected: “People are—nothing more”. Hewet’s conversation with Evelyn also harks
back to his own attempt earlier in the book to explain personal relationships without
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
reference to the qualities and states of mind of independent individuals where he imagines love as an epiphanic contact of “auras” or “bubbles” (109). Such contacts, however,
seem to be neither commonplace nor unproblematic; indeed, the book describes normal
human relationships as something suspect and perilous: “Why was it that relations between different people were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so
dangerous that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an instinct to
be examined carefully and probably crushed?” (201) These were questions Woolf explored
in depth in her repeated attempts to capture the phenomenon of personal connection. In
The Voyage Out Woolf deploys space and scale to explore it, as when Terence and Rachel
are said to have “dropped to the bottom of the world together” during a picnic tea (291);
a little later a shift of scale reverses another moment of connection as the two of them are
chilled “to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and indivisible they were
really very small and separate, the size of the glass leaving a large space for the reflection
of other things” (323). In her later writing Woolf uses images of intermixing and overlapping, and deploys sound, space, and time to further develop a language that can express
the significance of meeting.
Alongside these mainly metaphorical explorations Woolf also experimented with syntax, particularly those elements which ineluctably split the world into subject and object.
In August 1928, after spending time with Edward Sackville-West in the garden of Monk’s
House, Woolf used her diary to meditate on their meeting. This passage is particularly illuminating because it records a mental and textual process, a series of tentative linguistic
experiments through which Woolf can be seen exploring ways to express the felt significance of a moment of connection:
Eddy has just gone, leaving me the usual feeling: why is not human intercourse
more definite, tangible: why aren’t I left holding a small round substance, say the
size of a pea, in my hand; something I can put in a box & look at? There is so
little left. Yet these people one sees are fabric only made once in the world; these
contacts we have are unique; & if E. were, say killed tonight, nothing definite
would happen to me, yet his substance is never again to be repeated. Our meeting is – but the thread of this idea slips perpetually; constantly though it recurs,
with sadness, to my mind: how little our relationships matter; & yet they are so
important: in him, in me, something to him, to me, infinitely sentient, of the
highest vividness, reality. (D3 188)
The image of a physical residue left by meeting and conversation is one Woolf had deployed a number of times before she wrote this passage. In Jacob’s Room (1922) a conversation between undergraduates creates a “spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass” (JR
39) and the need for some substance in which to anchor human relationships recurs in
the drafts of To the Lighthouse. In a passage in which Mr Banks is trying to understand a
brief moment of connection with Mrs Ramsay he worries about how “broken & fleeting”
human relationships are and feels the lack of something “solid” to mark their significance
(Dick 143).3 The thought about solidity seems to have been particularly problematic here,
and the passage is heavily revised and fragmentary; Woolf finally breaks off, leaving the
sentence unfinished and does not include it in the published text.
“Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
91
In the diary entry the idea of a physical residue, the “small round substance,” is also
abandoned as a way of figuring her sense of connection with Edward Sackville-West.
Instead Woolf continues to explore alternative ways of capturing the significance of their
meeting. But here it is not only the idea of meeting that seems to be slipping away from
her: language itself is slipping and recurring. Woolf does not want to locate the meeting
either in herself or in Sackville-West, it is not “in him” or “in me.” The missing connective
is significant here because of what it leaves open—is the meeting in him or in me? Or is it
in him and in me? Neither seems faithful to the feeling of connection: if it is a feeling that
is present in only one of them then it is simply an illusion; if it is in both, then could it
be two separate, if reciprocal, emotions? Each might experience the other very differently,
and might indeed be entirely mistaken about what they experience. This is something
Woolf worries about later in the diary entry, imagining that Edward is thinking “‘What
impression am I making?’ constantly & is agitated: as a matter of fact, he is probably
making no impression: his agitation is about nothing: he is mistaken” (D3 188). The idea
continues to slip and Woolf tries to catch it again by shifting the preposition: if their meeting is not in either of them, might it be something “to him”, “to me”? She has moved from
locating the meeting beyond both participants to locating it within them, and then to the
more abstract relationship suggested by “to.” Finally though, Woolf does not find even
this last move convincing and the diary entry turns to a rather disheartening vision of the
insignificance of human relationships—a vision which lasts only until her earlier sense of
their significance and value returns, as it does repeatedly in her later writing.
Woolf ’s diary entry also suggests that in their conversation she and Edward SackvilleWest were discussing some of these problems about personal relationships. Sackville-West
certainly seems to have been interested in them; a few years later he became involved in an
organisation set up by Naomi Mitchison and Gerald Heard called, rather incongruously,
the “Engineer’s Study Group.” The idea of the group was to meet regularly with the aim
of developing some kind of group rapport or common feeling. The members of the group
felt, like many in the early 1930s, that the world in its current state was at constant risk
of war; as Michison puts it, “only an enormous lastminute effort could save us from utter
destruction.” She goes on to say that Engineer’s Study Group tried to approach this problem “first of all in terms of possible group-mindedness or group communication—the
next step possibly before the much bigger breakthrough to universal consciousness” (143).
Woolf would hardly have shared Heard and Mitchison’s practical faith in their group
meetings. However, she may well have been sympathetic to the connection they made between social problems and the inadequacy of human relationships. In a draft typescript of
Between the Acts, she writes an echo of these doctrines of social utopia through telepathic
communion into Isa’s thinking, though here the text seems to bring a satirical tone along
with these ideas: “in a good state of society there would be complete feeling and thought
transference; these hatreds, caused by impediments to understanding, would yield. Transparency would result; universal love would follow one sun would shine through our crystal clarity and all would be light” (Pointz Hall 81). Heard and Mitchison’s practical experiments of the early 1930s, with their emphasis on social change to be achieved through
group connection, were based on Heard’s series of speculative books on the evolution
of mankind through various stages of individuality and community. Isa’s comment may
echo these works, which Woolf knew, but they are also related to a more widespread, and
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somewhat cruder, idea of the link between group telepathy and the nature of society. For
example, the physicist and psychical researcher William Barrett argued in 1917 that:
If we were involuntarily sharers in one another’s pleasures and pains, the brotherhood of the race would not be a pious aspiration or a strenuous effort, but the
reality of all others most vividly before us; the factor in our lives which would
dominate all our conduct. What would be the use of a luxurious mansion at
the West End and Parisian cooks if all the time the misery and starvation of our
fellow creatures at the East End were telepathically part and parcel of our daily
lives? On the other hand what bright visions and joyous emotions would enter
into many dreary and loveless lives if this state of human responsiveness were
granted to the race! (294)4
Isa’s thought about “a good state of society” which parallels this simple suggestion of a
more equal and caring social order generated through involuntary telepathic sympathy
with others comes in response to Giles’s homophobic hatred of William Dodge. In the
published version of the text Woolf transformed this oddly specific telepathic utopia into
a more indefinite evocation of future unity. This can be read more seriously than the
draft, although Isa’s final image still retains some of the deliberate flippancy of the earlier
version: “Isabella guessed the word that Giles had not spoken. Well, was it wrong if he
was that word? Why judge each other? Do we know each other? Not here, not now. But
somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust—She waited for a rhyme, it failed
her; but somewhere surely one sun would shine and all, without a doubt, would be clear”
(BTA 38). Like Mrs Oliver’s facile “one-making” that gives her license to ignore the pain
of others (108), Isa’s solution to the problem of Giles’s prejudice sounds too conveniently
utopian. Where simplistic models of personal connection like Isa’s empathic telepathy or
Mrs Oliver’s quasi-Christian unity lead only to such culpably simplistic utopian consolation, Woolf ’s more complex and nuanced elaborations of personal connection parallel
and inform the equally balanced and complex visions of social community she developed
while working on The Years and Three Guineas.
There is a common difficulty in describing both personal connection and social
forms of community which is described succinctly by Robert Esposito in is 1998 book
Communitas. Esposito is interested in a fundamental problem about how political thinkers have been able to think about community. He argues that “community isn’t translatable into a political-philosophical lexicon except by completely distorting (or indeed
perverting) it…[t]he truth is that these conceptions are united by the ignored assumption that community is a “property” belonging to subjects that join [sic] them together
[accomuna]; an attribute, a definition, a predicate that qualifies them as belonging to
the same totality [insieme], or as a “substance” that is produced by their union” (1-2).
Esposito rather neatly lays out here some of the structural problems of thinking about
community; they are very close in their logic to the problems Woolf detected in her
search for a language of personal connection. There is a parallel dilemma here: on the one
hand, there is the unsatisfactory introduction of a separate substance produced by the
union of individuals (“something solid”); on the other there is an equally unsatisfactory
notion of a property that belongs to each subject separately (“something in him, in me”).
“Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
93
For Woolf, neither version seems sufficient to characterise either personal relationships
or political community.
One of the clearest examples of Woolf ’s engagement with this problematic logic of
community comes towards the end of The Years where North Pargiter is looking into his
glass of sparkling wine and thinking about the kind of world he would like to live in.
For him a life modelled on the jet (he was watching the bubbles rise), on the
spring, of the hard leaping fountain; another life; a different life. Not the halls
and reverberating megaphones; not marching in step after leaders, in herds,
groups, societies, caparisoned. No; to begin inwardly and let the devil take the
outer form, he thought, looking up at a young man with a fine forehead and a
weak chin. Not black shirts, green shirts, red shirts—always posing in the public
eye; that’s all poppy-cock. Why not down barriers and simplify? But a world, he
thought, that was all one jelly, one mass, would be a rice pudding world, a white
counterpane world. To keep the emblems and tokens of North Pargiter—the
man Maggie laughs at; the Frenchman holding his hat; but at the same time
spread out, make a new ripple in human consciousness, be the bubble and the
stream, the stream and the bubble—myself and the world together (Y 358-9)
North begins here by thinking about totalitarianism—the fascism and communism of the
black shirts and red shirts. These are, in Esposito’s terms, predicates that qualify followers
as being part of the same totality—a totality which, in the form of the totalitarian state
and its leaders, supresses the individual.5 Yet North does not want simply to remain an isolated individual: he wants to “down barriers.” But the problem arises that without any barriers between people there is no individuality: it is erased in becoming part of a single jelly
or mass. The community North wants is something that retains individuality and allows
him to be both “the bubble and the stream”. This is very much the kind of community
that Esposito argues is inherently untranslatable “into political-philosophical lexicons.”
In The Years Woolf ’s careful metaphors avoid attempting any such translation, but what
happens then when she comes to think through community, if not quite in a politicalphilosophical lexicon, then at least in her most sustained piece of political argument?
The question I have quoted in my title, “Can ‘I’ become ‘we’?” comes from a typescript draft of part two of Three Guineas that Woolf began writing in late June 1937. The
section deals with women’s entry into the professions, and in the draft Woolf imagines
professional men moving round and round in a rutted circle chanting “I”, “I”, “I”, “I”. It
is this individualism and egotism, and the attitudes and structures that support it, that are
the fundamental forces that lead to militarism and war. What is at stake here for Woolf
is whether, by becoming part of the professional life of the nation, women will simply be
assimilated into a system which causes war. Three Guineas argues that so long as women
retain “poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties” or in the June typescript, “poverty, contempt and freedom from nationality,”6 there is a chance that this can
be avoided. Woolf saw a short window of time available (she talks of between five and
fifteen years): a unique moment of opportunity, in which women might enter the professional world and yet avoid joining that deadly circuit, somehow managing not to follow
the male professional and “circle with him; and repeat with him I, I, I, I”. What might
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
be achieved if that opportunity were grasped, if the Outsiders Society were created, is a
transformation of the world which she talks about in terms of “we” replacing “I”:
And will “I” become “we” you ask? That is an old question and a very difficult
one. A dream that recurs like so many dreams. We are ourselves; we are here in
body, there in mind; we affect and influence others; we overflow the private life;
are part of the public life; yet are contained in ourselves. A problem familiar to
all artists, novelists in particular. Here is one of the dead. George Sand.
And here is Flaubert:
Artists naturally express the feeling which we all have now and again. Obvious
to the eye, there is in the sight before us—the river the barges the Embankment,
this and that and the other which make it a whole, a picture. To the novelist, in
character, the same scattered essentials. A question too deep and too broad for
us to follow now. Yet a very important question for us wh[o] stand here and now
on the bridge.7
Woolf goes on at this point to ask “Can ‘I’ become ‘we’?” and to figure this possibility
in terms of evolutionary change. She uses of these two pronouns repeatedly in this typescript, just as “I” (in quotes) had been used regularly in the draft of The Years to talk about
egotism and individualism. These pronouns give her a way of deferring the problematic
logic of community. Just as metaphorical devices, like the “seven-sided flower […] to
which every eye brings its own contribution” (82) in The Waves (1931), allow her to play
with subject and object while thinking about personal relationships, this use of “I” and
“we” lets her at least leave the problem of the communal subject to one side while she is
thinking through the idea of community in Three Guineas. Indeed, throughout her writing when Woolf is addressing ideas of community and personal relationship she is able to
think effectively through literary language: playing with metaphor and syntax to disrupt
or defer the usual structures of subject and object, self and other. Close attention to these
linguistic gambits can reveal a surprising amount about how Woolf was troubled by the
problematic logic of relationship and community and her literary responses to it.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
This has been a recurrent theme in criticism about the group. See e.g. Johnstone; Franks; Rosenbaum; and
Sidorsky.
“How difficult it is to write to you. It’s all Cambridge—that detestable place; and the ap-s-les are so unreal,
and their loves are so unreal” (L1 498), 21 May 1912 to Lytton Strachey.
The echo of Banks’s anxiety about “how very little one’s friends matter” (Dick 143) in the diary entry also
reinforces the correspondence between the two passages.
Barrett is also quoted in Thurshwell, p. 25.
In his formulation of the problem Esposito may have had in mind here the statist ideas of a number of
neo-Hegelian thinkers; David Bradshaw examines Woolf ’s relationship to statist ideas in general and to
Bernard Bosanquet in particular. See Bradshaw.
The quotations are not included in the typescript although the quote from Sand is in the scrapbooks and
in a footnote of the published text. The typescript titled “The Second Guinea” is item M29 in the Berg
collection; the pages are numbered and this passage is from p.120.
“The Second Guinea”, M29, Berg, p. 119.
“Can ‘I’ Become ‘We’?”
95
Works Cited
Barrett, William. On the Threshold of the Unseen, 2nd ed., revised. London: Kegan Paul, 1917.
Bradshaw, David. ‘Vicious Circles: Hegel, Bosanquet and The Voyage Out.’ Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Selected
Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane F Gillespie and Leslie K Hankins.
New York: Pace UP, 1997. 183-191.
Dick, Susan, ed. To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft. London: Hogarth, 1983.
Esposito, Roberto. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, 1998. Trans. Timothy Campbell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010.
Franks, Gabriel. ‘Virginia Woolf and the Philosophy of G. E. Moore.’ The Personalist: An International Review
of Philosophy 1.2 (1969), 222-240.
Johnstone, J. K. The Bloomsbury Group: A Study of E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and Their Circle.
New York: Noonday Press, 1954.
Keynes, John Maynard. ‘My Early Beliefs’ (1938) in Two Memoirs, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949.
Leaska, Mitchell A, ed. Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts. New York: University
Publications, 1983.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir, 1920-1940. London: Gollancz, 1979.
Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica. 1903. Cambridge: CUP, 1993.
Rosenbaum, S. P. Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987.
Sidorsky, David. ‘The Uses of the Philosophy of G. E. Moore in the Works of E. M. Forster.’ New Literary History 38.2 (2007), 245-271.
Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920. Cambridge: CUP, 2001.
Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918. London: Hogarth, 1964.
Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. 1915. London: Hogarth, 1990.
——. The Years. 1937. London: Hogarth, 1990.
——. The Waves. 1931. London: Hogarth, 1990.
——. Between the Acts. 1941. London: Hogarth 1990.
——. Jacob’s Room. 1920. London: Hogarth, 1992.
WOOLF’S UN/FOLDING(S):
THE ARTIST AND THE EVENT OF THE NEO-BAROQUE
by Laci Mattison
I
n The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (2000),
Ann Banfield describes Virginia Woolf ’s novels as variances of the Leibnizian monad
through influence she locates in the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and the aesthetics
of Roger Fry. More recently, Jessica Berman, in an essay entitled “Ethical Folds: Ethics,
Aesthetics, Woolf ” (2004), reveals the correlation between ethics and aesthetics through
Mieke Bal’s “Enfolding Feminism” and Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993). This paper diverges from these other studies in its examination of Woolf ’s
and Deleuze’s conceptions of the fold, with an emphasis not on the Baroque fold (of
Leibniz), which organizes Berman’s and Bal’s arguments, but on the un/folding(s) of the
neo-Baroque, the intensity Deleuze takes from Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of the
event. In the neo-Baroque, as Woolf would say, “certainly and emphatically there is no
God” (MOB 72). Thus, the harmony and compossibility of Leibniz’s monadology are no
longer the necessary factors because “God” cannot “select” the perfect world.1 Incompossibility is revealed as the originary state of existence: everything is part of the same fabric,
like the “silk” of the sea and sky in To the Lighthouse (1927), which “stretche[s],” enfolding
the Ramsays, the Macalisters, and the boat as “part of the nature of things” (TTL 188).
Thus, binary opposition, such as harmony and dissonance, becomes irrelevant. It is, after
all, through dissonance that supposed harmony is created, as Woolf affirms.2 Through the
non-dialectical un/folding(s) of the neo-Baroque, we can differently interpret the supposed contradictions in Woolf ’s writing: not as notes of dissonance, but as creative, vital
moments in which both Woolf and her artists (including those artists-of-the-everyday)
recognize and affirm textual and textural incompossibility, the everything-at-once, the
unlimited bifurcations of the world.
Banfield makes a convincing argument for the connection between Russell’s philosophy and the aesthetics of both Fry and Woolf, and, in a much earlier essay, entitled “Virginia Woolf and Our Knowledge of the External World” (1979), Jaakko Hintikka also pairs
Russell and Woolf. While both Banfield and Hintikka acknowledge Whitehead’s lasting
influence on Russell and while Banfield recognizes the triangulation of the philosophies
of Russell, Whitehead, and G.E. Moore as that which most influenced the Bloomsbury
Group, a discussion of the congruencies in Whitehead’s thought and Woolf ’s writing remains only gestural. For instance, Hintikka writes that space-time in Woolf ’s work “has
counterparts in…Whitehead’s theory of events as the basic ‘furniture of the world’ out
of which other entities can be constructed” and, furthermore, that “Woolf ’s emphasis on
‘moments of being’ has a neat counterpart in the importance of events in Whitehead’s
metaphysics,” but he then returns to a discussion of Russell (10). While Banfield likens
moments of being to Russell’s philosophy, she does not give adequate attention to the way
in which Whitehead’s thought influenced Russell’s own. With Deleuze’s arguments about
the neo-Baroque in The Fold, which have much to do with his own modernist impulse, we
Woolf ’s Un/Folding(s)
97
recognize how Whitehead’s rewriting of Leibniz finds its aesthetic counterpoint in many
modernist texts, from not only Woolf ’s writing but also works by writers as various as Joyce,
Borges, Beckett, Rhys, Nabokov, and so forth. My intention in coupling a reading of To the
Lighthouse with the Deleuzean notion of the neo-Baroque, which I consider to be a theory
of Modernism, is to reopen the question of aesthetics in Woolf ’s writing by way of the
event. In this way, chaos can be understood not as a contradiction to order and/or art, but
as the originary material out of which order and art continually de- and re-compose. With
this understanding, we recognize that art does not create order; rather, the modernist artist,
through a creative vision, sees chaos and order as two sides of the same fabric.
For Deleuze, via Whitehead, the four components of the event of the neo-Baroque
are “extensions, intensions…prehensions, and…eternal objects” (79). In The Fold, Deleuze also appropriates Whitehead’s definition of the event as a “nexus of prehensions,”3 in
which subjects and objects fold into each other and, in so doing, radicalize individuality
as impersonality.4 Whitehead’s example of the event in The Concept of Nature (1920) is
the Great Pyramid, which Deleuze also cites in his explication of the neo-Baroque (76).
The most obvious example in To the Lighthouse is the lighthouse itself, but to exemplify
the event in Woolf ’s writing, I pause to examine the beams of light as a nexus of prehensions. We can apply all four of the qualifications of the event as set forth by Whitehead
and Deleuze. The beams of light which emanate from the lighthouse have extension (i.e.,
the length or space covered by the light), which also intersects with their intensity (i.e.,
the brightness of light and the rhythm of the pattern the beams create). The light both
prehends (in its enlightening of other objects) and is prehended by Mrs. Ramsay, and it
is an eternal object. On this point, Deleuze carefully differentiates Whitehead’s eternal
objects from Plato’s as he argues that eternal objects must not be understood as static but
as objects that “gain permanence only in the limits of the flux that creates them, or of the
prehensions that actualize them” (79-80). The third beam is, after all, recognizable by its
pattern, which is actualized by its particular duration and, furthermore, is later prehended
by others (Lily, for instance).
In chapter six of The Fold, entitled simply “What Is an Event?,” Deleuze explains
the event as a musical concert: the vibrations of the notes (or, their extensive qualities),
intersect with the intensity (timbre, height, and so forth), but the concert is also a nexus
of prehensions in that each sound “perceives its own, and perceives the others while perceiving its own.” Moreover, writes Deleuze, “the notes of the scale are eternal objects, pure
Virtualities that are actualized in the origins, but also pure Possibilities that are attained
in vibrations of flux” (80). Or, otherwise put, the notes have some sort of recognizability
although they have a range of possible variation given the instruments, players, acoustics,
vocal range of the singers, and so forth, and they have a limited duration of actualization: once the concert is over and the sound waves have ceased to vibrate in and off the
instruments and bodies that inhabit the concert hall, the notes of the scale return to pure
Virtualities, to be actualized in a different network of differentiation.
Given this further explication, we can recognize many more instances of the Whiteheadian-Deleuzean event in To the Lighthouse. The image of the shawl, for instance, folded
around the skull, slowly drooping, unfolding as “time passes,” is an event. The weather, the
“pleats” of the sand dunes (TTL 13), the flights of birds as they “fold” their wings (28), the
“crumpled glove” (49) that Berman takes as her point of departure, or the way in which,
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after Mrs. Ramsay reads to James, she “fold[s] herself together” and the “whole fabric
f[alls] in exhaustion upon itself ” (38) are all events. The front steps, which Lily fills with
“the purple triangle,” the (impersonal) “wedge of darkness,” are also an event, and these
events in the novel all fold and unfold in the event of the text itself (63).
Here, I follow Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s affirmation in Deleuze and Language (2002)
that “[l]iterature is concerned with the event of language, far more than with the event
in language” (130). The event of the shawl, for instance, an impersonal object in “Time
Passes” amongst other once personal items that have been left behind, occurs on multiple
levels: as an object, the shawl is one occurrence of the event in the text, but, as an image
(a repetition with a difference), the shawl is also an event of the novel because it textually
patterns the rhythm of the narrative in which it has a particular duration. This material object must be understood as part of the larger nexus of prehensions in and of the
novel, moreover, when the vibrations of “ominous sounds…with their repeated shocks
still further loosened the shawl and cracked the tea-cups” (TTL 133). As with James’ own
experience of time, “fold upon fold,” layered like leaves (169, 185), the events of Woolf ’s
novels occur, in part, where time is creased, which Berman also gestures toward. The folds
of time act locally through creative re-membering like that Lily engages in the last section of the novel. But, on a larger scale, the event of the novel occurs at its central fold:
“Time Passes” envelopes “The Window” and “The Lighthouse.”5 While the parameters of
this essay do not allow for a detailed examination of these points, I briefly add that the
event of language is also enacted through the parentheses and brackets of the novel, which
amplify the textual un/foldings visually and also indicate a textural space and time—an
implication, as Whitehead would have it, that other worlds (other times and places) exist
simultaneously in the same universe.
Deleuze posits that the neo-Baroque “unfurl[s]…divergent series in the same world”
without these divergences being understood as contradictory to that world (unlike Leibniz’s
monadology). If Deleuze’s example of the event is a concert, then music in the neo-Baroque
style is much different than that of the Baroque. “[H]armony goes through a crisis,” writes
Deleuze, which “leads to a broadened chromatic scale, to an emancipation of dissonance
or of unresolved accords, accords not brought back to tonality.” The (musical) movement
from the Baroque to the neo-Baroque is “from harmonic closure to an opening onto a
polytonality” (82).6 This crisis of harmony occurs also in “Time Passes,” the “irregular, intermittent…dissevered” music, which is “never quite heard, never fully harmonised” (TTL
141). These contradictions are incompossible in the Monadology, but, for Whitehead and
Deleuze, incompossibility is the fabric which contains everything, the origin of the unlimited, bifurcating series of prehensions and, so, can be likened to the Deleuzean virtual or to
Woolf ’s impulse to “achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords.”7
Banfield also cites the above quote as part of her argument that the work of art, in and
for Woolf, “enclose[es] many possible perspectives, many alternatives closed to unreflective
common sense” (357). Woolf ’s art does not enclose, however, so much as it un/folds—the
folding is, after all, always predicated on the unfolding; and, in so doing, Woolf ’s writing
reveals not the harmony of the selected world but a polytonality or a textural incongruity:
“[A]gain [Lily] was roused as usual by something incongruous” (TTL 182). The incongruous object, first realized as only a color (brown), is then recognized as a boat, “Mr. Ramsay’s
boat” (182), which, later, once the fabric stretches, becomes part of that material which
Woolf ’s Un/Folding(s)
99
includes everything. Banfield makes a case for this passage as Post-Impressionist (via Russell
and Fry), a description which remains problematic: certainly, the color is first realized and
then ordered into form, but the form again dissolves into the textural landscape.
Furthermore, while Banfield recognizes that the harmony of the (monadological)
work of art is not a priori, she claims that this harmony is still produced “ex post facto
via a style and an art,” although an impersonal, not idiosyncratic, style and art (1). But,
to pin-point the completion of a work of art, of a vision, remains difficult in Woolf (and
elsewhere)—especially given the concept of the fold, for there is, as in Lily’s likening of the
landscape to fabric, a continual decomposition of form back into the textual/textural material. And, although the novel concludes with Lily’s affirmation that she had “had her vision”
(TTL 209), a prior unfolding of the vision is necessary, for Lily “was only trying to smooth
out something she had been given years ago folded up; something she had seen” (199).
This artistic ability to bring form from chaos and then to allow that form to deand re-compose back through the mesh of the original material (or, of incompossibility),
aligns with the event of the neo-Baroque. Deleuze writes: “Events are produced in a chaos,
in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes.” He
then seemingly contradicts himself, claiming that “[c]haos does not exist,” yet clarifies that
chaos “is inseparable from a screen that makes something—something rather than nothing—emerge from it” (76). It is in contradiction to Lily’s “[n]othing, nothing—nothing,”
the nihilistic danger, that Mrs. Ramsay “make[s] of the moment something permanent”
(TTL 160) and that Lily, likewise, creates something through her re-membering of Mrs.
Ramsay. So, while the vision is always only momentary in Woolf, it is paradoxically the
“essential thing” (49) “struck […] into stability” (113) and is, in this way, like Whitehead’s
fourth category of the event, eternal objects. The moment of vision testifies that “something” has “survived” (160), but this “something”8 is not static because Lily refashions it,
refolds it, and, in so doing, she qualitatively changes the texture of the material of which
everything is a part.
“If chaos does not exist,” argues Deleuze, “it is because it is merely the bottom side of
the great screen, and because the latter composes infinite series of wholes and parts, which
appear chaotic to us (as aleatory developments) only because we are incapable of following
them, or because of the insufficiency of our own screens” (77). Woolf ’s artists, however,
have the ability to experience the underside of the screen, to see the order or pattern as
part of the chaos out of which it emerges. If chaos is the textured, folded “cotton wool of
everyday,” then order is the “scaffolding” which is part of that cotton wool (MOB 73). In
moments of creative vision, the artist sees not order in contradiction to chaos, but as part
of that same chaos, which can then be re-ordered through the unfolding of the fabric, so
that a new order might rise to the surface. The event of the neo-Baroque is not the “great
revelation,” but “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the
dark,” which Lily recognizes as the “nature of revelation” when she peers into “the midst
of chaos” and recognizes “shape” (TTL 161).
Notes
1.
Leibniz writes: “Now, since in the divine ideas there is an infinity of possible universes of which only one
can exist, the choice made by God must have a sufficient reason which determines him to the one rather
than to another” (156).
100
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
See Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf I, p. 138, and Banfield, p. 357.
For Whitehead, prehensions do not have to be conscious; in this way, prehensions can be considered as
pre-personal, if not pre-human. In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead states: “The word perceive
is, in our common usage, shot through and through with the notion of cognitive apprehension. So is the
word apprehension, even with the adjective cognitive omitted. I will use the word prehension for uncognitive
apprehension: by this I mean apprehension which may or may not be cognitive” (Anthology 425-6). He
later clarifies his distinction between perception and prehension: “Perception is simply the cognition of
prehensive unification; or more shortly, perception is cognition of prehension” (428).
See Banfield’s arguments on impersonality in Woolf ’s writing through Russell’s philosophy. Also, see chapter
ten of A Thousand Plateaus (particularly pages 279-80). For Deleuze, becoming-imperceptible (a “worlding”) is the most intense stage of becoming. Imperceptibility in Deleuze’s philosophy has much to do with
Henri Bergson’s intuition, the method of the new metaphysics he proposes in “The Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903). However, the discussion of imperceptibility in A Thousand Plateaus also occurs alongside
Deleuze’s comments on Woolf ’s writing, his acknowledgement of her influence on his philosophy.
The image of the window is also an event, as it brings both the public (outside) and, through reflection,
the private (inside) together in its own folding. See Berman’s discussion of the window in Mrs. Dalloway,
p. 168-9, and Banfield’s comments on the windows in Woolf ’s work, p. 176.
Polytonal music, notably, originates in the early twentieth century, which suggests, again, there is something particularly modernist about Deleuze’s theory of the (Whiteheadian) neo-Baroque.
This passage from Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf I, p. 138, is cited in Banfield, p. 357.
Here, the “scene on the beach” as re-membered by Lily.
Works Cited
Bal, Mieke. “Enfolding Feminism.” A Mieke Bal Reader. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. 209-35.
Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: CUP, 2000.
Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. San Diego: Harcourt, 1972.
Berman, Jessica. “Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.1 (2004): 151-72.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. London: Athlone P, 1993.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans.
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Hintikka, Jaakko. “Virginia Woolf and Our Knowledge of the External World.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 38.1 (1979): 5-14.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Deleuze and Language. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays. Trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin
Schrecker. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Alfred North Whitehead: An Anthology. Eds. F.S.C. Northrop & Mason W. Gross.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1953.
——. Process and Reality. Eds. David Ray Griffin & Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Macmillan, 1929. 1978.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, 1927.
——. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt, 1985.
WOOLF’S CONTRADICTORY THINKING
by Angeliki Spiropoulou
C
ontradiction, in its different modes and senses, seems to lie at the heart of Woolf ’s
thinking about the world and the self. It may thus prove interesting to begin to
adumbrate some of the modalities of the presence of contradiction in her thinking about being, history, art and even thinking itself in their various inter-articulations
and ethico-political implications.
Paradoxically, or perhaps appropriately, contradiction itself is manifested in contradictory ways in Woolf ’s work. To begin with, it appears as both a symptom and a means
of pointing to an injustice that needs to be critiqued and corrected. Such an instance
paradigmatically occurs in the exploration of the relationship of women to fiction taken
up in A Room of One’s Own (1929), which, as has often been noted, is dialectically organized around the striking contradiction, permeating cultural history, between the omnipresence of woman as sign and her absence as producer of signs, her being the object of
poetry but being denied the status of the subject of history. By famously condensing this
set of contradictions in the fictitious image of Judith Shakespeare, Woolf seems to line
up with the Marxian tradition of dialectical materialism which recognizes in identifying
contradictions a political task, a revolutionary chance against a history of oppression. As
Walter Benjamin puts it apropos the task and method of materialist historiography in
his 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “Thinking involves not only the flow
of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration
pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a
monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters
it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes…a revolutionary chance in the fight for the
oppressed past” (254).
On the other hand, even though Woolf politically contests historical contradictions
which point to and sustain various forms of oppression, she equally employs contradiction as a means of thinking about a subject, especially in her essays. As has been remarkably demonstrated by Judith Allen, Woolf ’s essays are heavily punctuated with marks of
contradiction, such as “but” and “yet,” which work to the effect of interrogating received
opinion, stereotypical thinking and claims to unitary truth, also manifesting a sensitivity
towards antithetical positions, dissenting voices, the complexity of different responses,
and the multiplicity of possible perspectives. Allen associates this “resistance to singularity,
to fixity, to the limitations of generic labels” and the “need for the clash of oppositional
voices” to the essayistic itself (27), insightfully evoking Montaigne as a model for Woolf ’s
argumentative style while also alluding to Adorno’s famous view of the essay as a form
generically contesting systemic thought (Adorno 158).1
In as far as the essay is a space of thinking, instead of purely demonstrating a given
viewpoint, as is the case with classical rhetoric, Woolf ’s championing of contradiction in
her essays may be deemed to be owing to the formal idiosyncrasy of the genre. However,
it could further be argued that Woolf ’s thinking in/through contradiction also stretches
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
beyond the formal frame of the essay to her fiction and is inseparable from certain of her
aesthetic, epistemological and even ontological conceptions.
With regard to ontology, Woolf can be said to affirm self-contradiction against the
logic of self-identity that governs Western metaphysics. She explodes the dominant, principle of non-contradiction that not only governs the construction of logical syllogisms
in the classic Aristotelian logical works but also, and significantly, it is set by Aristotle as
the very foundation of metaphysics itself, his “science of Being”.2 Following Parmenides
and Plato, Aristotle poses “non-contradiction” as a founding principle of his Metaphysics
precisely because he sees it as the most secure of all principles in the study of being, for
he deems it impossible for the same thing to belong and not belong simultaneously to
the same thing in the same respect (Metaphysics Г3.1005b19-24). However, Woolf ’s dialectical thinking blatantly “contradicts” the classical tradition of identifying contradiction
with logical falsity and non-truth established by the Platonic dialogues and Aristotelian
thought. Her radical subversion of the “onto-logic” of self-identity, that is, of non-contradiction, is epitomized in the figure of the androgynous and ageless Orlando whose self is
humorously depicted in the homonymous novel (1928) as one and multiple, a man and
a woman, and an agent of different temporalities at once, as is indicated by the following,
much-quoted passage: “For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not—Heaven help us—all
having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and
fifty-two” (O 234-5).
In addition, Woolf ’s non-unitary mode of thinking, encompassing antithetical positions, is also extended to the aesthetic plane. As is perceptively noted by Jane Goldman,
Woolf ’s aesthetic vision is markedly “dualistic” (70), predicated as it is on an explicit call
for a “marriage of opposites,” expressed not only by the androgynous ideal of the writer’s
mind, put forward in A Room of One’s Own (136), but also by Woolf ’s emblematic urge
for an “amalgamation of dream and reality”, of “granite and rainbow” in her 1927 essay,
“The New Biography” (478), and, more widely, for a merging, in modern writing, of the
material and the spiritual, the inner and the outer, the poetic and the prosaic, truth and
fiction, in, for example, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924), “Modern Fiction” (1925),
and The Pargiters (1978), alongside A Room of One’s Own and a series of other essays in
which her aesthetic project is sketched out.3
Apart from the centrality of contradiction in Woolf ’s thought on an ontological and
aesthetic level, contradiction appears to be foundational in her work even on an epistemological level, since for her thinking and knowing a subject necessarily involves negation.
For example, “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925), often deemed paradigmatic of Woolf ’s
essays,4 is premised on negation as its title tellingly indicates. The attempt made in this
essay to define Greek is both negated a priori and proceeds on the basis of negations.
What Woolf seems to suggest is that we can only think about a subject if we admit that
we do not know it and, at the same time, that knowing a subject can only be attempted
negatively, by exploring what it is assumed not to be, by taking into account the not-I that
is part of the identity of the I, instead of positing it axiomatically as self-identical.
To the extent that Woolf ’s representations of identity and knowledge tend to involve
their negation in their very definition, they appear closer to the idea of contradiction famously expressed by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus: “Into the same rivers
Woolf ’s Contradictory Thinking
103
we step and do not step, we are and we are not” (fr. 49a), which inspired the Hegelian
redefinition of dialectics as a modern theory of knowledge that views contradiction and
movement as internal to thinking, consciousness and history itself.5
Although Woolf does not share in the progressive, teleological impetus of Hegel’s
thought on historical movement, her similar sense of change and contradiction as endemic
to historical consciousness is particularly apparent in the way she attempts to describe the
modern condition and assess contemporary literature. In her 1923 essay, “Poetry, Fiction
and the Future,” for example, she speculates on the obstacles raised to creativity by that
“atmosphere of doubt and conflict in which modern writers must work” (429) through
enumerating the contradictions at work in the consciousness of human beings in modern
times. “The [modern] mind,” she contends, is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable
emotions. That the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that
the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that one’s fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science and
religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union have broken” (429).
Woolf ’s depiction of modernity stresses its fundamentally antinomical character
which fosters antithetical thoughts, extreme sensations and ambivalent emotions. Her
definition of modernity as essentially fluid and contradictory, remarkably in line with
prominent theories of modernity, such as those propounded by Marx and Benjamin,
among others, is in turn related to modernity’s heightened consciousness of historicity visà-vis previous epochs. Putting literature in its historical context, Woolf describes contemporary writing as reflecting the contradictory nature of modernity, since: “[e]motions
which used to enter the mind whole are now broken up on the threshold,” so that
“[b]eauty is part ugliness; amusement part disgust; pleasure part pain” (“Poetry, Fiction and the Future” 433). And while the emotion Keats felt at hearing the nightingale
“is one and entire”, in “the modern mind beauty is accompanied…by its opposite. The
modern poet talks of the nightingale who sings ‘jug jug to dirty ears’” (433), she writes,
evoking lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the modernist poem par excellence.
In addition, this state of contradiction and collision peculiar to modernity is cause
for difficulty not only in terms of modern literary production, impeding creativity, but
also with respect to critical reception, the evaluation of contemporary literature. The essay “How it Strikes a Contemporary” (1923), for example, an essay precisely about the
possibility or rather the impossibility of judging modern literature, starts off by stating
how critics at a table pronounce contradictory opinions on the literature of their times
while they are in perfect agreement over the literature of the past. The essay itself is
built on a series of contrasts and contradictions, the word “but” appearing several times,
marking the shifts in an argument which, strikingly, seems to re-enact the seventeenthcentury quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. In summary, the argument goes
that when faced with the risky task of judging contemporary literature, the critics would
advise us to follow our instinct, yet also to check it by reading the masterpieces of the
past. We had better return to the classics because ours is a “barren age” (27), Woolf goes
on, but then if we want life and not the dead, she argues in reverse, we have to turn to
our contemporaries again to get refreshed and fascinated by their distinctive originality.
But, in the end, we are drawn once more back to the classics, the essay continues, because
modern writing feels as if “it has been taken down in bleak shorthand,” preserving the
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
“brilliance snatched from life but not transmuted into literature,” leaving us with dissatisfaction where there was pleasure (28). Once we go back to past masterpieces in order
to “anchor our instability upon their security” (28), we are, however, shocked by their
dullness, their lack of sense stimulation, which is, by contrast, abundantly provided by
the moderns. Yet, we are drawn to the classics, because we get convinced by their own
belief in knowing the truth about the world they described; something definitely lacking
in the modern writers who experience the world as fragmentary and contradictory. Interestingly, the mutual definition and undecided opposition between modern and canonical
writers on the basis of which Woolf explores the possibility of appraising contemporary
literature in “How it Strikes a Contemporary,” is resonant of those dialectical moments
in “On Not Knowing Greek” where the value of the ancients is, inversely, dependent on
what the moderns lack, namely, order, stability and permanence.6 Compare the closing
lines of the essay: “Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to
every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure and it is to the Greeks that we
turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of Christianity and its consolations, of our own age” (105-6).
However, at the end of “How it strikes a Contemporary,” Woolf also seems to imply
that there is continuity beyond the apparent turbulence of the present: “Literature” she
writes, “has lasted long, has undergone many changes…The storm and the drenching
are on the surface; continuity and calm are in the depths” (31). These sets of oppositions
between the classics and the moderns, the present and the past, continuity and change,
encountered in Woolf ’s thinking about contemporary literature, are related not to a mere
contradiction but rather a fundamental aporia between historicity and universality, solidity and fluidity, traversing her writing, and “haunting” her throughout. In 1929, she
writes in her diary: “Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever; will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the
world– this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like
a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another,
so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous we human beings” (A
Writer’s Diary 138).
In this sense, Woolf installs a historical problematic in the centre of her modernist work, albeit in oscillatory terms, in marked opposition to modernism’s alleged a-historicism. However, the search for continuity, expressed in her writings, is persistently
contradicted not only by the structural fragmentariness of her modernist narratives but
thematically as well. In The Years (1937), for example, Eleanor Pargiter’s quest for a “pattern” in life and history, is immediately contradicted by her niece, Peggy, who had silently
concluded that if it were such a pattern, it would be meaningless, like a “kitten catching its
tail” (Y 355). Orlando’s continuity across the ages is interrupted by a series of changes and
destructions, and in Between the Acts (1941), Miss La Trobe’s historical pageant, which is
supposed to produce a progressively continuous and unifying sense of the nation across
time, in fact proceeds with breaks and culminates in ruins. Woolf ’s disjunctive arguments
and discontinuous stories thus throw into question any sense of telos and suspend judgement and decisions. Paradoxically, the use of disjunction in her essays, does not work to
the effect of proving false any counter-arguments to a pre-decided point of view but, reversely, it is a gesture of exhausting all potential perspectives. As she herself acknowledges,
Woolf ’s Contradictory Thinking
105
she tends to “stretch [her] style to take in crumbs of meaning” (D3 235), which makes it
impossible to come to a conclusion, to decide in favour of one point of view.
“Undecidability,” which has been foregrounded by Jacques Derrida as the impossibility of opting for one of the poles of a duality, cancels any concept of pre-emptive
truth to which texts could be reduced (Points 23-4). However, it is not, as Derrida insists,
the symptom of simple indeterminacy, all-present fictionality or relativism, but rather it
provides evidence of the porosity of all limits, distinctions, and oppositions essential to
thinking, their necessary but provisional status (c.f. Limited Inc 148-9).7 Indecision, the
affirmation of both poles of a dualism, should thus be seen as an essentially ethical stance,
not in the sense of advocating a particular set of moral or political rules and values, but
quite the contrary, in that it takes into consideration the demand made by the other, by
what is “not I” with which the I thus enters into a relationship (116). Indecision, Derrida
warns, does not equal “paralysis, hesitation, or neutralisation, in the negative sense” (Sur
parole 52-3). More radically, it is a necessary condition for all decision-making. Because,
for a decision to be both possible and necessary, there must be the hesitation between
determined choices, without which there would be nothing to decide. And, inversely,
even when there is a decision, the undecidable never entirely disappears but rather haunts
every decision, as the possibility that things could be otherwise (Points 146-9). Indecidability, then, necessarily involves risk and as such it is closely linked with questions of
responsibility which literature paradigmatically takes up by its right or rather its duty to
be irresponsible toward established truths or norms, not only with regard to the past or to
the present but also with respect to the future (Sur parole 24). It poses the critical question
of how to be responsible vis-à-vis what cannot be reduced to received knowledge or morality; a question crucially evoked by the innovative subversiveness of Woolf ’s writings too.
It is telling in this respect that the essay “How it Strikes a Contemporary” — exemplary of Woolf ’s eschewing evaluative conclusions — ends with a strikingly similar call for
taking on responsibility toward what is to come in the future, asking the critics “to scan
the horizon; see the past in relation to the future; and so prepare for masterpieces to come”
(31). What, then, Woolf seems to be doing, by encompassing irreconcilable contradiction,
by resisting conclusions and completion, is to create an opening for all those unforeseen
possibilities of texts that are yet to come.
Notes
1.
2.
Besides Allen’s perceptive analysis, Edward Bishop has also noted Woolf ’s subversive essayistic style, Rachel
Bowlby has foregrounded the oscillatory mode in Woolf ’s essays, while Elena Gualtieri and Cuddy Melba
Keane have respectively explored different aspects of Woolf ’s “essayism,” emphasising its dialogical and
inconclusive nature.
Parmenides is deemed to have first formulated the “principle of non-contradiction” in his poem (fr.7.1):
“For this shall never be forced, that things that are not exist” (Tarán’s translation). Also see Diels and
Kranz. Plato’s conceding to the principle of non-contradiction as founding self-identity is most explicitly
expressed in the Republic (IV 436b) where it is stated that the same thing will not consent simultaneously
to do or suffer opposites—at any rate not in the same respect and in relation to the same thing. Besides,
Socrates’s dialectical method consisted in showing the interlocutor’s initial hypothesis to result in contradiction and therefore to non-truth. The principle of non-contradiction and of the “oneness” of a thing is
further dwelled upon in Plato’s dialogue Parmenides. For an interesting discussion of the latter that sets
it in the context of contemporary theoretical debates, see Wood. Finally, in Aristotle’s logical works, the
principle of non-contradiction comprises one of his privileged illustrations of the “common principles”
106
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
[koinai archai] underlying the art of dialectic, while in his Metaphysics, this principle forms the criterion
of “self-identity”, of what it is to be “one” thing, that is, to be something, and hence of what it is to be at
large (Metaphysics Г2.1003b22 ff).
Compare, for example, the following passage from The Pargiters: “If you object that fiction is not history,
I reply that…I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction” (9).
See for example, Bishop.
C.f. Heraclitus, fr. 80, which claims that strife as common to all things and that it is through strife that
things come into being and also cease. See also fr. 126, which refers to the warm becoming cold or the
dry wet, for example, as proof that things are not static but are governed by (self )change. For a collection,
translation and commentary of Heraclitus’s fragments in English, see Kahn. With respect to Hegel’s famous championing of contradiction, compare, for example, his affirmation that “[e]verything is inherently
contradictory” (Science of Logic 439). For a thorough discussion of the role of contradiction in relation to
Hegel’s logic and dialectical method, see Burbidge; and Forster.
See for example, Bishop.
Alongside Derrida’s pinpointing of certain “undecidables,” such as the words “hymen” or “pharmakos,”
which hold together two antithetical meanings, he also talks more generally of “undecidability” as essential to thought and indeed as precondition for any decision-making. For a thorough discussion on the
meanings and uses of “undecidability” in Derrida’s work, and especially in relation to literature, see Hill’s
thorough Radical Indecision, on which I heavily draw here.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. “The Essay as Form.” Trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Fredric Will. New German Critique
32 (1984): 151–71.
Allen, Judith. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Ed. W. D. Ross. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 (1924).
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans.
Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992.
Bishop, Edward. “Metaphor and the Subversive Process of Virginia Woolf ’s Essays.” Style 21(1987): 573-88.
Bowlby, Rachel. “Introduction: A More Than Maternal Tie.” Virginia Woolf: A Woman’s Essays. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. ix-xxxiii.
Burbidge, John. “Hegel’s Conception of Logic”. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Ed. Frederick C. Beiser.
Cambridge: CUP. 86-101.
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1988.
——. Points…, Interviews 1974–1994. Trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
——. Sur parole: instantanés philosophiques. La Tour d’Aigues, éditions de l’Aube, 1999.
Diels, Hermann, and Walther Kranz. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th edn. Berlin: Weidmann, 1951-52.
Forster, Michael. “Hegel’s Dialectical Method.” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Ed. Frederick C. Beiser.
Cambridge:CUP. 130-70.
Goldman, Jane. Modernism, 1910-1945: Image to Apocalypse. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004.
Gualtieri, Elena. Virginia Woolf ’s Essays: Sketching the Past. London: Macmillan, 2000.
Hegel, Georg W. F. Science of Logic. Trans. A.V. Miller. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969.
Hill, Leslie. Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism. Indiana: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2010.
Kahn, Charles H. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979.
Plato. Parmenides. Trans.‒comm.‒intro. Samuel Scolincov. Berkeley: California UP, 2003.
Plato. The Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.
Spiropoulou, Angeliki. Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin. London and
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UP, 1965.
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Woolf, Virginia. “How it Strikes a Contemporary” (1923). The Crowded Dance of Modern Life. Ed. Rachel
Bowlby. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. 23-31.
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107
——. “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924). A Woman’s Essays. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1992. 69-87.
——. “Modern Fiction” (1925). The Crowded Dance of Modern Life. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1993. 5-12.
——. “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925). A Woman’s Essays. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
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——. “The New Biography” (1927). The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. IV. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego and
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——. “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (1927). Vol. IV. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1994.
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——. The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. London: Hogarth Press, 1978.
THE FEELING OF KNOWING IN MRS DALLOWAY:
NEUROSCIENCE AND WOOLF
by Sowon S. Park
I.
C
apturing consciousness has been the spur to many great literary ambitions but in
the last three decades we have witnessed a remarkable growth in consciousness
studies in many fields, and especially in the natural sciences. Disciplines as
disparate as cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, cognitive
linguistics, evolutionary biology, anthropology and phenomenological psychiatry have
found a common focus in consciousness, making it an exceptionally multidisciplinary
field. Literary studies are not unaffected by the “cognitive turn”: significant emerging
areas spurred on by the recent growth in consciousness studies are neuro-literary criticism
and “evo” (evolutionary) literary criticism, whose messianic tones were captured in the
2002 special issue of Poetics Today. Entitled “Literature and the Cognitive Revolution,” it
pronounced that “evo” and “neuro” approaches will “revolutionize the study of literature
by overthrowing the rule of poststructuralism” (Poetics Today 167). To what degree this
nascent field will overturn poststructuralist knowledge still remains to be seen. However,
it is clear that there are unresolved and ongoing methodological issues arising from
attempts to generate an integrative framework that can accommodate responses across
the divide between the “two cultures.” By examining the particular case of Steven Pinker
on Woolf, I will foreground the general issues. I will then consider certain neuroscientific
discoveries which illuminate and provide a scientific framework for the literary methods
developed by Woolf and other modernists. Though neuroscientific evidence varies
vastly in its explanatory scale, Antonio Damasio’s science of consciousness has stunning
parallels with Woolf ’s model of mind, a link which has not been made by cognitive or
evolutionary literary critics. This paper will argue for the significance of affect, offered as
the “feeling of knowing,” in developing an adequate theory of consciousness that speaks
across the divide between the two cultures, as well as for the centrality of Woolf to the
field of consciousness studies.
II.
Towards the end of his internationally acclaimed book The Feeling of What Happens:
Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness, Antonio Damasio, one of the world’s leading
neuroscientists, poses this question: “[A]s a consequence of our greater understanding
of consciousness, [will] we…eventually be able to gain access to each other’s mental
experiences”? (305). To answer this question he proposes a hypothetical scenario. Set in the
near future when a high-powered scanner is able to represent the brain at an unprecedented
level of accuracy, he invites us to experience what goes on in his mind as he looks over San
Francisco Bay. Damasio’s retinas, his lateral geniculate nuclei, his visual cortical regions
that form the image of San Francisco Bay are all scanned, providing the patterns of neuron
firings that correspond to what he sees. The spatial and temporal resolution of this scanner
Neuroscience and Woolf
109
is so advanced that you can see with crystal clarity the buildup of the sight before his eyes:
the rapid volumetric acquisition of images provided by the scanner gives a precise and
compelling measure of the raw pixels as they are developed into shapes, colours, movement
and three-dimensions. In addition an equally sophisticated computer will provide you with
the description of the physics and chemistry of the neural-activation patterns, yielding a
remarkable set of correlates of the contents of the image in Damasio’s mind.
Does this process not lay bare, objectively, the distinct, phenomenal, qualitative
and subjective character of Damasio’s consciousness? Have not the magnificent developments in neuroscience finally provided us with the means to gain the profoundly longedfor knowledge of the mind of another? Is this not the answer to the “What’s it like to
be someone else?” question, otherwise known as the W.I.L. question that has occupied
most theorists in contemporary philosophy of mind? Damasio’s answer is no. He points
out that the advanced technology, even if perfectly realized, will give us the neural data
but not the experience of that data. The immediacy and the vitality of actual perception
in one’s mind cannot be completely transmitted to another because the ultimate mental
image in one’s brain is the result of the process of the visual stimulus triggering a wave of
changes in the “physical viscera” and then these bodily changes being detected by the cortex
which connects them back to the initial visual stimulus. In other words, or in Damasio’s
words, it has undergone the “body-loop” (The Feeling of What Happens, 79-81). When we
see Damasio’s conscious processes, all we will experience is the image of that body-loop
without the body-loop itself. The somatic response is uniquely his and is fundamentally
irreproducible to those who do not inhabit his body.
That our perception is generated in the body, by the body and that the bodily
responses are an essential element of the rational thinking process is Damasio’s thesis,
which has arguably revolutionized the field of cognitive science. Along with Francisco
Varela’s 1991 landmark neurophenomenological study, The Embodied Mind, Damasio’s
theory of embodied cognition has established that the mind is not in the head but in the
body as a whole. They are generally credited with co-pioneering the furthest reaches of the
human brain, now sometimes called the “feeling brain” (or the “affective brain”) and their
explanations of the neural, somatic basis of the processes of one’s mind which demonstrate
“why mappings of the body are well suited to signifying the self in the mind” (Damasio,
Nature 227) are reshaping traditional areas of scientific and philosophic study based on
Cartesian dualism; indeed, Damasio’s book Descartes Error (1994) is regarded by some as
having solved the mind-body problem.
For all that, Damasio’s conclusion that sensory perception cannot be reproduced on
non-sensory grounds should not surprise us. Those of us working outside the boundaries
of positivist conceptions of scientific truth will not find it remarkable that life as we
experience it cannot be reduced to fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance images) of the
brain, no matter how deep or how clear the resolution. What we should be surprised
by is the premise—that the only valid methods for accessing another person’s mental
experiences are those based on verifiable injunctions. Damasio, like other scientists, makes
little attempt to incorporate the study of consciousness in the field of literature, which is
so rich and so full of what it is like to be in someone else’s mind. But, as David Lodge has
forcefully argued in his essay “Consciousness and the ‘Novel’,” the rise of the novel at the
end of the eighteenth century marks the beginning of modern discussions of consciousness
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and the novel is “man’s most successful effort to describe the experience of individual
human beings moving through space and time” (10). However, in the current climate,
literature is mostly overlooked as a serious field of knowledge by the natural scientists.
III.
On the other hand, recent constellations of scientific knowledge charted by those
at the interface between cognitive neuroscience, cognitive linguistics and post-Darwinian
neuropsychology are not without attempts to incorporate literature, and the work of Steven
Pinker, the psycholinguist and cognitive neuroscientist, is representative. Unlike the majority
of cognitive scientists, he recognizes literature as a serious field of knowledge: “Fiction in
particular offers a precious gift to evolutionary psychology” he writes (“Consilient Study”
163). But if hopes for the opening of a vista upon a new transdisciplinarity are encouraged
by the premise, they are stalled as quickly as they are conceived because Pinker, like other
scientists, simply ignores the epistemological problem of aesthetic knowledge and proceeds
his investigations on the premise that knowledge about literature can be ascertained with
the same strategies and with the same claims to truth as other scientific investigations.
Thus literature is taken as stable data about what interests the human species which can
be analyzed “scientifically” for their adaptive and functional value. “[T]he people and
events on display in fictive worlds presumably reflect our species’ obsessions, and provide
an ecologically valid source of data about what matters to us,” he maintains (“Consilient
Study” 163). In regarding literature as data, Pinker abolishes the experience of the data
from the field of knowledge and thus his analyses cannot but yield profoundly reductionist
explanations of literature, such as the following:
Fiction may be, at least in part, a pleasure technology, a co-opting of language
and imagery as a virtual reality device which allows a reader to enjoy pleasant
hallucinations like exploring interesting territories, conquering enemies,
hobnobbing with powerful people, and winning attractive mates. Fiction,
moreover, can tickle people’s fancies without even having to project them
into a thrilling vicarious experience. There are good reasons for people (or any
competitive social agent) to crave gossip, which is a kind of due diligence on
possible allies and enemies. Fiction, with its omniscient narrator disclosing the
foibles of interesting virtual people, can be a form of simulated gossip. (171)
Pinker’s reasoning does not take into account the most profound human experiences
great literature can undoubtedly provide because he erases the phenomenological process
through which any reading is performed thereby reducing the reading of literature to
factual transaction of the most crudely instrumental value.
More pertinently for this discussion, his model has no room for literature which
does not entertain nor offer any obvious adaptive value. Modernism does not fit into the
evolutionary logic and thus remains, for him as with evolutionary critics, a mystifying
scientific puzzle. Pinker’s response is to deplore it. He despairs of the downhill turn the
humanities and the arts have taken in the last century, the origin of which can, apparently,
be traced back to a single statement made by Virginia Woolf that is to be found in “countless
English course outlines”: “In or about December 1910, human nature changed” (The
Neuroscience and Woolf
111
Blank Slate 404). Pinker not only misquotes Woolf but takes her hyperbolic gambit for
discussing character in fiction as a hypothesis which must be verified in the literal sense.
So he does not shy away from solemnly concluding: “Woolf was referring to the new
philosophy of modernism that would dominate the elite arts and criticism for much of the
twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature was carried over with a vengeance to
postmodernism, which seized control in its later decades. The point of this chapter [The
Arts] is that the elite arts, criticism, and scholarship are in trouble because that statement
was wrong. Human nature did not change in 1910, or in any year thereafter” (404). That
human nature did not change in a biological sense has patently very little to do with
Woolf ’s theory of representing character in fiction. But rather than widening the scope
of literature as biological adaptation and considering modernist innovations and achievements from a literary perspective, Pinker denigrates and dismisses the major literary
achievements of the twentieth century, revealing little more than deep-grained, C P Snowlike ideological prejudices against the humanities. For example he asserts: “The study of
literature in modern universities strikes many observers (insiders and outsiders alike) as
being in, shall we say, critical condition—politicized, sclerotic, and lacking a progressive
agenda.…Fiction has long been thought of as a means of exploring human nature, and
the current stagnation of literary scholarship can be attributed, in part, to its denial of
that truism…its distrust of science (and more generally, the search for testable hypotheses
and cumulative objective knowledge) has left it, according to many accounts, mired in
faddism, obscurantism, and parochialism” (“Consilient Study” 163). The assumption that
science is alone in seeking to produce general laws and culmulative knowledge effectively
stultifies the consilience he attempts.
In addition, it might be reasonable to expect a cognitive neuroscientist linguist specializing in consciousness to take a reasonable interest in the phrase “stream of consciousness,”
but in The Blank Slate this phrase is just another way of saying bad writing. He despairs
of modernist style which he summarizes thus: “omniscient narration, structured plots,
the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream
of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences,
subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose” (410). Not for a moment does he
consider the idea that by cutting loose from “orderly introductions of characters and structured plots” and tracing the “ordinary mind on an ordinary day” (E4 160) Woolf recreated
not just a knowledge of the mind or the world but mind in the world as it is in the process
of being constituted by the world, as Pat Waugh has convincingly argued in The Arts and
Sciences of Criticism (see also Waugh in this volume), which is precisely what Pinker had
also been arguing for in the preceding chapters. By divorcing the data of fiction from the
experience of that data, Pinker’s methodology distorts the fundamental principles of the
act of reading and overlooks the opportunity to build on the convergences.
Pinker’s appropriations are particularly unfortunate because one of the very aims of
his book is to illuminate the phenomenological nature of human consciousness, precisely
the field in which Woolf made giant strides. But his reading of Woolf is that she based her
theory of art on a “false theory of human psychology—the Blank Slate” which not only
led to the current “malaise of the arts and the humanities” as he sees it, but culminated
in Alan Sokal’s famous 1996 hoax article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” in The Social Text (Pinker, The Blank
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Slate 410). All of modernism and postmodernism was a mistake in Pinker’s view—one
big hoax.
So is the idea of convergence even desirable when the methods and the standards
of the natural sciences are automatically assumed to be a way of improving the nonscientific “soft” disciplines? How can consciousness scientists process what they regard as
speculative, evidence-free observations if they take their epistemological goal and their
conception of truth only from the empirical sciences? And how can we rely on analyses
of literature offered by scientists whose “critical theorising and practice, whose textuality
and linguisticity, whose readerliness and imagination, are as poor as that?,” as Valentine
Cunningham sums it up (108). It is difficult not to see today’s scientists, including
those informed by post-positivist quantum theories and those with accumulated literary
competence, as versions of Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times, whose mantra is “Now, what
I want is, Facts.…nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else,
and root out everything else.…Stick to Facts, sir!” (Dickens 15). But facts without an
understanding of the experience of facts in relation to consciousness can only amount to
the Gradgrindian blindness that Dickens satirized.
IV.
Nevertheless, the idea of convergence remains alluring if only because when it
comes to the W.I.L. question, there are so many overlaps and coincidences whether it
is approached logically, neurobiologically or literarily. Damasio’s investigations into the
“What’s It Like” question may have been on neural, physical and material grounds but
his conclusion extends, not alters, the conclusion Thomas Nagel logically came to in his
celebrated 1974 philosophical essay which posed the question: “What is it like to be a
bat?”—i.e. it may be possible for a human to know what it is like for him to behave as
a bat behaves which not the same as what it is like for a bat to be a bat because of the
differing perceptual systems.
Woolf has a simpler phrase for the W.I.L. question: she called it “creating character.”
“My name is Brown. Catch me if you can” so Woolf wrote of the long odyssey that
the writer embarks on when attempting to convey what it feels like to be someone else
(E3 420). The epistemological problem of the knowledge of the mind—a perennial
preoccupation for both novelists and philosophers—was Woolf ’s abiding obsession and
her contributions were as profound as they were radical. “How, then…did one know
one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?’ (TTL 57-8) wonders Lily
Briscoe as she sits close to Mrs Ramsay, the “sacred inscriptions” of whose heart she longs
to learn. Martha Nussbaum has considered this question in exemplary detail in “The
Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse.” She argues
that Woolf reconstituted the question of other minds by depicting “repeatedly, both our
epistemological insufficiency toward one another and our unquenchable epistemological
longing.…Virginia Woolf tackles a venerable philosophical problem. I believe that she
makes a contribution both to our understanding of the problem and to its resolution”
(731). The question of knowledge that Nussbaum examined is one between Woolf ’s
characters. And to this another dimension might be added: the question of knowledge
between the reader and Woolf ’s characters, an area to which Woolf ’s contributions are
no less significant.
Neuroscience and Woolf
113
The chief task of the novelist, Woolf stated, was to convey the mind receiving “an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture
to call life itself ” (E3 33). Novels should not merely provide the data that a character is
processing in the mind—the shower of atoms—but express the experience of that data,
to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall” (E3 33).
So Woolf represents to the reader not just the information of what a character may see,
hear, smell, taste and touch but the process of what it feels like to have that sight, sound,
smell, taste and touch and the kind of thoughts and memories they trigger, making us
acutely aware that while only some mental processes are conscious, all mental processes
are physical. This produces in the reader a perceptual mimesis of consciousness which
approximates the process of the sensations and cognitions of lived experience.
Likewise, Damasio’s discovery about how the body-loop functions in the normal
mind was that the feelings generated by the body are an essential part of rational thought.
Rationality requires feeling and feeling requires the body. So the body and the mind are
actually indivisible. He asserts that we live inside this contradiction of anatomical reality:
rationality produced from the flesh. Long before Damasio, Woolf wrote continually of mind
depending upon flesh. For example, in “On Being Ill” (1930) Woolf observed that although
literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the
body is a sheet of glass through which the soul looks straight and clear…On the
contrary the opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or
sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to
tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the
pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of
a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant. (4)
That we do not have a body but are a body is a fact of our existence she captured, as well
as produced, which is one of the reasons her prose feels so alive. Feelings and thoughts
are never immaterial: they are formed through the body. She begins Mrs Dalloway (1925)
with the squeak of Rumplemayer’s men taking the doors off the hinges, triggering in
Clarissa the physical sensation of plunging into open air 30 years before when she burst
open the French windows at Bourton, the memory of which feels like being flapped and
kissed by the waves of the sea. Woolf presents physical sensations as vehicle for knowledge,
undercutting the presumed opposition between reason and emotion. And emotions are
suffused with highly discriminating responses to what is of value to each character. The
following is Clarissa Dalloway’s famous “feeling of knowing” from Mrs Dalloway: “Only
for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which
one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the
farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with astonishing
significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured
with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores. Then, for that moment, she
had an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed…
the moment” (MD 24). What may seem like contradictory cognitive processes—thinking
and feeling—in the conceptual scenography of the “two cultures” are reshaped into a
continuum of “feeling of knowing” in Woolf, as they are in the experiments of Damasio.
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The novel ends with Clarissa, whose talent is “knowing people by instinct,” feeling very
much like Septimus, feeling that she knows him, not through various facts but through
her bodily responses to those facts: “Always her body went through it, when she was told,
first, suddenly” (MD 133). Septimus, who cannot translate his sensations into emotions—
who cannot feel—cannot think rationally either.
But the feeling of knowing does not lead to complete knowledge between the
characters in Mrs Dalloway (nor does it in the experiments of Damasio). Clarissa’s romanticized interpretation of Septimus’s death as a glorious act of defiance is a reconstruction
which bears little relation to reality: after all, Septimus wanted to live. In this sense,
the novel confirms the radically subjective nature of our perceptions. But even as the
question of knowledge between the characters is dealt with profound skepticism, Woolf
offers one of the most successful answers to the W.I.L. question. By incorporating feeling
into epistemology, Woolf guides the reader's mind through the structure of the somatic
responses that gave rise to the thoughts of the characters; this in turn creates "as-if"
responses in the reader as to how another mind thinks, how another body feels.
V.
Recent neurobiological breakthroughs have provided us with a solid framework for
understanding the workings of the phenomenology of consciousness of an ordinary mind
on an ordinary day. And while there are serious unresolved issues involved in bringing the
concepts and methods of one discipline—whose difference is chasmic—into a working
relation with the concepts and methods of another, on the “feeling of knowing,” at least,
accounts of consciousness have converged across the divide promising a new ground, even
if they were developed on either side of the two cultures.
Works Cited
Cunningham, Valentine. “Figuring Out.” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Eds. J.
Schlaeger and G. Stedman. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2008. 95-112.
Damasio, Antonio. Descartes Error. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994. 227.
——. The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. London: Heinemann, 1999.
——. “The Person Within.” Nature 423 (May 2003).
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. 1854. London: Methuen, 1987.
Jackson, Tony E. “Issues and Problems in the Blending of Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, and
Literary Study.” Poetics Today 23:1 (2002). 161-179.
Lodge, David. Consciousness and the Novel: Collected Essays. London: Secker and Warburg, 2002.
Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83 (1974).
Nussbaum, Martha. “The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse.” New
Literary History 26 (1995). 731-753.
Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton, 1997. 162-178.
——. The Blank Slate. London: Penguin, 2002.
——. “Toward a Consilient Study of Literature.” Philosophy and Literature 31:1 (April 2007).
Waugh, Patricia. “Revising the Two Cultures Debate.” The Arts and Science of Criticism. Eds. P. Waugh and D.
Fuller. Oxford: OUP, 1999.
Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Andrew McNeillie (vols. 1-4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols.
5-6). London: The Hogarth Press, 1986-2011.
——. To the Lighthouse. 1927. London: Penguin, 1992.
——. On Being Ill. 1930. MA: Paris Press, 2002.
——. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Edition, 2003.
“WHEN THE LIGHTS OF HEALTH GO DOWN”: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S
AESTHETICS AND CONTEMPORARY ILLNESS NARRATIVES
by Stella Bolaki
I
n her introduction to Virginia Woolf ’s “On Being Ill” (1926), Hermione Lee asserts
that “this essay has, in recent years, gained another kind of recognition in a burgeoning literature of pathology, cited on medical websites” (xxiii)—literature that includes
illness memoirs and medical humanities books which are becoming increasingly popular.
Looking at such websites we notice, however, that in most cases Woolf ’s essay is mentioned as an example of a time when there was a scarcity of narratives about illness. For
instance, the annotation of “On Being Ill” on The Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database,
at the School of Medicine of New York University, reads as follows: “The essay’s premise
[that illness is not a subject of literature despite how common it is in real life] is no longer true; we now have a great deal of writing about illness.” Are we meant to conclude
then that “On Being Ill” is a bit dated now that so much has been, and is being, written
about illness? Has what Woolf called “the unexploited mine”1 been exploited and has this
paradoxical richness of illness—the main contradiction in Woolf ’s essay—been resolved?
A fruitful use of “On Being Ill” for those interested in the intersection of literature
with illness or medicine would be “to juxtapose its claim that in 1930 the body was not
taken seriously as a literary theme, with our contemporary obsession with the body” (The
Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database). This is demonstrated by the proliferation of first
and third-person narratives that record “the daily drama of the body” (Woolf 5): ranging
from Joan Didion’s essay about her migraines “In Bed” (1968), Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals (1980), Paul Monette’s AIDS memoir Borrowed Time (1988), to Anatole Broyard’s
account of prostate cancer in Intoxicated by My Illness (1992), Jean Dominique Bauby’s
story of his stroke that left him physically paralysed in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
(1997), and Hilary Mantel’s memoir dealing with her struggles with severe endometriosis
entitled Giving Up the Ghost (2003), to mention but a few examples.
Woolf ’s salient points regarding language and illness in “On Being Ill” surely raise
questions such as whether illness has emerged as a more prominent theme in literature,
if the ill have a better vocabulary for communicating their experiences today, and who
is listening to what they have to say. In this essay, I wish to reclaim Woolf ’s relevance by
addressing in particular the importance of taking seriously the aesthetic dimension of
contemporary illness narratives. I will do that by staging a dialogue between Woolf ’s “On
Being Ill” and the diary essay published in 2010 by Hilary Mantel, which offers a certain
contradictory response to Woolf even though it seems to continue her aesthetic project.
Attention has been paid to the affinity between aesthetics and illness in readings
of “On Being Ill”. For instance, in “Exposing the Nerves of Language,” Kimberly Engdahl Coates shows how Woolf uses illness to create “a modernist aesthetic” (247) that
connects sensation and intellect and presents the ill body as “an analogue for the artist’s
mind” (258). Woolf writes: “In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality…In health
meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in
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illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poems by Mallarme or
Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent and distil their
flavour, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having come to us
sensually first, by way of the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour” (“On Being
Ill” 21-22). For Woolf, the ill body possesses a fundamental relationship to language and
creativity, and illness has something important to tell us about aesthetics. But what can
aesthetics tell us about the experience of illness?
In “On Being Ill” Woolf calls illness “the great confessional” (11) and the essay invites
her readers to inhabit an entirely different world, but this project raises new contradictions
when approached from a medical humanities perspective. Within this field, the aesthetic
mode is often viewed as an escape from the reality of the body, that is, as not a realistic
model for many people dealing with pain and serious illness—one thinks here of Susan
Sontag’s well-known polemic Illness as Metaphor (1978).2 Even among those who take
seriously the role of storytelling and personal narrative, however, the aesthetic is often
seen as “a subjective realm” which romanticises illness and which can hardly constitute “a
firm foundation for sustained ethical or political consciousness-raising” (Major 109). An
example of such scepticism is William Major’s critique of Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness: “Broyard believes that he is able to avoid the conventional because his illness [cancer]
has freed him from socially scripted patterns of behavior. Ironically, however,…the image
Broyard cultivates is middle class to the core, a well-trodden cultural trope: the existential
man who suffers for truth, and who uses art as a way to distance the self from the social
fabric” (98). As Major concludes his reading, “It is worth pointing out that such intoxication may be available to a select few…Many of us may see our illnesses through a glass
darkly, where only the feeble light of aesthetic redemption peeks through” (119). Woolf ’s
celebration of “ceas[ing] to be soldiers in the army of the upright” (12) and her preference for solitude in “On Being Ill” runs a similar risk of being seen as an “irresponsible”
and “disinterested” stance towards illness (both adjectives appear in the essay).3 Likewise,
her eclectic web of images and literary allusions may be dismissed for not representing a
realistic paradigm for most people suffering from serious illness. Mantel’s essay to which I
will now turn echoes, however implicitly, the above criticisms.
The opening of Mantel’s hospital diary published in The London Review of Books in
November 2010 records the voices, visions and hallucinations brought after her surgery,
including a smoking “circus strongman squatting on [her] bed” in a no-smoking hospital.4
This resonates with Woolf ’s dentist-visit hallucination on the first page of “On Being Ill”:
“when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse
his ‘Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the
floor of Heaven to welcome us” (3). Like Woolf, Mantel suggests that ill people inhabit
a strange world: “The nurses think I’m gallant, a tractable patient; they don’t know I’m
in another country.” But the similarities seem to stop here, or at least this is what Mantel
wishes to convince us of. In one of her letters, Woolf wrote about the privilege of being
ill at home as opposed to an institutionalised setting: “The horrors of illness cease when
one has a book or a dog or a cup of one’s own at hand” (303). Unlike Woolf, Mantel is
in the hospital, the place where the body is handed over to professionals and especially to
technology: “On 12 July I am attached to a small, heavy black box, which will vacuum
out the cavity and gradually close its walls. A clear tube leads from beneath my dressings
“When the lights of health go down”
117
into the box, and the box is plugged into the wall. It snorts like an elderly pug, and bloody
substances whisk along the tube. Through August, as the weather warms up, it will smell
like a wastebin in a butchery, and flies will take an interest in it. I can unplug myself for a
few minutes, but reconnecting is painful.”
While Woolf ’s patient can look outwards (“round and up”) to the sky, for instance,
and the clouds—what Woolf calls “this gigantic cinema” (14)—for Mantel’s patient “everything points inward”: “the furthest extension of her consciousness is not the rattle of car
keys, the road home, the first drink of the evening, but the beep and plip-plop of monitors and drips, the flashing of figures on screens; these are how you register your existence,
these are the way you matter” during illness. The clouds are invoked in Mantel’s essay but
differently: “[Hospital] walls recede, vanish into grey mist, like clouds over a cathedral”. As
soon as the last hospital visitor leaves, Mantel continues, “the inner drama of the ward is
free to begin again; the drama enacted without spectators, written within the confines of
the body a still more secret drama. Death stays when the visitors have gone and the nurses
turn a blind eye: he leans back on his portable throne, he crosses his legs, he says: ‘Entertain
me’.” Mantel’s humour is dark. Even though Woolf ’s pastoral imagery may come across
as lighter, as she adds after her vision of an overcoming nature, “divinely beautiful” as this
spectacle of clouds may be, it is also “divinely heartless” (14). She reiterates this idea when
she considers the “indifferent” but comforting rose standing “still and steady…in the earth”
and preserving “a demeanour of perfect dignity and self-possession” as opposed to the domesticated or romanticised rose that has become a symbol of human passion (14-15). As in
Mantel’s essay, ill people are closer to an awareness of death: “It is only the recumbent who
know what, after all, nature is at no pains to conceal— that she in the end will conquer…
we shall cease to drag ourselves about the fields” (“On Being Ill” 16).
Mantel’s direct objections to “On Being Ill” are fraught with contradictions:
I read On Being Ill, by Virginia Woolf. What schoolgirl piffle, I think. It’s like
one of those compositions by young ladies mocked in Tom Sawyer. I can’t understand what she means when she complains about the “poverty of the language”
we have to describe illness. For the sufferer, she says, there is “nothing ready
made.” Then what of the whole vocabulary of singing aches, of spasms, of strictures and cramps; the gouging pain, the drilling pain, the pricking and pinching, the throbbing, burning, stinging, smarting, flaying? All good words. All old
words. No one’s pain is so special that the devil’s dictionary of anguish has not
anticipated it. There is even a scale you can use to refine it: “Tell me,” the doctor
says, “on a scale of one to ten, how much this hurts.”
It is striking that Mantel defends the “ready made” here (in other words, the “quantitative”
medical language) when earlier in her essay, and elsewhere in her work, she is a strong
critic of the “short exclamatory hospital talk” with its “swift acronyms” and of the belief
that everything can be measured scientifically. In essence, her diary offers her hallucinatory visions precisely to communicate something that cannot be conveyed through “the
old words,” to rescue her experience from the narrower definition of the clinic so that it
makes sense to her, and thus to complement the biomedical model. It is not accidental
that Mantel notes that the hospital staff cannot see the “two simultaneous realities” she is
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
118
living in—she is even calling her “literary or religious preoccupations” an “elitist pursuit”
suggesting, more than a criticism, that each sufferer is entitled to their own “special” language. The “one size fits all” approach of medical reports and case studies that concentrates
on disease rather than the lived experience of illness, however strange the latter is, is clearly
inadequate.
But Mantel’s attack on Woolf is also directed at something else:
No doubt language fails in that shuttered room called melancholia, where the
floor is plush and the windowless walls are draped in black velvet…But then,
mental suffering is so genteel;…Virginia only has decorous illnesses. She has
faints and palpitations, fevers and headaches, though I am mindful that at one
stage they tried to fix her by pulling out her teeth. But she is seemly; she does
not seep, or require a dressings trolley, she does not wake at dawn to find herself
smeared with contact jelly from last night’s ECG. Virginia never oozes. Her secretions are ladylike: tears, not bile. She may as well not have had bowels, for all
the evidence of them in her book.
Here it seems Mantel sets up a hierarchy that partly involves the distinction between
mental and physical illness5 and echoes critiques such as those against Broyard mentioned
earlier. For Mantel, Woolf ’s suffering seems to be curiously devoid of the messy reality of
human affairs, genteel and ladylike, and as a result does not appear to be authentic or real
enough. In contrast, Mantel’s essay repeatedly returns to the abject body and its unspeakable fluids, and consciously uses language that is not elevated even though metaphors still
abound: “My flesh is swollen, green with bruising, and the shocking, gaping wound shows
a fresh pink inside; I look like a watermelon with a great slice hacked out. I say to myself,
it’s just another border post on the frontier between medicine and greengrocery.”
Even when religion comes in, Mantel makes a point of dismissing the special status
of her body and wounds: “There is a term for what is happening to St Teresa in Bernini’s
sculpture; it is ‘transverberation’. But she was pierced suddenly by the fiery lance of God’s
love, whereas I was pierced by prearrangement, in a hospital just off the M25.” “Illness
strips you back to an authentic self,” Mantel summarises, “but not one you need to meet.”
“On Being Ill” offers an image of the recumbent as having dropped out of the race and
thus having time for “fantastic and unprofitable excursions” of the mind (10). Mantel’s
idea of “stripping back to an authentic self ” is literal: “In sickness we can’t avoid knowing
about our body and what it does, its animal aspect, its demands. We see things that never
should be seen; our inside is outside, the body’s sewer pipes and vaults exposed to view, as
if in a woodcut of our own martyrdom.”
In response to Mantel’s comment about mental illness being more genteel, we can
note that “On Being Ill” privileges physical maladies—Woolf mentions for example
toothache, pneumonia, typhoid, influenza (4), and one of the earlier versions of the essay
included appendicitis and cancer (Lee xxxii n12). This is further expressed through the
language of the essay calling for a new literature of the body versus the mind: “All day,
all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in
the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can
only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like
“When the lights of health go down”
119
a sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole
unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and
satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe” (“On Being
Ill” 4-5). Woolf does not write explicitly about herself (she does not say “I”) but her approach towards the body is not as genteel or conservative as Mantel suggests: Woolf calls
it “a monster” (6) and writes that to look at illness “squarely in the face would need the
courage of a lion tamer” (5); and even though she reiterates her point about the lack of
of words for pain, by the time of The Waves (1931) she has found a more “primitive” or
“brutal”6 language through Bernard: “For pain words are lacking. There should be cries,
cracks, fissures, whiteness, passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time,
of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and
then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting” (220).
Illness narratives are not significant only because they record personal experience,
though it is important here to recognise the politics of writing in the first person about
one’s illness, especially when it comes to considering the history of the female body’s pathologisation. However, Alan Radley is right to stress that we should go beyond interpreting illness accounts according to content and pay attention to their aesthetic dimension
which is not separate from the realm of ethics or politics. As he explains in Works of Illness,
aesthetic activity should be seen as a kind of “work” (185) rather than as synonymous with
aestheticisation. Illness narratives partake of two worlds, the mundane world of disease
or the body and a “figurative” or aesthetic world—“a world of illness”—which they fabricate and into which the reader is invited (Radley 188). The idea of transfiguration of the
ordinary into the aesthetic (in Radley’s quotation) suggests that the latter is grounded in
the sensuous or the mundane. Illness narratives do not gesture towards some ethereal or
transcendental space into which the author escapes from the pains of illness. Woolf writes
that we need “a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth” to deal with
illness and pain, otherwise the body “will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with
rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism” (“On Being Ill” 5-6).
And even though her “mundane” reality is not that of Mantel, more recognizable to the
modern reader who is perhaps thirsty for graphic confessional material, Woolf draws her
imagery from the natural, outside world, rather than an ethereal space, and conjures “a
world of illness” into which she invites us.
However personal Mantel’s account may appear, it is important to note that her readers do not bear witness to unmediated suffering; the work of “transmutation” that writing
about her experience entails creates “a screen” through which the terrors of illness can be
contemplated with distance by both author and readers (Radley 184). To provide an example from her diary, Mantel writes:“For a while I think I have grown a new line on one of
my hands, a line unknown to palmistry. I think perhaps I have a new fate. But it proves to
be a medical artefact, a puckering of the skin produced by one of the tubes sewn into my
wrist. We call those ‘lines’, too. The iambic pentameter of the saline stand, the alexandrine
of the blood drain, the epidural’s sweet sonnet form.” The line here is a double signifier as
it stands in the world of medicine but also in the aesthetic and grounded “world of illness”
which Mantel conjures for us. This is one of several incidents when, to borrow Radley’s
argument, a part of the world of medicine is transformed into a fragment that exemplifies another world without being separated from reality. Through this process of aesthetic
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communication (reconfiguration or translation), disorder and disintegration—and what
is more disordered that the artificial drip of liquids in and out of one’s body—are turned
into something ordered and meaningful like meter that can be “grasped afresh by others”
(Radley 184). Rather than being an example of sentimentalising or romanticising illness,
such a process of transformation opens the possibility to understand works of illness as
“deriving their significance from the deployment of an ethic of freedom [for the person
who is ill], realized in terms of aesthetic practice” (Radley 38). Thus, Mantel notes in her
diary that “the black ink, looping across the page, flowing easily and more like water than
like blood, reassured me that I was alive and could act in the world.”7
Woolf may not be reporting with graphic immediacy like Mantel from the “undiscovered country” of illness but she is no “wuss,” as Mantel calls her in what is perhaps the
most provocative moment in her diary essay. Rather than settling on the idea of the ineffability of pain, which Mantel suggests is a result of being afraid to look at illness “squarely
in the face”, Woolf ’s image of “crashing together” gestures towards the idea of aesthetics
as work—and here she counters Mantel’s preference for the “ready made” language mentioned earlier. Woolf ’s phrase makes its first appearance in “On Being Ill” when she tells
us that “there is nothing ready made” for the ill person: “He is forced to coin words and
taking his pain in one hand and a lump of pure sound in the other crush them together
so that a new word in the end drops out” (7). This is an image of translating pain and raw
sensation into verbal form. Crashing together not only fabricates a new word or world
but also gives agency in the face of suffering. The phrase reappears on the last page of the
essay when “the great lady”, Lady Waterford, “crushed together” the plush curtain “in her
agony” as she watches her husband’s body being taken to his grave (28). More than what
“On Being Ill” says indirectly about Woolf ’s own endurance and courage (Hermione Lee
has uncovered this dimension in her introduction to the essay), its lasting legacy in relation to contemporary narratives of illness lies in the fact that it reinforces the importance
of taking seriously the aesthetic dimension and imaginative work underlying illness narratives. This dimension is fundamental to the communication of illness to both the one
who suffers and others who have no access to it.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Woolf ’s essay appeared in 1926 under the title “Illness—An Unexploited Mine” in the American Journal
Forum before becoming published by the Hogarth Press in 1930 under its original title.
Sontag opposes the confessional aspect of illness: “I didn’t think it would be useful—and I wanted to be useful—to tell yet one more story in the first person of how someone learned that she or he had cancer, wept,
struggled, was comforted, suffered, took courage…though mine was also that story. A narrative, it seemed
to me, would be less useful than an idea. For narrative pleasure I would appeal to other writers” (98).
There is no space to address the affinities between Broyard and Woolf in any detail here. Though they
both echo the idea of illness as a tool that helps restore some kind of “alienated identity” (and thus free the
individual from “the army of the upright”), Woolf would probably find Broyard’s “I” in his narrative “as
hard as a nut” (AROO 98).
All citations are from the LRB online version (Hilary Mantel, “Diary,” Vol. 32 No. 21, 4 November 2010)
even though a shortened version of the essay reappeared under the title “After Visiting Hours” in The
Guardian (Saturday 13 November 2010). The full diary was also published as an eBook called Ink in the
Blood: A Hospital Diary (2010).
This might stem from Mantel’s personal experience, as illustrated in her memoir: “The more I said that I
had a physical illness, the more [the doctors] said I had a mental illness. The more I questioned the nature
“When the lights of health go down”
6.
7.
121
of, the reality of the mental illness, the more I was found to be in denial, deluded.…It was in the nature
of educated young women, it was believed, to be hysterical, neurotic, difficult, and out of control” (Giving
up the Ghost 177).
In the manuscript of the essay Woolf had “brutal” instead of “primitive” (Lee xxvi).
Mantel’s memoir reiterates this idea: “I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and
made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into
being—even if the writing is aimless doodling that no one will ever read, or the diary that no none can see
till I’m dead” (Giving up the Ghost 222).
Works Cited
Coates, Kimberly Enngdahl. “Exposing the ‘Nerves of Language’: Virginia Woolf, Charles Mauron, and the Affinity Between Aesthetics and Illness.” Literature and Medicine 21.2 (Fall 2002): 242-263.
Lee, Hermione. “Introduction.” On Being Ill. Ashfield: Paris Press, 2002. xi-xxxiv.
Mantel, Hilary. “Diary” LRB 32.21, 4 November 2010: 41-42. Web. Accessed 10 January 2012 <http://www.
lrb.co.uk/v32/n21/hilary-mantel/diary>.
——. Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir. London: Fourth Estate, 2003.
Major, William. “Aesthetics and Social Critique in Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness.” Journal of Narrative Theory 32.1 (Winter 2002): 97-121.
Radley, Alan. Works of Illness: Narrative, Picturing, and the Social Response to Serious Disease. Ashby-de-la-Zouch:
InkerMen Press, 2009.
Sontag, Susan. Illness As Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. London: Penguin, 1991.
The Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. School of Medicine of New York University. Web. Accessed 10 January 2012 <http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=218>
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Penguin, 2000.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press,
1975-1980.
——. On Being Ill. Introduction by Hermione Lee. Ashfield: Paris Press, 2002.
——. The Waves. Oxford: OUP, 1998.
KINETIC TROPES, COMEDIC TURNS: DANCING TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
by Janet Winston
I
t hardly needs saying that To the Lighthouse, perhaps more so than Woolf ’s other novels, is concerned with ephemerality—both its impact on knowing and being, and how
to represent it in writing. In that sense, then, Woolf ’s novel shares a preoccupation
associated with dance. Dance scholars since the sixteenth century have lamented the fact
that dance, more so than the performance arts of theater and music, is by its very nature
impermanent (Lepecki 125-29). As dance theorist Mark Franco explains: “All dance…is
constituted by loss in the form of its own immediate disappearance which then engenders
a desire for its reappearance, ultimately for its reconstruction. Reconstruction and choreography—two facets of the science of making dances happen—are distinguishable from
dancing as the irretrievable mystery of what happened in those dances” (4). Dance critic
Marcia Siegel’s comments about dance’s comparatively low status vis-à-vis the other arts
calls to mind the parallel Woolf draws between Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner party and Lily Briscoe’s painting that “would be hung in the attics,…would be destroyed” (TTL 211). Siegel
writes, “[dance] doesn’t stay around long enough to become respectable or respected. Its
ephemerality is mistaken for triviality” (xv qtd. in Lepecki 130). In this paper, I have set
myself the task of fashioning a reading of To the Lighthouse inspired by dance.1 In so doing, I wish to open up Woolf ’s work to a more expansive approach: one that goes beyond
visual and auditory registers to consider the kinetic and the kinesthetic.
I am indebted to the scholarship of Evelyn Haller, Rishona Zimring, and Susan
Jones, whose research on Woolf ’s attitudes towards her own experiences dancing socially
and watching dance in performance as well as their startling analyses of dancing as influence, motif, and metaphor in several of Woolf ’s novels has laid the foundation for
my reading of To the Lighthouse. For example, in her essay “Her Quill Drawn from the
Firebird: Virginia Woolf and the Russian Dancers” and her more recent “Virginia Woolf
and Dance,” Evelyn Haller documents the influence that Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes
had on narrative themes and allusions in Woolf ’s fiction as well as structural and thematic
parallels between some of Woolf ’s novels and Japanese Noh theater. In her work, Haller
concentrates primarily on dance performance and the rich repository of stories, structures,
imagery, shapes, and sounds it provided Woolf. In her essay “‘The Dangerous Art Where
One Slip Means Death’: Dance and the Literary Imagination in Interwar Britain,” Rishona Zimring shifts our attention to the role of social dancing in Woolf ’s writing. Analyzing
specific scenes of dancing and the use of dance as metaphor in such novels as The Voyage
Out, Between the Acts, and Mrs. Dalloway, Zimring argues that dance is often linked in
Woolf ’s writing to anxiety, destruction, and the antithesis of contemplation.
Like Haller and Zimring, Susan Jones, in her essay “Virginia Woolf and the Dance,”
offers a surprisingly extensive archive of Woolf’s written comments on dancing and her
connections to London’s modern dance scene, and analyzes several discreet descriptions of
dance in Woolf’s novels. Jones’s approach to reading Woolf through a dance lens emphasizes
both Woolf’s rhythmic prose and what she refers to as the “choreographic patterning” of
Woolf’s experimental narratives (188). I find particularly compelling Jones’s sensitivity to
Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
123
non-choreographed bodily gestures and everyday movement in Woolf ’s fiction (171). Of
Night and Day, The Waves, and The Years, Jones writes, “Woolf grappled with the difficulties
of representing corporeal as well as psychological movement in relation to the apparently
inexorable temporal movement suggested by rational divisions of clock time” (189).
Given its concern with “temporal movement” in relation to the movement of the
thinking mind, To the Lighthouse surprisingly gets short shrift in Haller’s, Zimring’s, and
Jones’s analyses. True, Haller sees a correspondence between the Noh play Suma Genji and
Mrs. Ramsay’s otherworldly appearance in “The Lighthouse” (“Virginia Woolf and Dance”
469); Zimring identifies Lily Briscoe as one of Woolf ’s dancers because she is described as
making “a dancing rhythmical movement” with her paintbrush (TTL 161; Zimring 721);
and Jones refers to the dinner party scene as an example of the type of “kinetic structuring” that Woolf adopts from dance, and which she would fully develop in The Waves (183).
However, unlike many of Woolf ’s novels, such as The Voyage Out, The Waves, The Years, and
Between the Acts, To the Lighthouse does not boast any dance scenes, fully realized choreographic patterning, or allusions to known dancers or dance productions.
To sum up, as the scholars discussed above demonstrate, there are multiple ways to
consider Woolf ’s writing through a dance lens. We might loosely group dance-inspired approaches to her work into three categories. First, one can locate evidence in Woolf ’s diaries
and letters, and through her connection to other artists, such as Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell,
Duncan Grant, and Lydia Lopokova, of her familiarity with performances of specific dances
(see Haller, “Her Quill” 181, 187; Jones 173-76). One then examines these productions
with their myriad narrative, visual, and rhythmic components as potential influences on
her novels (see Haller, “Her Quill” 194-215, 221-25). Secondly, one can analyze fictional
scenes of social dancing or specific references to dancing and dance performance as special
sites of narrative meaning (see Zimring 717-23). One begins to decode these scenes by examining Woolf ’s attitudes toward her own experiences of partnered dancing and of watching new forms of dance as entertainment. Thirdly, and this is the approach I favor with To
the Lighthouse, one can explore the kinetic, kinesic, and kinesthetic aspects of Woolf ’s prose
(see Jones 180, 188-90, 195-98). Kinetic denotes movement; kinesics refers to communication through movement; and kinesthetic signifies the sensation “of muscular effort” felt
within one’s own body when willingly initiating movement of one’s body (“Kinetic”; “Kinesics”; “Kinaesthesis”). A central concept, popularized in the 1930s by modernist dance critic
John Martin and re-evaluated beginning in the late twentieth century by dance scholars and
neuroscientists, is “kinesthetic empathy” (what Martin calls “inner mimicry”)—the ability
to experience in one’s own observing body the corporeal sensations of an other’s dancing
body (J. Martin 47, 53; “What Is Kinesthetic Empathy?”; Foster 245-50).
These movement-specific terms suggest some preliminary questions: At what points do
we attend to movement in To the Lighthouse? What kinds of movement arrest our attention,
and why? How might we distinguish among these movements to make sense of them in a
narrative context? Here, we might consider not only descriptions of body language and locomotion as characters go about their business but also the characters’ and the reader’s sensate
experience of motion achieved by Woolf’s use of imagery and metaphor, and by changes in
prose tempo: a kind of literary kinesthesia. In what ways does To the Lighthouse “depend upon
movement for its effect” thereby making it a “kinetic art” (“Kinetic,” def. 6.)?
Guided by these questions and a curiosity about, what Randy Martin refers to as, “the
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project of thinking through dance” (as opposed to simply “identifying dance”), I began
to notice elements of To the Lighthouse I had not seen before (204). For example, a focus
on, what Randy Martin calls, “the kinesthesia of daily life”—that is, ordinary “actual or
quotidian uses of the body”—reveals Woolf ’s reliance on descriptions of movement to
delineate character, create narrative tension, and construct ontological and epistemological oppositions that undergird the novel (187, 184). For example—and this example will
serve as the central premise for the explications that follow—some quotidian movements
in To the Lighthouse evoke the music hall while others, the “free dancing” style made famous by Isadora Duncan,2 suggesting aesthetic parallels if not direct influences.
Evelyn Haller and Rishona Zimring have documented Woolf ’s ambivalent response
to British music hall acts, such as the slapstick routines of stars Harry Tate and Will Evans,
and the singing of Marie Lloyd (Haller, “Virginia Woolf and Dance” 461, 464; Zimring
712). Tate and Evans shared the program at London’s Hippodrome and Coliseum with
more highbrow choreographies, like the Ballets Russes. In 1918 Woolf went to see the
second run of producer Albert De Courville’s revue Box o’ Tricks,3 a variety show known as
a “Revue” combining musical theater, instrumentals, choreographed dancing, and physical
comedy in a series of theatrical sketches broken up by shorter acts with each new sketch
or act called a “turn” (Bedells 97-101; Moore 17-25, 44-45, 54-58, 75-78, 92, 104-6,
129). Writing in her diary about the night’s entertainment, Woolf complained about the
“incredible, pathetic stupidity of the music hall,” which discomfited her in its lack of refinement and wit (D1 144). She admitted, however, that Harry Tate’s (in her mind) authentically English humor (he was a Scotsman, born Ronald MacDonald Hutchinson) made her
laugh despite herself.4 After seeing another of Tate’s performances in 1924, this time at the
London Coliseum in a program featuring the Ballets Russes’s performance of The Faithful
Shepherdess, Woolf theorized about the aesthetic function of the music hall comedic “turn”:
“The peculiar pleasure of the ballet arises no doubt from this combination of sensual ecstasy
with an extreme severity, having its roots presumably in the religious element which lies at
the origin of the dance. Sandwiched between Harry Tate and other characteristically British
turns, the seriousness, the religious quality of the Russians is all the more apparent. One, indeed, serves as relish to the other. Harry Tate accentuates [Bronislava] Nijinska and [Lydia]
Sokolova.” (“From Alpha to Omega” 443 qtd. in Haller, “Virginia Woolf and Dance” 464).
I would argue that Woolf employs this same aesthetic formula of the “comedic turn” in
To The Lighthouse in the form of her character Mrs. McNab. Like Harry Tate, Mrs. McNab
is a Scot, and she shares her name with Sandy McNab, one of the Scottish comedians of
the Edwardian stage (Russell 77). Alison Light, in Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, remarks that
“Mrs. McNab is not quite a comedy-turn (though she leans towards it)” (201). I would
go further. The references to Mrs. McNab’s social milieu combined with her bodily movements connect her both to music hall audiences and to their comedic performers.
The narrator of “Time Passes” imagines Mrs. McNab’s youth spent “at the public
house, drinking” and describes her now at seventy, “mumbl[ing] out the old music hall
song” and “continu[ing] to drink and gossip as before” (TTL 135).5 According to Bonnie
Kime Scott, “[t]his music serves as an extension of Mrs. McNab’s indomitable character,
and bears some promise of renewal as she works to restore the crumbling Ramsay summer
home” (103). In depicting Mrs. McNab, however, Woolf relies on the association, at least
in the minds of Victorian middle-class reformers, between music halls and the supposed
Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
125
excessive drinking of the laboring classes who attended them—despite the fact that by the
1890s alcohol was banned in newly built halls and audiences were a mix of the working
and middle classes (Bailey, Music Hall ix-xii; “Conspiracies of Meaning” 166-67; Moore
17). Moreover, Mrs. McNab’s hulking ambulations and exaggerated gestures provide not
so much a glimpse into her resolute soul but rather, a view of a performance of physical
comedy. Woolf writes: “As she lurched (for she rolled like a ship at sea) and leered…and
hauled herself upstairs and rolled from room to room, she sang. Rubbing the glass of the
long looking-glass and leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound issued from her
lips—something that had been gay twenty years before on the stage perhaps, had been
hummed and danced to, but now…was like the voice of witlessness, humour” (TTL 134).
In addition to lurching, leering, and swinging, Mrs. McNab moves through the house rolling, “ambl[ing]…hobbl[ing],” “stooping,…groaning, singing, slapp[ing]…slamm[ing],”
“flopp[ing],” standing “arms akimbo,” “wagg[ing] her head this side and that” (TTL 135,
143, 139, 141). Unlike the disciplined and sensual movements of the Russian ballet dancers—about which Woolf had sensed a “religious quality”—the song and dance routine performed by “the toothless, bonneted” Scotswoman lacks any connection to, as the narrator
of “Time Passes” tells us, “dignified ritual or solemn chanting” (TTL 134, 143).
Just as “Harry Tate accentuates Nijinska and Sokolova,” so too Mrs. McNab accentuates Mrs. Ramsay. Whereas Mrs. McNab lurches and leers, Mrs. Ramsay steps quickly and
“glanc[es] discreetly” (TTL 17). In Charles Tansley’s and Lily Briscoe’s imagination, Mrs.
Ramsay moves nimbly and gracefully, “stepping with her usual quickness across fields”
and among flowers, “with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair” (TTL 184, 18).
Although her actual movements are rarely described, Mrs. Ramsay’s kinetic presence in
the novel is palpable. It finds expression in metaphors of nature, particularly the motion
of water flowing and spurting, but also the swaying of tree branches, the hovering of
birds, and the folding in of flower petals (41, 106, 107, 42). Maggie Humm, in her essay
“Beauty and Woolf,” argues that “[b]ecause it lacks a specific project, Woolf ’s ethics of
beauty…might be misread as a Hegelian vision of spiritualized nature, but Woolf ’s ethics is crucially embodied” (241). Indeed, Woolf uses Romantic tropes to represent Mrs.
Ramsay’s internal movements as embodied acts. Such movements include not only Mrs.
Ramsay’s mental processes—the silent act of contemplation and of reading poetry, for
example—but also her body’s organic dynamism.
In what might be described as a form of kinesthetic empathy, James, “[s]tanding between [Mrs. Ramsay’s] knees,” senses his mother’s motile energy at the moment where she
shifts her attention from him to his father: “Mrs. Ramsay…seemed to raise herself with an
effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at
the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning
and illuminating…this fountain and spray of life” (TTL 41, 40). The next moment, James
“felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs” (41). Mrs.
Ramsay’s own kinesthetic self-perception matches the impressions of her son: “It was odd,
she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers;
felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one”
(66). Mrs. Ramsay directs this belief seaward so that when listening to “the sound of the
sea” and watching the lighthouse beam stroke the water, she becomes both light and wave
(67, 66, 68). First, with the third stroke, she sees “her own eyes meeting her own eyes,”
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and then, in a state of rapture induced by the light upon the sea, waves that “curved and
swelled and broke upon the beach…raced over the floor of her mind” (66, 68).
The link between Mrs. Ramsay’s inner processes and her kinetic corporeality as well as
the descriptions of her as windblown and quick stepping, upward spraying and swaying, embodying waves and light evoke the theories and choreographies of Isadora Duncan, the socalled mother of modern dance. In 1920 Duncan wrote that “[t]he dancer of the future will
be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language
of that soul will have become the movement of the body.…She will dance the changing life
of nature, showing how each part is transformed into the other” (The Art of the Dance 6263). For Duncan, the source of all natural movement was the wave. As early as 1905, she saw
“waves rising through all things.…[W]hen we come to the movements of organic nature, it
would seem that all free natural movements conform to the law of wave movement” (69).
Of Duncan’s dance technique and choreography, Deborah Jowitt explains that “[w]
aves pervade her dances—as line, pattern, gesture, and, in a deeper sense, as impetus.…In
a solo like her wildly popular The Blue Danube, the phrases were built on the impetus of a
wave of water: the rush forward, the slight suspended pause, the retreat as if being sucked
backward” (91-92). Jowitt notes too that Duncan emphasized “the upward gesture” (92)
and, according to one enraptured eyewitness, “had a wonderful way of running, in which
she…left herself behind, and you felt the breeze running through her hair” (Frederick
Ashton qtd. in Jowitt 90).
One of the ways Duncan differentiated her dance technique from that of ballet was
in her description of discovering “the central spring of all movement” (My Life 75). Ballet
located this spring “at the base of the spine,” thus “produc[ing] an artificial mechanical
movement” of “an articulated puppet” (75). By contrast, Duncan located it in the solar
plexus, which she called “the crater of motor power” (75). In language that conjures images of Mrs. Ramsay’s “rain of energy” and the lighthouse’s beam of light, Duncan describes
how she harnessed the power of “this one Centre” of her body, “filling it with vibrating
light,” so that it became a “fount of light” (75).
I am not claiming that Woolf, in her descriptions of Mrs. Ramsay, intentionally drew
on Duncan’s philosophy of spiritual embodiment or her dance aesthetic. To my knowledge
Woolf never saw Duncan dance, nor did she remark on Duncan’s influence despite the
dancer’s popular appeal with members of London society and with several prominent artists, among them William Holman Hunt, Henry James, Auguste Rodin, Anna Pavlova,
and Mikhail Fokine (Jowitt 69, 83, 101). What I am suggesting, however, is a potential, if
indirect, influence.6 Eschewing the music halls, Duncan danced solo concerts in London in
1900, 1908, and 1921 at private homes, the New Gallery, and the Duke of York’s Theatre
(Jowitt 83; Koritz 47). It was at the New Gallery in 1900 where Woolf ’s friend, the classics
scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, read Theocritus’s poetry aloud to accompany Duncan’s dancing
(Jowitt 83). Woolf was aware of Duncan, for in 1928 she sent her sister, Vanessa Bell, a copy
of Duncan’s autobiography and listened to “the true history of Isadora Duncan’s life” as told
to her by fellow writer Rebecca West (L3 501). Duncan’s style of dancing reached Woolf
by way of the Ballets Russes through the choreography of Mikhail Fokine and the dancing
of Anna Pavlova. Ballet Russes Director Sergei Diaghilev asserted that “Fokine was mad
about her, and Duncan’s influence on him was the initial basis of his entire creation” (qtd.
in Garafola 39). Duncan’s dance style as well as her choice of costumes and music directly
Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns
127
influenced numerous Fokine ballets, including Les Sylphides, Firebird, and Le Spectre de la
Rose—dances that, according to Evelyn Haller, Woolf saw performed.7
As a spectator of dance, Virginia Woolf reflected on her ambivalent position as audience member. After attending a performance at the London Coliseum in 1918 of Diaghilev’s ballet Le Carnaval sandwiched between slapstick comedic turns, she wrote in her
diary: “What a queer fate it is—always to be the spectator of the public, never part of it”
(D1 222). She was referring to what she sensed was the music hall audience’s lackluster
response to the dance: though they had been “bellowing like bulls” over the slapstick
routine, they were merely “tolerant, but…a little bit contemptuous” about the ballet (D1
222). Woolf may have wanted to believe, as she stated in her 1924 review of The Faithful Shepherdess, that she appreciated, in a way that her fellow audience members did not,
the aesthetic value of juxtaposing new forms of movement with what she called the well
worn routines of “low grade…English humour” (D1 144). Her employment in To the
Lighthouse of kinetic tropes of “free dancing” next to comedic turns supports this view.
However, as a spectator of spectators of dance, her empathy—kinesthetic or otherwise—only went so far. Instead she granted such spectatorial powers chiefly to Mrs.
Ramsay. As an embodiment of Woolf ’s mother, Julia Stephen, Mrs. Ramsay is both a
keen spectator of human character and an empathetic ear. Add to this the novel’s focus on
painting and perspective, and its stream-of-consciousness style, critical analyses of To the
Lighthouse have rightly focused on the role of vision and rhythm in Woolf ’s prose. What I
am arguing here is that we consider as well how movement operates in the novel, not only
as something observed or heard but also as something felt within the body. Mrs. Ramsay
is not just empathetic; she is kinesthetic. Woolf ’s depiction of her illustrates modernist
dance critic John Martin’s explanation of what happens when spectators observe a dance
performance: “though to all outward appearances we shall be sitting quietly in our chairs,
we shall nevertheless be dancing synthetically with all our musculature” (53). Mrs. Ramsay may be “sitting quietly in [her] [chair]” throughout most of To the Lighthouse, but her
mental processes are strikingly embodied and frequently in motion.8
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
I am indebted to Stephen Pelton and to the Stephen Pelton Dance Theatre’s dance production it was this:
it was this: (2009) for motivating this project. Inspired by Woolf ’s use of punctuation in To the Lighthouse,
the dance builds a movement-based grammar from the passage in which Charles Tansley, accompanying
Mrs. Ramsay on her errands in town, “realized that it was this: it was this:—she was the most beautiful
person he had ever seen” (TTL 18).
Susan Jones, in her discussion of dance in The Voyage Out, notes that Woolf may have been “alluding to a
contemporary vogue for improvisation in dance” as exemplified by Isadora Duncan and others (186).
According to Catherine Parsonage, “the earliest jazz ‘song’ contained in the British Library sheet music
collection was included in Box o’ Tricks (1918)” (13).
As Rishona Zimring explains, “Woolf ’s interest in authentic working-class culture only went so far” (712).
I am grateful to my student Mary Locher for bringing Mrs. McNab’s inebriation to my attention.
Susan Jones argues that “the unselfconscious ‘free’ style achieved by solo dancers such as Loïe Fuller…,
Isadora Duncan…, and Maud Allan…may also have prompted Woolf to consider the metaphorical liberation of her narrative strategies from a more restricted form of realism associated with the Victorian and
Edwardian novel” (186-87). Conversely, Rishona Zimring, whose article on Woolf and dance brought
this “single mention of Isadora Duncan” in Woolf ’s autobiographical writings to my attention, explains
that “Bloomsbury (perhaps with the exception of Maynard Keynes) did not turn to the female dancer
[including Duncan] for inspiration” (711). For an in-depth discussion of Duncan’s influence on modernist
aesthetics, see Carrie Preston’s “The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan and Modernist Performance.”
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
128
7.
8.
See Haller, “Virginia Woolf and Dance” 457; “Her Quill” 226. For a nuanced discussion of Duncan’s
influence on Fokine, see Souritz 108-115.
My point is in keeping with Susan Jones’s observation, about Woolf ’s oeuvre more broadly, that one of the
ways Woolf uses dance in her writing is “to suggest an alternative to the Cartesian separation of mind and
body” (171).
Works Cited
Bailey, Peter. “Conspiracies of Meaning: Music-Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture.” Past and Present
144.1 (1994): 138-70.
——. Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure. Philadelphia: Open UP, 1989.
Bedells, Phyllis. My Dancing Days. London: Phoenix House, 1954. Internet Archive. Web. 27 May 2011.
Duncan, Isadora. The Art of the Dance. 1928. Ed. Sheldon Cheney. New York: Theatre Arts Books,1969 .
——. My Life. Garden City: Garden City Publishing, 1927.
Foster, Susan Leigh. “Kinesthetic Empathies and the Politics of Compassion.” Critical Theory and Performance.
Revised ed. Ed. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007. 245-58.
Franko, Matt. Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
Garafola, Lynn. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Oxford: OUP, 1989.
Haller, Evelyn. “Her Quill Drawn from the Firebird: Virginia Woolf and the Russian Dancers.” The Multiple
Muses of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane Gillespie. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993. 180-226.
——. “Virginia Woolf and Dance.” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie
Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. 455-74.
Humm, Maggie. “Beauty and Woolf.” Feminist Theory 7.2 (August 2006): 237-54.
Jones, Susan. “Virginia Woolf and the Dance.” Dance Chronicle 28 (2005): 169-200.
Jowitt, Deborah. Time and the Dancing Image. New York: William Morrow, 1988.
“Kinaesthesis.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1989. Online version. Sept.2011. Web. 27 May 2011.
“Kinesics.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1989. Online version. Sept. 2011. Web. 27 May 2011.
“Kinetic.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1989. Online version. Sept. 2011.Web. 27 May 2011.
Koritz, Amy. Gendering Bodies/Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-Century British Culture.
Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.
Lepecki, André. “Inscribing Dance.” Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Ed.
André Lepecki. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2004. 124-39.
Light, Alison. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury. New York:
Bloomsbury Press, 2008.
Martin, John. Introduction to the Dance. New York: Norton, 1939.
Martin, Randy. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Practice. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.
Moore, James Ross. An Intimate Understanding: The Rise of British Musical Revue 1890-1920. Ph.D. Thesis.
University of Warwick, 2000. Web. 27 May 2011.
Parsonage, Catherine. The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880-1945. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.
Preston, Carrie. “The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan and Modernist Performance.” Modernism/modernity
12.2 (April 2005): 273-89.
Russell, Dave. “Varieties of Life: The Making of the Edwardian Music Hall.” The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on
Performance and the Stage. Ed. Michael Booth and Joel Kaplan. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. 61-85.
Scott, Bonnie Kime. “The Subversive Mechanics of Woolf ’s Gramophone in Between the Acts.” Virginia Woolf in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Pamela Caughie. New York: Routledge, 1999. 97-114.
Siegel, Marcia. The Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance. Berkeley: U of California P,1985.
Souritz, Elizabeth. “Isadora Duncan and Prewar Russian Dancemakers.” The Ballets Russes and Its World. Ed.
Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. 97-115.
“What Is Kinesthetic Empathy?” Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy. The Watching Dance Project, U of Manchester, 2006. Web. 27 May 2011.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 1. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth Press, 1983.
——. “From Alpha to Omega.” The Nation and the Athenaeum. 20 Dec. 1924: 443.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt, 1978.
——. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Ed. Mark Hussey. New York: Harcourt: 2005.
Zimring, Rishona. “‘The Dangerous Art Where One Slip Means Death’: Dance and the Literary Imagination in
Interwar Britain.” Modernism/modernity 14.4 (Nov. 2007): 707-27.
BUT WOOLF WAS A SOPHISTICATED OBSERVER OF FASHION…:
VIRGINIA WOOLF, CLOTHING AND CONTRADICTION
by Claire Nicholson
T
he scholar or common reader does not have to look very far to find Virginia
Woolf making conflicting statements on clothes and fashion. Her diary records
how, in May 1926, she finds a visit to her dressmaker the “most enjoyable of
proceedings” and confesses to “a lust for lovely stuffs” (D3 86), but just a few weeks later
she “sinks to the depths of gloom” and declares herself “unhappy as I have been these ten
years” due to criticism of her hat (D3 91). Observing Woolf ’s volatile relationship with
dress, Ethel Smyth noted “what is amusing is her loving to cut a dash…to put on a smart
gown…and then despising herself for it” (Stape 41).
In another diary entry clothes become the dominant worry in a chaotic and comprehensive list of her current anxieties: “the inane pointlessness of all this existence…; contempt for my lack of intellectual power; society; buying clothes;…terror in the night of
things generally wrong in the universe; buying clothes; how I hate Bond Street and spending money on clothes” (D4 102-103). Only a week later, after attending a dinner party she
was able to claim “last night I conquered my profound trepidation about my clothes…
on the doorstep…I fluctuated and shivered, like a blown candle flame, but when I came
in and found only…grubby…Rex Whistler, why have I dressed at all I asked” (D4 104).
Her appearance provoked conflicting opinions from those who knew her. Rebecca
West recalled how Virginia and her sister Vanessa “looked as if they had been drawn
through a hedge backwards before they went out” (Noble 90), whereas Elizabeth Bowen
recalled how Virginia wore her clothes “with very great flowing charm” (Noble 47-8).
Leonard Woolf considered his wife’s sartorial habits to be unique: “she had a flair for
beautiful, if individual dresses” he recalls in his autobiography, before acknowledging that
to the crowd in the street there was something in her appearance which would provoke
laughter and ridicule. In pondering the cause he thinks it had much to do with her demeanour and movement, but it was also “partly that her dress was never quite the same as
other people’s” (BA 28-9).
Woolf ’s deployment of clothing in her fiction has attracted increasing attention in
recent years. Lisa Cohen, Randi Koppen, Jane Garrity and other critics have noted how
Woolf uses clothes within her fiction to evoke modernist tensions of surface and depth, of
appearance and reality. Clothes for Woolf ’s characters can act as vehicles for self-construction, as signifiers of cultural resistance, and as a means of contemplating the boundary
between the self and the other. This subtly assured use of clothing in her fiction has been
held in counter-balance to her own problematic sartorial practice. Catherine Gregg’s study
Virginia Woolf and Dress Mania: the Eternal and Insoluble Question of Clothes (2010) explores Woolf ’s self-confessed “clothes complex,” tracing its origins to her Victorian childhood and adolescence. The word most often applied to Woolf ’s relationship with clothing
is “ambivalence”; indeed, Woolf herself uses this term when recording two hectic days
spent in London in December 1939. After a shopping expedition where she was “tempted
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to buy jerseys and so on” she states “I dislike this excitement. Yet enjoy it. Ambivalence as
Freud calls it (I’m gulping up Freud)” (D5 249).
In the same year Woolf had been revisiting her complex associations with clothing
when writing “A Sketch of the Past” and it has been suggested that here lies the origin of
Woolf ’s “fundamentally ambivalent relation to dress” (Garrity 195). Whilst I concur with
the idea that Woolf held conflicting responses of love and hate towards the whole question of clothing and self-presentation at the same time, I believe the term “ambivalence”
may obscure or even diminish the sophistication and subtlety of her observations on the
powerful language of clothes and the pleasure she sometimes took in it. My point is that
Woolf ’s perception of dress is not tailored to fit the neutral tones of ambivalence, but is
more properly suited to the bolder lines of contradiction.
This paper will explore Woolf ’s positive and pleasurable experiences with dress in
fabric as well as in print. I begin with her sartorial observations in the novel Mrs Dalloway
(1925) and related short stories. I will then place these fictional fashion choices in context
with Woolf ’s own sartorial experiences during the period in which she showed a particularly heightened interest in clothing and which saw a marked evolution in clothing styles,
the decade from the early 1920s to 1930s.
Woolf ’s powers of observation have long been acknowledged. As Alex Zwerdling
states, “From her earliest years she had specialised in the art of noticing” (12) and in one
of her last diary entries she reminds herself to mark Henry James’ advice, “Observe perpetually” (D5 357). Whilst I make no claim that Woolf was an avid follower of fashion
in the Alice-in-Wonderland sense of running fast to stand still, which is the futile enterprise of being “in fashion,” she was certainly capable of showing an appreciation for the
aesthetic dynamic of dress. For example, she describes a dress made for the stylish Mary
Hutchinson by the American designer, Charles James as “like that cold dish at Fortnums,
all white with black dice, or Christabel’s hall, or like anything that’s symmetrical, diabolical and geometrically perfect. So geometric is Charlie James that if a stitch is crooked,
the whole dress is torn to shreds; which Mary bears without wincing” (L5 158). This is
matched by her undisguised admiration for a gown worn by Ottoline Morell: “I must
spare a phrase for the sealing wax green of Ottoline’s dress. This bright silk stood out
over a genuine crinoline. She did control the room on account of it” (D2 19-20). These
observations demonstrate sensitivity in visual response to shape and colour worthy of the
Post-Impressionist concept of significant form.
Self-observation, however, was more problematic. Her diary is full of sharp criticism of
her own appearance and often she berates herself for the vanity of falling prey to these “trivial
concerns.” She reveals her anxiety when acquiring new clothes, such as this entry in February
1940: “I suffered from my clothes complex acutely buying 2 new sets of clothes, & being
persuaded into a blue striped coat by an astute and human woman at Lewises. ‘But I want
you to have this – I don’t want you just because you’re in the country, to fling on anything.
You’ve got to think of others’ she said, as if she guessed all my private life – queer: she seemed
genuine. Of course, I looked like a shaggy, dowdy old woman” (D5 269).
Her self-perception as sartorial failure is belied by her astute use of selective clothing
detail in her fiction, and nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Mrs Dalloway’s
gloves. As we all know, the 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway grew out of a short story “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street” published in 1923, and the opening sentence “Mrs Dalloway said
Clothing and Contradiction
131
she would buy the gloves herself ” is altered in the novel to replace “gloves” with “flowers.” I am indebted here to Mark Gaipa whose incisive essay “Accessorizing Clarissa: how
Virginia Woolf changes the clothes and the character of her lady of fashion” (2009) charts
the implications of that substitution. The word “herself ” implies the errand could be delegated to someone else—probably her maid, Lucy—but the purchase of flowers is a more
plausible candidate for this than gloves.
As Clarissa recalls in the short story, “a lady is known by her gloves and her shoes”
(151) and her gloves signify her social position: they symbolize the material trappings
that separate her from working women; they insulate her from direct sensory contact;
they’re expensive; they are the badge of a lady of leisure. But it is not glove-wearing itself
that is significant, it is the immaculate fit that carries the true mark of distinction. Woolf
knows the importance given to correct fit when purchasing gloves; in the story she shows
each customer striving to achieve it. One customer “rose very sadly and took her bag, and
looked at the gloves on the counter. But they were all too large – always too large at the
wrist” (CSF 151). Miss Anstruther demonstrates the tightness of the pair she tries on by
splitting a seam (152). The gloves Clarissa wears on her shopping trip have been stretched
by her jewellery, and the snug fit of the new glove she tries on requires powder to ease it
into place. Although mail-order gloves were available in England as early as 1907, sizing
was not fully standardized until the late 1920s, hence there was no real substitute for visiting the glove-shop in person to achieve the desired close fit.
In the light of this, Clarissa’s observation of Lady Bexborough sitting in her carriage
in Bond Street carries the sartorial sign of reduced circumstances: “The white glove was
loose at her wrist” (150). Clarissa’s critical eye has already been demonstrated with her
bemusement at another woman she sees before entering Bond Street: “No! No! No! Clarissa smiled good-naturedly. The fat lady had taken every sort of trouble, but diamonds!
orchids! At this hour of the morning! No! No! No!” (149). But here her judgement of
sartorial bad taste is explicit; the loose fit of a glove carries a more subtle meaning, the reduction in circumstances possibly accompanied by the suggestion that Lady Bexborough
has lost weight, or is reduced to wearing old, stretched gloves (it was usual practice for a
woman in Lady Bexborough’s position to purchase new gloves each year at the start of the
summer social season in London). Mark Gaipa’s analysis of this story reveals Clarissa to be
trapped by a “numbing high-class fashion sensibility” (24); her identity as a lady of fashion
fits her like a glove. Her quest to achieve perfectly fitting gloves (like the pre-war French
gloves with pearl buttons she remembers) suggests a desire to return to the buttoned-up
Edwardian fashions of the secure and peaceful era before war broke out. As her mind turns
to the sacrifices made by countless young men in the conflict Clarissa equates post-war
existence with the triumph of once again finding correctly-fitted gloves: “Thousands of
young men had died that things might go on. At last! Half an inch above the elbow; pearl
buttons; five and a quarter [her glove size]” (153).
Woolf ’s handling of sartorial matters in the novel which grew out of this short story
reveals Clarissa as a more sympathetic character. The evolution of this character from
story to novel, from a woman “hemmed in by fashion sensibilities” to the person who
repairs her own evening dress, follows the direction taken by women’s clothing in the early
1920s; from Edwardian restrictive styles to looser-fitting, more relaxed, youthful dress,
and the rise of ready-to-wear clothing. At her party Clarissa achieves that sense of social
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ease which Woolf termed “frock consciousness” (D3 12), denoting the perfect synthesis of
body, mind and garment. The use of this term in her diary in April 1925, shortly before
the novel was published, is prompted by her being photographed for Vogue, and ushers in
a period when Woolf has an increasing engagement with the fashion world.
Perhaps the best illustration of “frock consciousness” is when Clarissa, as hostess, escorts her most important guest, the Prime Minister, around the room. In her silver-green
mermaid’s dress “she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the
moment” (154). We are not given a precise image of the dress, but it exemplifies her social
success. And other guests, too, achieve this heightened sartorial state: “Nancy, dressed at
enormous expense by the greatest artists in Paris, stood there looking as if her body had
merely put forth, of its own accord, a green frill” (157).
But Woolf ’s own “frock consciousness” has been compared with the sartorial humiliation suffered by Mable Waring, the protagonist of one of the short stories based on various guests at Mrs Dalloway’s party, written after the novel.1 In “The New Dress” (1927)
Mabel’s attempt at being economical and original by getting her dressmaker to produce an
unusual, antique-style dress becomes an embarrassing failure when she is ridiculed at the
party. This has been compared to the humiliation described by Woolf when her new outfit
and hat, bought on the recommendation of the editor of Vogue, Dorothy Todd, is criticised by Clive Bell: “Clive suddenly said, or bawled rather, what an astonishing hat you’re
wearing! Then he asked where I got it. I pretended a mystery; tried to change the talk, was
not allowed & they pulled me down like a hare; I never felt more humiliated’ (D3 91).
The hunting imagery reinforces the depth of her despair. However, the humiliation
suffered at the hands of Clive is actually transformed into triumph the following day when
she bumps into him, accompanied by Mary Hutchinson, whereupon the same outfit is
“praised to the skies” (D3 91). Woolf received advice from Mary on the use of cosmetics
and she acknowledged her as an authority on “clothes sense,” though she recognised that
Mary’s perfect elegance did not provide protection from criticism. Revelling in her own
ability to rise above the dictates of fashion, Woolf uses Mary as an illustration of how the
perfectly fashionable woman sets herself up for destruction.
I played a funny trick. I had no hat. Bought one…in Oxford Street: green felt;
the wrong coloured ribbon; all flop like a pancake in mid-air…I wanted to see
what happens among real women if one of them looks like a pancake in mid-air.
In came the dashing Mrs Montague. She started. She positively deplored me.
Then hid a smile. Thought Ah what a tragedy! Liked me even as she pitied me.
Was puzzled. & Finally conquered. You see, women can’t hold out against this
kind of flagrant disavowal of all womanliness. They open their arms to the flayed
bird in a blast; whereas, the Mary’s of this world, with every feather in place, are
pecked, stoned, often die, every feather stained with blood—at the bottom of
the cage. (L3 471-2)
It is interesting to note how Woolf sees herself as the victor in this scenario, and Mary as a
victim. But to return to Woolf’s Todd-endorsed outfit, just three days before Clive’s criticism
she had worn the same coat, dress and hat at Garsington, and the many photographs of her
taken by Ottoline Morrell on this occasion confirm it as a fashionable success. Shortly after
Clothing and Contradiction
133
she writes to Vita “Vanity compels me to admit that I should cut a very fine figure, in Todd’s
dress” (L3 281) so clearly her pleasure in dress was not confined to observation.
When Woolf became involved with fashion adviser Dorothy Todd, on whose recommendation she bought the outfit worn at Garsington, her reaction was “I tremble & shiver
all over at the appalling magnitude of the task I have undertaken – to go to a dressmaker
recommended by Todd, even, she suggested, but here my blood ran cold, with Todd” (D3
78). But I have come across an instance of Woolf placing herself in the very same position
as Todd, just a few years later.
Some years ago I met Nadine Marshall, a splendid, lively woman in her nineties,
with whom I developed a close friendship and visited often. She was the sister-in-law of
Frances Partridge, being married to her older brother, Tom Marshall, and through him
she met members of the Bloomsbury Group. When I asked her about her wedding she
showed me a photograph of the occasion in July 1934, and described the outfit she wore
made from pale lime-green crepe de Chine, trimmed with navy and white spotted silk and
accessorized with her mother’s fox fur. When she told me the outfit was made by Ronald
Murray, a young Scottish designer, I enquired whether this was her mother’s dressmaker,
knowing her mother had been considered a very stylish woman. She replied, “Oh no, I
was recommended to him by Virginia Woolf. She set up the appointment for me and took
quite an interest. She was very pleased with how it all turned out.”
So in the spirit of contradiction, I conclude with this example of someone most unexpected; Virginia Woolf’s fashion protégé. Woolf could advise a twenty-three year-old on
the most important outfit of her life in 1934, the same year in which she described her own
complex about clothes as “dress mania.” The observations of sartorial detail in her fiction are
subtle and suffused with meaning; she read the language of clothes and used it to inform her
reader, to identify with the pleasures and complexities of dress. But it was not mere observation; she knew how to indulge in sartorial pleasure, in fabric, as well as in fiction.
Note
1. See Gregg 8.
Works Cited
Gaipa, Mark. “Accessorizing Clarissa: How Virginia Woolf Changes the Clothes and the Character of her Lady
of Fashion.” Modernist Cultures 4 (2009): 24-47
Garrity, Jane. “Virginia Woolf and Fashion.” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.195-211
Gregg, Catherine. Virginia Woolf and “Dress Mania”: the Eternal & Insoluble Question of Clothes. London: Cecil
Woolf Publishing, 2010.
Noble, Joan Russell. Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries. Ohio UP,1972.
Stape, J. H. Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995.
Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again (Autobiography vol. 3). London: Hogarth Press, 1964.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway London: Hogarth Press, 1925.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann.
New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-1980.
——. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (ed. Susan Dick) London: Hogarth Press, 1985
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984.
Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf in the Real World. London: U of California P, 1986.
BI-SEXING THE UNMENTIONABLE
MARY HAMILTONS IN A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN:
THE TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES OF UNINTENDED PREGNANCIES
AND CALCULATED CROSS-DRESSING
by Vara S. Neverow
V
irginia Woolf states in A Room of One’s Own (1929) “For we think back through
our mothers if we are women,” immediately asserting: “It is useless to go to the
great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure.
Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quincey—whoever it may be—
never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted
them to her use. The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own
for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully” (75, my emphasis). The narrator
does not mention Henry Fielding in this list of male British literary luminaries or anywhere else in the essay. Since, like most of Woolf ’s published work, A Room is about what
is cleverly not said and what cannot be said directly without undesirable consequences, I
argue that by not mentioning Fielding Woolf indicates she has “learnt a few tricks [from
him] and adapted them to her use,” with particular reference to one of the three unmentioned Mary Hamiltons who haunt Woolf ’s essay.
In the second paragraph of A Room, the nameless narrator mentions three well-known
Marys, saying, parenthetically, “call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by
any name you please—it is not a matter of importance” (5, my emphasis), a phrase with a
shrug similar to “whoever it may be” above. The speaker suggests any surname will do as
long as the given name is Mary; but, when the narrator of A Room, with a rhetorical wink,
says “by any name you please” (5), she hints that we may also call her “George,” as in Hamilton.1 Using Fielding’s narrative strategies as a template for A Room, Woolf slyly reveals
she has “lift[ed] something substantial from him successfully,” revising Fielding’s work by
writing in a similarly evasive and euphemistic style to protect “delicate ears” (Fielding 23).
The “George” mentioned above is Dr. George Hamilton, born Mary Hamilton. Both a
historical figure and the protagonist of Henry Fielding’s heavily fictionalized, anonymously
published 1746 pamphlet, The Female Husband: Or The Surprising History of Mrs Mary,
Alias Mr George Hamilton, Taken from Her Own Mouth Since Her Confinement, Hamilton
achieved notoriety when she was, as Caroline Derry notes, “arrested in 1746 and charged
under the Vagrancy Act 1744 with ‘imposing upon his Majesty’s subjects’” after her wife,
Mary Price, “made public complaint” (595). Hamilton, a lesbian who by cross-dressing
successfully passed as a man and a doctor, had married multiple women (possibly as many
as fourteen, according to some contemporary sources), garnering the privileges of a man’s
life until she was exposed as an imposter, tried for her transgressions, imprisoned, sentenced
to six months of hard labor and publically flogged in four market towns.
Many Woolf scholars have noted that the narrator of A Room, by naming the three
Marys, evokes another missing Mary Hamilton.2 Lynne T. Hanley explains the connection in her 1984 article:
Truth and Consequences
135
The three Marys figure in an old English [sic] ballad narrated by a fourth, Mary
Hamilton,…awaiting execution for bearing the King’s child. The opening lines
of the ballad succinctly pronounce her doom.…Since each of the three Marys
appears in Woolf ’s text—Mary Seton presides over custard and prunes at Fernham; Mary Beton provides the legacy which, to her niece, is so infinitely more
important than the vote; Mary Carmichael writes the novel in which Chloe likes
Olivia—we can assume that Woolf takes the name—and the fate—of the fourth
Mary to be her own. (426)
Jane Marcus’s “Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction” (1987), Krystyna Colburn’s
“Women’s Oral Tradition and A Room of One’s Own” (1995), and Jane Goldman’s3 The
Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (2006) also discuss the Mary Hamilton named
in this Scottish ballad.4
Albert H. Tolman in his 1927 PMLA article discusses the ambiguous iterations of
this particular Mary and her ballad, generally known as “The Four Marys,” the “Fower
Maries,” or, eponymously, “Mary Hamilton.” In the version Joan Baez sings, the ballad
ends with Mary Hamilton stating: “Last night there were four Marys; / Tonight there’ll
be but three: / There was Mary Beaton and Mary Seton / And Mary Carmichael and
me,”5anticipating her impending execution for infanticide. In most versions, this Mary
Hamilton is a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Scots. Helen Child Sargent and George
Lyman Kittredge in their 1904 selection of ballads from Francis James Child’s five-volume
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898) note: “The ballad purports to relate
the tragic history of one of the queen’s Maries.…The ballad seems to have taken its rise in
an incident which occurred at Mary’s court in 1563, which involved the queen’s apothecary and ‘a French woman who served in the queen’s chamber.’ There is also a striking
coincidence between the ballad and the fate of a Mary Hamilton who, in the reign of Peter
the Great, was one of the attendants to the Russian empress” (421).
Marcus links the disastrous pregnancies of these two Mary Hamiltons to the untoward fate of Woolf ’s Judith Shakespeare, the imaginary sister of the bard, who similarly suffers for her heterosexuality. As the narrator in A Room observes, soon after “Nick Greene
the actor manager took pity” on Judith Shakespeare, “she found herself with child by that
gentleman and so—who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when
caught and tangled in a woman’s body?—killed herself one winter’s night” (111).
In “Sketch of the Past,” Woolf assiduously avoids direct statements, relying on hints,
insinuations, euphemisms, allusions, and other devious rhetorical maneuvers that are
partly based on her own “tea-table training”6 (MOB 150; see Neverow “Woolf ’s Editorial
Self-Censorship” and “Freudian Seduction”), but also mimics and mocks the calculatedly
elusive, yet salaciously suggestive rhetoric of Henry Fielding. Woolf ’s subtle writing strategies have been misinterpreted. Eve Patten, in April 2011, reviewing the final volume of
Virginia Woolf ’s essays, edited by Stuart N. Clarke, overlooks Woolf ’s witty insider jokes,
remarking: “Throughout her life Woolf…wrestled with the style of her critical writing,
hindered by an instinctive politeness—her ‘tea-table training’, she called it—that held
back her pen. She rarely matched the best of her contemporaries…Woolf too often simply
overwrote, lumbering herself with verbiage she didn’t really need.”
But Woolf does not suffer from “an instinctive politeness,” nor does she “h[o]ld back
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
her pen” because of a lack of derring-do. Instead, as her narrator in A Room states quite
explicitly, she is “afraid of the lash” (89). This phrase can be viewed metaphorically, evoking fear of public humiliation, yet implicit in this choice of terminology is a very different
kind of writing—specifically that of scarification.
While Woolf ’s narrator fears the lash, Fielding’s narrator in The Female Husband savors its succulence as a titillated spectator enjoying Hamilton’s whippings: “those persons
who have more regard to beauty than to justice, could not refrain from exerting some pity
toward her, when they saw so lovely a skin scarified with rods, in such a manner that her
back was almost flead” (23). Though the narrator mimes compassion, he actually expresses
sadistic pleasure (see Finlay 159). As Emily Bowles argues: “Hamilton’s body is overwritten
with signs of transgression that, Fielding suggests, have aesthetic and erotic meaning to
her readers. She becomes a site of desire and an alternative to the codified norms of sexual
and textual order. But she also literally transforms from a sexual agent into a text that corresponds to Fielding’s ideas about poetic justice.…The story written on her skin is not her
own, impressed on her as it is by scarifying rods, but her body continues to write it” (15).
Marcus seems to be the earliest Woolf scholar to refer to Fielding’s pamphlet,7 stating:
“There was, however, another historical Mary Hamilton, whose story may have surfaced
during the meetings regarding the defense for the Radclyffe Hall trial, which both Virginia and Leonard attended” (179). This Mary (or George) never suffers the discomforts
and dangers of pregnancy or gives birth, nor is she executed or commits suicide. Two of
the three Mary Hamiltons—and the ill-fated Judith Shakespeare as well—are literally
destroyed by their embodied femaleness. They dare to enjoy the pleasures of their bodies
but cannot escape the dire consequences of child-bearing out of wedlock.
Unlike the others, the third Mary Hamilton thwarts the potentially fatal “creativity
of her female body” (Hanley 426). This Hamilton enjoys her own sexuality and offers her
multiple wives a satisfying alternative to the dangers of heterosexual intercourse. When a
recalcitrant wife tells her female husband, “you have not—you have not—what you ought
to have,” Dr. Hamilton, unsuccessfully attempting to assuage spouse’s anxiety, promises:
“she would have all the pleasures of marriage without the inconveniences” (Fielding 15).
These “inconveniences” cause the untimely deaths of the other Mary Hamiltons and Judith Shakespeare. Bonnie Blackwell describes Dr. Hamilton’s solution, her “‘infallible
nostrum’” (60; Fielding 14), as a “medicine of secret composition” (60), a prosthetic substitute for male genitalia (see Castle below).
Woolf was certainly familiar with the Four Marys of ballad fame since Leonard Woolf
references the Scots ballad tradition in his 1914 The Wise Virgins (Marcus 174). Woolf
would have had access both to Francis James Child’s five-volume work, The English and
Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898), and to Sargent and Kitteridge’s 1904 volume quoted above. Possibly, Woolf might have read Tolman’s 1927 article while researching the
Four Marys for her argument. But more importantly, could she have had access to Henry
Fielding’s extremely scarce pamphlet, The Female Husband?
In 1920, J. Paul de Castro wrote an article, “The Printing of Fielding’s Works,” that
included the publication history of The Female Husband. Relying on Wilbur L. Cross’s
1918 Fielding biography for identification of the anonymous work, de Castro indicates
at first that no print version of the work exists (261), but adds a note in which he states:
“Since the above was written, I have discovered a copy of ‘The Female Husband.’ It
Truth and Consequences
137
consists of 23 pages, and is the report of a case heard at Wells Quarter Sessions. It is a
vividly written account of a Manx girl who…travelled through Devon and Somerset in
male attire as a doctor. While in Devon she married two women consecutively and then
decamped.…[I]n Wells she there married a young girl…but was shortly after identified as
a ‘wanted person’ [and]…was committed to Bridewell” (“The Printing” 270).
In 1921, de Castro wrote another brief article, “Fielding’s Pamphlet, ‘Female Husband,’”8 published in the periodical Notes and Queries. Now in possession of a copy of the
pamphlet, de Castro speculates that Henry Fielding wrote the work for financial gain,
that Fielding’s first cousin (identified as Henry Gold both in this article and in the note
from the previous article)9 heard the case against Hamilton, that Fielding may have been
present at the trial “seated among counsel,” and that, therefore, he may actually have
witnessed Mary Hamilton’s testimony. Given this possibility, de Castro suggests that, “as
was stated on [Fielding’s] title-page,” the information was actually “‘taken from her own
mouth’” (185).
Sheridan Baker, in his landmark 1959 PMLA article, “Henry Fielding’s the Female
Husband: Fact and Fiction,” contends that Fielding did not attend Hamilton’s trial or
“interview the prisoner” and “was not present at the trial” (219). Regarding the actual
artifact—the pamphlet itself—Baker observes that, as of 1959, one of four surviving copies of Fielding’s pamphlet was listed in the British Museum catalogue.10 I have confirmed
that the pamphlet was accessioned in 1926, five years after de Castro published his second
article. Since the British Museum acquired the document during the same period that
Woolf herself (as opposed to her narrator) was researching “all that men have written
about women” (AROO 27) for A Room, it seems possible that Woolf may have actually
read this particular pamphlet.
There are actually two anonymous versions of the pamphlet—the one published in
1746 during Henry Fielding’s lifetime and the other republished in 1813, with significant
alterations. It seems unlikely that Woolf ever saw or heard of the 1813 edition. It differs
in content from the earlier version, being far more salacious, and boasts a lurid color frontispiece depicting a platform where a portly fully-clothed man whips Mary Hamilton (restrained by the wrists and stripped naked to the waist while wearing trousers) as another
man in judicial garb and wearing spectacles looks on with apparent interest. He stands
next to a man dressed, perhaps, as a squire. Below the platform, the hoi-polloi watch the
quasi-theatrical scene. This pamphlet is not listed in the British Library or any other major
libraries to which Woolf might have had access, though a copy is in the collection of the
New York Public Library and was also a featured item on the Antique Roadshow (http://
http://
www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/200201A06.html;;11 for those who are interested
www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/200201A06.html
in seeing the NYPL image of the frontispiece and title page, the permanent web link is
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?PS_CPS_CD5_069).
This image from the NYPL is also included in Adrienne L. Eastwood’s article, “Surprising Histories: A Comparison of Two Pamphlets,” published in 2007 in Notes and
Queries. Eastwood examines the differences between Fielding’s 1746 pamphlet and the
far more explicit 1813 variant “published anonymously under the title The Surprising Adventures of a Female Husband!, [and] retain[ing] some of Fielding’s prose, [though] many
alterations have been made” (491). She also observes that “Baker was the first to write
about this text in 1959” (491 n4), oddly neglecting to mention de Castro’s 1921 Notes
138
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
and Queries article. As Eastwood concludes, “in the comparison of these two pamphlets,
we can see a demystification of female homoerotic behaviours that sensationalizes these
behaviours—possibly for a more exclusively male audience and for different (primarily
pornographic) purposes” (496). One must speculate that this slackening restraint of expression offered opportunities to male writers, but did not apply to Woolf or any of her
female peers even in the subsequent century.
In his article, Baker rigorously investigates the life of the historical Mary Hamilton.
According to his research, she was born in Somerset, moving when still young to Angus County, Scotland. Baker states, “at fourteen, leaving home in her brother’s clothes,
she entered a[n]…apprenticeship as a quack doctor” (213) and, continuing to wear men’s
clothing, began her own business using the nomenclature Dr. George Hamilton. As Terry
Castle12 observes, “cross dressing was a direct if risky way for a woman to escape those
constraints…imposed by rigid sex roles” (606). Castle describes Fielding’s narrative not just
as a “lesbian picaresque” (605) but as a cautionary tale (see 609) intended to discourage
women from passing as men or exploring same-sex relationships.
Marcus, aligning the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness with A
Room, perhaps goes a bit too far in arguing that “the heroine of the essay, Judith Shakespeare,
[is] Radclyffe Hall, and the unnamed Mary (Hamilton) of the old Scots ‘Ballad of the Four
Maries,’ speak[s] in the voice of Mary (Llewelyn), Stephen Gordon’s lover in The Well of
Loneliness” (163). I would suggest instead that, by donning Dr. George Hamilton’s identity, the narrator of A Room (not entirely playfully) also tries on the garb of Dr. Hamilton,
modeling not just Radclyffe Hall’s attire but Orlando’s outfits after her sex-change and, by
association, Vita Sackville-West’s cross-dressing costumes. The cross-dressing motif of The
Female Husband has such strong resonances with Orlando’s own eighteenth-century sexual
adventures that it seems Woolf integrated it into the narrative. Her cautionary phrasing in
A Room regarding Sir Chartres Biron and Sir Archibald Bodkin eavesdropping on women’s
privacy (see Marcus 166) replicates Orlando’s Sapphic visits with Nell, Prue, Prue Kitty and
Kitty Rose, who “had a society of their own of which they now elected her a member” (O
160, my emphasis). “[A]lways careful to see that the doors are shut and that not a word of it
gets into print,” these eighteenth-century women are about to speak of what “All [women]
desire,” when “the gentleman took the very words out of our mouths”(O 160), just as Fielding claims to do in the title of The Female Husband. The narrator also mocks the fictitious
but very Fielding-esque “Mr. S. W.” who believes “‘when women lack the stimulus of the
other sex, women can find nothing to say to each other’” and “Mr. T. R. [who] has proved…
‘that women are incapable of feeling affection for their own sex’” (O 160, my emphasis).
A Room suppresses the naming of Mary Hamilton in any of her manifestations and
echoes the ambiguous and suggestive style of Fielding’s The Female Husband, a narrative in
which absolutely nothing is said explicitly. Regarding the 1746 pamphlet, in “‘So Lovely
a Skin Scarified with Rods’: Modern Notions in Fielding’s The Female Husband,” Emily
Finlay remarks: “critics have often noted the scarcity of the lines Fielding allows Hamilton,
[but] I would argue that this silence, like the absence of description regarding her [sexual]
equipment, both forces the issue of Hamilton’s sexuality to the forefront of the text and positions her as the erotic object of the sadistic male gaze. The latter is evident in the relish the
narrator takes in describing instances of the partial unveiling of Hamilton’s body” (159).
Finlay highlights the narrator’s arousal as he describes an incident in which: “Hamilton,
Truth and Consequences
139
dancing with her fiancé[e], becomes involved in a quarrel. A man ‘seizing [her] violently
by the collar, tore open her waistcoat and rent her shirt’ [Fielding 20]. The narrator then
describes Hamilton’s breasts as ‘beyond expression beautiful’ [Fielding 20]” (Finlay 301).13
Given Woolf ’s subtly playful, suggestively sly style, it seems feasible that she modifies
Fielding’s tricks to make her points and counters his patriarchal views by endorsing her
own Sapphism and the expression of female sexual desire, teasing her readers much in the
same way Fielding tantalized his. Whether the narrator is making insider references to The
Well of Loneliness obscenity trial or using ellipses to represent the intimate relationship
between Chloe and Olivia, the same strategies are evident in The Female Husband, where
ellipses and dashes are rife—see the “you have not” passage (15) marking the absence of
Mary Hamilton’s sexual “wherewithal” (12).
When Fielding declares, probably facetiously, that Mary Hamilton was born on the
Isle of Man (see Baker 223), most Woolfians immediately think of the ambiguously sexual
tail-less “queer” and “quaint” Manx cat (AROO 11)14 which evokes associatively how Dr.
George Hamilton compensates for the lack of a “tail.”15 In A Room, Woolf writes: “as I
watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe,
something seemed lacking, something seemed different.…The tailless cat, though some
are said to exist in the Isle of Man, is rarer than one thinks. It is a queer animal, quaint
rather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes” (11). Similarly exploring what seems to be missing, Castle observes: “Hamilton’s dildo—for that is what one
must assume is signified by the none-too-mysterious “wherewithal” in the foregoing passage—reappears later on as that “something of too vile, wicked, and scandalous a nature”
discovered in her “trunk” and produced in evidence against her” (609).
Woolf ’s choice of the word “quaint” (an obvious variant on “cunt”) aligns with
Fielding’s coded sexual terminology in the crudely written letter from Mary Price to her
suitor, Dr. Hamilton. Price is “determin’d [to] be so distant and cool, that the woman of
the strictest virtue and modestly in England might have no reason to be asham’d of having
writ it” (Fielding 18); however, the letter itself, as Finlay observes, “is composed of puns,
which contribute to the metaphorical chain [of sexual allusions in the narrative]. ‘Kan
nut’ and ‘Kuntry’ instantly evoke ‘cunt,’ while ‘cummand’ plays on ‘cum,’ designating
the letter as the space of explicitly female sexuality” (164). From a different perspective,
Bowles notes that Dr. Hamilton’s object of desire, Mary Price, “actually wants a lover who
does not have what he ‘ought to have’” (34, my emphasis).
Pairing the Manx cat’s missing tail and the narrator’s fear of the lash invokes a complicated associative reference to whips. As the narrator reads Mary Carmichael’s fictitious
novel, Life’s Adventure16 she alerts abruptly and pauses, saying ominously: “then I went on
very warily, on the very tips of my toes (so cowardly am I, so afraid of the lash that was
once almost laid on my own shoulders”) (AROO 89, my emphasis), noting later that Carmichael would have to face “her trial to take her fence” (AROO 92, my emphasis). The lash
is explicitly linked to the judiciary and its power to punish (thus evoking Dr. Hamilton’s
four public whippings). The second reference is less obvious. Metaphorically it tests Carmichael’s skills in “writing” (AROO 92, my emphasis) but embedded in the same phrase is the
legal term “trial” (AROO 92)—evoking again the judicial system and its punitive authority.
Aligning A Room with Dr. Hamilton’s actual fate surfaces in Woolf ’s references to
the newspaper industry, a consummate representation of the patriarchal control of society
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
140
and, concomitantly, the legal control of women. As Bowles observes, Dr. George Hamilton “achieved tabloid celebrity status while in prison but then disappeared from historical
records” (15), for Hamilton’s fate was amplified by newspapers before she was forgotten.
Centuries later, Woolf’s narrator in A Room finds, in the “lunch edition of the evening paper,” the same sensationalism as that of the newspapers of Fielding’s and Dr. Hamilton’s era:
I began idly reading the headlines.…Mr Justice—commented in the Divorce
Courts upon the Shamelessness of Women.…A film actress had been lowered
from a peak in California and hung suspended in mid–air.…The most transient
visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be
aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a
patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the
professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He was…the
Foreign Secretary and the judge. (AROO 33)
Woolf’s reference to “testimony” (linguistically and historically linked directly to male
“wherewithal”) and to exclusion of women from positions of power are subtle reminders of
Dr. George Hamilton’s fate as chronicled in the newspapers, the judicial system, Fielding’s
1746 The Female Husband, and the anonymous 1813 redux, The Surprising Adventures of
a Female Husband! Countering the patriarchy, the anonymous narrator of A Room of One’s
Own obliquely but insistently defends the autonomy of all women, channeling Dr. George
Hamilton, the cross-dressing female husband, who suffered both physical injury and public
humiliation for enjoying the liberties accorded to men and for loving women.
Notes
As Sheridan Baker notes the “factual Charles Hamilton…become[s] Fielding’s George” (213, emphasis in text).
Multiple variants of the Marys’ names include the spellings Beaton and Seaton. Marcus observes that Woolf,
on 27 April 1928 (L3 487), “wrote to Vita Sackville-West ‘I rang you up just now, to find you were gone
nutting in the woods with Mary Campbell, or Mary Carmichael or Mary Seton, but not me’” (209 n1).
3.
In “‘Ce chien est à moi’” (2007), Goldman writes: “In one version of the…‘Four Maries’ Ballad, Mary
Hamilton, whom Woolf pointedly elides and leaves unnamed, sings from the gallows of ‘This dog’s death
I’m to die’” (102).
4.
Erik Fuhrer’s article, “A Woolf in Priest’s Clothing” explores intriguing religious references embedded in
Woolf ’s discussion of the Marys in A Room of One’s Own.
5.
In this version, Mary Hamilton is executed in Glasgow. All three of the Mary Hamiltons have a connection
to Scotland.
6.
The term appears in “A Sketch of the Past,” where Woolf refers to how her “tea-table training…allow[ed]
one…to slip in things that would be inaudible if one marched straight up and spoke out loud” (148).
7. Marcus (68) relies on Lillian Faderman’s inaccurate assertion in Scotch Verdict: “Fielding found [Hamilton]
guilty of marriages to three woman and ordered her whipped publically” (180). Evidence does not support
the view that Fielding tried, convicted or sentenced Hamilton.
8.
Some versions cite the title in quotation marks.
9.
Fielding’s first cousin is variously identified as Henry Gold (see de Castro, “The Printing” 30; “Fielding’s
Pamphlet” 84-85), Henry Gould (see Castle 604) and David Gould (Donoghue 74).
10. Baker does not specify the provenance of the British Museum item.
11. The story of The Female Husband was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 play of the same name, starring comedian
Sandi Toksvig.
12. Strangely, Jane Marcus does not cite Castle’s work in “Sapphistry,” though the article is contemporary with
her research and highly relevant to her argument.
13. Footnotes used in Finlay’s article are replaced with page references.
1.
2.
Truth and Consequences
141
14. De Castro refers to Mary Hamilton as “a young Manx girl” (“The Printing” 270).
15. See also Marcus 173 regarding the cat’s attributes. (The Manx cat has been discussed extensively by many
scholars—see, for example, Briggs 225-26.)
16. Carmichael’s book is aligned not only with the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness but
with Marie Stopes’s controversial Love’s Creation published under her birth name Marie Carmichael rather
than her married name (Marcus 175-76; see also Goldman, Cambridge 97).
Works Cited
Blackwell, Bonnie. “‘An Infallible Nostrum’: Female Husbands and Greensick Girls in Eighteenth-Century England.” Literature and Medicine 21.1 (Spring 2002): 56-77.
Bowles, Emily. “You Have Not What You Ought: Gender and Corporeal Intelligibility in Henry Fielding’s The
Female Husband.” Genders OnLine Journal 52 (Dec. 2010). Web. Accessed 10 January 2012 <http://www.
genders.org/g52/g52_bowles.html>.
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. New York: Harcourt, 2006.
Castle, Terry. “Matters Not Fit to Be Mentioned: Fielding’s The Female Husband. ELH 49.3 (Autumn 1982): 602-22.
Colburn, Krystyna. “Women’s Oral Tradition and A Room of One’s Own.” Re: Reading, Re: Writing, Re: Teaching
Virginia Woolf: Selected Papers from the 4th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Eileen Barrett and
Patricia Cramer. New York: Pace UP, 1995. 59–63.
De Castro, J. Paul. “The Printing of Fielding’s Works.” The Library series 4-1.1 (June 1920): 257-70.
——. “Fielding’s Pamphlet, ‘Female Husband.’” Notes and Queries Series 12-VIII (151) 5 March 1921. 184-85.
Derry, Caroline. “Sexuality and Locality in the Trial of Mary Hamilton, ‘Female Husband.’” King’s Law Journal
19.3 (2008): 595-616.
Donoghue, Emma. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
Eastwood, Adrienne L. “Surprising Histories: A Comparison of Two Pamphlets.” Notes and Queries (Dec. 2007):
490-96.
Faderman, Lillian. Scotch Verdict: Miss Pirie and Miss Woods v. Dame Cumming Gordon. New York: Columbia
UP, 1994.
Finlay, Emily. “‘So Lovely a Skin Scarified with Rods’: Modern Notions in Fielding’s The Female Husband.” Déjà
Vu: antiTHESIS 17 (2007): 154-70.
Fielding, Henry. The Female Husband: Or The Surprising History of Mrs Mary, Alias Mr George Hamilton, Taken
from Her Own Mouth Since Her Confinement. Oxford Text Archive. June 1, 2011.
Fuhrer, Erik. “A Woolf in Priest’s Clothing: Female Prophecy in A Room of One’s Own.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany
80 (Fall 2011): 10-11.
Goldman, Jane. “‘Ce chien est à moi’: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog.” Woolfian Boundaries: Selected Papers from the Sixteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Clemson: Clemson U Digital P, 2007. 101-07.
——. “‘Ce chien est à moi’: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog.” Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007): 49-86.
——. The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006.
Hanley, Lynne T. “Virginia Woolf and the Romance of Oxbridge.” The Massachusetts Review 25.3 (Autumn
1984): 421-36.
Marcus, Jane. “Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction.” Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 163-87.
Neverow, Vara. “Freudian Seduction and the Fallacies of Dictatorship.” Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the
Dictators’ Seduction. Ed. Merry Pawlowski. NY: Palgrave, 2001. 56-73.
——. “Woolf ’s Editorial Self-Censorship and Risk-Taking in Jacob’s Room.” Virginia Woolf and the Literary
Marketplace. Ed. Jeanne Dubino. New York: Macmillan, 2010. 57-72.
Patten, Eve. “Virginia Woolf ’s Battle with Her Tea Table Training.” Irish Times, 2 April 2011. Web. Accessed 10
January 2012 <www.irishtimes.com>
Sargent, Helen Child and George Lyman Kitteridge, eds. English and Scottish Popular Ballads Edited from the
Collection of Francis James Child. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904.
Tolman, Albert H. “Mary Hamilton: The Group Authorship of Ballads.” PMLA 42.2 (1927): 422-32.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Introduction and annotations by Susan Gubar. Gen. Ed. Mark
Hussey. New York: Harcourt, 2005.
——. Orlando. 1928. Introduction and annotations by Maria DiBattista. Gen. Ed. Mark Hussey. New York:
Harcourt, 2006.
——. “Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. 2nd ed. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt, 1985. 61-158.
LACANIAN ORLANDO
by Katharine Swarbrick
F
or many years the work of Virginia Woolf has attracted perceptive psychoanalytic
interpretation from a variety of perspectives. When Makiko Minow-Pinkney first
offers an in-depth account of the relationship between Woolf ’s texts and the preoccupations of continental psychoanalysis in 1987, the stage is set for radical insights and
debate. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject remains a key text in terms of presenting the framework in which such insight and debate has unfolded. Woolf ’s aesthetic and
feminist concerns entail the deconstruction of a hegemonic masculine discourse whose
structure and effects are seen as represented, indeed endorsed, by Lacanian theory. Lacan’s
Symbolic order, the bedrock of language and culture, is supported by the signifier of the
phallus, through which man, as bearer of the phallus, asserts a monosexual control of the
Symbolic domain. Feminist writing is, of necessity, a protest against this domain, to which
all subjects accede through their assumption of the Oedipus complex. As such feminism’s
attempt to recover and communicate what has been severed from the Symbolic register
often involves a circumvention of Oedipus or a return to an earlier stage. Minow-Pinkney,
as a feminist critic focusing Woolf ’s construction of a feminine perspective, highlights
the importance of the work of Julia Kristeva who is central to her analysis of Woolf ’s
novels. Kristeva forefronts the significance of a primary pre-Oedipal stage repressed by
phallocentricity. The Imaginary and the maternal lie at the heart of Kristeva’s semiotic
modality and constitute a new means, for Minow-Pinkney, of understanding Woolf ’s
feminist aesthetics.
A focal point in the discussions that follow is Woolf ’s endorsement of the writer’s
mind as androgynous. Woman is ideally placed in this respect being simultaneously both
inside and outside the Symbolic domain. From this position she subverts the phallocentric
ideology which, for critics of Lacan, structures his theories concerning speaking subjects.
Minow-Pinkney reminds us that there are dangers in thinking of this androgyny as merely
“difference.” She cites Stephen Heath who points out in The Sexual Fix that the idea of
female androgyny can simply re-emerge as the term which designates the feminine as not
man, not phallic, re-establishing the status quo. Brenda Helt further emphasises in her
article “Passionate Debates on ‘Odious Subjects’” the complexity of Woolf with regard to
issues of androgyny and sexual identity. Helt argues we must remain alert to the strategies which Woolf uses to dissociate desire from actual gender, and, at another level of the
sexual debate, to resist seeing her work as pitting homosexual against heterosexual desire.
What emerges from this framework is an initial view of Lacanian theory which
whether it is seen as prescribing, or merely describing, the status quo, presents a phallocratic, repressive system. What ensues next is the fear of an impasse which threatens
to close down the possibility of moving beyond the binary phallic/not phallic, which is
interpreted as lying intransigently at the heart of that system. Have we attributed at the
outset too great a rigidity to aspects of Lacanian theory which might be far more useful in
highlighting these crucial subtleties contained in Woolf ’s work than originally thought?
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143
In the study which follows I aim to revisit aspects of Lacan as a means of testing whether
that theory can, after all, serve such a purpose. To this end, I shall focus on one particular
Lacanian concept, jouissance, which bears a close affinity with Woolf ’s literary representations of desire. In a joyous moment in Orlando (1928), a text at the core of her ideas on
sexuality and desire, she tells us that our bisexual protagonist “enjoyed the love of both
sexes equally” (O 211). What can Orlando’s enjoyment tell us about psychoanalysis, the
feminine, and the projects of Woolf in general?
Jouissance, the French term, commonly rendered as enjoyment, has a stronger sense
than its translation implies. Freud conceives it as energy, a force which originates in the
erogenous zones of the body, and strives toward discharge in its pursuit of an object of
satisfaction imagined in a multiplicity of forms. For Lacan, jouissance cannot be so clearly
defined. Impossible to articulate or represent, even by means of the rigours of mathematical calculus as energy can, jouissance is related to Lacan’s order of the Real, an ineffable
dimension beyond the Symbolic and Imaginary manifestations of words and images. The
drive toward jouissance is consequently doomed to repeated failure, as this location of
jouissance renders it impossible to reach. Lacanian jouissance can thus only be understood
as highly localised or residual; whether it is contained within the circumscribed limits of
phallic enjoyment or tied to the rims of the erogenous zones, it is productive only of an
enjoyment which is partial, curtailed, transitory. At this point the idea of the dominance
of the phallus already comes under threat, in that the phallus is marked by failure. The
subject nonetheless maintains the sense of an absolute enjoyment, a horizon beyond reach
where the idea of complete jouissance takes the form of madness, death or the realisation of
incestuous relations. On the borders of the text Orlando, this horizon expresses itself distinctly in a sustained thematics of death which leaves Orlando “in love with death” (226)
as a boy, and as a woman “desirous only of meeting death by herself ” (247); this obsession
is matched by energetic bids to seize the quintessence of life “What’s life we ask…Life,
Life, Life!” (258), which in its absoluteness, shares the same horizon as death.
A further means by which the speaking subject strives to keep alive the possibility of
reaching absolute jouissance is to invest the phallus with the capacity to signify enjoyment
in this sense. At this point we see how the phallus has come to be endowed with monolithic power despite the truth about the limits it dictates to jouissance. This attribution of
power to the phallus is not a supposition of the masculine alone, but also characteristic of
the feminine subject who in terms both of sexual satisfaction, and wider social freedoms,
is subject to significantly greater constraints than her masculine counterpart. Woolf ’s Orlando has spawned such an interpretation in the French text Orlanda (1996), a humorous
rewriting of Woolf by Belgian author and psychoanalyst, Jacqueline Harpman. Harpman’s
text, as I shall discuss, allows us to see with particular clarity certain conceptions of jouissance at work, whose orthodox alignment with commonly held assumptions regarding
masculine and feminine sexuality affords us a re-reading of Woolf ’s text which illuminates
all the complexity of the latter at the level of sexual enjoyment.
Harpman’s text is the story not of a boy who becomes a woman, but of a woman
who usurps the body of a young man. The repressed sexuality of Aline, rational, respectable, heterosexual academic, travels into the body of Lucien, a stranger she crosses at the
Gare du Nord, and who becomes the sudden, random host of Aline’s imprisoned libido.
Lucien is not chosen for any individual quality, but for his sex alone, and is summarily
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
transformed into a hybrid persona of feminine desire and masculine body named Orlanda. Once inside Lucien’s body, Aline embarks on an orgy of jouissance focused around
the sexual organ of Lucien and targeting the phallus of other potential masculine partners.
Orlanda’s first act is to masturbate with unbridled satisfaction and his second is to seduce
a man on the train to Brussels as he embarks on a career of unrestrained promiscuity
and immediate pleasure. Meanwhile the devitalised body of Aline continues to live her
conventional life until the point at which Orlanda meets Aline and the two protagonists
initially play out the mythical scenario of Aristophanes in which two severed halves of an
originally undivided body unite in complementary and blissful harmony. This short-lived
state of affairs is succeeded by Aline’s realisation that the unscrupulous pleasure machine
must go; she murders Lucien, and, reabsorbing her escaped libido, returns to life as a
woman with renewed sexual purpose. Harpman’s role as a psychoanalyst, suggests that we
interpret this outcome as the therapeutic modification of a feminine subject whose highly
repressed sexuality has been allowed recognition and expression. Nonetheless, the surface
events suggest that it is the phallus, whose properties are embodied in the organ of the
penis, which remains the key to sexual satisfaction. The masculine subject is presented
as in undisputed possession of these. As such Orlanda exemplifies the impasses to which
psychoanalytic readings of sexual identity as phallic/not phallic give rise—and Lacan is
often made to answer for them.
However, close readings of Lacan point to a quite different conception of the phallus.
Lacan’s theory insists first and foremost on the phallus as a signifier, removing its essentialist association with the male genital. Next Lacan insists that this signifier is lacking: there
is no signifier of jouissance because jouissance cannot be represented. Crucially, as a signifier (and one which is missing) the phallus is something with which the Lacanian subject,
masculine or feminine, can only identify, a position of subjectivity which underlines its
lack of identity with the phallus. It follows that no subject can master or possess the phallus, whilst the type of identification which the masculine subject maintains with it accords
him only the limited satisfaction of the erogenous zone. All these structural impossibilities
which act as a bar to absolute enjoyment highlight the lure of the latter as a powerful neurotic fantasy which lies at the core of Harpman’s fiction and numerous others.
What of Woolf ’s Orlando in this respect? It will be clear from the outline of the text
Orlanda above, that Orlando presents jouissance in quite a different way. Let us consider
the early reference to the oak tree, an image which endures throughout the three centuries
spanned by the text, both in the title of Orlando’s poem, and in the tree on the hill which
appears in the opening and closing pages of the biographical fiction. Orlando flings himself onto the earth at the foot of this tree as a boy of sixteen: “He loved, beneath all this
summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root
of the oak tree to be” (O 18). The hardness of the root, its animate energy which can be
ridden, and the capacity of the oak to signify, through its fecund generation of streams
of images, “the back of a great horse or the deck of a tumbling ship” (19) layers Woolf ’s
figure with connotations of the phallic signifier. Orlando as a subject moors himself to
this root as something external which lends him coherence, “for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to” (O 19). The signifier “oak tree” is a
stable point of identification which, centuries on, serves the same purpose for Orlando as
a woman: “Flinging herself on the ground, she felt the bones of the tree running out like
Lacanian ORLANDO
145
ribs from a spine this way and that beneath her. She liked to think that she was riding the
back of the world. She liked to attach herself to something hard” (309).
Woolf ’s image is crucial. The tree as phallus belongs neither to Orlando the boy nor
Orlando the woman, but remains a common point of reference with which each identifies in subtly different ways. For the boy, the metaphor of the spine is the salient image;
for the woman, the expanding network of ribs characterises its shape. For the boy, the
image of the horse or the ship, concrete and clearly defined, connotes the pleasures afforded by the roots of the oak; for the woman, an image of extended, unlimited freedom
emerges as she “rid[es] the back of the world” (309). Phallic jouissance is connoted here
in the introduction of the oak at the start of the text, but this enjoyment is not presented
as having the monopoly of jouissance as such. Beyond it lies a jouissance intimated in the
final appearance of the oak tree and experienced by Orlando as a woman. Orlando the
boy incarnates this initial phallic jouissance; the aura which surrounds him from the outset
alludes, in its exaggerated colour and beauty, to the magical enchantment, the glamour,
which the phallus radiates onto reality. And Orlando’s beauty expresses this propensity
of the phallic actively to conquer the space around it. “From deed to deed, from glory
to glory, from office to office he must go…Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for
some such career” (14). Phallic enjoyment in Lacanian theory resonates with this connection with enjoyment of the worldly, the material, the gift, the penis. Woolf ’s evocation
of phallic enjoyment highlights consistently the seamlessness between Orlando and the
public space which surrounds him. For Orlando the woman, this above all is the difference between man and woman; the role of writing will be given the task to bridge a gap
which, significant as it is, does not reside in an essentialised, anatomical organ, but in the
forces of social convention.
The boy Orlando’s affinity with the space which surrounds him does not, however,
offer him mastery over sexual pleasure as it does in the case of Harpman’s Orlanda. As
bearer of the phallus he suffers its frustrations. Orlando is unlucky in love, disappointed
in the Clorindas, Favillas, Euphrosynes on offer to him, and abandoned on the night of
the flood by his Muscovite Princess; sexual satisfaction is elusive, spasmodic. His writing
is ridiculed by Nick Greene and his inspiration falters for, “he scratched out as many lines
as he wrote” (108); the pleasure he takes in ownership, in the refurbishment of his vast
mansion, crumbles to nothing; and the refinements of love degenerate into the horrors
of lust as the Archduchess-harpy dispossesses Orlando utterly by driving him from his
home. At this point in the text Woolf indicates unmistakeably the limits of phallic enjoyment within Orlando’s private world and transports him to high office in Constantinople
to test its limits in the very public context of the role of the Ambassador Extraordinary.
Here Orlando is brought to the pinnacle of his worldly achievements and raised to the
“highest rank in the peerage” (121). Phallic enjoyment, enjoyment of the world and all its
resources— beauty, birth, honour—is brought to a climax on the occasion of Orlando’s
investiture as duke on the centre Balcony of the Embassy, where he places the ducal coronet on his head. This climax is no sooner reached than over, as in place of some expected
miracle, chaos ensues; the duke retires summarily only to fall into a death-like sleep of
seven days duration. This bathetic turn of events conveys Woolf ’s humorous illustration of
the conviction that we have gone as far as we can with the body and projects of the man:
it is time to bring on Orlando the woman.
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
If we consider the presentation of Aline in the reading of bisexuality which Orlanda
represents, Woolf ’s feminine reincarnation is incomparably more positive and multivalent. The lady Orlando emerges, not from a process of splitting which renders her lifeless
and unfulfilled, but on the same corporal site of an original self with which she remains
inextricably linked: “Orlando had become a woman there is no denying it. But in every
other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatsoever to alter their identity” (133). The impact of the
figures of Chastity, Modesty and Purity is telling in this respect. Whilst Harpman’s Aline
remains trapped between the allegorical ladies, lamenting the inescapable, respectable decency in which they have shrouded her life, in Woolf ’s text it is the ladies themselves who
lament: “But men want us no longer; the women detest us. We go, we go” (131). Chastity,
Modesty and Purity fail to cover the nakedness of Orlando and henceforth desert their
post forever. They abandon her to remarkable freedoms, “for her sex changed far more
frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive; nor can
there be any doubt that she reaped a twofold harvest by this device; the pleasures of life
were increased and its experiences multipled” (211). For Aline such enjoyment is beyond
reach; she fails as a woman to enjoy the man with whom she lives and, as Orlanda, seeks
only to seduce men, the object choice of the original self, Aline. In this respect the homosexual desire which seemingly drives the erotic life of Orlanda is a superficial disguise.
It is Aline’s libido which dictates the gender of the individuals pursued, and she enjoys
these men as a woman whom fantasy has endowed with a penis. As devitalised woman
or as the fantasy of this sexual hybrid—a woman with a phallus—Harpman’s protagonist
remains convinced that jouissance is fundamentally under the remit of the phallus. It is
this conviction that binds Aline and Orlanda together. On the other hand we are told that
Woolf ’s Orlando, now established as a woman, “enjoyed the love of both sexes equally”
(O 211). She does this, I would argue, from the vantage point of a most sophisticated
understanding of jouissance. For Woolf ’s protagonist, as the figure of the oak tree implies,
the phallus belongs to neither sex and as such defines neither sex entirely. The story of the
boy Orlando highlights the failure of the phallus to represent absolute jouissance, such that
its limits are clearly established. In respect of the feminine, Orlando by no means endorses
the notion of an a priori frigidity in woman dictated by castration; woman is not castrated,
she is woman. Hence the new body of Orlando connotes erotic potential from the start,
for none “has ever looked more ravishing” (132). Orlando is constrained only in terms
of her relation to public space—a problem which the act of writing is set to address. As a
subject she now embraces, “the strength of a man and a woman’s grace” (133), indicating,
I would argue, that she moves at will, not between male and female genders in any literally
performed way, but subjectively between two different forms of jouissance. But how can
this feminine jouissance be understood as something which takes us beyond the familiar
binary phallic/not phallic in which the feminine simply re-emerges as lack?
A way of illustrating this asymmetry between modes of enjoyment is provided in
Lacan’s formulas of sexuation. Lacan’s chapter 7 of Le Séminaire Livre XX, Encore charts
the different modes of jouissance experienced by masculine and feminine subjects (73).
For the feminine subject, using mathematical antinomies based on Kantian logic, Lacan
gives two crucial definitions. The first states there is no woman who is not submitted to
the phallic function; the second, not all of a woman is submitted to the phallic function.
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147
The first statement implies that the phallus functions in the arena of feminine sexuality.
Woman is not devoid of any relation to the phallus, but similarly to the masculine subject,
her relation to it cuts her off from absolute enjoyment and inscribes her within the order
of the Symbolic. This is precisely what the function of the phallus achieves. Unlike the
masculine subject, however, she remains at some level outside the Symbolic since not all
of a woman is submitted to that function. At this level woman subverts the dominance of
the phallus and her jouissance connects with a radical otherness which lies outside the field
of language, and by extension, knowledge. This otherness, however, cannot be defined as
a lack, or a complementarity, or a binary opposite; it cannot be designated as “different
to”; it cannot be labelled a dark continent which stands ready for epistemological penetration; in short it cannot be defined as anything which puts it in some position relative
to the phallus. This otherness emerges as absolute—as otherness as such. The logic of
mathematical antinomies is the key to understanding this place occupied by the feminine
which ultimately indicates a dimension beyond the reach of experience as it appears to
us. To fall under the aegis of the Symbolic which supports and grounds perceptual reality
entails our experience of the world as located in space and time. To introduce the category
of “not-all” entails that a world in which all phenomena can be objects of experience does
not exist. Feminine jouissance lifts the limit on the totalised, finite world and points to a
place where Symbolic and Real meet.1
Let us be clear that the experience of feminine jouissance is not tied to gender; it
cannot be for the reason that Lacanian psychoanalysis charts two unconscious subjective
positions, not two genders, and notes that these positions cannot be tied to anatomical
males and females. Psychoanalysis’s use of the term “woman” implies a subject who, at the
level of the unconscious, has taken up the feminine position. As such feminine jouissance
is open to a biological male who chooses the position of the feminine subject. It is also
paramount to observe that phallic and feminine jouissance do not dictate the choice of an
erotic attachment even in terms of a particular object, still less in terms of an object which
might be characterised as heterosexual or homosexual. The object cannot be prescribed.
Let us return to Orlando’s story in respect of these subtleties.
Since Lacan charted feminine jouissance it has become equated with feminine sexuality as such and we have tended to overlook the fact that the feminine position encompasses two relations to jouissance, one phallic and one, as Lacan calls it, supplementary;
this choice itself indicates a further difference with masculine jouissance as, for the latter,
the phallic function remains the only option. Orlando the woman is a robust illustration
of this choice. The interminable legal process which attempts to determine her sexual
identity may be read as a metaphor for the manner in which the feminine both eludes
and experiences the full impact of castration. The axe falls so infinitely slowly that it never
makes its incision; yet the axe has always already fallen and Orlando has always been a
woman. The significance that Woolf ’s text attributes to the house and its contents, to Orlando’s lovers, to her marriage and her enjoyment of Mar/Bonthrop/Shel, to the birth of a
child, to department stores, and motor-cars which Orlando drives “[m]asterfully, swiftly”
(O 300), testifies to her capacity for phallic enjoyment. These are far from being whimsical
details. Beyond these worldly symbols, however, lies her connection with something beyond, a vanishing point where the world becomes indeterminate, impossible to symbolise.
It is a connection expressed in significant images as the text draws to a close. Orlando’s
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experience on the banks of the Serpentine is striking in this respect. The toy boat on the
ripples of the pond becomes, in its intimate connection with her husband as Bonthrop,
the brig on which he sails in its perilous ascent of great walls of Atlantic waves. Its link
to the masculine, to the absent husband, and its function in navigating and charting the
currents of infinite forces which support it, points to the boat as a representation of the
phallus which cannot signify jouissance but merely mark it out. The boat/brig fully points
out the limitless forces which swell around it at the moment it disappears as an object of
perception and passes into a beyond which Orlando can only intimate with the exclamation “Ecstasy!” (274). The term is Orlando’s breathless attempt to convey the jouissance of
an otherness which lies beyond; which is not other in terms of any conceptual quality to
which we may compare it, but an otherness which resides in itself.2
A later image which intimates this otherness is that of the multitude of selves; a succession or sequence of selves which knows no end: “For she had a great variety of selves to
call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered
complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as
many thousand” (294-5). The world, and the self, as Orlando knows, can never be fully
finalised, totalised. There is no self of hers that is not a possible experience, but not all selves
are possible to experience as we do not have room for them all in representation. Again the
unending chain of selves goes hand in glove with feminine sexuality as the jouissance which
goes beyond; the multiple selves are a means by which Woolf expresses the crucial logic of
sexuation which states that not all of a woman is submitted to the phallic function. We are
now in a position to appreciate fully Woolf’s choice of phrases as indicating the privileged
position of the feminine subject, simultaneously within and outwith the Symbolic, when
we read her reference to Orlando as being of the age whilst remaining herself (254), and her
“truth” that “when we write of a woman everything is out of place” (297-8).
In conclusion, Woolf ’s literary anticipation and transposition of the logic of the
feminine structure of sexuation proposed by Lacan is striking. Focusing the detail of this
transposition is an exercise which can be of assistance in avoiding the reductive impulse
to characterise masculine and feminine as phallic/not phallic; it likewise counters the
reductive impulse to tie subjectivity to gender; and it further confounds the reader’s attempts to see the homosexual and heterosexual as pitted against each other. The logic of
sexuation further opens the new possibility of reinterpreting the feminine in its relation to
the border of the Symbolico-Real rather than envisaging its unique route of escape in an
Imaginary pre-Oedipal situation. Woolf ’s fiction yet again proves to be a key unlocking
multiple doors to an infinite sense of possibilities for readers of all sexes.
Notes
1
2
For a more detailed discussion of Lacan’s Kantian formulae please consult Derek Hook’s “Lacan’s Kantian
Logic of Sexuation” to whom I am indebted for my understanding of points of this argument.
Woolf scholars have analysed this episode in Orlando in ways which are both intriguingly similar and different to my interpretation—see in particular Minow-Pinkney 138-9.
Works Cited
Harpman, Jaqueline. Orlanda. Paris: Grasset, 1996. Trans. Ros Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.
Lacanian ORLANDO
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Heath, Stephen. The Sexual Fix. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Helt, Brenda. “Passionate Debates on ‘Odious Subjects’: Bisexuality and Woolf ’s Opposition to Theories of
Androgyny and Sexual Identity.” Twentieth Century Literature 56.2 (Summer 2010): 131-167.
Hook, Derek. “Lacan’s Kantian Logic of Sexuation.” The Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research
19 (2009): 89-117.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. 1781. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1990.
Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire Livre XX, Encore. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975.
Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. Brighton: Harvester P, 1987.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. 1928. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.
THE BISPECIES ENVIRONMENT, COEVOLUTION, AND FLUSH
by Jeanne Dubino
We will get by, we will get by, we will get by, we will survive.
—The Grateful Dead, “Touch of Grey”
…somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there,
she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive,
of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as
it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the
people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees
lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.
—Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
T
he first headnote, clearly, puns on the prefix “bi” in the title. The “by” in “Touch
of Grey” is linked to survival—we will get by, as the Grateful Dead repeat, and
add, as an almost redundant coda, we will survive. In Mrs Dalloway the freefloating narrator links survival—but after death, not in life—to trees. It is through our
tree-like linkage—our branching out—to other people that we survive. Trees are, or can
be, a lattice, a network. Woolf here suggests that our survival is dependent on this kind
of network. It is not just through a one-on-one, binary connection, that we continue on
after death, but rather through a mesh of multiple connections. And the Grateful Dead
acknowledge this multiple dimension of survival too. The refrain beginning “We will get
by” is repeated throughout the song as “I will get by”; the first-person pronoun changes to
“we” only in the very last line of the song.1
This notion of survival through a complex system is an integral part of Darwinism.
Darwin’s emphasis on an “inextricable web of affinities” (Darwin 415) is highlighted now
by many scientists who hope to suggest the complexities of evolution through the use of
the term “coevolution.”2 Coevolution is conceived of in multiple ways, but for the sake of
this essay I will define it as the way “two interacting species or groups of species change
in response to each other” (Vermeij 219). Coevolutionary approaches, as the sociologist
Myra Hird writes, “consider selective pressures as more involved with each other, more
enmeshed” (740). Coevolutionary histories “privilege species interdependence” (McHugh
160). Though “co” might suggest binary, coevolution is not binary, but rather heterogeneous. As the environmentalist Anders Pape Møller writes, coevolution involves “interactions among interactions”; scientists thus recognize that “any single case of interaction
between two parties may be affected by an entire range of additional interacting factors”
(180). Scientists who work within the framework of coevolution often include a consideration of the ecosystem in which these interactions take place; indeed, some conceive of coevolution as the interaction between the species and their environments.3 All
would agree that these interactions among species, and among species and their environments, are multi-directional (Haraway, “Encounters” 112). As Donna Haraway colorfully
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151
characterizes the coevolutionary scene, “living critters form consortia in a baroque medley
of inter- and intra-actions” (“Encounters” 112).
Humans, of course, are part of what Haraway calls this “bestiary of agencies” (Companion 6). Carrie Rohman highlights Darwin’s genius in linking human life species with
other animal forms (22). Myra Hird reinforces humans’ symbiotic relationship with the
world—we must, she concludes in “Coevolution, Symbiosis and Sociology,” learn from
this “‘filthy lesson’ of our connection with the world” (740). In Flush we see how Elizabeth Barrett learns this “‘filthy lesson’” from her excursion to Whitechapel, and that she
never forgets the connection between the worlds of the underground and her own ultrarespectable Wimpole Street:
They were in a world that Miss Barrett had never seen, had never guessed at.
They were in a world where cows are herded under the bedroom floor, where
whole families sleep in rooms with broken windows; in a world where water
is turned on only twice a week, in a world where vice and poverty breed vice
and poverty. They had come to a region unknown to respectable cab-drivers.…
In this mysterious world a cab with two ladies could only come upon one errand.…It was sinister in the extreme.…This, then, was what lay on the other
side of Wimpole Street—these faces, these houses. (F 94-95; emphases added)
But Flush is replete with other worlds—webs of worlds. In Darwin’s Plots Gillian Beer
notes that web in Victorian England referred not to a spider’s web but rather to the weave
of a fabric (168). In Flush, “web” also specifically refers to fabric—when Flush first enters a
shopping arcade he observes “webs of tinted gauze” (F 28)—but more significantly, Flush
is a novel filled with textiles: “gleaming silk,” “ponderous bombazine,” “thin white muslin,” the stuff of skirts and trousers, banners and shawls, tapestry and plush, carpets and
runners, knitting and needlework (F 28, 120, 149, 154, 166, 18, 19, 158, 123). These
webs swooshing around Flush are suggestive of the interwoven worlds within the novel,
and a reminder of Woolf ’s lifelong desire to render the manifold textures of life in all its
plenitude and profusion. In this essay I focus on the life of the natural world. While Woolf
populates Flush with wild and tamed species—a menagerie of cats and lions and tigers,
partridges and parrots and rooks, elephants and fish and fox, black beetles and blue bottles, hares and fleas, and dogs— purebreds and mixed breeds, generations of greyhounds
and of course breeds of spaniels—I will consider the interconnections and links she makes
among only a few of these animal families.
In an earlier paper on Flush I had considered the image of the chain—as in a dog on a
chain, and Woolf ’s use metaphor of the “chain of love”—an image used to expose the constrictions binding the Victorian world, and to parody the Victorian urge to connect, only
connect (see Dubino). Yet Woolf is at the same time more subtle than the overt use of the
chain would suggest. In Flush she portrays other ways species are linked together, and how
these links shift. While her focus, in this feeling-filled novel, is on the emotional bonds,
she also represents the physical ways species connect to each other. Scientists hypothesize
the many ways species coevolve together. The ecologist Geerat Vermeij explains four of
the dominant hypotheses: predator-prey, competitors, host-guest, and mutual beneficiaries (this last is also termed symbiosis). The zoologist James Thomson complicates this
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
taxonomy with his term “diffuse evolution” (52), whereby a species can “function as a mutualist in some ecological circumstances and as a parasite in others” (52). Other scientists4
would agree that relationships shift. The marine biologist Charles Veron states simply,
“‘everything is always on its way to becoming something else’” (Holland 53). Woolf ’s
genius lies in her understanding of the myriad shades and degrees of relationships—and,
here, more specifically, of bispecies affiliations. It is almost as if she were anticipating the
way scientists have teased out the coevolutionary dimensions of Darwinian thought. In
the rest of my paper I will examine four instances of these shifting relationships in Flush.
Predator-Prey
The first page of the novel introduces the first of these relationships, or the predatorprey: “where there is vegetation the law of Nature has decreed that there shall be rabbits;
where there are rabbits, Providence has ordained there shall be dogs” (F 3). Within this
one sentence Woolf not only sets forth the “life-dinner principle” (Vermeij 227), she illustrates the way beings do not preexist their relating.5 At the same time Woolf parodies
the notion of divine intervention: Providence here does become the means by which beings enter into “co-constitutive relationships” (Haraway, Companion 12). This particular
relationship, as Vermeij reminds us, is an asymmetrical one; success for the prey—escape
from the predator—means life, or survival, while capture means injury or death. Failure
for the prey, on the other hand, may mean just waiting that much longer to acquire a
meal, and possibly, ultimately death if too much time passes before it can eat again (Vermeij 227). Clearly, in Flush, the predator—the Spaniel—does prevail, and does go on to
propagate and develop into lines and families (e.g. “the Clumber, the Sussex, the Norfolk,
the Black Field, the Cocker, the Irish Water and the English Water”; F 5). Woolf does not
tell us what happened to the hares; by implication, they seem to have vanished. 6 Later,
when Flush is in London, he dreams of hares—but then opens his eyes to the harsh reality
that “[t]here [are] no hares”; they have been displaced by the Victorian world in which
Elizabeth Barrett lives, with “only Mr. Browning in the armchair talking to Miss Barrett
on the sofa” (59).
But Woolf would never settle for just an easy eat-or-be-eaten relationship; she complicates it in her portrayal of Flush himself chasing after hares in Three Mile Cross. Here
she reminds us of how “plants and animals interact in much more sophisticated and intricate ways than nonspecialists could imagine from a walk in a field or forest” (Thompson
596). We see that kind of understanding in Flush as well in his walk with Mary Russell
Mitford early on in the novel:
The cool globes of dew or rain broke in showers of iridescent spray about his
nose; the earth, here hard, here soft, here hot, here cold, stung, teased and tickled the soft pads of his feet. Then what a variety of smells interwoven in subtlest
combination thrilled his nostrils.…But suddenly down the wind came tearing
a smell sharper, stronger, more lacerating than any—a smell that ripped across
his brain stirring a thousand instincts, releasing a million memories—the smell
of hare, the smell of fox. Off he flashed like a fish drawn in a rush.…He forgot his mistress; he forgot all humankind.…He raced; he rushed. At last he
The Bispecies Environment
153
stopped bewildered; the incantation faded.…And once at least the call was even
more imperious; the hunting horn roused deeper instincts, summoned wilder
and stronger emotions that transcended memory and obliterated grass, trees,
hare, rabbit, fox in one wild shout of ecstasy. Love blazed her torch in his eyes;
he heard the hunting horn of Venus. Before he was well out of his puppy-hood,
Flush was a father. (12-13)
Preceding Flush’s flight after the hare is a foreplay of an orgiastic sensory intermingling
of textures and smells, followed by a lightning-like bolt of predatorial instinct shooting
through his brain and releasing atavistic, prehistoric memories of the chase, but then
arousing yet deeper instincts and resulting in his survival not through a capture of the prey
but rather through his becoming a father and perpetuating the species.
Competitors
While it would seem that the predator in Flush has been supplanted by the lover,7
Flush still has antagonistic relations with a species. This antagonism is manifested not
with hares, which he would simply prefer to chase, but with a rival from another species,
the human. Flush and his challenger, Robert Browning, are not competing for survival,
but rather, in this emotional world, for the attention of another. Woolf complicates and
even mocks Flush’s role here by portraying his competitor—Mr. Browning—as indifferent
to his adversary. As she had with the predator-prey scene that turns into a hunt for love,
Woolf builds up the suspense leading to Flush’s attack on his enemy. Flush can tell that
something dangerous is looming simply by a gesture—by the way Elizabeth picks up a
letter. Inside of him stirs a warning of “some danger menacing his safety” (51). Soon this
danger takes shape; Flush comes to envision a contemporary version of his enemy, who is
not another dog, but a Victorian-looking figure resembling the vampire Count Dracula, a
“man in a cloak,…a cowled and hooded figure” (52). When this figure physically appears
in the shape of Robert, Flush, overcome by feeling, flings himself at target and bites his
trousers. Flush’s attack is met not by an assault in kind, but far worse, by “a flick of the
hand” and not even a beat in the action: Robert continues talking with Elizabeth (63).
The “arms race scenario” that has been used to characterize competition, “with each side
continually deploying new defenses and counterdefenses” (Thompson 596), is quickly
made ridiculous, becoming that of a gnat pestering a giant. Flush’s second attack on Robert is met by the same indifference. Eventually Flush lays down arms (paws, you might
say) and, by the end of the novel, becomes the “best of friends” (117) with his former
rival. In the transformation of this relationship alone we can see an instance of how, to use
the words of the biologist John N. Thompson, “mutualisms…have evolved from initially
antagonistic interactions” (596).
Host and Guest (Pet)
If Flush is similar to a troublesome gnat flicked off by a large member of another
species, he takes on the opposite role in the third of the bispecies relationships: that of the
host-guest, or, less euphemistically, the parasitic. This time, Flush is the host to a plague of
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fleas who successfully torture him; his suffering, wrote Barrett Browning herself, is comparable to “‘Savonarola’s martyrdom’” (133). Flush cannot, of course, as easily flick off his
tormenters as Robert can flick him off; he requires human agency to remove his scourge.
As a pet, he depends on a human for his care. Indeed, in his role as pet, one may argue
that he himself is a parasite—and certainly there are scientists who do. Stephen Budiansky
attributes the dog’s “brilliant evolutionary success” (5) to its parasitic “shrewd adaptation”
(14). He argues that “dogs loom as a huge net biological burden upon mankind, competing for food, diverting vast economic assets in the form of labor and capital, spreading
disease, causing serious injury” (7). No doubt, as the zoologist James Serpell notes, the
costs of pet-keeping alone are “staggering” (12); in 2010 $55 billion was spent on pets
in the US alone (Martin). Flush may have been a gift to Elizabeth, but his maintenance
requires effort on her part—those purple drinking jars and collars cost something. In addition, to save his life when he is kidnapped, she must pay a somewhat sizable ransom,
and, moreover, a price of another kind—a willingness to risk her family’s censure and even
her relationship with Robert.
Mutual Beneficiaries
But this last example—the price she is willing to pay for her dog—shows us that
rather than being a pest, Flush has become a soul mate to Elizabeth: “She loved Flush,
and Flush was worthy of her love” (F 49). They are mutual beneficiaries. In the annals of
dog literature—and by literature I mean the range from the fictional to the scientific—it is
this form of mutualism—the symbiotic relationship between dogs and humans—that scientists and dog experts emphasize rather than the parasitism propounded by Budiansky.
Because the entire plot of Flush is primarily about the relationship between a dog and his
human, it would be difficult to address all the ways that the novel illustrates this mutualism in this short essay. I will rather highlight some of the key features of Flush’s symbiotic
relationship with Elizabeth.
This relationship is above all an emotional one, one reflective of the tie that has bound
humans and dogs together since the earliest beginnings of civilization. Darwin writes in
The Origin of Species, “It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become
instinctive in the dog” (240). The anthropologist Mary Elizabeth Thurston encapsulates
her Lost History of the Canine Race as “Our 15,000-Year Love Affair with Dogs.” Elizabeth
Marshall Thomas, another anthropologist who studies dog and human behavior, argues
that “thoughts and emotions have evolutionary value. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have
them. Thought is an efficient, effective mechanism that we, and many other animals,
would be hard put to do without” (viii). Flush has certainly inherited the mechanism of
thought and feeling; from the beginning of the novel we are told, “Spaniels are by nature
sympathetic; Flush, as his story proves, had an even excessive appreciation of human emotions” (11); “His flesh was veined with human passions; he knew all grades of jealousy,
anger and despair” (133).
Again covering a range of genres and disciplines, the number of dog books testifying
to the way this emotional creature make humans emotional is legion. Linda Hogan et al.
write, “From them we have even learned about love and the depths of community and
familial bonding.…We are animated by animals. Their lives have transformed our lives”
The Bispecies Environment
155
(xi-xii). Vicki Hearne describes the way dogs specifically are “domesticated to, and into,
us, and we are domesticated to, and into, them” (28). Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson believes
that “dogs make us human” (xi); they heighten our “capacity for love” (14). Caroline
Knapp rhapsodizes, in moments, on dogs, who are able to “lead us into…a place that can
transform us” (7). Falling in love with a dog, she continues, is like “enter[ing] a new orbit”
(7). Elizabeth Barrett Browning herself made this claim in her sonnet to Flush; he is one
of those “‘low creatures’” who “‘lead[] to heights of love’” (qtd. in F 160). Flush’s entry
into Elizabeth’s life does momentarily send her out of her grief; in an early scene, when she
is crying, he presses his head against her and looks into her eyes: “Was it Flush, or was it
Pan?,” she thinks, “Was she no longer an invalid in Wimpole Street, but a Greek nymph
in some dim grove in Arcady?…For a moment she was transformed; she was a nymph and
Flush was Pan” (38). In her typical way, Woolf immediately deflates this intensity: “But
suppose Flush had been able to speak—would he not have said something sensible about
the potato disease in Ireland?” (38).
Though Woolf seems to give the lie to dogs’ devotion to their humans in this particular scene, the rest of the novel certainly bears out Flush’s love, as we have already seen in
his one-sided competition with Robert Browning for Elizabeth’s attention. If Flush brings
love to Elizabeth’s life, he is given not just the material well-being he receives in his role
as a pet/parasite, but also love and attention, and he comes to depend on that. The novel
bears out an essential fact of domestication: Mary Elizabeth Thurston notes that “[t]rue
domestication requires the animals to remain beholden to humans” (7). The ethologist
Ádám Miklósi finds that “if dogs have a choice they seem to prefer to join human groups”
(165). That is certainly true for Flush when he is at his most domesticated: “Naturally,
lying with his head pillowed on a Greek lexicon, he came to dislike barking and biting; he
came to prefer the silence of the cat to the robustness of the dog; and human sympathy
to either” (F 47).
But this preference was not without a cost, as Woolf shows; even Elizabeth herself
“was too just not to realize that it was for her that he had sacrificed his courage, as it was
for her that he had sacrificed the sun and the air” (F 48). Woolf would agree with other
ethologists that dog love is not unconditional love.8 As Haraway writes, “A cursory glance
shows that dogs and humans have always had a vast range of ways of relating” (Companion
33). Haraway and others note that being a pet is “a demanding job for a dog, requiring
self-control and canine emotional and cognitive skills matching those of good working
dogs” (Companion 38). Roger Grenier writes that “too close a proximity to humans makes
domestic animals unhappy.…Everything is a sign: a cough, a glance at a watch.…Every
minute carries its ration of anguish” (32). After long years of training in the bedroom
school, Flush has learned to “read signs that nobody else could even see” (F 51). But the
stress on him is intense; his move to Florence gives him leave to break out of this close
proximity, and he is free to roam about the city without the protection of his chain, and so
remind us, as the behavioral ecologist Barbara Smuts writes, that “most dogs are perfectly
capable of negotiating and managing many aspects of their world without us” (124).
Conclusion
There is much more one can say about the subtleties and the permutations of this
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
156
last form of coevolution, including the way dogs and humans are companion species who
break bread together—à la Donna Haraway—and the ways pet-keeping can, as James
Serpell writes (187), make us aware of our biological affinities with other species. Woolf
does treat these dimensions as well in Flush. She hints, for example, at another form of
“beneficial mutualism,” queer knowledges, or a “more inclusive sense of the social as enriched by abundance beyond reproductive calculation” (McHugh 162).
But what I have hoped to do here is conjoin the worlds of literary studies and animal
studies—or, more broadly, the humanities and the sciences—in an effort to enrich our
understanding of literature. Woolf ’s writing in particular is nothing if not, to include a
phrase from Haraway, demonstrative of a “layered and distributed complexity” (Companion 63). To understand this complexity means we need to go to other disciplines, and
to that end I have consulted the work of evolutionary biologists, cognitive ethologists,
sociologists, and other scientists.9 Writes Haraway, “Dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships” (Companion 12), and in studying these relationships,
Anders Pape Møller emphasizes, one needs an integrative approach (181). Edward O.
Wilson calls for a “consilience” of knowledges, or a synthesis of disciplines across the
spectrum, from the humanities to the sciences, to create a new groundwork of explanation (8; see also Nordlund). A coevolutionary approach to literary studies—in this case,
one that analyzes four forms of bispecies relationships—shows how Woolf, ever attuned
to the fluidities, volatilities, and disruptions that are a part of human relationships, was
also sensitive to the ebbs and flows of the patterns of interactions among nonhuman—and
human—animals.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
There are other versions of this song, some of which have the final line of the refrain repeating the firstperson singular pronoun.
See, for example, Blondel, Hird, Laland et al., Møller, Thompson, Thomson, and Vermeij.
For example, according to the “Red Queen hypothesis,” evolutionary changes in a species cause the environment to deteriorate unless the species continues to evolve (Vermeij 220). See also Blondel, who reports
on the ways human societies and Mediterranean landscapes have interacted through the millennia; Laland
et al., who describe how organisms modify their environment; and Stone, who argues on behalf of “dual
inheritance” theory, or the coevolutionary, dialectic interaction of genetic make-up and cultural conditioning, and their effect, in turn, on environment and culture.
For example, see Thompson and Møller.
As Donna Haraway insists throughout her writing on companion species relationships; they are ever “contingent, co-regulated, and creative” (Smuts 115).
In fact, the population of hares in Spain has been considerably diminished; see David and DeMello.
And yet, at the same time, by having him respond to the “hunting horn of Venus” (119) Woolf here
equates the chase after the prey with the chase after the beloved.
Haraway insists that “belief in ‘unconditional love’ is pernicious” (33).
But literary theory certainly provides useful frameworks; for example, Raymond Williams’s notion of
“structures of feeling,” with its emphasis on relations, particularly on the relations, over time, between lived
and felt experience, and “formal and systematic beliefs,” would be another window through to consider
coevolution (Williams 132).
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Systems during the Historic Period.” Human Ecology 34.5 (2006): 713-29.
Budiansky, Stephen. The Truth about Dogs: The Ancestry, Social Conventions, Mental Habits and Moral Fibre of
Canis Familiaris. London: Phoenix, 2002.
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David, Susan E. and Margo DeMello. Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood
Creature. New York: Lantern Books, 2003.
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Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly
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FROM SPANIEL CLUB TO ANIMALOUS SOCIETY:
VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FLUSH
by Derek Ryan
I
n The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) Donna Haraway alludes to A Room of One’s
Own (1929) when arguing that “categorically unfixed dogs”—which we might call “mongrels,” “random bred dogs,” “mixed breeds, or just plain dogs”—need ‘“A Category of
One’s Own”: “Woolf understood what happens when the impure stroll over the lawns of the
properly registered” (88). Although Woolf’s most detailed portrayal of a dog, in her fictional
biography Flush, happens to be of a cocker spaniel, my paper will explore some of the ways in
which this text complicates the relationship between the “properly registered” and “unregistered,” and negotiates the contested, sometimes contradictory, spaces shared by humans and
animals. Over the past fifteen years or so Flush has garnered more critical attention than had
previously been the case, and some of the earliest, most insightful examples include Susan
Squier’s reading of Flush as a “stand-in for the woman writer” (124), Ruth Vanita’s claim
that Flush’s relationship with Barrett Browning works as “a metaphor for the socially created gap between members of the same gender” (254), and Pamela Caughie’s argument that
Woolf’s novel works as “an allegory of canon formation and canonical value” (146). But more
recently critics such as Craig Smith, Dan Wylie and Jeanne Dubino (see her paper included
in this volume) have turned their focus to questions concerning animality in Woolf’s text. As
Smith warns, it is important to move away from allegorical readings which can often betray
an “anthropocentric bias,” where Woolf’s fictional biography is “accepted as a serious object
of study only to the extent that it may be represented as being not really about a dog” (349).
Taking the dog in this text seriously as well as the text itself—therefore worrying over, as Jane
Goldman puts it, “the dogginess of the dog” (“When Dogs Will Become Men” 180)—I am
interested in the ways in which Woolf’s modernist canine experiment anticipates and intervenes in the wider context of our own contemporary debates on the question of the animal in
literary studies, philosophy and posthumanities. Ultimately, I want to claim that Flush details
the ordinary experiences of a dog interacting with humans, but that the text can also be understood as a journey away from hierarchical, essentialist categorisations based on inclusion or
exclusion, and towards a more open, entangled zone of human and animal.
In the opening pages of Woolf ’s novel, the dogginess of the dog is defined by the
exclusive (we might say “properly registered”) organisation of the Spaniel Club:
By that august body it is plainly laid down what constitute the vices of a spaniel,
and what constitute its virtues. Light eyes, for example, are undesirable; curled
ears are still worse; to be born with a light nose or a topknot is nothing less
than fatal. The merits of a spaniel are equally clearly defined. His head must be
smooth, rising without a too-decided stoop from the muzzle; the skull must be
comparatively rounded and well developed with plenty of room for brain power;
the eyes must be full but not gozzled; the general expression must be one of intelligence and gentleness. (F 7)
From Spaniel Club to AnI malous Society
159
Membership of the Spaniel Club (established since 1885 as an offshoot of The Kennel
Club, itself founded in 1873) depends on categorisation based on physiology. It is not
only a question of who is a member and who is not; behind the humour and elegance of
Woolf ’s prose is a matter of life itself: “[t]he spaniel that exhibits these points is encouraged and bred from; the spaniel who persists in perpetuating topknots and light noses
is cut off from the privileges and emoluments of his kind” (7). Perhaps most telling,
however, is the fact that standing at the top of this hierarchy, on only two legs, is always a
human judge “laying down the law, impos[ing] penalties and privileges which ensure that
the law shall be obeyed” (7). Indeed, Linden Peach has pointed out that the Spaniel Club’s
focus on the “pure bred” takes on an added significance when we consider the publication history of Flush—this section of Woolf ’s text appeared in the first installment in the
October 1933 issue of Atlantic Monthly alongside a review of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf
by Alice Hamilton (Peach 203-204).
In contrast to this form of organisation, Haraway—in both The Companion Species
Manifesto and When Species Meet (2008)—argues that it should never be a question of one
species or Being having control over another, but rather multiple stories of cross-species
entanglements: her preferred term, “Companion Species”, “is less a category than a pointer
to an ongoing ‘becoming with’” (When Species Meet 16-17). As Susan McHugh explains,
it is a term used “to inscribe people, animals, places, and technologies in relations that at
their best inspire an ongoing sense of curiosity and reciprocity” (159). Claiming to be a
“creature” (and philosopher) “of the mud” (When Species Meet 3; 28), Haraway is the selfstyled choreographer of “a multipartner mud dance” where “[t]he partners do not precede
their relating; all that is, is the fruit of becoming with: those are the mantras of companion
species” (16). Haraway’s mud philosophy is important for emphasising the multiple ways
in which our lives today—in domestic settings and in a coevolutionary sense—are bound
up with those of dogs and other companion species, and also for shedding light on the
specific ways in which animals are (mis)treated in our contemporary stories.
The close domestic and co-evolutionary relationship between human and dog is
emphasised by key moments in Woolf ’s novel where Flush and Miss Barrett meet eyeto-eye. Very briefly, the first example of their reciprocal gaze comes when Miss Mitford
gives Flush to Miss Barrett and “[f ]or the first time she looked him in the face. For the
first time Flush looked at the lady lying on the sofa” (18); later on we are told that Flush’s
“large bright eyes shone in” his new companion’s (27); and on one occasion it is actually
Miss Barrett who refuses to meet Flush’s eyes as he is chastised following his jealous attack on Mr Browning (46). Woolf ’s examples here of human-dog gaze in fact anticipate
current scientific research. In “The Secret Life of the Dog,” a Horizons documentary first
broadcast on the BBC on 6th January 2010, we see animal behaviour scientist Daniel
Mills’ experiment into dog recognition of human emotions, which previous research has
shown to be expressed asymmetrically so that when humans look at a face they have a
left-gaze bias (i.e. they look at the right-hand side of the person’s face). The findings are
fascinating: while dogs look randomly at pictures of objects or of other dogs, they also
display a left-gaze bias when looking at a human face. Later in the documentary, cognitive psychologist Juliane Kaminski conducts an experiment which shows that dogs are
even attuned to the direction of the human gaze, something not achieved by our closest
ancestor, the chimpanzee. Moreover, these skills are specifically developed through the
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coevolutionary stories of humans and dogs (dogs do not show these abilities with their
own species, for example).
In Woolf’s novel, Flush’s ability to respond to the human gaze is only denied by death. In
the final paragraphs, as Miss Barrett responds to Flush jumping on the sofa and “thrust[ing]
his face into hers” by recalling her sonnet “Flush or Faunus,” they seem to be connected by
more than just their gaze (if you like, they are not just face-to-face but face-in-face) (105).
As Haraway notes, we now know that the “molecular record” of humans and dogs contain
traces of each other (Companion 31), and if this material, molecular intermingling is being
emphasised in Woolf’s text, then it is fitting that this should occur—perhaps as a reminder
of the importance of Flush’s life on the shaping of his companion—moments before his
demise. Woolf might not have been aware of today’s advances in molecular biology, but it
is as though she wants to emphasise that Flush should not be thought of as some symbolic
canine figure that stands for all dogs, let alone as mere allegory for a strictly human concern.
If he is any figure at all, he illustrates those of Haraway, where “[f ]igures are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse
bodies and meanings coshape one another” (When Species Meet 4).1 Such nodes or knots also
seem to be evident in a short unfinished sketch written by Woolf entitled “The Dog”: “She
attached herself…she would not let me out of her sight. She became like a supplementary
limb—a tail, something attached to my person. I never had to call her. I had great difficulty
in detaching her” (CSF 334-335)
The fact that the closing lines of Flush echo the description used when Flush and Miss
Barrett first looked at each other is also revealing. In the first example we read: “Broken
asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant
in the other? She might have been—all that; and he—but no. Between them lay the widest
gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman;
he was dog” (18-19). And in the final paragraph we read: “Broken asunder, yet made in the
same mould, each, perhaps, completed what was dormant in the other. But she was woman; he was dog” (105). It could of course be argued that these final comments reinforce the
gulf between Flush and his human companion one last time, although as with the earlier
passage the semi-colon appears to leave the possibility of boundary crossing open. More
tellingly, however, this latter passage is different from the former in two important ways:
firstly, the possibility that each “completed what was dormant in the other” is no longer
followed by a question mark—although Woolf uses the word “perhaps,” she seems to be
more certain of their cross-species connection by the end of the book; secondly, instead of
the sharp, “But no. Between them lay the widest gulf,” the conjunction Woolf uses at the
end of the novel is far softer. In this instance the “but” may not be in forceful contradiction to the statement preceding it, but might simply present the anomaly that Woolf ’s text
has illuminated: here is a human and a cocker spaniel whose lives are intertwined beyond
language “but” they belong to different species (we might also note that this latter passage
does not reinforce the statement concerning who could speak and who was “dumb”). As
we read that Miss Barrett “looked at Flush again” and that “he did not look at her” we are
aware that this must not be due to an incapacity of his species for response or an abyssal
gulf between human and dog but rather because “[h]e had been alive; he was now dead.
That was all” (106). The very fact there is an expectation that Flush will return his owner’s
gaze emphasises their inter-species connection, the “becoming with” of companion species.
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161
Haraway’s emphasis on “molecular differences” (Companion Species 5) and “becoming with” has echoes of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal,” which I
will briefly define for the purposes of this paper as the shared event of becoming different,
of becoming entangled with the other in a “creative line of escape” from traditional ontological categories of human and animal (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 35-36). It should
be noted that in When Species Meet, and despite acknowledging the influence of Deleuzian “assemblages” on her thought (314), Haraway is herself emphatic in her dislike of
Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-animal: “I want to explain why writing in which I had
hoped to find an ally for the tasks of companion species instead made me come as close
as I get to announcing, “Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the enemy!”’ (27). But although
Haraway has taken issue with Deleuze and Guattari’s work—she is specifically concerned
by what she considers the failure on their part to account for the everyday, mundane, and
real lives of animals—I would argue that a combination of her focus on domestic and
coevolutionary stories and Deleuze and Guattari’s disruption of human-centred relations
is important when considering the question of the animal in Woolf ’s text.2 As Matthew
Calarco notes in Zoographies (2008), which calls for the rejection of “human chauvinism” (35), Deleuze and Guattari provide a rare example in Western philosophy of a nonanthropocentric treatment of the animal. In contrast to Haraway’s accusation that they
lack a “curiosity” for the animal (When Species Meet 27), for Calarco they demonstrate
a “‘fascination’ for the animal and other nonhuman perspectives that are at work in becoming-animal; for them, it is this fascination that motivates revolutionary literature and
progressive discourses on animals…a fascination for something ‘outside’ or other than the
human and dominant perspectives (and this ‘outside’ might well lie within human beings,
for example, in an inhuman space at the very heart of what we call human)” (42-43). The
point then is not that Deleuze and Guattari are incurious as Haraway has charged, but
that they are more than curious. Their real fascination is not limited to the animal in what
they call its “molar” (that is, unified and fixed) form but rather the “molecular” changes
and intensive involvement of species. It is in this sense that fascination sparks becoming,
where “[i]n the experience of becoming, when one is fascinated by something before oneself, when one contemplates something before oneself, one is among it, within it, together
in a zone of proximity” (Lawlor 176).
In Flush we might say that this type of fascination actually occurs within a domestic
setting, evident, as discussed above, in the human/animal gaze shared by Flush and Miss
Barrett. As Leonard Lawlor notes, “it is this gaze from the singular animal…that places
the animal within me: one in the other.” (176) Turning to Deleuze and Guattari can help
to expand upon and complicate the domestic, material-semiotic entanglements between
Woolf ’s canine protagonist and his human companions. In A Thousand Plateaus they outline three ways in which we can distinguish animals—the first two anthropomorphic and
a third which challenges anthropocentric conceptualisations. First, there are the “Oedipal
animals”—that is “‘my’ cat, ‘my’ dog.” Importantly it is here, in their criticism of the ways
in which this view of animals “draws us into a narcissistic contemplation,” that Deleuze
and Guattari make the provocative comment which Haraway finds particularly distasteful: “anyone who like likes cats or dogs is a fool” (265). This is indeed a startling statement
(!), but taking this comment out of context, Haraway risks giving the impression that
Deleuze and Guattari are cruelly dismissive of animals, when in fact they are exposing the
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ways in which animals have been reduced by humans to mere psychoanalytic facades with
“a daddy, a mommy, a little brother behind them”; they are attempting to challenge and
complicate our conceptualisation of human/animal relations (265). In Deleuze and Guattari’s model, the second kinds of animals are “State animals”—those “with characteristics
or attributes” that fit them into “divine myths.” Finally, there are the more nomadic “pack
or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a becoming” (265). This third way of approaching the animal is to take into account their own capacity for world-making rather than
assimilating them into an anthropocentric arrangement. The emphasis here is on moving
away from individuated subjectivity (of humans or animals) and towards affect and movement of collectively emergent, interwoven agencies. In order to explore the full extent
of Woolf ’s fascination for the animal in Flush, I would argue that it is important not to
abandon Deleuze and Guattari as “the enemy,” but to take on board their concerns about
Oedipal and symbolic animals, and to ask whether this third kind of animal—the one that
provides the line of flight from anthropocentrism—is located in Woolf ’s novel. After all,
“cannot any animal be treated in all three ways?…Even the cat, even the dog” (265-266).
Even, we might add, Flush.
Although Flush spends most of his time in a Victorian domestic setting, and although he is compared by Barrett Browning to the Greek god Pan (F 27; Barrett Browning 188), he ultimately contradicts rather than conforms to the model of an “Oedipal” or
“State” animal. Instead of settling into the domestic order or mythological associations,
Flush plays a central role in Woolf ’s reimagining of the earthly space shared by humans
and animals, where hierarchies are flattened and species boundaries blurred. Take, for
example, the description of how the previous domestic order had created a gulf fuelled
by hatred between Flush and his human owners, likened to “an iron bar corroding and
festering and killing all natural life beneath it” (49). After “the cutting of sharp knives and
painful surgery, the iron has been excised” and what results is a kind of material-semiotic
alliance between Flush and Miss Barrett, the fleshly reconceptualisation of human/dog
relations: “Now the blood ran once more; the nerves shot and tingled; flesh formed; Nature rejoiced, as in spring. Flush heard the birds sing again; he felt the leaves growing on
the trees; as he lay on the sofa at Miss Barrett’s feet, glory and delight coursed through his
veins. He was with them, not against them, now; their hopes, their wishes, their desires
were his” (49). Whilst this passage could be read as an example of anthropomorphism,
of human appropriation of the dog, Woolf ’s use of free indirect discourse encompasses
a more collective, connected arrangement. Indeed, Flush’s singularisation is here intermingled with the “birds” and “trees,” as well as a pair of human “feet”—which had earlier
signalled the so-called “gulf ” and hierarchical order as he sat “on the rug at Miss Barrett’s
feet” (18). But rather than simply being another example of where dogs, as Haraway puts
it, are “[p]artners in the crime of human evolution” (Companion Species 5), Flush moves
towards Deleuzian becoming which prefers the term “involution” and which is not so
much about “descent and filiation” as it is about “alliance” and “transveral communications”: “to involve,” they clarify in A Thousand Plateaus, “is to form a block that runs its
own line ‘between’ the terms in play and beneath assignable relations” (263). The alliance
formed between Miss Barrett and Flush forms a shared becoming-other that involves human and animal at the same time as working between these terms and beneath species
characteristics.
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From this point in the novel onwards, even at moments when the human/animal
divide appears to be re-inscribed, the potential for lines of flight from the anthropocentric
order is emphasised. For example, the traumatic incident when Flush is captured and
taken to Whitechapel leads to a discussion of Wimpole street and its dangers, and Miss
Barrett’s resistance to the dominant viewpoint that they should not save Flush: “For her
it was madness. So they told her. Her brothers, her sisters, all came round her threatening
her, dissuading her…But she stood her ground. At last they realised the extent of her folly.
Whatever the risk might be they must give way to her” (F 66). The dognapping of Flush
throws “doubts upon the solidity even of Wimpole street itself,” undermining its “apparent solidity and security” as the hub of Victorian civilisation (51). Woolf ironically uses
the moment where the human most obviously and cruelly exerts its power over the animal
in order to illuminate human failings; that there is no natural, fixed order of things. After
Flush is “led out into the open air” and returned to Wimpole Street, it is a setting that
now exposes the myth of itself as the safe and untouchable haven of civilisation: “The old
gods of the bedroom—the bookcase, the wardrobe, the busts—seemed to have lost their
substance. This room was no longer the whole world; it was only a shelter” (67). We are
told that “everything was different” and that “[e]verything in the room seemed to be aware
of change” (69). Miss Barrett and Flush are closer now having somehow found a line of
flight from the illusion of human superiority: “They had been parted; now they were together. Indeed they had never been so much akin. Every start she gave, every movement
she made, passed through him too” (68).
This all leads to a more literal fleeing, as Flush and his companion escape to Italy “leaving tyrants and dog-stealers behind them.” Both Flush and Miss Barrett “had
changed” (75), and Flush “had revised his code accordingly” so that this “new conception
of canine society” (and note the mixing of canine and society, of nature and culture), is
one where dogs are more liberated: “Where was ‘must’ now? Where were chains now?
Where were park-keepers and truncheons? Gone, with the dog-stealers and Kennel Clubs
and Spaniel Clubs of a corrupt aristocracy!” (77). We learn that Flush “was the friend of all
the world now. All dogs were his brothers. He had no need of a chain in this new world;
he had no need of protection” (77). This reads like an earlier canine version of Woolf ’s
famous statement in Three Guineas concerning women’s role as members of an “Outsiders’ Society” of having no country and wanting no country: “As a woman my country is
the whole world” (TG 313). Ultimately, Flush too seems to fit better with an Outsiders’
Society as opposed to the Spaniel Club; it may well be true that on one level Flush acts as
an allegory for, as Woolf puts it in A Room of One’s Own, the “dog’s chance” women writers
have been given in patriarchal culture (AROO 141), but I would also like to suggest that
Flush offers a specifically nonanthropocentric vision of such an Outsider’s Society—what
I term in my title an “Animalous Society.”
In her excellent article on Flush, Anna Snaith has commented that it is “a text whose
supposed anomalousness has often caused it to be read out of context—or not to be
read at all” (615). Arguing that this novel is not so anomalous after all, Snaith’s reading
makes an important and convincing case for taking the text seriously as “part of Woolf ’s
anti-fascist writing of the 1930s” (632). Focusing more directly on the question of the
animal, however, I am suggesting that it is precisely the anomalous status of Woolf ’s
canine protagonist that enables us to explore a more fluid and nonanthropocentric
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
164
relation between species. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of
the “anomalous” has much in common with their understanding of an Outsider—the
anomalous is a “phenomenon of bordering” that is distinct from the “abnormal” which
“can be defined only in terms of characteristics, specific or generic” (269). We are therefore reminded of the opening to Woolf ’s novel, when Woolf lays out the etymology of
the word “Spaniel,” dog of “Hispania” which “derives from the Basque word espana,
signifying an edge or boundary” (5).4 My neologism—Animalous Society—implies that
the anomalous and animal in Woolf ’s text are coextensive; Flush, as a dog who “would
meet with the approval of the Spaniel Club” (10) but also becoming with, and becoming-animal-with, his human companions, should not be seen as simply an “exceptional
individual” within the confines of his role as “the family animal or pet” (Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 269), but as transforming human/animal relations and
becoming nomadic even within his domestic arena. Taking account of the anomalous in
Flush is not then a question of the abnormal and rejected or normal and included, nor
is it about anomalies within a group; instead it is the creation of gaps in the divide, and
the invitation to trespass those divides, between inside and outside, culture and nature,
registered and unregistered.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
For an example of such knotted human and nonhuman figures in Between the Acts (1941) see Goldman,
“When Dogs Will Become Men” (186).
Rosi Braidotti has suggested that what is shared between Haraway and Deleuze is a deep “alliance” in
presenting theories which are “materialist” and “neo-literal,” and therefore not limited to the “textual” and
“resolutely not metaphorical”: “Haraway shares with Deleuze two key features: serious neo-foundational
materialism on the one hand and a rigorous theory of relationality on the other” (200).
Later in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari allude to Woolf ’s “thin dog”—which she actually
takes from Katherine Mansfield’s journal (E4 447; see also Goldman, “Ce chien” 53-54)—to exemplify
the symbiotic relations formed between the different elements that combine in an “event” or “haecceity”:
“Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate
them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be read without a pause: the animal-stalksat-five-o’clock […] Five o’clock is this animal! This animal is this place! ‘The thin dog is running down the
road, this dog is the road,’ cries Virginia Woolf. That is how we need to feel” (290).
For more on Flush and the origin of Spaniels see Dubino 2011.
Works Cited
Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology.” Theory Culture Society 23
(2006): 197-208.
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. “Flush or Faunus.” 1850. Selected Poems. Ed. Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor.
Ontario: Broadview, 2009.
Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia UP,
2008.
Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana and
Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1991.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1986.
——. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004.
Dubino, Jeanne. “Evolution, History, and Flush; or, The Origin of Spaniels.” Virginia Woolf and the Natural
World: Selected Papers from the Twentieth International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Kristin Czarnecki
and Carrie Rohman. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2011. 143-150.
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Goldman, Jane. “‘Ce chien est à moi’: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog.” Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007):
49-86.
——.“‘When Dogs Will Become Men’: Melancholia, Canine Allegories, and Theriocephalous Figures in Woolf ’s
Urban Contact Zones.” Woolf and the City: Selected Papers from the Nineteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Elizabeth F Evans and Sarah E. Cornish. Clemson: Clemson University Digital
Press, 2010. 180-188.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Chicago
UP, 2003.
——. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.
McHugh, Susan. “Queer (and) Animal Theories.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15 (2009): 153169.
Peach, Linden. “Editing Flush and Woolf ’s Editing in Flush.” Ed. Eleanor McNees and Sara Veglahn. Woolf
Editing/Editing Woolf: Selected Papers from the Eighteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Clemson:
Clemson University Digital Press, 2009. 201-205.
Smith, Craig. “Across the Widest Gulf: Nonhuman Subjectivity in Virginia Woolf ’s Flush.” Twentieth Century
Literature 48:3 (2002): 348-361.
Snaith, Anna. “Of Fanciers, Footnotes, and Fascism: Virginia Woolf ’s Flush.” Modern Fiction Studies 48:3
(2002): 614-636.
Squier, Susan Merrill. Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985.
Vanita, Ruth. ‘“Love Unspeakable:” The Uses of Allusion in Flush.’ Themes and Variations: Proceedings of the
Second Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Vera Neverow-Turk and Mark Hussey. New York: Pace
UP, 1993: 248-257.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Dog.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (2nd Edition). Ed. Susan Dick. London: Harcourt, 1989. 334-335.
——. Flush. 1933. Ed. Kate Flint. Oxford: OUP, 1998.
——. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. 1929; 1938. Oxford: OUP, 1998.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Andrew McNeillie (vols. 1-4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5-6).
London: The Hogarth Press, 1986-2011.
Wylie, Dan. “The Anthropomorphic Ethic: Fiction and the Animal Mind in Virginia Woolf ’s Flush and Barbara
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ECOLOGY, IDENTITY AND ESCHATOLOGY:
CROSSING THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY IN WOOLF
by Sam Wiseman
The real Hardy country…is that border country so many of us have been living
in: between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of
place and an experience of change. (Williams, The Country and the City 197)
P
owerfully drawn to both rural and urban environments, Virginia Woolf is in many
ways the quintessential peripatetic English modernist. Her thoughtful analyses of
the psychic impacts of places reveal ideas about the country and the city that challenge common assumptions, such as the idea that the urban necessarily represents culture
and enclosure, while the rural is the home of a bucolic, idealized “Nature”. She suggests that the cosmopolitan, transient dynamics of modernity provoke a crisis of English
national identity, problematizing notions of authenticity and belonging, exclusion and
borders. In this paper, I will argue that for Woolf, the crisis engendered by this artificial
urban-rural dualism should be viewed not as a symptom of a perniciously fragmented and
alienated modern consciousness, but rather as indicative of an emerging broader understanding of our relationship with the environment and nonhuman animals. In exploring
these ideas, Woolf employs eschatological imagery: the ultimate destruction of human
civilization, she suggests, is a possibility that perpetually haunts modernity. Yet what is
ultimately gestured towards is not so much a post-human world, as one in which the
boundaries between human and nonhuman are challenged.
I
Woolf repeatedly voices an insistent craving for a specific sense of wildness in her
letters and diaries;1 she is drawn to the transgressive possibilities of urban life, and aligns
it with a sense of escaping cultural boundaries more commonly associated with rural
wilderness. An essay like “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927) implicitly challenges the notion that the rural environment provides a sense of freedom which the urban
cannot; or, to put the point more broadly, that rural and urban spaces stimulate different
clusters of emotions which do not overlap or mingle. We should note, as Hermione Lee
remarks, that her urban novels are arguably “the most pastoral city novels ever written”
(421); and, as Lawrence Buell states, that Mrs Dalloway might be classed as a rare example
of what he calls “urban bioregional imagination” (86).
Conversely, Woolf ’s final novel Between the Acts (1941), an eccentric and playful account of a rural English pageant set shortly before the Second World War, challenges associations of the countryside with tameness and reclusiveness. Instead, as Helen Southworth
notes, the novel locates a “strange and savage quality” within the English countryside
and village life (206). The latter, for Woolf, cannot be unproblematically understood as a
haven from a supposedly claustrophobic and restraining urban world. Woolf ’s response
to the crisis of national identity provoked by modernism’s cosmopolitan character is thus
Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
167
to encourage a focus on how cosmopolitanism filters our understandings of the English
environment, and to challenge existing conceptualizations that locate “Englishness” exclusively within the countryside.
What ties Woolf ’s analyses of place together is her resolute determination to transgress artificial boundaries, be they ontological or literal. Southworth argues that her conception of the rural world in Between the Acts derives, in part, from “[t]he presence of a
nomadic, ‘foreign’ figure at the centre of the work”, Miss La Trobe (206). Moreover, notes
Southworth, several of the central characters of Between the Acts are also associated with
a kind of nomadism, most prominently Mrs Swithin, Isa Oliver, and William Dodge.
Woolf identifies the rural landscape of England not as an organized, controlled space
which can be understood as a mesh of private property relations and collections of rooted,
regional attachments, but rather as a zone open to constant exploration and reassessment.
The region of Between the Acts is, significantly, indeterminate—we are told that it is “land
merely, no land in particular”—but in its dynamism and movement, its refusal to accept borders both literal and metaphorical, it chimes with Raymond Williams’ “Hardy
country”. Woolf ’s novel intuitively identifies this “border country”, and suggests it is key
to a new understanding of the relationship between English landscape and identity. The
socio-cultural crises of modernity, and the impending threat of war, provoke the need for
this re-examination.
Joanna Tapp Pierce has noted that Woolf can be aligned with female contemporaries
such as Elizabeth Bowen and Sylvia Townsend Warner in her recognition of the radical
liminal potential of spaces that cannot be easily understood in terms of an oversimplified
city/country binary. This kind of liminal potential is evident in the setting of Between the
Acts, insofar as its inhabitants cannot be reduced to either “rural” or “urban” dwellers, and
particularly given the emphasis on nomadic transgression of borders. Woolf draws our
attention to the affinities and interconnections that exist between the rural and urban
spheres. In doing so, she anticipates the work of cultural theorists like Williams, who
argues that rural social structures can be traced to the “same essential drives” as those associated with cities and modernity: the expansion of capitalist property relations (Country
50). Woolf attempts to reclaim the urban and rural environments from reductive understandings, and illuminate the complexity of their relation.
Thus, in Between the Acts, the unexpected arrival at Pointz Hall of Mrs Manresa and a
companion reminds Isa, Lucy and Bartholomew that the rural world is not a separate social universe to that of the city: “Utterly impossible was it, even in the heart of the country,
to be alone? That was the shock.…If it was painful, it was essential. There must be society.
Coming out of the library it was painful, but pleasant to run slap into Mrs Manresa and
an unknown young man with tow-coloured hair and a twisted face. No escape was possible; meeting was inevitable. Uninvited, unexpected, droppers-in, lured off the high road
by the very same instinct that caused the sheep and the cows to desire propinquity, they
had come” (34). Far from the countryside offering a refuge from the constraints of society and culture, Woolf emphasizes their inescapable presence there. Indeed, she suggests,
social interactions seem to derive from the same kind of “natural” logic, the “very same instinct”, that underlies animal behaviour. The inclination to socialize emerges as one of the
various ways in which behavioural and experiential similarities between human and nonhuman animals undermine notions of their supposed absolute ontological separateness in
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the novel. If human social activity stems, in some ways, from the same kinds of instincts or
inclinations as animal behaviour, then any clear separation between “culture” and “nature”
is undermined.2 As Jed Esty notes, Woolf describes “forms of culture so rooted in the local
ecology that they ring in echoes with the singing birds and the lowing cows” (102). The
complex character of rural life is also brought out by Woolf ’s use of the ambiguous phrase
“the heart of the country”, which could either refer to Pointz Hall’s literal distance from
the city, or suggest that the region of the novel symbolizes a kind of idealized Englishness,
the heart of England itself. Esty argues that in Between the Acts Woolf “seems interested in
trying to reclaim English tradition…from an imperial Britishness that had appropriated
the national past” (90). The novel therefore represents an attempt to draw attention to
the pre-war crisis of English national identity, challenging existing patriotic tropes, and
gestures towards possible new ways of understanding that identity.
II
It is in Woolf ’s urban writings that her critique of a reductive, dualistic understanding of the relation between countryside and city, and her challenge to the drive to impose boundaries upon either realm, is most thorough and penetrating. In this respect
Woolf can be aligned with more general modernist trends, evident in Lawrence and Joyce
(among others), which associate the urban experience with a kind of wildness and vitality.
This constitutes the appropriation of tropes previously associated with the rural. Hence,
as Miroslav Beker argues, in Mrs Dalloway (1925) London has a somewhat similar effect
on Clarissa Dalloway that nature had on Wordsworth. For Clarissa, London “has a profound meaning, a fascination that is not fully explicable in rational terms, amounting to a
mystical communion with the locale” (376). This kind of experience of the city as a wild
or liminal zone is perhaps most effectively explored in “Street Haunting”. Here, sensations
and language typically associated with organicism and the “natural” emerge in a nomadic
dérive around nighttime London: “How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands
of light, and its long groves of darkness…high among the bare trees are hung oblong
frames of reddish yellow light—windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily
like low stars—lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is
only a London square” (178). As Rebecca Solnit points out, the tone of this essay indicates “a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude…
an observer’s state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened” (186). It also explores, in different senses, the experience of transgression, since cities “make walking into true travel:
danger, exile, discovery, transformation, wrap all around one’s home and come right up to
the doorstep” (188). As a woman, Woolf consciously challenges the accepted behavioural
boundaries of her society in her nighttime wanderings.3 Her social transgression stimulates and mirrors the experience of wildness, the discovery within the urban of sensations
and phenomena normally associated with the rural. Through a close attentiveness to the
phenomenological experience of urban walking, and a conscious interrogation of the ways
in which culture tends towards the enclosure and regulation of urban experience, Woolf
reveals the permeability of the supposed urban-rural boundary.
In the novels, urban experience often functions to undermine a culturally-constructed sense of self. Insofar as it works to defamiliarize us, forces us to attend anew to our
engagements with the physical world, Woolf suggests that it may in fact do so more
Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
169
effectively than rural life. Hence the often-quoted passage towards the end of Orlando
(1928), which highlights the ways in which the quintessentially modern experience of
driving through a city challenges the unity of the self: “After twenty minutes the body
and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of
motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up small of identity which
precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself that it is an open question in what
sense Orlando can be said to have existed at the present moment” (212). Williams draws
upon this passage to illustrate a continuing tendency within literature to separate urban
from rural experience, since it closes with Orlando entering the countryside, at which “her
mind regained the illusion of holding things within itself ” (212). As Williams reads the
passage, the discontinuity and atomism of the city are experienced as a form of perception,
one which raises problems of identity that are “characteristically resolved on arrival in the
country” (Country 241). Woolf ’s point, however, is surely not so much that the problems
are resolved—since they reflect an inescapable truth about the nature of human personality—but merely that rural experience makes it easier to ignore them. Her returning sensation of her mind “holding things within itself ” is, we are told, an “illusion”. What the
passage therefore suggests is that what Williams calls “metropolitan perception” facilitates
a more sophisticated understanding of the fragmentary, interdependent character of self.
We might see projects like Between the Acts, works of cosmopolitan modernists engaging
in what Jed Esty calls “the nativist turn” in the interwar period, as a series of attempts to
apply such insights to the English landscape.
As Solnit notes, “Street Haunting”, like Orlando, is also concerned with the problem
of “the confining oppression of one’s own identity”, and identifies urban walking as a
means of escaping this (187). Woolf explores the psychic effects of being surrounded by
so many different consciousnesses: “Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little
way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but
can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.…And what greater
delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate
into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of
the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?” (187). We find here the striking
and unexpected usage of “natural” imagery to describe a quintessentially urban experience, and the suggestion that that experience promotes a sense of animality, of our “fellow men” as “wild beasts”. Both examples imply that urban experience cannot be easily
disentangled from rural. Moreover, they suggest that modernity, by stimulating new ways
of understanding our relation to the world and others, and by challenging the notion of
the bounded and narrowly human self, is conducive to a renewed attentiveness to those
experiences and landscapes commonly considered “natural”.
This can be most clearly brought out with recourse to Williams’ point that advanced
capitalism leads to relations between humans and the world that are “extremely active, diverse, self-conscious, and in effect continuous” (“Ideas of Nature” 83). What this suggests
is that the emergence of the kinds of urban experience that are evident in Woolf ’s work
reflects a specific potential of modernity, to reveal the actual interrelation of human and
nonhuman matter. Woolf ’s emphasis on the nomadic transgression of walking, with its
refusal to acknowledge artificially imposed boundaries, is central to this. Not only do we
thus become inescapably aware of the ways in which the inanimate world influences our
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
170
activity; we also come to see previously occluded affinities with nonhuman animals, since
the notion of a distinctively human autonomy that is somehow separate from the physical
influence of the external world is undermined. The modernist cosmopolitan experience
therefore stimulates a more sophisticated understanding of the character of materiality, as
well as its interrelation with human activity. Such an understanding is of value whether
applied to urban or rural landscapes. Woolf hints at this kind of intuition in her explorations of animality and fragmentation within the urban context, and recognizes that such
experiences imply a challenge to the assertion of borders both within and between the
urban and rural worlds.
Woolf ’s sense of the city as a wild, liminal space, one that promotes a sense of animality and diminishes awareness of regulated cultural boundaries, is linked to her explorations of prehistory and barbarism. In the modern city, the purported apex of Western
culture, Woolf finds herself drawn towards imaginative engagement with worlds in which
human civilization does not yet exist. This interest in reimagining the urban landscape
as a site of the prehistoric and primitive is explored most thoroughly in Between the Acts.
Early in the text, we learn that Lucy Swithin is reading H.G. Wells’ An Outline of History:
[She] had spent the hours between three and five thinking of rhododendron forests in Piccadilly; when the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided
by a channel, was all one; populated, she understood, by elephant-bodied, sealnecked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters;
the iguanadon, the mammoth, and the mastodon; from whom presumably, she
thought, jerking the window open, we descend.
It took her five seconds in actual time, in mind time ever so much longer, to
separate Grace herself, with blue china on a tray, from the leather-covered grunting monster who was about, as the door opened, to demolish a whole tree in the
green steaming undergrowth of the primeval forest. (8)
The contemplative, playful tone here is characteristic of the novel, which tentatively examines the contingency and precariousness of Western civilization without offering unambiguous judgements on its value. The apparent closeness of the prehistoric world Lucy
imagines implies a paradox: that it is precisely when civilization and progress most confidently assert themselves that their fragility and contingency become most apparent. Woolf
highlights the absurd hubris of the idea that by constructing cities we build eternally
impregnable citadels. The setting of Between the Acts is overshadowed by the imminent
onset of the Second World War; as Hilary Newman argues, this partly explains Woolf ’s
suggestion that “all people retain something of their primitive ancestors, which could at
any time erupt to submerge civilization and reduce humanity to a state of chaos” and “a
resurgence of barbarism” (23). The novel’s position on this possibility is ambiguous, but
such passages can be said to perform a similar function to the explorations of animality
found throughout the novel: that is, they do not call for an abandonment of human culture, but rather for a renewed and broader understanding of it, one that acknowledges our
animality and evolutionary history.
As the novel closes, Woolf evokes the notion that Western civilization masks a latent
barbarism once again. At the day’s end, the married couple Giles and Isa find themselves
Ecology, Identity and Eschatology
171
alone together:
Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity
was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought,
they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first
they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in
the fields of night.…The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost
its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that
dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks.
Then the curtain rose. They spoke. (197)
The reference to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness evokes the threat of a descent into nihilistic
chaos that hangs over much of the novel, as does the recurrent imagery of prehistoric
humanity. These themes are linked to animality, the “dog fox” and the vixen. However,
as Southworth notes, we should not read this as a simple metaphor for a clash between
“civilization” on the one hand, and the apocalyptic threat of the coming war on the other
(211). Woolf identifies a latent violence underlying domestic life, but suggests that this
needs to be acknowledged rather than attacked. As war threatens, it becomes more important than ever to develop a fuller conception of humanity and its relationship with
the world: to recognize our ontological connections to nonhuman animals, and the interdependence of culture and the nonhuman world. Crucial to the development of such
recognition, Woolf suggests, is language. With the last words of the novel, “[t]hey spoke”,
we sense that verbal communication is key to the negotiation of the “savage landscape”
that Giles and Isa confront, both domestically and nationally. These insights underpin
Woolf ’s exploration of the possibility of communication, verbal and otherwise, between
the human and nonhuman. In Woolf ’s fiction we therefore find a playful reappropriation of eschatological imagery. This, she suggests, can contribute to the development of a
broader understanding of the human. Ultimately, these crises of modernity might represent opportunities to develop a more sustainable mode of being in the world, one which
challenges an overly simplistic and dualistic view of the relationship between English
culture and environment.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
For an insightful recent discussion of ‘wildness’ in Woolf ’s writing see Allen 65-84.
Using Donna Haraway’s terms, we might call this crossing of nature and culture “naturecultures” (Haraway 16).
For more on Woolf and walking see Rachel Bowlby’s classic essay ‘Walking, Women and Writing’ (191-219).
Works Cited
Allen, Judith. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.
Beker, Miroslav. “London as a Principle of Structure in Mrs Dalloway.” Modern Fiction Studies 18.3 (Autumn
1972): 375–385.
Bowlby, Rachel. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997.
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005.
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Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Oxford: Princeton UP, 2004.
Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996.
Newman, Hilary. “Continuity and Destruction in Between the Acts.” Virginia Woolf Bulletin 3 (January 2000):
21–25.
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso, 2006.
Southworth, Helen. “Virginia Woolf ’s ‘Wild England’: George Borrow, Autoethnography, and Between the
Acts.” Studies in the Novel 39.2 (Summer 2007): 196–215.
Tapp Pierce, Joanna. Placing Modernism: The Fictional Ecologies of Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby, and Elizabeth
Bowen. Ph.D. thesis: University of South Carolina, 2000.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
—––. “Ideas of Nature.” Culture and Materialism. London: Verso, 2005. 67–85.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
—––. Orlando. London: Penguin, 1993.
—––. “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.” Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 177-187.
“PLEASE HELP ME!”
VIRGINIA WOOLF, VIOLA TREE, AND THE HOGARTH PRESS1
by Diane F. Gillespie
I
n the turbulent mid-1960s, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote a personal cry
for “Help!,” the title song for both movie and sound-track album. The Beatles, suddenly famous, describe a life “changed in oh so many ways.” Their way of dealing with
lost self-confidence and a need for affirmation was to sing rhyming stanzas to an upbeat
tempo. If they had written a line like “Help me if you can” during the 1930s, an advice
column called “Can I Help you?” in London’s Sunday Dispatch2 might have echoed reassuringly. For eight years, hundreds of people dealt with their social insecurity by writing
letters to its author, Viola Tree (1884-1938).
In the spring of 1937, Tree brought the Woolfs a manuscript that quoted or referred
to several letters from her column and bore the same title. Virginia, although she continued to read certain submissions, had been less involved with everyday work at the Hogarth Press (Willis 369-70). She pitched in, however, after their manager’s sudden death
left them short-handed (Marder 224). Along with Leonard, therefore, she had a hands-on
relationship with Can I Help You? until its publication in the fall of 1937. During this time
of escalating totalitarian sentiment on the continent and her nephew Julian Bell’s death
in Spain in July of 1937, however, Virginia Woolf was contemplating help and advice on
a larger scale. She was drafting her own Can I Help You? book of letters and replies, published in 1938 as Three Guineas.
A number of Woolf scholars have treated overlapping topics related to social behavior.3 Closest to my topic, however, is an insightful 2008 article by David Dwan who
discusses manners, especially in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), in
the context of philosophical skepticism. In the face of meaningless flux and incoherent
identities, he says, social rituals are useful—so long as they are recognized as fiction and
do not harden into dogma (Dwan 261, 263). Viola Tree’s Can I Help You? offers a parallel
context for Woolf ’s challenges to conventional values and rules of etiquette, one that also
affirms manners as an evolving art form helpful, at best, in fostering harmonious human
relationships in lives well lived.
I. “her vulgarity is not vulgar” –V. Woolf
Viola Tree was the eldest of three daughters of famous actor-manager Sir Herbert
Beerbohm Tree (1853-1917) and actress Helen Maud Tree (1858-1937).4 For a time, Viola pursued an operatic career, but she was known primarily as a stage actress. Effervescent
and multi-faceted, Tree intrigued Virginia Woolf. 5 Their largely business relationship supports new research, like Helen Southworth’s recent essay collection, that emphasizes the
involvement of Hogarth Press in a variety of modernist cultural discussions. Viola Tree’s
Can I Help You? reflects a personal experience of social change, or, as her father wrote in a
1913 essay, of a time when “the barbed wire fences” separating “classes are being relegated
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
to the limbo of the human scrap-heap” (H. B. Tree
4). Like Virginia, Viola was the daughter of a prominent, educated man. As such, her declarations about
modern and democratic impulses in society were
tempered by her awareness of pressures to conform to
a traditional feminine role. Also like Virginia, Viola’s
view of conventional social behavior was an evolving
mixture of qualified respect and spirited resistance.
That the Woolfs should offer a self-help book on
manners by a stage celebrity6 has not escaped criticism. It is an easy genre to mock, and there are some,
then and now, who judge a publication entirely by its
appearance or author. Did the Hogarth Press imprint
on such a book violate both professional and personal
standards, as some have implied? It is true that, in
1924, Virginia Woolf had penned a satirical review of
the Nonesuch Press’s Weekend Book, a “prettily printed
“My Father and I in Richard II. —
little” collection of poetry and “games and songs and
Very Tired After a Dress-Rehearsal”
from Castles in the Air: A Story of My recipes and quips and cranks,” suitable, she says, “to
Singing Days (1926). Photo by F.W. hand to one’s hostess in return for a candlestick” (E3
Burford.
414). Yet, as J. H. Willis also notes, the Hogarth Press
went ahead and published, “presumably without blushing or laughing” (379), what seems
to be its own pretty little book, elegantly illustrated by Tree’s daughter Virginia Parsons,
and subtitled Your Manners—Menus—Amusements—Friends—Charades—Make-Ups—
Travel—Calling—Children—Love Affairs.7 Willis attributes this implied publishing faux
pas to Tree’s being an “old friend” whose memoir, Castles in the Air: A Story of My Singing
Days, the Woolfs had published in 1926 (369). On that earlier occasion, Vita SackvilleWest, a relatively new Hogarth author herself,8 had reprimanded Virginia in a letter: “And
oh, dear, idolized Virginia that you are, how could you publish Viola…? It makes me
vomit. I don’t like you to sell your soul” (Letters 126).9
Title page and frontispiece by Virginia Parsons for Viola
Tree’s Can I Help You? (1937).
“Please Help Me!”
175
Whether Vita was jealous, teasing, or genuinely dyspeptic, Virginia fired back a seemingly contradictory defense of author and book, one that also helps to explain the later
publication of Tree’s Can I Help You?. “You are utterly wrong about Viola,” Virginia wrote.
After pointing out that memoirs aren’t poems, she added, “Don’t you see her vulgarity is
not vulgar, her irreticence is not unashamed: an aroma—she aims at that: life: fact: not the
thing we go for,” she added tactfully, “but I cant make you understand: try reading as if
you were catching a swarm of bees; not hunting down one dart[-]like dragon fly” (L3 268).
Virginia also assumed that the aristocratic Vita, however unconventional herself, was
attacking Viola personally. Although Vita did not use the word “vulgar,” it was a common criticism of women who displayed themselves publicly on-stage. In Can I Help You?,
in fact, Viola remembers a dressing-room visit from Vita, with Harold Nicolson, after a
performance. “’We don’t know what makes you so good,’” Vita said on that occasion,“‘—
your pauses—or your knees.’” Viola archly makes the best of it, “That was lovely, puzzling praise,” she writes (Can 166). Remembering how, in her youth, “a stage career was
thought a deterrent to marriage” for the socially ambitious (Can 11), Viola quotes the
society hostess who said to her openly, “‘You can’t float about on a wire as Ariel with no
petticoats and appear at a ball half an hour later in white satin’” (Can 22).10
According to social historians, “vulgar” was the criticism most feared by the rising middle class (Wildeblood 39), hence multiple editions of hefty etiquette bibles by authorities
like Emily Post in America and Lady Troubridge in England.11 Vulgarity was not just common or crude behavior; it was also inappropriate flaunting of wealth, fashionable dress, or
social connections (Wildeblood 39-40). Tree may have been pretentious, but she was too
complex and self-aware for simple either-or judgments. In her person and in her writing, she
reflected long-standing ideals, if not of modesty, at least of honest self-criticism and “‘consideration for others’” (Wildeblood 40). She also had wit; common sense intelligence; sensitivity and kindness; and the ability to live intensely, learn from, and describe her experiences.
Some of Viola Tree’s rich aroma emerges in a sketch Virginia wrote in 1926 after Viola
visited to consult about her memoir: “She is a flamboyant creature, much of an actress—
much abused by the Waleys & Marjories;12 but rather taking to me.” “She has,” Virginia
continues, “the great egotism…which any bodily display, I think, produces,” and she “easily
reverts to the topic of her own charms….she runs on, in the best of clothes, easy & familiar,
but,” Woolf adds, “reserved too; with the wiles & warinesses of a woman of the world, half
sordid half splendid, not quite at her ease with us, yet glad of a room where she can tell her
stories, of listeners to whom she is new & strange.” Even though she “will run on by the
hour,” Woolf adds, Tree “is very watchful not to bore.” Finally, her “charm” disguises the fact
that she is “a good business woman” of “considerable acuteness” (D3 86, emphases mine).13
The General Strike of 1926 slowed sales of Tree’s memoir, yet one reviewer called it “delightful,” with the “occasional gift of tart epigram” (Birrell 212). The major reservation concerned quotations from candid letters she wrote to her fiancé, Alan Parsons.14 Most reviewers
conclude, however, that if she doesn’t care about people reading the letters (New Statesman
171), and her fiancé doesn’t, “why should anybody else”? (Saturday Review 159). The TLS reviewer thinks the book may be indiscreet, but it “is honourably exempt from any of the faults
of a section of the public who, rightly or wrongly, think their intimate affairs of acute interest to everyone else” (314, emphasis mine). In other words, Tree’s voluble lack of reserve is
disarming because, as Woolf says with her double negative, it is “not unashamed” (L3 268).15
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
II. “Am I a Snob?” –V. Woolf
A decade later, in early December 1936, Virginia read her neither entirely vulgar nor
unashamed essay “Am I a Snob?” to the Memoir Club (D5 26 n1). Here she focuses, not
on her youthful “tea-table training” or the social failures that frustrated her conventional
step-brother (MOB 150, 154-7), but on her adult forays into society. Among many types
of snobbery, she concludes that her own is the “wish to impress” by “always flourishing
a title or an honour in…other people’s faces” (MOB 206). She is, she admits, “a coronet
snob,” “a lit up drawing room snob,” and a “social festivity snob” (MOB 210).16 Aristocratic hostesses invite her to their parties because she is a well known writer. This notice
feeds her vanity, but she remains anxious about how she will appear and comport herself,
not as a writer, but “as a woman” (MOB 208; 211-12).17
Woolf ’s self-mocking analysis of her own pretentions, and candor about her social insecurities certainly prepared her to appreciate Viola Tree’s Can I Help You? when she “thrust”
(Virginia’s word) her manuscript upon the Woolfs a few months later (L6 111). In the
course of considerable business-like discussion in the correspondence (now at the University
of Reading), the Woolfs suggested cuts but encouraged Tree’s amusing stories and unabashed
personal comments. They also accepted her suggestion of an arguably pretentious but effective marketing strategy. They not only turned Tree’s uninhibited name-dropping into an
index of selected names, but even included a boxed excerpt on the draft order form.18
Tree begins Can I Help You? by defending herself against two potential criticisms: 1)
that she is a snob and 2) that she is no authority on manners. Her defense is not uncritical.
Tree describes her coming out in society as a young, marriageable woman under appraisal
by parents of marriageable men. She wonders if it “would have been better” had she “not
dipped into social life, dinner parties, time-wasting luncheons, extravagant clothes, opera
boxes” since, she writes, all the “young men’s mother[s] looked down their noses at me…;
and that made me a little dissatisfied with the…cloistered devotion to duty” of the stage.
“It also made me,” she adds, “what unworldly people have often called ‘snobbish’” (Can 1112). She defines her snobbery as “a love of Lords and Ladies,” not “for their titles,” but for
“what they have to give” and “for their beautiful manners and beautiful manors” reflecting
“generations of tradition…that everybody…seeks unconsciously to imitate” (Can 12).19
Tree suggests that pleasing behavior, conventional or more democratic, can benefit all
social classes, increase beauty in life, and foster confidence, fair play, and kindness both on
social occasions and in the home. Although she loves compliments on her own best manners (Can 14) and on, for example, her posture in contrast to that of the modern girl who is
“backed like a camel, or indeed like a whale” (Can 185), she identifies with “humblish” people (Can 86). As Woolf might say, Tree’s pride is not unhumble. She admits that her family
considers her “rude” and “tactless,” a “decline in manners” she attributes first to a busy stage
career that gave her “no leisure, no method and a terrifying optimism,” and then to marriage,
motherhood, and limited finances (Can 15, 23-4). Still, she insists she can give advice on
etiquette because she was “nicely brought up” by parents who were “born hosts” (Can 1617; 21-2); because, for five decades she has “mixed with all worlds, and loved them all” (Can
18; 24-5) and because, for eight years, she has penned her advice column (Can 25).
Viola Tree has produced not just an advice book but also another memoir, a buzz of
personal observations of social mores from before and after her singing career. She confides
“Please Help Me!”
177
in her reader, italicizes for emphasis, and expresses opinions on everything from the general
awfulness of bridesmaid’s dresses (Can 129) to the common sense of eating hot food when
served rather than waiting for a whole table to begin (Can 34-5). Tree also creates entertaining examples of ineffective and effective invitations,
announcements, and speeches, as well as humorous
little dramatic scenes in the present tense. Yet, in spite
of all the headings, the book seems loosely constructed because, as Tree explains, “digression is the apple
of mine eye” (Can 28, cf 25).
Two chapters exemplify the tone of Can I Help
You?. “Manners to Children” emphasizes parents’ behavior, not (as is more usual) children’s. Parson’s pretty,
but lifeless illustration, “Children at Ease with Dog”,
reinforces her mother’s point that children should have
pets—Tree even includes a sub-section called “Some
Instances of Bad Manners to Dogs” (Can 101)—but it
does not communicate the lively humor of her advice
or honesty about her own lapses (Can 91-3). Above
all, she says, oddly in contrast to the bored-looking
children in the illustration, childhood should be re“Children at Ease with Dog” by Virginia
membered as a happy time (Can 99-100).
In the final chapter, “A Lover’s Good-Bye”, Parsons for Viola Tree’s Can I Help You?
Tree says that both women and men must have the
courage and good manners necessary to make clean
breaks with ill-suited people (Can 247-8). Although
she advises lovers not to “feel the difference in class”
since “barriers are breaking every day,” she creates a
story about “the two people in the picture,” a traveling salesman and a rich, spoiled schoolgirl who
“were obviously too many miles apart” (Can 248,
252). Tree’s conclusion to this chapter applies to the
whole book: “good manners or fine behavior” are
meant to avoid “giving pain to others” (Can 252).
III. “She could transmit something into
words.” –V. Woolf
Viola Tree, with her stage career and life writing, “put on the body” Shakespeare’s sister “has so “A Lover’s Good-Bye” by Virginia Paroften laid down” (AROO 118). Then, in November sons for Viola Tree’s Can I Help You?
of 1938, a year following the publication of Can I Help You?, Tree died suddenly of pleurisy.
Noting in her final diary sketch that Viola was “two years younger,” Virginia Woolf recalls
“the quality of her skin: like an apricot; a few amber coloured hairs. Eyes blistered with
paint underneath. A huge Goddess woman, who was also an old drudge;….Last time I saw
her…she was in her abundant expansive mood. I never reached any other; yet always liked
178
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
her. Met her perhaps once a year, about her books.” Virginia now recalls “tea in Woburn
Sq.” with Viola: “the butter was wrapped in a newspaper. And there was an Italian double
bed in the drawing room. She was instinctive; & had the charm of good actress manners;
& their Bohemianism, & sentimentality. But I think was a sterling spontaneous mother &
daughter; not ambitious; a great hand at life; I suppose harassed for money; & extravagant;
& very bold; & courageous—a maker of picturesque surroundings. So strong & large,
that she should have lived to be 80.” Viola, Virginia adds, “could transmit something into
words” (D5 187).
We can imagine Virginia Woolf reading Can I Help You? and relating it both to her
own public and private experiences and to those of her fictional characters.20 As she was
helping with Can I Help You?, however, Woolf was researching and writing Three Guineas,
her own advice book, published by the Hogarth Press in the year Viola Tree died. Three
Guineas is about private and public behavior, about not giving pain to others, on domestic, national, and international scales. Woolf creates—and links to each other—letters requesting help to prevent war, to rebuild a women’s college, and to enable women to enter
the professions.21 Without making exaggerated claims for Tree’s Can I Help You?, I think it
appealed to Woolf in part because she valued candid glimpses of women’s lives, and in part
because, as she had insisted in A Room of One’s Own, what happens in a drawing-room
is just as important as what happens on a battle-field (77). Also, Tree’s book anticipates
“the sort of education” Woolf says in Three Guineas “is needed” to teach everyday ways of
peace to a competitive society sliding again towards war (TG 33). The draft order form
quotes reviewers who highlight Tree’s personality, calling her a helpful, wise, witty, kind,
and amusing “darling.” It is Harold Nicolson, however, who says Can I Help You? is not so
much about etiquette as it is “an illustration of the best way to live.” 22
If Tree realized that some of her flights of fancy may cause “the elect” to “laugh in
their sleeves” (Can 12), Woolf realized that, in Three Guineas, she risked both laughter and
derision (e.g. L6 229; 239).23 One of her fancies is an “experimental college,” “new college,” “poor college” that would help to prevent war by including “arts that can be taught
cheaply and practiced by poor people” (TG 33-34) and by using books and paintings that
are “new and always changing” (TG 34). Instead of the “arts of dominating…of ruling,
of killing, of acquiring land and capital,” its teaching would include the everyday “arts of
human intercourse; the art of understanding other people’s lives and minds, and the little
arts of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them” (TG 34).
These two Hogarth Press publications, Viola Tree’s Can I Help You? and Virginia
Woolf ’s Three Guineas, are, on the surface, an odd pairing. Although she does not grapple
intellectually with the kinds of large issues Woolf raises, Tree demystifies and undermines
hierarchical rituals with her personal, humorous touch. We can imagine that the “good
livers” and “good thinkers” Woolf sought to teach in her imaginary college (TG 33-4)
would welcome Tree’s Can I Help You?. It is a reassuring, common-sense, and helpful book
on the arts of everyday behavior, in and beyond the home, by a complex woman Woolf
considered “a great hand at life” (D5 187).
Notes
1.
My thanks to David Higham Associates, Jean Rose of Random House Group, and Nancy Fulford for
“Please Help Me!”
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
179
access to the Hogarth Press papers in Special Collections at the University of Reading Library; and to Trevor Bond and Jeff Kuure of Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections (MASC) at the Washington State
University (WSU) Libraries where Leonard and Virginia Woolf ’s personal library is housed. Although I
have been unable to locate copyright information for F. W. Burford, I wish especially to thank Georgia
Tennant, Jo Tennant, and Silvy McQuiston for permission to reproduce their mother’s illustrations for
Viola Tree’s book.
Founded as the Weekly Dispatch in 1801, it became the popular Sunday Dispatch in 1928; it stopped publication in 1961.
Among them are studies of Woolf ’s treatments of class distinctions (e.g., Zwerdling, Rosenfeld, Adolph,
Johnston, and Fernald); country or aristocratic houses and their occupants (e.g., Schroder and Rudikoff);
and social rituals (e.g., Simpson and Minow-Pinkney).
Viola Tree was educated at the Academy of Dramatic Art and the Royal College of Music. The other
well-known Tree daughter was Iris (1897-1968), a poet, actress, and artist’s model. Max Beerbohm (18721956), essayist and caricaturist, was their uncle.
In 1920, Viola contributed to Max Beerbohm’s edition of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s memoirs. She also
managed theatres, directed and wrote plays, and published on various topics in newspapers and for Vogue.
She had several minor film roles in the 1920s and 1930s.
The copy remaining in the Woolf ’s library (MASC, WSU) has “Travellers copy” penciled in on the cover
above the title.
“Even those who know the Hogarth Press well are surprised by Adventures in Investing by ‘Securitas’
(1936); Diet and High Blood Pressure, by Dr. I. Harris (1937); and Viola Tree’s Can I Help You?” (Porter
7). The Hogarth Press’s two detective novels by C. H. B. Kitchin (1929; 1934) initially seemed a similar
anomaly (Gillespie, “Virginia”). The Press’s “Religion” category in catalogues of the 1920s and 1930s also
at first seemed uncharacteristic (Gillespie, “‘Woolfs’”).
Tree’s 1926 book is among the Woolfs’ in MASC at WSU, as are Sackville-West’s Seducers in Ecuador
(1924) and Passenger to Teheran (1926).
For Virginia’s other comments on, and contacts with, Viola Tree, see L3: 143, 245, 251, 318; SackvilleWest, Letters 122-3; Sackville-West, Vita and Harold 147.
Tree played Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest in 1904.
In 1937, Post’s large Etiquette appeared in a revised edition after twenty-five reprintings of the 1922 edition
by Funk & Wagnalls. Tree herself directs readers to Troubridge’s Book of Etiquette: The Complete Standard
Work of Reference on Social Usage, also much reprinted after its initial 1913 publication.
Arthur Waley (1889-1966) published translations of Japanese and Chinese texts. Marjorie Thomson or
Joad (c. 1900-1931) worked for the Hogarth Press from 1923 to 1925.
In the Press correspondence (University of Reading) about Tree’s memoir, Castles in the Air, Leonard writes
the letters but consistently summarizes and defers to Virginia’s advice.
Viola Tree had married drama critic Alan Parsons (1889-1933) in 1912. One of two sons, David Tree
(1915-2009), followed in the family theatrical tradition. Their daughter, Virginia (1917-2003), who studied at the Slade and illustrated Can I Help You?, married into the nobility.
As an example of self-awareness, Tree notes, “If I have a good quality, it is not being ashamed of making a
fool of myself, and there is ample evidence of it in this story” (Castles 12-13).
Beerbohm Tree offers a whole list of “kinds of snobbery” (20).
Minow-Pinkney provides a recent discussion of Woolf ’s ambivalence about “the famous social hostesses of
the day” (233; 236).
Hogarth Papers (University of Reading).
In Between the Acts, Miss LaTrobe’s megaphone echoes Tree’s juxtaposition of “manor” and “manner” (187).
Woolf is most interested in her characters’ silent reactions to social expectations. Tree, for example, notes
in a footnote that “second helpings” are “not really the highest good manners,” but admits that she herself
is “most guilty” (Can 210). Like Mrs. Ramsay, Tree would have forgiven Mr. Carmichael, silently condemned by Mr. Ramsay for a second helping of soup in To the Lighthouse.
Variations of the word “help” recur, as Woolf insists that educated men’s daughters can “help…to prevent
war” (TG 11) only by describing the world as they see it (e.g. TG 58).
Hogarth Papers (University of Reading).
Vita Sackville-West charged Woolf with “’misleading arguments’” (L6 243); Q. D. Leavis charged her with
“’dangerous assumptions,…preposterous claims and…nasty attitudes.’” “I thought I should raise their
hackles, poor old strumpets,” Woolf writes of the Cambridge ladies (L6 271 and n1).
180
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
Works Cited
Adolph, Andrea. “Luncheon at ‘The Leaning Tower’: Consumption and Class in Virginia Woolf ’s Between the
Acts.” Women’s Studies 34 (2005): 439-59.
Birrell, Francis. Review of Viola Tree’s Castles in the Air. Nation and Athenaeum 39, 29 May 1926. 212.
Dwan, David. “Woolf, Scepticism and Manners.” Textual Practice 22.2 (2008): 249-68.
Fernald, Anne E. “Class Distinctions.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 42 (Spring 1994): 3.
Gillespie, Diane F. “Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and the Detective Novel.” The South Carolina Review
35.2 (Spring 2003): 36-48.
——. “’Woolfs’ in Sheep’s Clothing: The Hogarth Press and ‘Religion.’” Leonard & Virginia Woolf: The Hogarth
Press and the Networks of Modernism. Ed. Helen Southworth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. 74-99.
Johnston, Georgia. “Class Performance in Between the Acts: Audiences for Miss La Trobe and Mrs. Manresa.”
Woolf Studies Annual 3 (1997): 61-75.
Marder, Herbert. The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf ’s Last Years. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1989.
Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. “Virginia Woolf and Entertaining.” The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and
the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. 227-44.
Porter, David. Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press: Riding a Great Horse. London: Cecil Woolf, 2004.
Review of Viola Tree’s Castles in the Air. TLS, 29 April 1926. 314.
——. Saturday Review of Literature 3, 2 October 1926. 159.
——. New Statesman 27, 29 May 1926. 171.
Rosenfeld, Natania. “Links Into Fences: The Subtext of Class Division in Mrs. Dalloway.” LIT 9 (2001): 139-60.
Rudikoff, Sonya. Ancestral Houses: Virginia Woolf and the Aristocracy. Palo Alto, CA: Society for the Promotion
of Science and Scholarship, 1999.
Sackville-West, Vita. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A.
Leaska. New York: William Morrow, 1985.
——. Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1992.
Schroder, Leena Korre. “’The Lovely Wreckage of the Past’: Virginia Woolf and the English Country House.”
English 55 (Autumn 2006): 255-80.
Shaffer, Brian W. “Civilization in Bloomsbury: Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway and Bell’s ‘Theory of Civilization.’”Journal
of Modern Literature 29. 1 (Summer 1994): 73-87.
Simpson, Kathryn. Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Southworth, Helen, ed. Leonard & Virginia Woolf: The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 2010.
Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm. “Our Betters: A Medley of Considered Indiscretions.” Thoughts and After-Thoughts.
London: Cassell and Co., 1913. 3-35.
Tree, Viola. Can I Help You? Your Manners—Menus—Amusements—Friends—Characes—Make-Ups—Travel—
Calling—Children—Love Affairs. London: Hogarth Press, 1937.
––––. Castles in the Air: A Story of My Singing Days. London: Hogarth Press; New York: George H. Doran, 1926.
Wildeblood, Joan and Peter Brinson. The Polite World: A Guide to English Manners and Deportment from the
Thirteenth to the Nineteenth Century. London: OUP, 1965.
Willis, J. H. Jr. Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41. Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia, 1992.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. 1941. San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969.
——. Collected Essays. New York and London: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Andrew McNeillie (vols. 1-4) and Stuart N. Clark (vols. 5-6).
London: The Hogarth Press, 1986-2010.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-1980.
——. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. 2nd ed. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. San Diego, New
York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanivich, 1985.
——. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957.
——. Three Guineas. 1938. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966.
Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1986.
“AM I A SNOB?” WELL, SORT OF:
SOCIALISM, ADVOCACY, AND DISGUST IN WOOLF’S ECONOMIC WRITING
by Madelyn Detloff
T
his paper is dedicated to a childhood friend, Maria Fleuette de Guzman, who died
unexpectedly June 2 at the age of 45. Although we grew up with very similar abilities and similar life beginnings, her path diverged from mine, minutely at first, but
with each divergent path opening up different opportunities and leading to significantly
different lives, class statuses, respect accorded to us, and bodily health by the time we both
turned 45 last summer. Theorists of complexity call such dramatically different outcomes
despite only minute differences in initial conditions the “butterfly effect” after the discovery by Edward Lorenz that minute divergences in initial weather conditions can lead to
drastic differences in the weather as it unfolds—a butterfly flapping its wings in China, the
saying goes, can cause a hurricane in Miami days later (Mlodinow 194). The butterfly effect
on a lifetime means that a chance encounter with a mentor, or a future partner, or a cop
at the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time, can precipitate a
headwind, or a tailwind, or a hurricane that changes the course of a life if we examine it in
hindsight. Hindsight, as Leonard Mlodinow argues in The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, tricks us into imagining portents when there are at the moment of an
event’s occurrence, only probabilities (196). In 1965, no one could have predicted that the
life trajectory of my friend as it would appear in hindsight to her survivors in 2011.
Clearly one’s life path is not completely subject to the random accident of birth or the
frivolous whims of chance. Our actions and decisions do have consequences, as I am fond
of reiterating to my students. If I finish college (or don’t), if I get married (or don’t), if I
join the army (or don’t)—certain options open up to me as a result of those actions, and
other options close. But the train of causality indicated by that series of if-then situations
is not completely in our control—not fully protected from contingency by our will, our
talent, or our hard work: touch on any of the above ifs and hundreds of little baby ifs seem
to scurry out from under it like a spider sac bursting open: if I can afford college, if I can
get into college, if am not forbidden entry to college because of my citizenship status, or
(if I am male in the U.S.) I consent to register for the selective service, or (if I am female
in Woolf ’s time) I find a university willing to confer degrees upon women, if I remain
healthy, if the economy doesn’t collapse, if ad infinitum. There are a lot more ifs involved
in the marriage and army scenarios, one’s survivability in either situation foremost among
them, but perhaps we should leave that discussion for the pub tonight.
As Mlodinow suggests in his discussion of the impact of randomness on our lives, we
are predisposed to see our experiences through the lens of causality rather than chance,
because causality aligns with a sense of deservingness and our need to find life rational as
well as purposeful: “We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the
world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree
of success and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation. That’s
why, although there is sometimes little difference in ability between a wildly successful
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
person and one who is not as successful, there is usually a big difference in how they are
viewed” (212). There, but for the accident of chance, go I.
But apparently that secularized version of the cliché is hard to swallow. Mlodinow
explains that we tend to preserve our sense of deservingness by projecting it onto victims of
misfortune, as if victims must have brought misfortune upon themselves. Mlodinow cites
the work of social psychologist Melvin J. Lerner to illustrate his point. In 1966, Lerner
and C. H. Simmons conducted a study of “Observer’s Reactions to the ‘Innocent Victim,’” where college students were recruited to participate in a supposed study of learning
methods. One person in the group (who was really a plant working for the researchers) was
chosen to be the “learner” or, in the study’s design, the victim of undeserved cruelty. The
study participants were told that she was to receive electric shocks for each answer she got
wrong. Lerner and Simmons found that, although at first outraged by the treatment the
victim apparently received, the observers soon began to disparage the victim, as if she somehow deserved the painful shocks she was apparently receiving. Thirty years later Lerner and
Leonard Montada revisited the findings of the study describing it as arising out of:
efforts to explain why scientifically trained university students insisted on condemning poverty stricken victims as “lazy and no good” while denying the evidence of their victimization by overwhelming economic changes. The explanation offered for that seemingly motivated resistance was that people, for the sake
of their security and ability to plan for the future, need to believe they live in
an essentially “just” world where they can get what they deserve, at least in the
long run. It was further reasoned that being confronted with innocent victims
of undeserved suffering poses a threat to this fundamental belief, and as a consequence, people naturally develop and employ ways of defending it. This may
involve acting to eliminate injustices. But failing that, by blaming, rejecting, or
avoiding the victim or having faith that the victim will eventually be appropriately compensated, people are able to maintain their confidence in the justness
of the world in which they must live and work for their future security. (1)
The belief in a just world, in other words, can actually perpetuate injustice and suffering
by rationalizing it.
But, you may say, “what do variances in the weather, or belief in a just world, or the
divergent life trajectories of you and your childhood friend, have to do with Woolf, or her
socialism, or her snobbery?”
Let me explain…
In 1928 Woolf wrote one of the most irritating lines in literary criticism: “For genius
like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born
in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born to-day among the working
classes” (AROO 48). If you have ever taught A Room of One’s Own in a room with any students who hail from the working classes, you are no doubt well aware of the line’s irritating
effects: irritating because of the seemingly flippant eruption of Woolf’s own class bias in the
text, but also irritating because those fighting words get under our skin, if we are reading A
Room of One’s Own attentively. What are the material conditions that allow creativity to flourish and realize itself as a fully formed cultural production? What are the effects of intellectual
“Am I a Snob?”
183
“malnourishment” among those who do not have the material advantages of those who can afford to study, not to mention dine, at Oxbridge? (AROO 57). And these are questions that still
should get under our skin in these days of ever more corporatized and privatized education.
That irritating “contradictory” Woolf who displays simultaneously class bias and an
acute understanding of the links between ideology, education, and material wherewithal,
appears in her later work as well. On the intellectual level, Woolf is often very precise about
the links between money, power, and social value. In Three Guineas, for example, she exposes the hypocrisy of a capitalist State that correlates the salary a person commands with
his social worth while refusing to acknowledge the unpaid labor performed by women:
Is the work of a mother, of a wife, of a daughter, worth nothing to the nation
in solid cash?…It seems incredible, yet it seems undeniable. Among all those
offices there is no such office as a mother’s; among all those salaries there is no
such salary as a mother’s. The work of an archbishop is worth £15,000 a year to
the State; the work of a judge is worth £5,000 a year; the work of a permanent
secretary is worth £3,000 a year; the work of an army captain, of a sea captain,
of a sergeant of dragoons, of a policeman, of a postman—all these works are
worth paying out of the taxes, but wives and mothers and daughters who work
all day and every day, without whose work the State would collapse and fall to
pieces, without whose work your sons, sir, would cease to exist, are paid nothing
whatever. Can it be possible? (TG 54)
Analyzing the “atmosphere” (we might call it ideology) that distorts masculinist society’s
estimation of the value of women’s labor, Woolf is quick to point out its irrationality,
describing it as an odor, an aroma, a flavor: “atmosphere is one one of the most powerful,
partly because it is one of the most impalpable, of the enemies with which the daughters
of educated men have to fight” (TG 52). Describing the impalpable atmosphere so viscerally, Woolf implies that the undervaluing of women’s labor has much more to do with
affect than it has to do with reasoned judgment. Women’s presence in the workplace seems
to disgust and offend men – the word “Mrs.” is described as a “contaminated word; and
obscene word” that is “rank” and “stink[s] in the nostrils of Whitehall” (TG 52).
While many of us have commented on the affect of shame in Woolf ’s life and work,
less has been said of how what Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank call shame’s “sister” affect—
disgust—operates in her writing. Notable exceptions are Alison Light’s study of Woolf ’s
relationship with her servants, which analyzes at length the feelings of disgust Woolf associates with close proximity with the working classes or with the “help,” especially her
cook, Nellie Boxall, and Maren Linett’s analysis of Woolf ’s anti-Semitism as evidenced
by the “Jew in the Bathtub” scene in The Years. (Kathryn Simpson, in her essay in this
volume, and Leena Kore Schröder also link Woolf ’s anti-Semitism to abjection, which is
similar to disgust, although more of a psychoanalytic term than an affect theory term, and
for purposes of this discussion I want to keep them separate.)
Woolf also expresses disgust in reaction to a journalist who encroaches on her privacy,
calling him “a bug” down from London “to come & steal in & take notes” (D5 73). Together with the palpable disgust that Woolf displays in her writing towards her servants,
or towards the “Jew” in the bathtub in The Years, Woolf ’s eruptions of disgust seem to be
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
184
precipitated by real or imagined encroachments of privacy. The “Jew” is a neighbor whose
ablutions can be heard through the thin walls of Sarah’s rented room. Nellie, as Light
notes, would be in close proximity with Woolf because the duties of her job as a ‘domestic’
necessitated a kind of encroachment on privacy:
Yes, survivals like ‘old Sophy’, could be eulogized or patronized, embodying those
older connections from which one had safely and guiltily distanced oneself. Alternately, the housemaid might be a harbinger, the conventional symbol, sweeping away
the mess of the past. Yet those actual young women in one’s kitchen, younger than their
mistress, with their own unruly interiors, there in the flesh and doing the dirty work,
they were far more troubling. One would never really have a room of one’s own whilst
they were in and out. (83 italics in original)
If shame makes, according to Sedgwick, “a double movement toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality,” exerting a kind of contagious/repulsive force on
those who witness or experience shame, then disgust is a turning away, a refusal to identify
or relate (Sedgwick 37). Ben Highmore, in his reading of George Orwell’s Road to Wigan
Pier, describes how the “pedagogy of disgust” constructs a schism between the working
classes and the upper classes: “It is the pedagogy of disgust that is such an elemental figure
in Orwell’s work and provides a more effective class investment than the mere ideological
beliefs that are usually associated with social class: ‘It may not greatly matter if the average
middle-class person is brought up to believe that the working classes are ignorant, lazy,
drunken, boorish, and dishonest; it is when he is brought up to believe that they are dirty
that the harm is done’” (130). Could it be possible that Woolf, who had such illuminating insights about how the British educational system produced violence prone, possession loving, competition driven, woman distaining subjects, could have been blind to the
pedagogy of disgust and its enforcement of class division? Perhaps. Probably.
However, Woolf ’s own work suggests that she had some self-awareness about her elitist inconsistencies. When she asked, “Am I a snob?” in her memoir club speech of Dec. 1,
1936, she was poking fun of her propensity to admire the social rank and apparent lack of
self-consciousness of the aristocracy:
The snob is a flutter-brained, hare-brained creature so little satisfied with his or her
own standing that in order to consolidate it he or she is always flourishing a title or
an honour in other people’s faces so that they may believe, and help him to believe
what he does not really believe—that he is somehow a person of importance.
This is a symptom that I recognize in my own case. (MOB 206)
On the one hand, Woolf’s self-ironization helps her to situate herself in relation to the arbitrariness (indeed the falsity) of claims of class privilege. The snob is not a person of importance, although s/he attempts, foolishly, to impress people into thinking that s/he is. And
the coroneted person to whom the snob grovels is not, according to the evidence supplied
in Woolf’s essay, worthy of admiration. The possession of a coronet is completely a matter
of accident of birth, uncoupled from deservingness. Lady Sybil Colefax, simply put, behaves
badly and gets away with it because she is a rich woman from an aristocratic family. In this
“Am I a Snob?”
185
sense, Woolf rejects the belief in a just world, which would encourage one to rationalize inequity by maintaining that the poor deserve to be poor, the colonized deserve to be colonized,
the rich and privileged deserve to be privileged. Other explanations need to be proffered in
order to understand gross injustices, which may explain Woolf’s socialism, her feminism, her
anti-imperialism. That is, Woolf at least attempts to locate her own privilege—in her very
specific self-positioning in Three Guineas as a part of the “educated class” that can “expect
maids to cook dinner and wash up after dinner” (TG 4); or (as Paula Maggio and Alison
Light both note) in Woolf’s conscious self-positioning in her preface to Margaret Llewelyn
Davies’ collection of working women’s stories, Life as We have Known It (Maggio; Light 20304). In that preface, Woolf describes herself as a spectator, however benevolent, to the narratives of the working class women of the Cooperative Guild: “If every reform they demand
was granted this very instant, it would not touch one hair of my comfortable capitalistic
head. Hence my interest is merely altruistic. It is thin spread and moon coloured. There is
no life blood or urgency about it. However hard I clap my hands or stamp my feet there is a
hollowness in the sound which betrays me. I am a benevolent spectator” (xix).
Woolf marks her distance from working class women not from an affective motive,
but rather from what we might call an ethical one that refuses to rationalize the inequities
that leave her “comfortable capitalistic head” untouched by the struggle of the women of
the Cooperative Guild. To be untouched is not necessarily to be unmoved. In fact, recognizing one’s good fortune not to be so touched is an admission that all things are not equal
or fair. While this may not be wholly satisfying, it at least accounts for Woolf ’s apparent
contradictoriness – her elitism as well as her fierce advocacy for victims of unjust systems.
The world is not just. We must work to make it so. Admitting that we don’t always get
what we deserve is a small, but consequential part of that work.
Works Cited
Highmore, Ben. “Bitter After Taste.” Melissa Gregg; Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham:
Duke UP, 2010: 118-137.
Kore-Schröder, Leena. “Tales of Abjection and Miscegenation: Virginia Woolf ’s and Leonard Woolf ’s ‘Jewish’
Stories.” Twentieth-Century Literature 49. 3 (2003): 298-327.
Lerner, Melvin J. and Simmons, C. H. “Observer’s Reaction to the ‘Innocent Victim’: Compassion or Rejection?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4.2 (1966).
Light, Alison. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.
Linett, Maren. “The Jew in the Bath: Imperiled Imagination in Woolf ’s The Years.” Modern Fiction Studies 48.2
(2002): 341-359.
Maggio, Paula. “What does Virginia say about working class women?” Blogging Woolf. Feb. 27, 2009. http://
bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/workingclass/.
Mlodinow, Leonard. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.
Montada, Leo and Lerner, Melvin J. (eds.). Responses to Victimization and Belief in a Just World. New York:
Plenum Press, 1998.
Sedgwick, Eve, and Adam Frank, Eds. Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Thompkins Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.
Woolf, Virginia, “Am I a Snob.” Moments of Being. 2nd edition. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1985.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979-1985.
——. “Introductory Letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies.” Life as We Have Known It. Ed. Margaret Llewelyn
Davies. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975.
——. Three Guineas. 1938. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966.
“COME BUY, COME BUY”:
WOOLF’S CONTRADICTORY RELATIONSHIP TO THE MARKETPLACE
by Kathryn Simpson
E
arlier views of Woolf as an elitist author detached from the workings of the literary marketplace have been challenged and complicated more recently by a critical
focus on Woolf ’s engagement with the commercial world.1 Far from being wary
of being “sullied” by contact with the market, Woolf is now recognised as an artist intent
on marketing her wares: as a writer and publisher she is seen to manipulate, exploit and,
as Jennifer Wicke argues, shape the market and our understanding of it (“Mrs Dalloway”
5). However, this active engagement with the market is in tension with, and contradicted
by, the strong distaste for popularity and commercial success which remained a significant factor influencing Woolf ’s publishing decisions and her fictional representations of
money-making success. One of Woolf ’s most controversial stories—“The Duchess and
the Jeweller” (published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1938)—proves a rich site for exploring
these contradictions, especially given Woolf ’s position in this particular historical moment of the late 1930s as a writer at the peak of her fame but increasingly critical of the
commercial world.2 Always ambivalent about making money from her writing, by the late
1930s Woolf ’s more typically critical and contradictory attitude to the literary marketplace had become more antagonistic and her hatred of what, in Three Guineas, she called
“intellectual harlotry” (TG 114) had become increasingly fierce. Whist she struck out (in
essays, such as “Reviewing” 1939) against the increasing commercialisation of literature
and the commodification of art, however, she continued to utilise her business acumen in
her negotiations over fees paid for her fiction throughout the 1930s. “The Duchess and
the Jeweller” was a story for which, taking Vanessa Bell’s advice, she insisted on being paid
in advance (L6 157, 159, 191).
Many critics have examined Woolf ’s anti-Jewish prejudice in this story and elsewhere
in relation to what Hermione Lee calls “the habitual, half-conscious anti-Semitism of her
circle” (680). However the troubling anti-Semitism of “The Duchess and the Jeweller”
is framed and analysed, there is no question that Oliver Bacon embodies a number of
negative Jewish stereotypes: his insatiable greed, social climbing, conspicuous consumption and success in the commercial world as a jeweller, alongside his physical attributes of
an “elephantine” nose and swaying gait serve as intractable bodily markers that work to
mitigate gentile fears of assimilation and “passing.” What becomes clear however is that,
as Maren Tova Linett remarks, Jewish characters in modernist works “are not ordinary, or
simply stereotyped, European Jews, but instead are saturated with meaning” (2). It seems
that Woolf ’s offensive depiction of her Jewish jeweller speaks not only of her revulsion at
the commercial world he so successfully epitomises, but also of her own powerfully felt
unease about her own role in this world. As Karen Leick remarks, “Woolf ’s anti-Semitic
characterisations of Jews consistently appear in works where she was most consciously
concerned with her mainstream reception and the income she might earn as a result of
her success” (161). This is particularly pertinent in the late 1930s context in which Woolf
“Come buy, come buy”
187
was revising and publishing her story, a context in which, as Three Guineas makes clear,
she perceived monstrous forces at work with an intensified capitalist ethos provoking insatiable desires to possess, to acquire and to control. Money is both the material manifestation and symbolic representation of this destructive greed, enslaving those who acquire
it, corrupting creative and intellectual life, and impoverishing spiritual and moral values.
However, Oliver Bacon’s optimistic and opportunistic entrepreneurialism also resonates with John Maynard Keynes’s endorsement of “animal spirits,” the emotional aspect
of economic decision-making that he saw as necessary to keep the economy buoyant.
In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), Keynes celebrates such
impetus, claiming that “a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation…animal spirits — …[are] a
spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction […] if the animal spirits are dimmed and
the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical
expectation, enterprise will fade and die” (161-2). Such “animal spirits” are characterised
by a naïve optimism and confidence, which puts aside “the thought of ultimate loss…as
a healthy man puts aside the expectation of death” (Keynes 162). Whilst Keynes is keen
to make the point that not all aspects of the economy depend on “waves of irrational psychology,” he also stresses that “it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go
round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating
where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance”
(162-3). Such optimism is also contagious, boosting consumer confidence as well as spurring on further investment.
A falling back on sentiment and chance are clearly pertinent to explaining the decision Oliver makes to accept what he is certain are false pearls in the bargain he strikes with
the Duchess. His naïve optimism and putting aside of potential losses are also key to the
speculative investment he makes in the Duchess’s pearls and her daughter. However, the
infectiousness of such optimism means that, as Tony Lawson and Hashem Pesaran argue,
“[t]he individual is subject to the emotion of the herd” (51). Although this is desirable for
Keynes’ theory, for Woolf, who was reading Freud’s theories of the group around this time,
the idea of “the herd” resonates powerfully with the rise of German fascism.
In her story, the jeweller’s economic “animal spirits” are not depicted as positively confident and energetic but are, rather, atavistic, bestial and abject as Oliver is said
to “snuff[ed]” for “another truffle, a blacker, a bigger further off” and “snort[s]” and
“neigh[s]” (CSF 249, 250). Keynes may himself have characterised Oliver’s “animal spirits” in this way given his own anti-Semitic attitudes often focused on what he perceived as
the Jewish love of “compound interest” (qtd. in Reder 836). Woolf also referred to Keynes
as “dear old Hitler” in her diary in the mid 1930s in what Hermione Lee sees as part of
a resistance to “fear, shame, anger and helplessness” in the face of Nazi threat expressed
though “the minute form of jokes, word-play, inventiveness,” but which may also have a
more critical import (D5 163; Lee 727). Amongst the many animals Oliver is likened to,
his “long pointed nails” used to “rip his letters open” and his anticipation of being alone in
the woods to seduce the innocent Diana when out “riding” (a fantasy future which alludes
perhaps to “Little Red Riding Hood”) carry wolfish overtones. Woolf ’s anti-Semitic bestiary can be seen to speak of both her wariness about the wolfish greed of the commercial
world and her own Woolfishly greedy part in it.
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
As Leena Kore Schröder argues, money, “filthy lucre,” knows no boundaries, “insinuating itself indiscriminately into high and low, infiltrating the furthest reaches of legitimate and criminal transaction, infecting every social process and institution” (304).
Money is the agent of disturbance, undermining the demarcations of self and other and
making clear that what is held to be “foreign” to the self is actually within us. The desire
for money was not foreign to Woolf or Keynes, but, refusing to acknowledge this, greed
is expelled and projected onto the Jewish foreigner and, obviously, plays a central role in
anti-Semitic stereotypes and prejudice. However, as Schröder also argues, Woolf ’s story
promises miscegenation and the seeping of one identity into another, proliferating ambiguities at every level. Whilst the anti-Semitism of Woolf ’s story puts her on the inside
of a powerful cultural circle, there are many instances of the disturbance and, indeed,
dissolution of boundaries at work which multiply and complicate the contradictions and
paradoxes of this story. These contradictions resonate with Woolf ’s assumption of an outsider identity as a feminist and pacifist in relation to the powerful forces at work in her
own social circle and the wider society.
To tease out Woolf ’s insider/outsider position I return to Woolf ’s “de-Jewing” of her
central character via the change of his Hebraic names to a decidedly unkosher and ostensibly English sounding Oliver Bacon. “Oliver” is already a border-crossing name in Woolf ’s
fiction, appearing as it does in several of her narratives. Looking back to The Voyage Out,
“Oliver” was the name given to a bottle of crème de menthe, a gift exchanged between Miss
Allen and her close woman friend which acted as a talisman to ensure their safe adventuring and the continuation of their erotically suggestive bond. The name also, perhaps more
obviously, looks forward to Isa Oliver in Between the Acts, the thwarted poet who, married
to a banker on the stock exchange, secretly writes her poetry in a book bound like an account book.3 “Oliver” then is a name evoking contradiction—at once signaling deviance
and conformity, homoerotic potential and the constraints of marriage, and also pointing
to a connection between writing and moneymaking.
In The Voyage Out, Rachel’s feverish nightmares are haunted by sexually predatory
goblin men (perhaps recalling Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market”4) and her death invites
harsh criticism of the symbolic exchange of women as objects. The situation in “The
Duchess and the Jeweller” is less clear-cut and it is a woman, the Duchess, whose greed
and illicit behaviour present a match for Oliver’s avarice and outsider status. The Duchess’s
uncontrollable greed and perhaps other insatiable desires are articulated via her gambling
addiction and this lack of control leads her to take the role of an active and independent
agent in a male-dominated sphere. In this she is a transgressive woman: she is both a member of the social elite to which Oliver Bacon craves access and also a deviant border crosser,
trespassing on “male” territory, confessing secrets and dealing illicitly with the jeweller.
In her interview with Oliver she uses her excessively elaborate dress and her over-blown
and self-consciously performed femininity to charm and persuade him to buy the pearls
he is certain are fakes. The display of her wares is both abject and suggestively sexual: she
carries the pearls in “a long wash-leather pouch” which “looked like a lean yellow ferret”
and they emerge in an unnatural birth “from a slit in the ferret’s belly…like the eggs of
some heavenly bird” (CSF 251-2, 252). They roll “down the slopes of the vast mountain
sides that fell between her knees into one narrow valley…There they lay in the glow of the
peach-blossom taffeta. Ten pearls” (CSF 252).
“Come buy, come buy”
189
It would seem that the pearls, nestled here in the silky swathes of “peach-blossom taffeta” are suggestively clitoral and, in keeping with her transgressive behaviour, the Duchess
seems to offer both her own and then her daughter, Diana’s, sexual favours as part of the
bargain she is trying to strike. Indeed, she allows Oliver to “stretch[ed] out and t[ake] one
of the pearls between finger and thumb. It was round, it was lustrous” (CSF 252). That
is, he takes the pearl from between her legs. The pearls are said to come from the Appleby
cincture, a cincture being a girdle or belt often associated with ecclesiastical clothing, and
so concerned with modest dress and “covering up.” Yet pearls, as we see in the Duchess’s
performance here, are also part of a sexual display—a contradiction compounded when
in answer to Oliver’s question, ““How much?”” the Duchess “covered the pearls with her
hand” (CSF 252).5
The Duchess’s fear of her husband’s discovery of her gambling, debts and secrets
shared with the jeweller is articulated tellingly in an image that speaks of castration of
this deviant, phallic woman: the Duke, “straight as a poker” would “cut her off, shut her
up down there” (CSF 252). Whilst to be “cut off” is a common phrase to describe being
disinherited and removed from economic security and/ or disempowered, to be “shut…up
down there” is more unusual, suggesting sexual stifling and imprisonment—literal and/or
metaphorical—but indicating that the Duchess’s illicit dealings are tantamount to criminal acts. However, such a powerful threat does not prohibit the Duchess’s avarice and she
continues to bargain, forcing through her business proposal—£20,000 for her fake pearls
and the promise of her daughter, Diana, a virginal prize too tempting for Oliver to resist,
confirming as it would, his access to the upper echelons of society he most covets. In this
transaction he seeks to gain cultural as well as monetary capital—though the fact that
the pearls are “rotten at the core” may throw a question on the symbolic worth of Diana
herself (CSF 253).
The “filthy lucre” then highlights and disrupts the marked boundaries between the
Duchess, “daughter of a hundred earls” and the jeweller from “a dark alley” in Whitechapel, disturbing assumptions about their relative social positions and making clear the
contradictions at the heart of their bond: “They were friends, yet enemies; he was master,
she was mistress; each cheated the other, each needed the other, each feared the other”
(CSF 251, 248). In an earlier draft of the story they were also “conspirators”6 and in the
published version the Duchess, with her own false pearls and her plumage, seems to take
on the identity of the “crowds of Jewesses, beautiful women, with their false pearls, with
their false hair” that Woolf was forced to remove in order that her story be accepted for
publication (Dick 315).7 This slippage of identity in which the Duchess becomes symbolically Jewish (her voice transplanting that of Oliver’s memory of his mother saying Oliver’s
name), resonates for Woolf herself. Just as Oliver in the story is metaphorically wolfish,
there are many biographical instances of Woolf ’s feeling of being symbolically Jewish too,
notably from the mid-1930s.
As Leick has suggested, Woolf ’s marriage to Leonard gave her an “accidently Jewish
identity,” putting her into a “precarious outsider’s category” (172). Woolf ’s letter to Violet
Dickinson outlining the journey she and Leonard are to make through Germany in 1935
suggests that because “Leonard’s nose is so long and hooked, we rather suspect that we
shall be flayed alive” (L5 385). This horrifically prescient image signals her recognition
that as Leonard’s wife she too would be treated like a Jew. As Britain entered the war, this
190
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
became a fact as both she and Leonard were on the Gestapo Arrest List. Other instances,
too, indicate a degree of acceptance of this outsider identity, notably Woolf ’s response to
the destitute young Jewish woman whom she found on her doorstep in March 1936. The
woman assumed that Woolf and Leonard were brother and sister and so both Jewish, and
Woolf ’s diary does not record that she corrected this detail (D5 19).8
Lara Trubowitz argues that Woolf ’s depiction of Oliver draws on the details of
Woolf ’s Jewish acquaintances, notably the Jewish aristocrat, Victor Rothschild, and that
she transposes details of Rothschild’s home and lifestyle into her story. Trubowitz remarks
on the similarity of Woolf ’s description of Rothschild’s library in her diary with its “steel
bookcase packed with first editions, each sealed in a red morocco case” and Oliver’s steel
safes filled with jewels each covered by a “pad of deep crimson velvet” (D4 228; CSF 250;
Trubowitz 291). Although Trubowitz does not explore this point, what seems significant
is that in this transposition jewels are synonymous with books, and both are commodities
for conspicuous display and investment. This transposition of books and the luxuriously
opulent jewels of Oliver’s hoard not only suggests Woolf ’s anxiety about the place of books
in the marketplace, but also her conflicted feelings about her own role in creating niche
markets in which books are not valued and appreciated for their own sake but are prized
as modernist investments (as Lawrence Rainey argues). As Leick claims about Woolf ’s
representation of Jews in The Years, “the presence of Jews not only reveals, but also causes
or is a catalyst for the new and changing marketplace that England has become, implicitly
threatening the old order” (168). Woolf ’s successful modernist marketing practices have a
similar result, as Wicke, Gordon and others have argued.
Further, just as Oliver prostitutes his talent as a skilled jeweller able to recognise a fake
but betraying his professional practice in order to satisfy his greedy desires and achieve his
social ambition, so too does Woolf, as she seeks to make money and consolidate her reputation on the literary market. The publication history of this story itself clearly resonates
with these concerns: Woolf wrote her story for money, adjusted it to suit her customer,
and “sold out” to the fashionable Harper’s Bazaar creating a story for ready consumption
as a commodity.9 Like Oliver Bacon, she is aware of her own complicity in prostituting
her talent and dealing in “false pearls” and so shoring up a social, political and economic
system she finds increasingly despicable and inhuman. That said, the actual amount Woolf
made from this story is less than half she was originally offered: in July 1937 Jacques
Chambrun offered her $1000 for a story but, following the objection to Woolf ’s representation of her Jewish character, this amount reduced to $960 in total for “The Duchess and
the Jeweller” plus “The Shooting Party” (D5 137, n6). Does this mean that she, like Oliver,
made a bad deal (her “customer” in effect getting two for the price of one)? Her diary suggests that she is aware that she anticipated being cheated, as (allegedly) is the Duchess, by
a “sharper”: Woolf accuses Chambrun of being a cheat in racist terms, referring to him as
“that maroon coloured sharper” whom she thinks “will somehow wriggle out” of the deal
(D5 112, 113). Although in a letter to Vanessa Bell she plans to be “hard as flint” in her
dealings with him and is resolved not to “put pen to paper without a cheque,” her diary
indicates that she had begun work on this story over a month before she wrote this to Bell
(L6 173, 177; D5 107). It could also be that this reduction in profit reduces her feeling of
complicity with commercial practices and so mitigates her anxiety about this commercial
transaction (as might her gift of money to Vanessa—her “due on the story”—for helping
“Come buy, come buy”
191
Woolf to negotiate the payment for her story (L6 191). There is an irony, if not a contradiction, at work in this: if Woolf ’s anti-Semitic representations of greedy Jews convey her
anxiety about making money from her writing, in this case her offensive depiction worked
to reduce her profit and, presumably, her anxiety.
Woolf ’s stereotypical representation of Jewish identity seems to resonate with Woolf ’s
personal and political position at this point as well. Like the stereotypical Jew, Woolf feels
that she cannot fully assimilate into her contemporary society and context: in her diary
she records, “I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider” (D5 189). She feels she can no
longer “pass” as English when to be English means to be belligerent, patriotic, and adhering to what in Three Guineas she called “unreal symbols” of pride, patriotism, honour,
and loyalty to corrupt institutions (TG 92-6). In her diary in November 1938 she states,
“How widely I feel outside it all” and notes that the publication of Three Guineas had
“queered the pitch,” created or made visible her altered position in terms of her public
reputation and her private relations (D5 188-9). Although Oliver and Woolf recognise
the revolutionary potential of the materials at their disposal—Oliver’s hoard of diamonds
are “‘Gunpowder!’” enough to blow up Mayfair, and Woolf ’s hoard of newspaper cuttings
and other evidence are enough to blow up St Paul’s (CSF 292; D4 77)10 — neither achieve
this potential. Oliver’s desires override this disruptive impetus, and Woolf fears that, although her words potentially threaten the social order, war will be inevitable, as the description of Oliver’s gems—“[t]ears” and “[h]eart’s blood”—seems to suggest (CSF 250).
At several points in the story, Oliver is said to have “dismantled” himself, the symbols
of his success seemingly instantly stripped away. Each time this is followed by his recounting of his narrative of success and acquisition of the commodities and possessions that
shore up the public identity he creates for himself. Not masking her feeling of dismantling
so convincingly, Woolf expresses increasing uncertainty about her identity as a writer and
as part of Bloomsbury – more and more she doubts the efficacy of her words to confirm
her pacifist and feminist identity when continually “writing against the current” which she
finds “difficult [to] entirely disregard” (D5 189). Like Isa Oliver, Woolf may feel her writing is an escape from the real world— Isa’s poetry hidden in an account book making clear
that the economic is the real world. But Woolf does directly address the economic reality
in Three Guineas and more obliquely in “The Duchess and the Jeweller” in her attempt to
use her influence as a woman and as a writer “to abolish the inhumanity, the beastliness,
the horror, the folly of war” and to attack the money motive and lust for power epitomised
by Hitler’s increasing power and the question this provokes of “[w]hat’ll he gobble next”
(TG 96; D5 173).
In “The Duchess and the Jeweller” Woolf utilises the most clichéd and derogatory of
Jewish stereotypes to reveal not only her own anxiety about her negotiation of the literary
marketplace and money-making success, but a fear of a more general complicity in the
gobbling greed she saw as insidiously pervading Britain, most notably in the madness of
the “money motive” of all those with power and wealth. In Three Guineas Woolf argued
that we are all the figure of the fascist dictator and that fascism is alive and thriving in imperialist, patriarchal Britain;11 in “The Duchess and the Jeweller” she argues that we are all
“playing the Jew”— greedily addicted to money and prepared to enter into risky gambles
to increase our hoard, whatever the cost.
192
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
Notes
1.
2.
For example see Wicke, Delany, Garrity, Hankins, Caughie, Abbott, Willison, et al, Gordon, and Dubino.
Laura María Lojo Rodríguez persuasively explores these similar tensions and contradictions in her reading
of this story in relation to British Aestheticism.
3.
Phyllis Lassner and Trubowitz also note this.
4.
This poem in itself is the epitome of irresolvable contradiction (is it a cautionary tale against lust or an
immoral story endorsing fleshly delights?) as well as a commodity par excellence, saleable as it is, on multiple and diverse markets—from the late Victorian production of illustrated gift editions, to the twentieth
editions for children and adults, including its reproduction in Playboy. See Lorraine Janzen Kooistra for
further discussion.
5. Kate Henderson also comments on the “sexual undercurrent” of this interaction and Oliver’s action of
taking a pearl (60).
6.
Trubowitz also makes reference to this revision (281).
7.
Schröder also comments on this in relation to the miscegenation in Woolf ’s story (310).
8.
Schröder similarly discusses this diary entry (322).
9.
Henderson argues similarly that Woolf ’s story fits neatly into the “larger framework of consumption” that
Harper’s Bazaar signifies (53).
10. Lassner and Trubowitz also note this connection.
11. As Woolf states, “we cannot dissociate ourselves from that figure [of the fascist dictator], but are ourselves
that figure” (TG 163).
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VIRGINIA WOOLF AND DECEMBER 1910:
THE QUESTION OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION
by Makiko Minow-Pinkney
W
oolf asked in her diary as she revised the manuscript of Mrs Dalloway (1925)
on 13 December 1924: “But is it ‘unreal’?”At issue here is the contradiction
between “reality” and modernist fiction brought to the fore a year and half earlier
in Arnold Bennett’s critique of the characters of Jacob’s Room (1922). His criticism had already
prompted Woolf’s essay “Character in Fiction,” in which she famously asserts, “on or about
December 1910 human character changed” (E3 421). Instead of exploring the personal factors which explain why Woolf alighted on that specific date, I want to look here at the wider
context of her 1910 statement, going beyond the bounds of Bloomsbury itself in quest of
what Woolf calls, in an earlier version of “Character in Fiction,” “a vaguer force at work—a
force which is sometimes called the Spirit of the Age or the Tendency of the age” (E3 504).
It is generally accepted that the Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London played its
part in Woolf ’s theory of character change in late 1910. But I want in this essay to venture
out into what may initially appear quite unrelated directions; so my question is: to what
extent can we regard Henry Parker Manning’s compendium, The Fourth Dimension Simply
Explained: A Collection of Essays Selected from Those Submitted in the Scientific American’s
Prize Competition, which was itself published in 1910, as being a factor in Woolf ’s mischievous theory of character and cultural transition? Is the mathematical theory of four dimensions the absent term or missing “link” in our scholarly reconstruction of her thinking
about the mutation of character in the year 1910? Since her questions in the “Character in
Fiction” essay—“But I ask, myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality?” (E3
426)—are central to her statement of cultural metamorphosis, I would like here to offer a
model of a modernist artist who posed similar questions and for whom mathematics played
a major role in his most radical aesthetic thinking. Leo Stein recalls a gathering of avantgarde artists at his home in Paris around 1908-09: “There was a friend of the Montmartre
crowd, interested in mathematics, who talked about infinities and fourth dimensions, Picasso began to have opinions on what was and what was not real” (Stein 75-76). Stein is
here referring to the birth of Picasso’s new ideas about “reality” which led him towards cubism, whose origins remain even today a matter of much debate. The mathematical friend
Stein mentions in his reminiscence was an insurance actuary Maurice Princet. Whether he
really introduced four-dimensional geometry to Picasso is not entirely clear; for the artist himself later denied it. The prominent mathematicians who advocated non-Euclidean
geometry and higher dimensions in France in that period were Henri Poincaré and Esprit
Jouffret. However, Jean Metzinger, whose significance as a theoretician for the cubist movement has recently become more evident to us, recalled that he himself had learnt the new
geometries under Princet’s tutelage in 1910 (A Cubism Reader 235).
And that crucial Woolfian year 1910 is indeed central here. For Picasso painted the Portrait of Ambroise Vollard in the spring of that year, his Seated Woman with a Book possibly in
the summer, and the Portrait of Henry Kahnweiler in the autumn. Some cubist works were
Woolf and December 1910
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accepted by the Salon d’Automne in October-November 1910, and more cubist paintings appeared at the Salon des Indépendants, followed by the first general exhibition of cubism at the
Indépendants in May 1911, which caused a considerable stir among the broader public. Meantime, Henry Manning’s The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained was published in New York.
Cubism and fourth-dimensional theory are deeply imbricated with each other. Some
contemporary commentators themselves made the connection, such as the American modernist painter Max Weber in an article on “The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point
of View” in July 1910 (Camera Work 25); and this relationship is above all what Linda
Henderson’s volume The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art
endeavours to establish, meticulously documenting the widespread presence of the now
somewhat forgotten concept of the fourth dimension in cultural circles around the end of
the nineteenth and the early twentieth century.
By demonstrating the similarity between Picasso’s Portrait of Ambroise Vollard and a
textbook illustration of four dimensions by the geometer Esprit Jouffret, Henderson proposes that Picasso’s new-found inspiration was indeed four-dimensional geometry, and that this
constitutes the missing link which explains his radical change of style from Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon of 1907 which was still in part pursuing nineteenth-century aesthetic goals. The
artist and critic Tony Robbin argues that Picasso made another radical conceptual breakthrough with the portrait of Henry Kahnweiler by fully engaging with four-dimensional
geometry and that this brought cubism to its full realisation (Robbin 30). But who, then,
taught him the geometry of four dimensions? Admitting that there is no firm proof, Robbin
argues that it was probably Alice Derain, Princet’s mistress and subsequently his wife, (and
Picasso’s one-time lover), and his friend Max Jacob, a writer and four-dimensions enthusiast,
who visited him in Cadaqués, Spain, in the summer of 1910. The woman of Seated Woman
with a Book is, arguably, Alice Derain, and the book itself may be Jouffret’s treatise on the
fourth dimension. In this startling interpretation of Tony Robbin’s, Picasso thus “graciously
thanks Alice for her help and company in his search for the fourth dimension” (37).
As is well known, radically new hypotheses as to the nature of matter were advanced
and many related new discoveries were made around the turn of the century: electromagnetic waves, Röntgen’s rays, the electron, radium, and subatomic structure. These theories
and discoveries which, taken as a whole, made matter seem less solid, porous, even empty,
certainly fascinated the wider public; and the fourth spatial dimension was another startling concept that captured the popular imagination between 1880 and 1905. Indeed,
according to Henderson, by 1910 it had become a widespread preoccupation among
intellectuals, artists and the general public in America and Europe. Henderson asserts
that it is “the nineteenth-century field of n-dimensional geometry and the concept of a
possible fourth spatial dimension that emerged from it in the 1870s that proved crucial
to the imagination of twentieth-century artists” (“The Image” 133). My contention is
that to recognise this mathematical notion as the intellectual context around 1910 from
which modernist art and literature emerged would enrich our understanding not only of
Woolf herself but of modernism in general. I am therefore inclined to regard this particular mathematical theory as a necessary background to Woolf ’s December 1910 remark,
and would argue that in the paintings of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition of that year
she found something like the fourth dimension “in the practical state” (to borrow Louis
Althusser’s phrase), i.e., actually embodied in brushstrokes on canvas, whether or not she
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knew of the actual mathematical theorising about it.
For the poet and avant-garde theorist Guillaume Apollinaire, four-dimensionallyinspired cubist art meant the final defeat of Impressionism; it metamorphosed that nineteenth-century movement and all the paintings that reacted to it into twentieth-century
Modernism. From dissatisfaction with the visual realism of Impressionism, from doubts
about the validity of observing and recording an object accurately, what Roger Fry called
Post-Impressionism emerged around 1880; but this was of course only one symptom of
the wider intellectual crisis of the period. A similar realisation of the inadequacy of human
sense-perception began to undercut the foundations of positivism, and scientific method
itself started to shift in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Instead of observation, creativity would become the key principle of scientific endeavour. The emphasis would soon
be not on experience but on imagination and the formulation of hypotheses. Parallels in
the literary field are evident enough in the development from Realism’s passive mirroring
of external reality to Modernism’s creation of forms to present reality actively. The fin-desiècle also saw the Symbolist movement, mysticism, occultism, spiritualism and a renewed
interest in German Idealism, all of which articulated dissatisfaction with dominant social
ideologies and culminated in an impassioned desire for secret meanings occluded from
utilitarian everyday life. The notion of the fourth dimension was part of this general intellectual trend to look for hidden truths beyond the visible surface, and it could thus be
regarded as a phenomenon in science parallel to the Symbolist movement in literature.
Starting in the mid-nineteenth century as disparate individual ideas of mere mathematical curiosity, four-dimensional geometry had advanced rapidly in the second half
of the century to become a serious possibility as a description of reality. In the AngloAmerican world it was Charles Howard Hinton who was the most prominent advocate of
four-dimensional “hyperspace philosophy” and the great populariser of the concept. H.G.
Wells encountered the notion while attending the Royal College of Science in London between 1884 and 1887, and used the idea in his stories thereby contributing to its diffusion
in the wider world; the success of The Time Machine in 1895 encouraged the popular idea
of time as the fourth dimension. In France, Poincaré and Jouffret energictically advocated
the concept, encouraging the belief that the fourth dimension makes a global synthesis of
knowledge possible.
Interest spread widely both in the scientific community and the general public. Henry
Manning’s book, The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained, boasted of 245 entries on the topic submitted to his journal, The Scientific American, from all over the world. Charles Hinton’s
The Fourth Dimension was published in 1904 and was reprinted in London five times. This
mathematical concept then combined variously with elements in mysticism, theosophy, and
occultism in the United States, England and Europe. Linda Henderson even claims that the
fascination with the idea had grown so widespread by 1910 that it became almost “a household word” (The Fourth Dimension 45), and that it served as a realm where people would
locate utopian answers to the conundrums which contemporary science failed to address,
such as the Platonic Ideal, the Kantian Ding an sich and even Heaven itself, to the point,
ultimately, where it functioned as a justification for anything and everything new in the era.
When the solar eclipse of 1919 proved Einstein’s relativity theories to be valid, the
abstract mathematical idea of four dimensions became accepted as the objective reality
of physics; and Einstein’s theory of a space-time continuum, with time as the fourth
Woolf and December 1910
197
dimension, took over from the earlier geometrical notion of four dimensions in the public
mind. Soon the spatial concept of the fourth dimension disappeared from mainstream
cultural memory and went underground, surviving in non-mathematical cultures such
as science-fiction writing and mystical literature. Even cubism came to be erroneously
ascribed to Einstein’s theory, though in fact Einstein was not known to painters in France
in the first decade of the twentieth century.
There seems to be no explicit mention of the term “fourth dimension” by Virginia
Woolf. However, the relevance of this mathematical notion to her work may be defended
partly by her lively ‘curiosity about the ideas, images and vocabularies of physics’ (Whitworth 127), and also by the surprising number of mathematicians of one kind or another in
her novels: Mr Bentley in Mrs Dalloway reflects on Einstein and speculates on mathematics
as the sky-writing aeroplane flies overhead; Andrew in To the Lighthouse (1927) has a gift
for mathematics so exceptional that even the philosopher Mr Ramsay is deeply impressed
by it; Bernard refers to a mathematician’s certainty when he questions the grounds of his
own being in the holograph of The Waves. But the most pertinent character for my argument here is Katharine Hilbery, the heroine of Night and Day (1919), who longs to be free
of her banal middle-class social duties so that she can pursue her mathematical interests.
Katherine’s passion for mathematics is caught up in issues of gender form the start: “in
her mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature” (42), and she prefers the “unwomanly nature of the science,” its “exactitude” and “the star-like impersonality of figures”
to “the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose” (42) to which her exceptionally literary family is devoted. Mathematics represents to her a “complete emancipation
from her present surroundings” (42), and thus from the socially prescribed role of the
middle-class woman. As we know, Vanessa Bell is the model for the heroine (L2 109), and
Katherine’s antipathy to her family’s propensity for phrase-making and the pursuit of emotional exactitude originates from Vanessa’s silent personality and the non-verbal occupation
of painting. Given the fact that Vanessa’s painting is replaced in the novel by Katherine’s
mathematics, it would appear that the two activities are firmly associated with each other
in Woolf ’s mind. Despite Katherine’s own initial belief that mathematics and poetry are
antithetical, the novel ultimately suggests their underlying shared nature; for both represent
a visionary power which frees one from the banality of the social world. In Ralph’s reverie,
both activities are envisioned as belonging to “another world” where an ideal is created and
shared, “a vision flung out in advance of our actual circumstances” (512). Mathematics is
antithetical only to the kind of literature valued by Katherine’s father or William Rodney,
the function of which is to pour “soothing balm” over the raw ugliness of human affairs and
to provide a form which moulds passion into the sanctioned “civilisation” (525).
Katherine’s problem (which is also the theme of the novel, as indicated by its title)
is how to connect the world of impersonal numbers and wild visions which she can only
inhabit secretly at night with her day-time domestic life of overseeing human affairs laden
with feelings and emotions; namely, how to connect “poetry” and “prose” (mathematics
and poetry being perceived as belonging to the same side by the novel if not by the heroine). One cannot help speculating what Katherine herself might make of the notion of
the fourth dimension, that unfathomable space where higher reality exists and into which
she would be able to step smoothly, “erect, without essential change” (356), from her daily
three-dimensional surroundings. How to connect “night and day,” the visionary world of
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poetry/mathematics and the mundane world of prose, was also Woolf ’s own problem as
a novelist at the time. From this pressing concern Woolf ’s modernist aesthetics were to
be developed in the years that followed; though Night and Day is not itself a modernist
novel, it already contains some typical Woolfian notions such as “poetry,” “impersonal
relationships,” and the image of life as a “globe,” all of which become utopian aspirations
for the contemporary novel in Woolf ’s later aesthetic thinking. I therefore propose that by
making her heroine a mathematician Woolf has herself given us a strong pointer towards
the relevance of the intersection of higher-dimensional mathematics and European avantgarde art in the emergence of her own modernism.
In “Modern Fiction” Woolf calls on the novelist to look within and record “a myriad
impressions” and the “incessant shower of innumerable atoms” (CE2 106) as they fall and
shape themselves. This may make her seem an Impressionist of sorts. However, we should
remember that attending to the intimate and the immediate is only one half of the aim
of her work. For in all her writing a countervailing desire for “true reality” and “the truth”
figure repeatedly too; it is, in fact, often just such an epistemological quest for absolute
knowledge of the object that motivates both the individual Woolfian text and her writing
process itself. Or in Ann Banfield’s succinct words, “Woolf ’s fiction is an implicit theory
of modern knowledge” (52). Impressionist technique is necessary only as a method, just
as Post-Impressionist painters themselves used Impressionist techniques only insofar as
they were locally useful for their more global aesthetic aims. A powerful epistemological
urge towards the impersonal and the permanent is also then, albeit paradoxically, a central
goal of Woolf ’s work and modernism in general. For as she affirms later in “A Sketch of
the Past,” “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern” (MOB 72). Woolf ’s phrase here
emphasizes the universal structure behind everyday phenomena and thus points in the
same direction as Metzinger’s striking account of Cézanne in 1910: “Cézanne showed us
forms living in the reality of light” (A Cubism Reader 76).
Such paradoxical duality or contradiction, or in Woolfian parlance “granite and rainbow,” has been at the very heart of modern art since Charles Baudelaire in “The Painter of
Modern Life” defined its task as being a synthesis of contradictory elements, of modernity’s
transient immediacy and art’s eternal universality; and this challenging task continued to be
an aesthetic goal for cubist painters. Metzinger praises Picasso’s resolution of duality in his
1910 review of the Salon d’Automne: the painter has synthesized “intelligence” and “feelings,”
“tactile perception with visual perceptions,” and has demonstrated the eternal forms existing
behind phenomena as had first been revealed by Cézanne. It was, in Metzinger’s view, by
way of “free, mobile perspective” that Picasso had overcome the dualism and illuminated the
object without denying it, thus making it “the sensorial and living equivalent of an idea, the
total image” (A Cubism Reader 76). Woolf’s modernist ambition is also to impart to character
in the novel “a total image” from such a free, mobile perspective, thereby setting the character
“in her higher relation to the world” (E3 433, emphasis added), so that Mrs Brown would
suggest “a complete view of human life…< a whole universe >” (E3 509) and synthesize “[m]
yriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas” and “all sorts of different scenes” (E3 425).
Or let us take Woolf ’s famous image of life as a luminous halo or semi-transparent envelope in “Modern Fiction.” She rejects the “series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged,” an image which would more easily fit a linear, one-point-perspectival system of
representation. Her new, more complex image is both spatial (a halo or an envelope) and
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199
temporal (“from the beginning…to the end”) and thus would be better dealt with by
four-dimensional representation than by conventional three-dimensional means. Existing
narrative methods thus become inadequate, making the call for a radical new style and
language which can convey a new vision of life urgent. Woolf had to hand the examples
of H.G. Wells’s fourth dimension-based short stories such as “The Remarkable Case of
Davidson’s Eyes” (1895) and “The Plattner Story” (1896) to see just how limited this rich
notion can be when it is treated purely as a matter of literary theme or content; it can
clearly only prove aesthetically fruitful when it is a transforming principle of literary form
instead. Since Wells fails to go beyond a rudimentary treatment of the mere content of
this mathematical concept, he is not surprisingly condemned by Woolf as a materialist.
The fourth dimension had been interpreted as a liberating agent by most of its proponents. Hinton believed that with enlarged imaginative powers gained by the practice
of visualising the four-dimensional cubes which he called “tesseracts,” individuals would
gain access to true reality. In his review of Hinton’s book The Fourth Dimension, Bertrand Russell agreed on this point: speculation on the fourth dimension would “stimulate
the imagination, and free the intellect from the shackles of the actual.” Russell believes
that “emancipation from the real world” is vital for complete intellectual liberty; “a mind
should be able to think as easily of the non-existent as of the existent” (Russell 574). One
can thus imagine the headily liberating effect of the idea of the fourth dimension, which
offered the possibility of discarding anything which had been established as fact and reality. From its perspective, no laws—social, cultural or aesthetic—of the so-called real world
are fixed or absolute, nor are any models of relationship between genders or generations.
There is a certain resonance between Russell’s remark and Woolf ’s later expressed beliefs
on facts, truth and the non-existent. It would certainly be interesting to know whether
he discussed the Hinton book with Virginia Stephen over lunch in London on 12 March
1905, just five months after the publication of his review, or perhaps at one of Ottoline
Morrell’s parties which they both attended at Garsington.
By the time Woolf was writing “Character in Fiction” in 1924, Einstein’s theories had
been accepted as the objective description of physical reality rather than a purely abstract
mathematical theory or fantasy; and his idea of a space-time continuum, which is itself a
four-dimensional, non-Euclidian structure, was sweeping away the earlier spatial understanding of the fourth dimension. It would not be surprising if Woolf had retrospectively
recognised the first expression of such an epochal shift in the understanding of the fundamentals of our world in the 1910 exhibition. This change in the perception of reality and
a radical desire to start fresh, to break away from the conventional moulds of perception,
were the common feature of the artists gathered together as “Post-Impressionists,” who
were in fact too diverse to be adequately defined by any single term as Fry himself was
well aware (Vision and Design 81). Such painters challenged the dominant conventions of
linear one-point perspective and the chiaroscuro modelling techniques which had reigned
since the Renaissance to represent “reality” as three-dimensional and with the human at
its centre. Though cubism was not itself represented at the London exhibition, we might
regard it as the final aesthetic “destination” to which the paintings exhibited, particularly
those of Cézanne, were tending. For Gleizes and Metzinger argue in Du “Cubisme,” that
“Anyone who understands Cézanne has an inkling of cubism,” since between the two
there is only “difference in intensity” (A Cubism Reader 420).
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The importance of Fry’s 1910 exhibition for Woolf at the time might simply have
been the ambience of excitement and hopefulness, giving her much needed confidence in
embarking upon her own aesthetic journey. The essential significance of the exhibition,
in both artistic and social terms, was indeed in its emancipatory effect; for “[t]he PostImpressionist revolution” was, as Clive Bell later recalled, “to liberate the creative powers
of all those young and youngish artists who possessed any powers worth liberating” (Old
Friends 77). Linda Henderson argues that both non-Euclidian geometry and the fourth
dimension were “primarily a symbol of liberation for artists” (The Fourth Dimension 339);
so if British artists and above all Woolf herself did not possess the vocabulary of the fourth
dimension, they arguably did not need it, for they had the 1910 exhibition itself, those
startling Post-Impressionist canvases which pointed inexorably forward to cubism.
The notion of the fourth dimension became so attractive because it amalgamated
two cultural dominants at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the
twentieth century: science and the transcendence of surface reality. It gave the Zeitgeist,
which was deeply dissatisfied with the materialistic world, a concrete and scientific form
in which to express its utopian desire for higher truths. It came to stand, in Apollinaire’s
words, for “the aspirations and premonitions” of many young artists (14); it was, to borrow Woolf ’s words, a “vaguer force at work” directing the “Tendency of the Age.” “Nothing more than historical interest may be attached to it,” Apollinaire writes, but then adds
that, none the less, “this utopian expression should be analyzed and explained” (14). If
this concept of a higher, unseen fourth dimension of space is indeed, as Linda Henderson
claims, “[o]ne of the most important stimuli for the imaginations of Modernist artists in
the twentieth century” (“The Images” 131), it is because the concept expressed symbolically what the Zeitgeist most desired. Or as Tony Robbin puts it:
in 1910, Picasso became the champion of a new culture that was told by science that the essence of things lay in structures that skin hid. Picasso’s private
use of the fourth dimension…spoke to so many, then and now, because it accomplished a goal of the whole culture.…Cubism was no vacuous formal improvisation; it rocked Western painting because it offered a new way of seeing
space that was considered to be truer to life. Picasso used the technical drawing
of four-dimensional geometry to show his audience the reality they knew existed
but could not otherwise see. (40)
Whether or not the terminology of the fourth dimension was actually used by any particular group, it is from this wider spirit of the epoch, this pervasive utopian desire, that
modernist art emerged. We should recall here that towards the end of 1910, that crucial
period which Woolf designated later as the moment when human character changed,
Virginia Stephen, as she then was, resumed the writing of her very first novel Melymbrosia
with renewed enthusiasm and with a new resolution to become a novelist after a prolonged break due to illness. The novel’s heroine, Rachel, is a young woman who strongly
believes in “Spirits” and “the presence of the things that aren’t there”; therefore she wages
war “against the people who believe in what they see” (38). (The heroine of this earlier
version of The Voyage Out (1915) is thus already fighting the war in which Woolf would
later herself take sides against the materialism of the Edwardians.)
On the publication of Orlando in 1928, one contemporary reviewer noted the aptness
Woolf and December 1910
201
of the concept of the fourth dimension in relation to it. Cleveland Chase pointed out in
the New York Times that Woolf used an ancient literary form, allegory, “to express her very
modern fourth-dimensional concepts,” and described the novel as “an application to writing of the Einstein theory of relativity” (21 Oct. 1928: 7). For Chase the fourth dimension
is relativity theory, and both are mainly to do with “the element of time,” which he takes
to be Woolf ’s preoccupation in Orlando. As I have already noted, after 1920 Einstein’s
theory turned the term “fourth dimension” into a synonym for the space-time continuum;
and the impact of Einsteinian theory on the modernism of the 1920s and 1930s has been
well discussed in previous scholarship. But I have been arguing that the geometrical fourth
dimension long preceded this Einsteinian interpretation of the term; and that it was this
spatial fourth dimension, or at least the cultural desire symbolised by that concept, which
formatively contributed to the emergence of early modernism, generating its utopian and
even euphoric impulses. This mathematical vision, I suggest, underpins both Woolf ’s own
fictional innovations and her theory of character change in December 1910.
Works Cited
Apollinaire, Guillaume. The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditation. 1913. New York: George Wittenborn, Inc.,
1962.
Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: CUP, 2000.
Bell, Clive. Old Friends. Roger Fry: Anecdotes, for the use of a future biographer, illustrating certain peculiarities of
the late Roger Fry. 1937. London: Cecil Woolf, 1997.
Chase, Cleveland. Rev. of Orlando by Virginia Woolf. New York Times 21 October 1928. 7.
Fry, Roger. Vision & Design. Ed. J.B. Bullen. London: OUP, 1981.
Gleizes, Albert and Jean Metzinger. Du “Cubisme” (1912) in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 19061914. Eds. Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2008: 417-35.
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple Henderson. The Fourth Dimension and Non- Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1983.
——. “The Image and Imagination of the Fourth Dimension in Twentieth- Century Art and Culture.” Configurations 17 (2009):131-60.
Manning, Henry P. Ed. The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained. New York: Munn & Company. Inc., 1910.
(Electronic Text Centre, U of Virginia Library).
Metzinger, Jean. “Note sur la peinture,” Pan (October-November 1910). A Cubism Reader. Eds. Mark Antliff and
Patricia Leighten. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2008: 49-52.
Robbin, Tony. Shadows of Reality: The Fourth dimension in Reality, Cubism, and Modern Thought. New Haven &
London: Yale UP, 2006.
Russell, Bertrand. “New Books.” Rev. of The Fourth Dimension by Charles Howard Hinton. Mind. Vol. XIII.
1904: 573-74.
Stein, Leo. Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose. New York: Crown, 1947.
Weber, Max. “The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View.” Camera Work, 31 July 1910: 25.
Whitworth, Michael. Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Oxford: OUP, 2001.
Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” Collected Essays. Vol. 2. Ed. Leonard
Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2. 1920-1924. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1978.
——. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf. Ed.
Jeanne Schulkind. London: The Hogarth Press, 1978.
——. “Character in Fiction.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3. 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York:
Harcourt, 1987.
——. “Character in Fiction” (a transcript of Woolf ’s draft paper, delivered to the Heretics Society). The Essays of
Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1987.
——. Night and Day. Oxford: OUP, 1992.
——. Melymrosia. Ed. with Intro. Louise DeSalvo. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2002.
VIRGINIA WOOLF ON MATHEMATICS: SIGNIFYING OPPOSITION
by Jocelyn Rodal
“Books, so people say, are an infallible guide to character. Thus we might be
worse occupied than in examining the works of Shakespeare, the plays of Ben
Jonson—Mrs Aphra Behn’s Lyrics” (JRHD 159).
V
irginia Woolf penned these words in an early handwritten draft of Jacob’s Room
(1922), later removing them from the final novel. Dry and slightly sarcastic, at
once understated and perversely exaggerated, these lines contemplate literature
coolly, sitting at the bottom of a page that is covered in scratch marks and deletions. If
we flip over the leaf of the holograph, we come upon something very different: “50 2 53
280[×]50 = 14,000” (160). Here, Woolf calculated a word count on the back of her writing.1 The reflection is odd: buried amid Woolf ’s first experimental novel, opposite a page
that muses about the value of literature, we find a blank sheet scratched with arithmetic.
These marks are literally, physically reversed: recto—literature; verso—mathematics.
Across her long writing career, Virginia Woolf depicted mathematics as the contrary of
literature, constructing an ongoing opposition between literary ambiguity and mathematical
consistency. Her novels reflect on mathematics as though drawn to that which is most different from themselves, and by considering what writing is not, Woolf further pins down what
writing really is. Like a shadow that illuminates the self in perfect negative, Woolf ’s negative
depictions of mathematics illuminate the prominent contradictions and ambiguities of her
own writing. In the process, Woolf develops a play of opposites which represents rivalries
that are inherent in communication generally, fundamental to the division between written
symbols and the world they describe. Woolf’s simultaneous communication of oppositions
within single, common terms ultimately enables a newfound generality.
Just before Jacob’s Room, Woolf ’s second novel featured a protagonist who was an
aspiring mathematician. In Night and Day (1919), Katharine Hilbery “would not have
cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of
figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose” (42). Katharine’s love
of mathematics does not exist in and of itself; instead it is repeatedly, reliably juxtaposed
with her dislike of literature, and as Katharine moves toward mathematics and maturity,
her desires exist only in oppositional struggle with the arts. Katharine has a heritage to
contend with. Her deceased grandfather was a magnificent poet, and her blossoming
selfhood is circumscribed by his fame as well as by the exclusively literary attitudes of her
prominent Victorian family. Here in the shadow of great poetry, mathematics—like the
stray calculations scattered across the backs of pages in Woolf ’s drafts—is an interloper,
positioned as an intellectual and physical reversal. Woolf tells us explicitly, “in [Katharine’s] mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature” (42).2
The title, Night and Day, describes the divide between practical, mathematical, modern Katharine and her dreamy, literary, Victorian mother. It also more specifically refers to
Katharine’s repressed mathematical longings:
Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
203
[S]he would rather have confessed her wildest dreams of hurricane and prairie
than the fact that, upstairs, alone in her room, she rose early in the morning or
sat up late at night to…work at mathematics. No force on earth would have
made her confess that. Her actions when thus engaged were furtive and secretive,
like those of some nocturnal animal. Steps had only to sound on the staircase,
and she slipped her paper between the leaves of a great Greek dictionary which
she had purloined from her father’s room for this purpose. It was only at night,
indeed, that she felt secure enough from surprise to concentrate her mind to the
utmost. (42, ellipsis original)
Mathematics is the pursuit of the night, literature that of the day, and the two are poles
apart. But this opposition is complicated, like that of a shadow or doppelganger: shadows
cannot exist without light, and day would have no name if it were not followed by night.
The enduring link between mathematics and literature becomes apparent as Katharine
chooses to hide her mathematical dreams textually, deferring them with ellipsis (“sat up
late at night to…work at mathematics”) and burying them, quite literally, inside the dictionary. Here written language conceals mathematics, but it also guards mathematics.
Moreover, these particular letters communicate mathematics. Higher level mathematics
employs letters far more than numerals, and it employs the Greek alphabet especially.
Katharine deliberately steals a Greek dictionary to hide and hold her studies, and just
as mathematics repurposes Greek letters for its own uses, Katharine is repurposing both
lexicon and language.
As written pages, Woolf complicatedly pairs literature and mathematics. Night and
Day’s description of Katharine’s secret studies bears undeniable resemblance to Woolf ’s
later description of Jane Austen’s efforts in A Room of One’s Own (1929), where we learn
that “Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper,”
“careful that her occupation should not be suspected” (67)—exactly as Katharine hides
her work under the leaves of a dictionary at the first sound of steps outside. In addition
to the secrecy of composition, both descriptions emphasize the physical pages involved,
which can be covered to mask their content, or flipped over to alternate between language
and calculation. With this parallel in working form, Katharine becomes a twentieth-century heir to Austen. Katharine just exercises her own type of written expression.
Night and Day repeatedly metonymizes mathematics with its form, the “sacred pages
of symbols and figures” that Katharine dreams about and endows with great beauty (477).
“How visibly books of algebraic symbols, pages all speckled with dots and dashes and twisted
bars, came before her eyes” (314). She “cast her mind alternately towards forest paths and
starry blossoms, and towards pages of neatly written mathematical signs” (224). Emphasizing the visual and tangible aspects of marks on paper, Woolf describes math’s written form
rather than its intellectual content, and Katharine treasures and romanticizes the material
manifestations of her study. This representation emphasizes the written signs that are common to mathematics particularly, but it also defamiliarizes written language generally, using
the foreign marks of mathematics to call attention to the intrinsic strangeness of all written
symbols. In fact, written sheets exist as strange artifacts throughout Night and Day, because
Katharine lives in a house overcrowded with piles of dusty, valuable manuscripts left behind
by her famous grandfather. She is his involuntary archivist, examining handwriting, framing
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fragments, and forever handling innumerable pages without caring what they signify. Thus,
as marked pages, mathematics parallels literature in Night and Day. Woolf aligns the disciplines by emphasizing their common form, and in the process she raises the paradoxical
possibility that mathematics is another kind of writing.
The double reversal that occurs here—from literature to its opposite and then onward
to the realization that these opposites are aligned—creates a contradictory collision of
extremes that can be hard to follow. In Night and Day mathematics is at once a metaphor
for literature and a paradigm for everything that literature is not. This paradoxical relation
is not unique to Woolf ’s second novel; it is characteristic of parallels and oppositions that
are fundamental to the fields of writing and mathematics themselves, and mathematicians
have investigated this relationship as well.
Katharine Hilbery has a doppelganger in history. David Hilbert, his surname identical to Katharine’s in all but the final letter, was possibly the single most important mathematician working during Woolf ’s lifetime. When he died in 1943, Nature remarked that
“there can be few mathematicians nowadays whose work does not in some way derive
from that of Hilbert” (Taussky 182). Hilbert worked during an explosive time, because
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mathematics went through enormous
transformations. The field became dramatically more abstract and apparently remote from
the empirical world. Subfields became multifarious and diverse in their outlooks and assumptions. Mathematicians questioned and reexamined the foundational assumptions
of their discipline, worrying that matters which had been taken for granted were much
more complicated than previously assumed, even as if the structure of mathematics might
have been built upon sand. Several histories of mathematics have specifically described
this period as modern or modernist, highlighting parallels with modern art and culture.3
David Hilbert was at the very center of high modernism in mathematics. His books and
publications were exemplary of the inventiveness, formality, and axiomatic method that
characterized his period. The powerful generality, diversity, and prescience of his work
made it difficult for conservative mathematicians to deny the watershed moment that
mathematics was undergoing. And, also active as a speaker, teacher, and philosopher,
Hilbert always vehemently defended recent innovations from detractors who sought to
dismiss modern mathematics as too strange or out of touch with reality.
To support modernist mathematics, in the 1920s Hilbert developed a philosophy
that called attention to signs and symbols in the field, arguing that such written marks not
only communicate but can actually embody the foundations of mathematics itself. This
perspective, termed formalism in the philosophy of mathematics,4 holds that the form of
mathematics (its written signs and the grammars that govern relations between them) is all
that is necessary to ground the consistency of mathematics. As a methodology it devotes
particular attention to the syntax, rather than the semantics, of mathematics; that is, it
directs attention to the relationships between mathematical signs, because the meaning of
these signs can be regarded as indeterminate.
Mathematics does have form and content, syntax and semantics. When Woolf calculated word counts on the backs of her drafting pages, she wrote down numbers in a
column and then followed a series of arithmetic rules to determine a product—we can
see from the scratch marks. The rules are the same regardless of the particular numbers,
and at no point would they have required Woolf to hold at once in her mind the entire
Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
205
magnitude and meaning of the large numbers involved. In this way, written multiplication engages with mathematical form (written signs), and syntax (established relational
rules), but not semantics (the sense and significance of the written numbers). In this
sense, mathematics has a great deal in common with language, and it can be conceived
and practiced in a manner that emphasizes form, or content, or a combination of the two.
Hilbert’s formalism operated at a high level, far beyond the scope of calculation. Hilbert argued that attention to mathematical form could—far from emptying mathematics
of its content—ultimately enable a more effective and multiple engagement with mathematical meaning. He considered formal mathematical proof (representable as a variable)
a worthy subject for mathematical investigation, thus reversing the typical conception of
form and content in mathematics and allowing form to very literally become content. The
resulting subfield, metamathematics, prompted mathematics to turn inward. Much like
language used to characterize language, Hilbert used mathematics to analyze mathematics. In the process, mathematics had to be conceived as an ordered language—absolutely
consistent, but with nonspecific meanings.
In Night and Day, Woolf addresses literature in a meta-representational manner by
writing about mathematics, a relative unknown, which itself eventually points toward
writing. Here mathematics—frequently referred to as form but hardly ever endowed with
any evident content—operates like an algebraic variable, because it can be shuffled whole
from page to page even as its meaning remains unknown. Math’s undecidedness in Night
and Day enables Woolf to more generally and ambiguously examine the simultaneous
rupture and continuity that exists between Katharine’s modern expression and that of
her literary ancestors: in mathematics Woolf constructs a symbol that forestalls its own
meaning yet remains intelligible via an anchored formal position. The analytic interspace
which develops—wherein readers understand the relationships between symbols before
they understand the meanings of those symbols—allows Night and Day to very broadly
consider the links between different varieties of expression.5 This meta-representational
system is very much like Hilbert’s formalism.
As Katharine struggles to express herself in a new form, she repeats the struggle that
Woolf herself faced as she strove toward modern literature that still remained unrealized.
Night and Day depicts the struggle to speak in a strange and unknown language about
things that are not yet known themselves. Where meaning is so indefinite, the relations
between formal symbols gain prominence—readers become acutely aware that they are
interpreting those “pages all speckled with dots and dashes and twisted bars” (314).
Woolf ’s representations of order and number parallel and refigure Hilbert’s philosophy of mathematics.6 Katharine Hilbery’s absorption in mathematical signs as central but
nonspecific signification is one key case, but related attention to mathematics as writing
and relation appears elsewhere in Woolf ’s work. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Mr. Ramsay’s
alphabet exemplifies formalist mathematics: “if thought is like the keyboard of a piano,
divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order,
then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one,
firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q” (33). Mr. Ramsay steps, in
order, from A to B and onwards up to Q. He is counting. But whereas if he did so with
numerals his position would have a particular denotation, by choosing letters Mr. Ramsay
evades the exact in favor of the general, reducing his count to relation and order. These
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
letters are algebraic variables,7 and like variables, their meaning is open-ended.8 Woolf
explicitly tells us that Mr. Ramsay’s choice of this particular letter is arbitrary: he “had
reached, say, the letter Q.” Indeed, his thought process demonstrates that the signifiers
may just as well be any other ordered sequence, such as “the keyboard of a piano” which
he considers first. As under Hilbert’s mathematics, there is a particular sign and a rigorous
order, but a flexible, nonspecific meaning.
From here, Mr. Ramsay marches deeper into the ordered relations of mathematical
formalism: “But after Q? What comes next?…If Q then is Q—R—…Then R…’” (34).
This process is exclusively relational, based on order and not meaning. In a sense, this
purely formalist approach does lead him to his goal, because Mr. Ramsay knows that R
follows Q, and despite his claims later that he cannot reach R, in this passage, he technically does: “If Q…Then R” (34). In fact, Mr. Ramsay never fails with letters, orders, or
relations, but the moment that he tries to step outside of his mathematically formalist
system: “R is then—what is R? A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered
over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard
people saying—he was a failure—that R was beyond him. He would never reach R” (34).
Mr. Ramsay does not struggle to step from Q to R, he only struggles to understand what
R is. He cannot explain the relationship between his mathematical system and the outside
world. And while elsewhere in To the Lighthouse Lily Briscoe struggles with “two opposite
forces; Mr. Ramsay and the picture” (193), here we see once more how mathematics and
art remain opposed in Woolf ’s writing: they may both be languages, but we do not know
how to translate between them.
Some feared that Hilbert’s formalist philosophy would reduce mathematics to meaningless rules.9 Mr. Ramsay’s alphabet is a case in point, because it misses out on everything
that is vital in life; readers have frequently seen the alphabet passage as a satire of the
failings of logical thought. But, unlike Mr. Ramsay, Hilbert resisted this sort of reductive
formalism. Instead, by focusing on signs and relations and sidestepping direct reference,
Hilbert preserved mathematical generality: the capacity of a theorem to retain meaning in
multiple contexts and applications. 10 Turning back to our own terms, we could call this
ambiguity: the capacity of language to retain meaning under multiple interpretations.
Here, the advantage of Mr. Ramsay’s alphabet system rematerializes, because although
Mr. Ramsay fails to see its implications, Woolf enables P, Q, and R to evoke many further words. Scholars have frequently observed that R can stand for Ramsay and reality,
among several other possibilities.11 In turn, Hilbert was famous for his ability to endow
mathematical descriptions with multiple meanings. He reconstructed all of classical geometry using traditional terms but absolutely flexible semantics, expanding the field into
a general study of the patterns of the universe. He asserted that the work was meant to
be so totally, beautifully ambiguous that one could “say at all times—instead of points,
straight lines, and planes—tables, chairs, and beer mugs” (Reid 57). This assertion recalls
Andrew Ramsay’s instruction to Lily Briscoe: she may as well “Think of a kitchen table…
when you’re not there” (23). But here, the choice of a table is emphatically, deliberately
random. It does have associations in history,12 but the important point—for Hilbert and
for Lily—is to find one form, one sign, that can ambiguously indicate other objects in the
real world without ever reductively pointing to any one of them. And although Hilbert
and Lily both very specifically hone in on their chosen sign, building the formalist system
Virginia Woolf on Mathematics
207
of relations that is both his mathematics and her painting, they simultaneously remember
the power of ambiguity.
Even if readers cannot directly translate between these alternate systems of signs and
relations on paper, they come together in their formal similarities and their common
modes of meaning. In the process, meaning itself emerges from commonality, becoming
not merely indeterminate but fully and affirmatively multiple; the refusal of reference
generates interdisciplinary meaning. Woolf used generality and formal relation to bring
together the most disparate fields. In our own studies of written meaning, we would be
well served to examine the role of ambiguity in other disciplines.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
Such word counts crop up frequently in Woolf ’s drafts. Here, the margin of the opposite page presents two
more calculations, complicating the opposition (JRHD 159); while Woolf usually calculated word counts
on her blank verso pages, she sometimes did so in the margins of recto pages. She kept careful track of her
writing process quantitatively as well as qualitatively, and the boundary between such self-evaluations is
both prominent and hazy.
Woolf depicts mathematics negatively in several novels. In Jacob’s Room, Woolf links mathematical exactitude with militarism and male domination, and in To the Lighthouse, a discussion of square roots leads Mrs.
Ramsay to contemplate “the masculine intelligence” (106). In The Waves, Rhoda’s struggle with arithmetic
leads her to envision herself as “The other, [that] painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It
will die in the desert” (21); in her imagination, the harsh lines of numerals written on a blackboard swell
into walls forcing her outside of society. In Mrs Dalloway, “proportion” is Sir William Bradshaw’s primary
justification for the cruel regulation of society’s outsiders, and Woolf highlights the term’s mathematical
meanings by emphasizing the divisions that Bradshaw produces: “slicing, dividing and subdividing, the
clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out
in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion” (102).
See Herbert Mehrtens, “Modernism vs. Counter-modernism” and Moderne, Sprache, Mathematik; Jeremy
Gray, Plato’s Ghost and “Modern Mathematics as a Cultural Pheonomenon”; and Moritz Epple, “An Unusual Career between Cultural and Mathematical Modernism.”
Mathematical formalism has a long history, with antecedents reaching back to Gottfried Leibniz’s work
on the infinitesimal and George Berkeley’s explanations of arithmetic. It was most influentially developed
by Hilbert in the 1920s. An extreme mathematical formalist would assert that numbers are fundamentally
written signs, and that mathematics is only the study of consistent rules for manipulating such signs; more
moderate formalists, including Hilbert, instead assert that numbers should be regarded as if they are only
signs, arguing that although matters of meaning (such as scientific application or intuitive sense) may be
very real, they are not necessary to support the basis of mathematics. The multiplicity of mathematical formalism is underlined by the fact that Hilbert’s movement itself went through identifiably different stages:
see Mancosu, The Adventure of Reason, 125-58.
In “Modern Novels and Vagueness,” Megan Quigley has argued that Night and Day investigates vagueness
with its use of language and symbolism. She further quotes Woolf claiming that “I can’t manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalized way…directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to
me” (123). However, Quigley identifies Katharine’s mathematics as contrary to this theme of symbolic
ambiguity, assuming that meaning in mathematics is “static” (119). The flaw in this argument reveals itself
in the particular mathematics that Quigley herself quotes from the novel (“A plus B minus C equals xyz”
[120]), which consists almost entirely of variables—symbols that mathematics employs particularly for
their ability to stand for the unknown, existing among multiple possibilities. Mathematically speaking, if
Katharine were describing a static value with “A plus B minus C,” she would not have described it in terms
of variables.
It is unclear whether Woolf knew of Hilbert’s work (his name does not appear in her letters or diaries) but
she likely would have heard of him. Certainly, during Woolf ’s lifetime Hilbert was about as famous as it
is possible for mathematicians to be, and they shared several friends and colleagues in common, including
Bertrand Russell, Frank Ramsey, and G. H. Hardy. Yet even if Woolf never did read of Hilbert’s work,
208
7
8
9
10
11
12
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
more subtle and various influences remain likely. Jeremy Gray and Herbert Mehrtens have demonstrated
that modern mathematics participated in the broader societal sweep of modernism, suggesting intellectual
cross-pollinations that sometimes remain difficult to pin down even when their results are clear.
Sandra Donaldson and Ann Banfield have both noted that P, Q, and R also appear as variables in symbolic
logic, but they have overlooked the general dominance that these particular letters possess in the field
(Donaldson 331, Banfield 189-90).
Mathematical variables are open-ended in particular ways. They are more flexible than literary symbols in
the sense that they frequently hold a literally infinite range of possible values or meanings, unlimited by
association or context. However, they remain pinned down in the sense that their bounds are stark and
that any particular meaning, once selected, must remain constant and thus iterable. In this sense, linguists
compare variables to pronouns. That is, “she” is a flexible term that can stand in for an infinite number of
subject positions, but it remains bounded (it must refer to a female) as well as iterable (within any single
well-understood phrase, “she” should always indicate the same female).
Hilbert’s philosophy of mathematics was controversial, itself a direct response to a reactionary movement
led by L. E. J. Brouwer, who maintained that any mathematics lacking clear intuitive sense should be dismissed. The debate between Hilbert and Brouwer eventually developed vitriolic intensity, leading Albert
Einstein to resign his post at the Annalen in protest of what he called a “frog-and-mouse battle” (see Paolo
Mancosu, Brouwer to Hilbert 3 or Constance Reid 187).
In a mathematical context, generality is one of the highest aims of research and proof. It carries no connotations of vagueness.
For particularly rich examples, see Elizabeth Abel 55-7 and Christine Froula 149, 167-73.
Ann Banfield has elaborated on these associations at length in The Phantom Table.
Works Cited
Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.
Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism. New York: CUP, 2000.
Donaldson, Sandra M. “Where does Q Leave Mr. Ramsay?” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 11 (1992):
329-36.
Epple, Moritz. “An Unusual Career between Cultural and Mathematical Modernism.” Jews and Sciences in German Contexts. Ed. Ulrich Charpa and Ute Deichmann. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2007.
Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity. New York: Columbia UP, 2005.
Gray, Jeremy. Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008.
——. “Modern Mathematics as a Cultural Phenomenon.” The Architecture of Modern Mathematics. Ed. J. Ferreirós and J. J. Gray. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Mancosu, Paolo. The Adventure of Reason: Interplay between Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Logic,
1900-1940. New York: OUP, 2010.
——. Ed. From Brouwer to Hilbert: The Debate on the Foundations of Mathematics in the 1920s. New York: OUP,
1998.
Mehrtens, Herbert. “Modernism vs. Counter-modernism, Nationalism vs. Internationalism: Style and Politics
in Mathematics 1900-1950.” L’Europe Mathématique: Histoires, Mythes, Identités. Ed. Catherine Goldstein,
Jeremy Gray, and Jim Ritter. Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1996.
——. Moderne, Sprache, Mathematik: Eine Geschichte des Streits um die Grundlagen der Disziplin und des Subjekts
formaler Systeme. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990.
Quigley, Megan M. “Modern Novels and Vagueness.” Modernism/Modernity 15 (2008): 101-29.
Reid, Constance. Hilbert. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996.
Taussky, Olga. “Prof. David Hilbert.” Obituary. Nature 152 (1943): 182-3.
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. San Diego: Harcourt, 1978.
——. To the Lighthouse. San Diego: Harcourt, 1981.
——. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt, 1981.
——. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, 1989.
——. Virginia Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room: The Holograph Draft. Transcribed and Ed. Edward L. Bishop. New York:
Pace UP, 1998
——. Night and Day. New York: OUP, 2000.
“A BRIEF NOTE IN THE MARGIN:” VIRGINIA WOOLF AND ANNOTATING
by Amanda Golden
V
irginia Woolf maintained a contradictory relationship to academic institutions.
Readers and critics are familiar with her childhood freedom to read throughout
her father’s library and her arguments for women’s education in A Room of One’s
Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).1 As H. J. Jackson has observed in Marginalia
(2002), writing in books is a technique that students have learned in school. While Woolf
rarely annotated her personal library, this paper illustrates the ways that academic institutions informed her responses to marginalia.
As Woolf put it in her 1923 diary, her usual strategy was “reading with pen & notebook” (D2 259).2 Hermione Lee has argued that Woolf “hardly ever marked her books,
and was satirical about people who did” (406).3 Instead, as Lee puts it, Woolf ’s “reading
notebooks were her system of annotation” (406). In addition, Diane Gillespie has noted
in her introduction to the catalogue of Leonard and Virginia Woolf ’s library at Washington State University that Woolf inscribed “some of her books [with]…light marks in the
margins or handwritten genealogies of characters. Leonard [Woolf ], on the other hand,
kept indices in the back or marked passages in many books he read” (xviii). The three-page
manuscript to which Lee is referring is in Woolf ’s Monks House Papers at the University
of Sussex.4 In this sketch, Woolf proposes that a “student of character” “will keep his attention alert upon all [instances of ] such” “[a] practice…so common of writing…observations in the margins of books.”5 It is significant that Woolf selects a student, as annotating
is a student practice.
Several different types of academic and institutional contexts informed Woolf ’s composition of “Writing in the Margin” on May 22nd of what was probably 1906. The previous year, Woolf had been selecting letters and completing a “note” about her father, the
Cambridge scholar who had annotated his personal library, for Frederic Maitland’s Life
and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906) (PA 219).6 It was also in 1905 that, as Beth Rigel
Daugherty, Melba Cuddy Keane, Quentin Bell, and other scholars have noted, Woolf
began teaching at Morley College (PA 217). After visiting Madge Vaughn and her husband, headmaster of the Giggleswick School, in Yorkshire in April of 1906,7 Woolf also
commented on Madge’s annotating when returning her collection of Gustave Flaubert
and George Sand’s correspondence, “I wanted to endorse, and add to, your pencil marks,
whole passages seemed to start up as though writ in old ink. They penetrate so far and sum
up as much that is universal as well as individual, and they say things that almost can’t be
said” (PA 301; L2 229).8 In this instance, Woolf might have felt obligated to acknowledge
Madge’s annotations. Woolf ’s reference to “old ink” is also striking in its ambiguity and
suggestion of earlier reading practices.9 In her final statement that Madge’s remarks articulate “things that almost can’t be said,” Woolf may also be implying that Madge should
not have written them in the margins. Whether or not this is the case, Woolf ’s sentiments
anticipate the efficiency and precision that will characterize her later descriptions of annotating.
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
In “Writing in the Margin”, Woolf characterizes annotating as a “spontaneous, anonymous expression of…temperament…[. The] value alter[s] precisely because it is evidently not to be restrained & not to be acknowledged.”10 She stresses an annotator’s insistence:
“this anonymous commentator must scrawl his O…or his…Beautiful upon the…sheet,
as though the author received the man upon his flesh.”11 Woolf ’s conclusion summarizes
the functions of annotating: “to utter protest, or approval, or question or correct or in any
way assault the book with a pencil, you must agree that the love of annotating books is one
of the most permanent & rigorous pastimes in the human mind.”12
Woolf ’s imagination of an annotation as if it were a reader’s inscription on an author’s flesh is more violent than her later characterization of readers as reviewers, and her
reference to flesh also recalls her desire to reach her Morley College students. As Beth
Rigel Daugherty points out, in Woolf ’s essay entitled “Reviewing” (1939), “the dialogue
between reviewer and author…grows out of an author’s genuine desire ‘to be told why
[the reviewer] likes or dislikes his work’ and a reviewer’s genuine desire ‘to tell them why I
either like or dislike their work’” (“Reading” 27). Melba Cuddy-Keane has noted Woolf ’s
desire to engage her students when she asks in her “Report on Teaching at Morley College,” “I do not know how many of the phantoms that passed through that dreary school
room left any image of themselves upon the women; I used to ask myself how is it possible
to make them feel the flesh & blood in these shadows? So thin is the present to them; must
not the past remain a spectre always. Of course it was not possible in the way I took to
make them know anything accurately” (Cuddy-Keane 83; Bell 203).13 Accuracy becomes
an ambition to which Woolf and Edward Pargiter in The Years (1937) aspire in their annotating and translating of Greek. Annotating, for Woolf and Edward, is an attempt to
translate the untranslatable.14
Woolf had formal training in Greek, studying with Clara Pater and completing
“Intermediate and Advanced” courses at Kings College, London, as Christine Kenyon
Jones and Anna Snaith have recently illustrated (Jones and Snaith 6-7).15 Diane Gillespie
has observed that in Woolf ’s library at Washington State, her “copy of Agamemnon…
[contains] English words she had pencilled in over the Greek” (xvii).16 Two editions of
Agamemnon including Woolf ’s annotations remain in her library. In addition to these
volumes, Woolf compiled a fragile, cardboard Agamemnon reading notebook that is in the
Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.17 Woolf ’s copy opens with her translations on the left hand side of the page in blue ink and the segment of Greek text that she
has pasted at the top of the right hand side of the page. Woolf underlined briefly and commented in light black ink above the Greek letters. As Brenda Silver notes, Woolf wrote in
her 1922 diary that she was “making a complete edition, text, translation, & notes of my
own—mostly copied from Verrall; but carefully gone into by me” (D2 215).18 Neither of
the copies of Agamemnon in Woolf ’s personal library were A. W. Verrall’s translations and
she may have cut up a copy of this translation to make her edition. A pile of cut pieces of
paper still remains between the pages of Woolf ’s reading notebook in the Berg Collection
and is visible on the microfilm.
Woolf ’s text reads as if she was correcting Agamemnon; she may have been crossing
out commas, drawing in parentheses, and adding in Greek words for a future Hogarth
Press edition. Within a month after her previous reference to her Aeschylus edition in her
diary, Woolf ’s desire for precision in her Greek translation is also present in a letter to R.
Virginia Woolf and Annotating
211
C. Trevelyan: “I want to discuss your Aeschylus with you—I give way about the spelling
of quire. Nor should I yield to Logan. If he thinks Earlham a masterpiece, he is not to
be trusted about the letter K” (L2 601-2). Translating for Woolf enables her attention to
language within the institutional structures that informs her sense of a “complete edition.”
Communicating with Trevelyan, she is acting as an academic from outside of academia,
and able to articulate what she sees as fidelity to the text, history, and genre of Greek
translating with which she is engaging.
In her Agamemnon notebook, Woolf demonstrates techniques that are integral to
the history of annotating as an institutional practice. Woolf ’s sense of the formality of
translating as a genre may be in response to her academic training in Greek. While in her
reading notebooks, as Lee has explained, Woolf “drew margins” and listed page numbers
in them, unlike the readers that she critiqued in “Writing in the Margin”, Woolf also may
have been more inclined to annotate a text she created herself, rather than in a book that
she did not own or that someone else might read (406).19 In her Agamemnon notebook,
Woolf added notes in the margins of the Greek text that resemble “marginal glosses”
and below the text, akin to footnotes, translations on the left hand side of the page, and
corrections to the Greek text itself. Marginal commentary, as Anthony Grafton has demonstrated, evolved from the marginal gloss and the footnote (30).20 As Lawrence Lipking explains, marginal glosses contained definitions and explications (612). The genre of
marginalia differs from the marginal gloss in its informality. Lipking defines marginalia as
“traces left in a book…wayward in their very nature; they spring up spontaneously around
a text unaware of their presence” (612). Aspects of marginal glosses and marginalia can
also be present, he argues, in the same note (Lipking 650). Marginalia is a flexible genre
and it is significant that both Lipking and Woolf characterize it as “spontaneous.”
The genre of translating provided Woolf with the opportunity for impersonal commentary. While her comments would have reflected her linguistic predilections, they
would not have expressed the personal sentiments that marginalia in other types of texts
often contain. Woolf subsequently concludes “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925), approximately three years after working on Agamemnon, “[i]n spite of the labour and the difficulty it is this that draws us back and back to the Greeks; the stable, the permanent, the
original human being is to be found there” (CR1 27). Woolf here underscores the effort
involved in attempting to reach an essence beyond the surface of the skin, which for her
included constructing and inscribing her Agamemnon notebook. 21
In her later novels, To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), Mr. Ramsay and
Bernard both envision different forms of annotating, without writing in the margins of
books. Mr. Ramsay imagines “scraps of paper on which one scribbles notes in the rush of
reading” (TTL 37). Unlike Leslie Stephen’s tendency to annotate his reading, Mr. Ramsay
here is writing on pieces of paper, as Woolf herself did, and the description recalls the annotators’ speed in “Writing in the Margin” (Lee 406). While she was writing To the Lighthouse,
as Jane De Gay has noted, Woolf would have also returned to the image of herself behind
her parents as they read, which is in Leslie Stephen’s photograph album at Smith College.22
Unlike Mr. Ramsay, Bernard in The Waves gestures toward more conventional forms of marginalia. He proposes, “let us turn over these scenes as children turn over the pages of a
picture-book…I will add, for your amusement, a comment in the margin” (TW 241). He
also characterizes mental notes as “making marks in the margin of my mind” (189).
212
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
The year after she completed The Waves, Woolf returned to her father’s annotating
in her essay, “Leslie Stephen” (1932). As Woolf recounts, he left behind such remarks as,
“‘Conceited dunce,’ that [as she explains] he was wont to scribble impatiently in the margin.”23 Noel Annan has described Stephen’s “gift of Victorian concentration.…scribbling
marginalia, he would seem to idle through a book. Then, taking up a pen and lying almost
recumbent…he would complete an article of six thousand words often at a sitting. ‘It is
one of my weaknesses’, he wrote, ‘that I cannot work slowly; I must, if I work at all, work
at high pressure’” (51). There is also a resemblance between the speed of this process and,
as Julia Briggs cites, Woolf ’s account that The Years was “‘written at a greater gallop than
any of my books.’ Indeed, much of it had been written in a state of ‘intoxicating exhilaration’, in which Woolf felt ‘free to define my attitude with a vigour & certainty I have never
known before’” (Briggs 289).24
The Years presents a detailed image of late-nineteenth century annotating in an academic context. In the first segment of the novel depicting 1880, Woolf envisioned Edward Pargiter at Oxford annotating his Greek text, rapt with excitement as he prepares
to translate: “He read; and made a note; then he read again.…He caught phrase after
phrase exactly, firmly, more exactly, he noted, making a brief note in the margin, than the
night before. Little negligible words now revealed shades of meaning, which altered the
meaning. He made another note; that was the meaning. His own dexterity in catching the
phrase plumb in the middle gave him a thrill of excitement. There it was, clean and entire.
But he must be precise; exact; even his little scribbled notes must be clear as print” (TY
47). Woolf here captures the proximity of Edward’s note taking to his thought process.
The speed of this passage, with its short, punctuated passage also mirrors his experience
of thinking, writing, and returning to his text. In Edward’s desire to affix meaning to his
page, his strategy also resembles forms of marginal glosses. Woolf ’s fictional rendering of
his response here is closer to the act of reading than the notes in Edward’s text that would
remain. She also employs the word scribbling—as she had to describe both Mr. Ramsay’s
attempt to respond to his reading and her father’s annotating—to capture the speed with
which Edward desires to articulate his interpretation, yet with less irreverence than in her
description of her father’s annotating.
The development of Woolf ’s description of Edward’s annotating above suggests that
she initially depicted practices closer to her own responses in her reading notebooks and
translations of Greek in her books. Building toward the previous scene in The Years involved imagining the role of annotating in an academic context. In an earlier version of the
novel, published as The Pargiters, the narrator observed that Edward “had the makings of
a real scholar in him, his tutor had once said. A real scholar…the highest type of mind…
conceivable” (63).25 In another passage, Edward takes notes, but compared with the scene
in The Years, his erasable inscriptions in a different segment of the text demonstrates greater hesitancy: “The actual text therefore presented no difficulties to him, though each time
he read it, he questioned certain readings, & pencilled comments & queries of his own on
the blank page which was bound in with the text” (64). Also missing from this passage is
the deliberation and accomplishment in Edward’s translating in The Years.
Edward’s annotating also suggests the techniques readers have brought to Woolf ’s
novels, particularly those that preceded The Years. Isolating Woolf ’s engagement with annotating practices allows readers and scholars to understand further the complexity of her
Virginia Woolf and Annotating
213
relationship to academic institutions. While, in many ways, Woolf remained distant from
academia, its conventions informed her own and others’ writing and reading practices in
ways that she addressed throughout her oeuvre. As Woolf ’s rendering of annotating practices in her fiction illustrates, creative thought and institutional practice are intertwined in
a fashion that remain at the core of modernism to the present.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
I am grateful for a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Poetics from the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at
Emory University that enabled me to complete this essay. I would also like to thank Beth Rigel Daugherty,
Diane Gillespie, Emily Dalgarno, Karen V. Kukil, Brian M. Reed, Terry Kidner, Anita Helle, Emily James,
Catherine Paul, Wayne Chapman, and Gillian Groszweski.
Woolf ’s diary entry is dated 28 July, 1923.
See also Sparks regarding Woolf ’s library.
See Golden.
Woolf Monks House Papers Reel 2: Writing in the Margin. At top 22nd [?] May. The date on the next manuscript is 6th July 1906. Scan sent from University of Sussex library in an email of 4/6/11.
See also Woolf, PA 214.
See also Bell 93 regarding the Gigglewick School.
Letter in July of 1906.
I thank Anita Helle for returning my attention to “old ink.”
Some words in Woolf ’s handwriting are unclear and I have included the following potential variations:
“value alter [valuable?]…to be restrained [refrained?].”
Woolf ’s handwriting suggests the following ambiguous word: “the author received the [?].”
Woolf ’s handwriting suggests the following potential variations and points of ambiguity: “you [?] must
agree that the love [lure?] of annotating books is one of the most permanent and rigorous pastimes [?] in
the human mind.”
Daugherty brought to my attention Woolf ’s “Report on Teaching at Morley College” in Bell’s biography.
See also Sylvia Plath’s observation in the Unabridged Journals regarding what writing enables one to reach (286).
Jones and Snaith observe that “between 1897 and 1901” Woolf and Vanessa Bell attended King’s College
(2). See also Bell, Annan, and Cuddy-Keane regarding Woolf ’s teaching at Morley College, 23 and “On
Not Knowing Greek,” 138.
Email of 3 /25/11 from Diane Gillespie to the author citing the Short-Title Catalog of Virginia and Leonard Woolf ’s library and Brenda R. Silver in Virginia Woolf ’s Reading Notebooks page 125 regarding Woolf ’s
second diary volume and the location of Woolf ’s Agamemnon notebook in the Berg Collection.
This copy is also on the microfilm of Woolf ’s Berg Collection Reading Notebooks.
Email of 3/24/11 from Emily Dalgarno to the author citing Silver’s dating of Woolf ’s translation and her
diary volume.
See also Daugherty’s descriptions of Woolf ’s reading notebooks in “Reading” 33.
See also Whittier-Ferguson.
Ronald Schuchard emphasized the role of humanity in a critic’s work in his lecture “‘The man who suffers
and the mind which creates’ in The Waste Land,” at the T.S. Eliot International Summer School. In Eliot’s
Dark Angel, he also argues that “the charge of the biographical critic…is to explore the ways in which art
and personality, art and consciousness are indissolubly linked” (22).
De Gay, Leslie Stephen’s Photograph Album. Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College. <http://www.
smith.edu/library/libs/rarebook/exhibitions/stephen/38h.htm> Accessed 14 June, 2011. Karen V. Kukil
brought De Gay’s study and this photograph to my attention.
Woolf, “Leslie Stephen,” 70-1.
Woolf D4, 30 Sept. 1934, p. 245; 31 Dec. 1932, p. 135 (qtd. in Briggs, 480 n75).
In the place of the scene depicting annotating, in The Pargiters, Woolf described Edward’s “one bookcase,
[however,] between the fireplace and the window, was [fu] tidily arranged with rows of old books,—Pope,
Dryden, Addison, Johnson & so on, which he had bought almost as much as for the subdued ripple of
brown & gold that their backs made as for their contents. His [work] <text> books, his note books, his…
shabby dictionaries [& textbooks] were concealed beneath a curtain on the lower shelves” (59).
214
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
Works Cited
Annan, Noel. Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian. New York: Random House, 1984.
Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. 1972. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974.
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. New York: Harcourt Brace, 2005.
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003.
Daugherty, Beth Rigel. “Learning Virginia Woolf: Of Leslie, Libraries, and Letters.” Virginia Woolf and Communities: Selected Papers from the Eighth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jeanette McVicker and
Laura Davis. New York: Pace UP, 1999.
——. “Reading, Taking Notes, and Writing: Virginia Woolf ’s Reviewing Practice.” Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace. Ed. Jeanne Dubino. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 27-42.
De Gay, Jane. Virginia Woolf ’s Novels and the Literary Past. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006.
Gillespie, Diane. “Introduction.” The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short-Title Catalog. Eds. Julia
King and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic. Pullman: Washington State UP, 2003.
Golden, Amanda. “Virginia Woolf ’s Marginalia Manuscript.” Woolf Studies Annual 18 (2012).
Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Random House, 1996.
Lipking, Lawrence. “The Marginal Gloss.” Critical Inquiry 3.4 (Summer 1977): 609-655.
Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.
Jones, Christine Kenyon and Anna Snaith. “‘Tilting at Universities:’ Woolf at King’s College London.” Woolf
Studies Annual 16 (2010):1-44.
Maitland, Frederic William and Virginia Woolf. The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth and
Co., 1906. Nabu Public Domain Reprints.
Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. New York: Random House, 2000.
Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
——. “‘The man who suffers and the mind which creates’ in The Waste Land.” T. S. Eliot International Summer
School. University of London School for Advanced Studies. London, UK. July 2011.
Silver, Brenda R. Virginia Woolf ’s Reading Notebooks. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1983. Sparks, Elisa Kay. “Leonard and Virginia’s London Library: Mapping London’s Tides,
Streams and Statues.” Virginia Woolf ’s Bloomsbury: Volume 1 Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice. Ed. Gina Potts
and Lisa Shahriari. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Whittier-Ferguson, John. Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound. New York: Oxford UP,
1996.
Woolf, Virginia. Agamemnon Reading Notebook. Berg Collection. New York Public Library. New York, NY.
——. Agamemnon Reading Notebook. Reel 13, “Reading Notebooks.” The Virginia Woolf
Manuscripts from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public
Library. Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications International, 1993.
——. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Ed. Susan Gubar. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005.
——.The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979-1985.
——. “Leslie Stephen.” The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950.
——.The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1975-1980.
——. “On Not Knowing Greek.” The Common Reader: First Series Annotated Edition. Ed. Andrew McNeillie.
1925. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984.
——. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. 1990. New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1992.
——. The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977.
——. Three Guineas. 1938. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1966.
——. To the Lighthouse. 1927. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.
——. The Waves. 1931. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959.
——. “Writing in the Margin.” University of Sussex Library. Sussex, UK. SxMs18/2/A/A.23/C.
——. The Years. 1939. Ed. Eleanor McNees. New York: Harcourt Inc., 2008.
Woolf, Virginia and Leonard Woolf. “Writing in the Margin.” Monks House Papers Reel 2. The Virginia Woolf
Manuscripts from the Monks House Papers at the University of Sussex. University of Sussex; British Library.
Brighton, Sussex, England: Harvester Microform. Woodbridge, CT: Distributed by Research Publications,
1985.
“OBSERVE, OBSERVE PERPETUALLY,” MONTAIGNE, VIRGINIA WOOLF
AND THE “PATRON AU DEDANS.”
by Gill Lowe
T
his paper will consider the figure of the “patron au dedans” or “invisible censor
within” in Woolf ’s writing. It will show that Woolf ’s interrogatory practice may
be seen as both internal soliloquy and as dialogical; she is in constant debate with
the “invisible presences” (MOB 92) who constantly check and verify the writing self. I
will propose that, in a sketch written for the Hyde Park Gate News, the thirteen year old
Virginia was experimenting with the dialectical processes inherent in composition: writing and reading; creating and editing; producing and marketing.
Creation is a contradictory process. A distinguished novelist once told me that teaching her insatiable creative writing students was like breastfeeding twenty-four babies.
Their voracity led to some musing as we considered a Kleinian “good breast-bad breast”
model for this analogy. Teachers know the contradictions implicit in the task. We support and praise but, concurrently, we have the contrary task of being critical; we have to
censure and check.
Throughout her memoirs, diaries and letters there is a sense of Woolf perpetually
observing the workings of her own mind; conversing with her self about composition and
the editing process. She distinguishes “a spectator in me who…remained observant, note
taking for some future revision” (MOB 155). Woolf knows that a degree of autonomy has
been achieved when one is able to step back to better observe one’s self. In her 1924 essay
“Montaigne,” she writes: “The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent” (E4 73). As Judith Allen demonstrates in Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language
(2010), both Montaigne and Woolf “were intensely interested in what ensues when one
brings one’s self, in all its mystery and mutability, to meet another self ” (17).
The crucial instruction in Woolf ’s “Montaigne” to “Observe yourself ” (E4 74) has,
by the end of the essay, become more urgent. “Observe yourself ” is substituted by “Observe her” and the imperative is repeated four more times, finishing with “Observe, observe perpetually.” Woolf personifies the soul in an inner room “as she broods over the fire”
(E4 72). The self and the soul are not unified; we watch the soul “with absorbed interest,”
it becomes “an enthralling spectacle” (E4 78). For Woolf, Montaigne’s success came by
“means of perpetual experiment and observation” (E4 78). In the same essay Woolf considers the concept of readership and how the “patron au dedans” may be our best appraiser:
One writes for a very few people, who understand. Certainly, seek the Divine
guidance by all means, but meanwhile there is, for those who live a private life,
another monitor, an invisible censor within, ‘un patron au dedans’, whose blame
is much more to be dreaded than any other because he knows the truth; nor is
there anything sweeter than the chime of his approval. This is the judge to whom
we must submit; this is the censor who will help us achieve that order which is
the grace of a well-born soul” (E4 75).1
216
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
Her essay considers the contradictions involved in creation; a person must be encouraged “to explore and experiment” but there needs to be “some internal balance.” She
writes: “This freedom, then, which is the essence of our being, has to be controlled” (E4
75). Woolf understands that encountering internal conflict facilitates the creative act. Experts on creativity would concur. As Derek Attridge writes in The Singularity of Literature
(2004): “The very term ‘experiment’ paradoxically combines the notions of a controlled,
repeatable physical process and the unpredictable trying-out of new procedures” (20).
The “Montaigne” essay was originally published in the Times Literary Supplement of
January 1924 to review a recent publication of Charles Cotton’s translation of the Essays of
Montaigne.2 A month later, Woolf began to draft “The Patron and the Crocus.”3 Caroline
Pollentier makes an interesting point about Woolf ’s decision to use the original French
expression in her review, rather than Cotton’s translation of the word patron. Pollentier
writes: “patron signifies ‘pattern’ and thus relates to a private order within the self, that is,
a moral idea of withdrawal and self-knowledge. By quoting the text in French rather than
providing us with Cotton’s unequivocal translation (“a pattern within ourselves”),4 Woolf
added another meaning to the original text, giving Montaigne’s early modern ethics of
privacy a modern twist” (77).
Woolf uses her own translation, “an invisible censor within” so she may raise the issue
of readership and its relationship to patronage. She signifies the idea of an internal order
or pattern, like Cotton, but, additionally, her translation of “patron” suggests synonyms
of power such as master, host, superior, boss, employer, chief, or governor. Pollentier suggests that in “The Patron and the Crocus” Woolf shows “the influence of the audience in
the production of art, by figuring the patron as an internalized agent of pressure on the
author” (77). Woolf is clearly aware of the market when she refers, in “The Patron and the
Crocus,” to how a book may be received: “For a book is always written for somebody to
read, and since the patron is not merely the paymaster, but also in a very subtle and insidious way the instigator and inspirer of what is written, it is of the utmost importance that
he should be a desirable man” (E4 212).
Woolf was acutely sensitive about her readership. She used both internal and external
voices to help her compose, arrange, order and find a pattern from an inchoate mass of
ideas.5 She was alert to the criticism of her readers, especially those whom she admired.6
On 7th August 1939, she breaks off from the “mornings [sic] grind” of revising: “I have
been thinking about Censors. How visionary figures admonish us. That’s clear in an MS
I’m reading. If I say this So & So will think me sentimental. If that…will think me Bourgeois. All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle of invisible censors” (D5 229).
Virginia Woolf heard voices in her head and, most of the time, they were not speaking Greek. Sometimes these voices belonged to members of her family and sometimes the
voice was another part of her self, asking questions, reassessing, censoring, checking and
re-checking. She understood that she could receive conflicting and inconsistent advice
from these voices.7
Woolf welcomed the idea of a fine critic who could set standards but, in “An Essay
in Criticism,” she stigmatises the arrogance of “these insignificant fellow creatures [who]
have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves
‘we’ for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible” (E4
450). She worries that one who believes reviews will begin to “doubt and conceal his own
“Observe, Observe Perpetually”
217
sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees” (E4 450).
Woolf despises this kind of authority: the right to judge, to command and to compel
compliance. She prefers the idea of a two-way dialogue leading to consensual agreement.
Although the patron is perceived as an agent of pressure, for Woolf the concept must
embrace the idea of affirmative collaboration.
She began to write as a small child but her life as a paid, professional writer only
began in December of 1904, after her father had died. On the 28th November 1928, the
ninety-sixth anniversary of Leslie Stephen’s birth, she recognises that her success depended
on his death; only one of them could thrive: “His life would have entirely ended mine.
What would have happened? No writing; no books;- inconceivable” (D3 208). The importance of the two meanings of “inconceivable” can be inferred here; she is impelled to
eliminate those who conceived her before she can create for herself. A few lines later she
admits she is still influenced by him: “I hear his voice” (D3 208).
After Julia’s death, “A finger seemed laid on one’s lips” (MOB 104). To break what she
calls this “stifling” silence she tries to smother and suppress her mother’s hidden presence.
The gagging does not work though; the daughter acknowledges her mother’s posthumous
authority: “I could hear her voice” (92). To be able to speak again she, famously, had to
“do battle” with her ghost (157).
In the Hyde Park Gate News of Monday 8th April 1895, Virginia Stephen dramatises
the figure of a writing woman. It is the last existing piece before children’s journals stop,
interrupted, as in To the Lighthouse, by a mother’s death. If, in “The Patron and the Crocus,” we replace “he” with “she,” we can see that, although thirty years apart, these two
texts can be related. The Editor in the sketch is analogous to “the patron who will cajole
the best out of the writer’s brain and bring to birth the most varied and vigorous progeny
of which he is capable” (E4 212). This patron/ midwife/ editor assists with the birth of
the writer’s offspring. This figure may be seen both as a separate person and part of the
writer herself.
In the sketch the Author is trying to write but is blocked. The door opens and “a cold
draught of wind” (HPGN 200) causes the Author’s hair to rise “in protest”; her whole
demeanour changes, her lines deepen and “her under lip protruded.” She seems about “to
be angry” as another woman intrudes on the writer’s “musings” (200). This is the Author’s
Editor, at first presented as a vaguely intimidating and contrary figure; she “advanced
into the room,” as if about to attack. We are told by the child-writer that “[t]he Editor
was not an ordinary person. She knew her Author very well” (201). The Author is aware
that she is dependent on her Editor. They work best as a duo rather than when duelling.
The Editor gets the best from her Author when she is a pleasant “patron” rather than a
confrontational critic.
Previously I have suggested that this figure can be seen as a projection of Virginia’s
sister, Vanessa, who was Editor of the Hyde Park Gate News. Much has already been written about the close personal and artistic alliance between Vanessa and Virginia. In The
Sisters’ Arts Diane Gillespie points out that, “[i]n spite of all they shared, a dualistic structure inevitably dominates discussions of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, in part because
each woman caricatured the other as opposite” (5). Gillespie suggests that it is convenient
for the narrative of “biographers or critics” to set up the sisters’ relationship as a series of
dualities: “to think of the virginal, barren woman versus the sensual, maternal one; the
218
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
domestically inept versus the practical and competent; the dependent versus the independent; the conversationalist versus the silent listener; the mentally unstable versus the
sane” (5).
Perhaps the expedience of this convention led me to read Vanessa as the motherly
judge of the susceptible aspiring writer in the sketch. We are used to considering Vanessa
as a surrogate for those “invisible presences” (MOB 92) who, though dead, still powerfully
influenced Woolf. It is possible to see the Editor figure as an alter ego for Vanessa. We can
read the sketch as an exploration of intersubjectivity; Virginia and Vanessa as two distinct
figures in relation to each other but, in this paper, I want to suggest that this is a self-referential piece, that the Editor can be seen as another version of the Author, herself. Clearly,
these two interpretations do not have to be mutually exclusive; they can, creatively, exist
together. I wish to suggest that both the Author and the Editor can be seen as two selves:
the prospective young writer and the self-critical patron au dedans.
In “The Patron and the Crocus” Woolf recognises that a patron must “efface…or
assert himself as his writers require; that he is bound to them by a more than maternal
tie; that they are twins indeed, one dying if the other dies, one flourishing if the other
flourishes; that the fate of literature depends on their happy alliance” (E4 215). This suggests that the receiver of Virginia’s work, whether her own self or an external figure, fulfils
more than a quasi-maternal role in relation to the writing figure. Stating that the patron
and the writer are “twins indeed” implies co-dependency. There may be some competitive
connection but they need also to be able to co-operate if their joint venture is to flourish.
The juvenile sketch also shows these tensions: Virginia intentionally shows the sometimes
effacing, sometimes asserting, editing self, in apposition to the writing self.
There are two extant manuscripts of the Hyde Park Gate News for 14th December
1891. The fair copy in Vanessa’s hand uses the word “Editor” but, in the second rougher
version, “Editor” is crossed through and, in Virginia’s writing “Author” is pencilled above.
This suggests that the young Virginia was debating with herself these differing, but complementary, roles.
Six months later, Adrian had decided to set up the “Talland Gazette” in competition
with his siblings’ publication. An article in the Hyde Park Gates News on Monday June 27th
1892 (Volume II, No. 24) speaks disparagingly about his ambition to function as both
author and editor. He “has been strongly advised to give up writing by himself but to join
with this respectable journal” (HPGN 75). The writer, presumably Virginia, chooses to
use the depersonalised but united “we” in a curt dismissal of his attempts. Katerina Koutsantoni, writing not about this example but about the use of “we” in Woolf ’s The Common
Reader essays, expresses its effect succinctly: “By using collective attribution inclusively,
the author asserts her own expertise but offers her views as shared, commonly held ones,
strategically coating them in a cloak of solidarity” (80). By using “we” the tyro reviewer
employs what Koutsantoni terms “collective authority”: “We have not yet had time to
look over ‘The Talland Gazette’ with a view to criticism. We hope that Master Adrian
Stephen will take the advice of his parent and give up ‘The Talland Gazette’ altogether”
(HPGN 75).
The Stephen children sought to write in obscurity by preserving anonymity or using
personae, but, simultaneously, sought praise and public recognition. They were already
aware of the power of an audience but knew how to evade individual responsibility for
“Observe, Observe Perpetually”
219
what they had written. Nina Skrbic refers to the juvenilia as responding to a “particular
impulse to thwart the official censor” (xv).
The sketch enacts a fictional discourse between Editor and Author. The young Virginia employs theatrical devices; this is literally “scene making” (MOB 145). It is arguable
that this is a heuristic piece, a practical experiment to discover what it might mean to be a
professional writer. Dramatising this encounter is a safe way of exploring the relationship
between writing and reading; the seller and the marketplace. The sketch performs an encounter between two coolly oppositional selves. This is a double act: a dialogic interaction
between a guileless writing self and a more demanding other-than-self. The Editor is a detached inspector but also self-interestedly supportive: she wants to profit from publishing
the Author’s poems. The Author is seen as reliant; she seeks advice but is relatively passive.
Author and Editor are set up in dialogue so Virginia can better interrogate the way the
two roles interact, first in tension with each other but finally in co-operation. Virginia recognises, even in this early project, the obligation of a writer to keep a separation between
the spontaneity of creation and the rigour of editing.
We can discern Woolf ’s habitual wry tone; the piece should not be taken entirely
seriously.8 It begins with a stage direction: “Scene—a bare room, and on a black box sits
a lank female, her fingers clutch her pen, which she dips from time to time in her ink pot
and then absently rubs upon her dress” (HPGN 199). The writer is depicted as inert and
abstracted as she limply looks out on the indifferent and darkening world outside. The
window is a trope to show the separation between interior and exterior states. This is the
outlook from Leslie’s library. Hyde Park is to the north and the street “which led nowhere”
(MOB 126) to the south. The depiction is not, however, entirely negative. Virginia was allowed access to her father’s books but the woman here is allowed more than a reader’s pass.
She is inside “the cage” (MOB 123) of the patriarchal space but the window is open to the
world outside. There is a possibility that her interiority may be allowed to be made public.
Pathetic fallacy is surely being mocked here. The writer “wishes to be poetical”
(HPGN 199) but Nature is not consoling: the “gaunt poplar” waves its arms without empathy; she sees “gloomy” silhouettes of “bleak” trees to the north; the sun “dives” for cover
behind a black cloud. The church “rears itself in the distance” as if it were antagonistic to
the figure’s need for divine inspiration. Funereal wreaths of smoke rise “monotonously”
from Dickensian chimney tops. There seems to be a sardonic vein of humour in the
sketch: an ironic elegy for childhood plays out to the mournful soundtrack of “Auld Lang
Syne” (HPGN 199). The calendar tells us “authoritatively” that the sun will set at 6.42; it
may be autumn. Time is running out but the Author has written nothing.
The Author is a caricature. She has an unattractive “most disagreeable expression”
which becomes cartoonish as the piece progresses. Her nose, illuminated by the setting
sun, is shiny and she has “few hairs” (200). She has been commissioned to write poetry but
this task is not suited to her “time of life” or to her temperament: “Poetry she considered
to be an indelicate exhibition of your innards” (200). Her silence can be seen as petulant
rather than powerful.
Woolf reprises this figure, but with a more serious purpose, in another scene for her
celebrated 1931 talk, “Professions for Women.” She discloses that she is speaking autobiographically: “I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which
for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot” (E6 482). Confronted
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by the creeping phantom of the maternal “Angel in the House,” the Author has to fling her
ink pot at her, in self-defence. Finally, she “turned upon her and caught her by the throat”.
Dramatically, we are told: “She died hard” (E6 481).
Both tableaux conceptualise the contradictions inherent in the writing process and
set in opposition pertinent dualities: subjectivity/impersonality; public/private; liberation/control and authority/autonomy. In “Professions for Women” listeners are told that
for “that young woman” to “be herself,” she had to “rid herself of falsehood” (E6 481).
Both Virginia Stephen and Virginia Woolf had, recurrently, to remove unwelcome voyeurs; to eradicate the critical voices inhibiting the writing craft; to listen instead to the
“patron au dedans.”
In her diary for Saturday March 8th 1941, Woolf returns to the imperative “Observe
perpetually.” The ambiguously encouraging tone, combined with her tentative use of the
word “hope,” are retrospectively poignant, given that they are recorded at the very end of
her life. “No: I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James’s sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the oncoming of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that
means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope” (D5 357-8).9
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Juliet Dusinberre points out that “Montaigne” was “the first single-author essay in the first volume of The
Common Reader” (219).
See Dusinberre (237) for more textual detail about the William Carew Hazlitt edition.
Published in The Nation and Athenaeum in April 1924. Both essays were collected in The Common Reader,
published in 1925.
Caroline Pollentier is here citing from Montaigne IV, 204.
See Woolf ’s persistence in trying to find order from what is yet unstructured in “Sketch of the Past”:
“behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern” (MOB 85) and “There is a pattern hidden behind the cotton
wool” (MOB 85-6).
Woolf also interprets silence as criticism. She writes about Lytton Strachey: “I have felt his silence disapproving; have moderated my folly under it” (D3 208).
See “The Artist and Politics” (M 232) where “crying and conflicting voices” are heard in his studio by the
artist.
As Alex Zwerdling states “A certain analytic distance had in fact always been a strong element in Woolf ’s
nature, and some form of irony had characterised her writing as early as the Hyde Park Gate News” (182).
It is not clear here exactly which words are being ascribed to Henry James. Anne Olivier Bell’s footnote to
the 8th March diary entry makes reference to Desmond MacCarthy’s Portraits (155). A consideration of
that original essay may suggest a significant connection between the two writers and their response to the
“despondency” mentioned by Woolf on this day. In his portrait of James, MacCarthy writes about a time
when he was with the writer, “sauntering along a dusty road which crosses the Romney marshes. He had
been describing to me the spiral of depression which a recent nervous illness had compelled him to step
after step, night after night, day after day, to descend.” MacCarthy refers to the “arid rejection of life and
meaningless yet frantic agitation he had been compelled to traverse!” (155). Henry James speaks again—
and intriguingly he begins with the word that has been the focus of this Glasgow Woolf conference—
“‘But,’ and he suddenly stood still, ‘but it has been good’—and here he took off his hat, baring his great
head in the moonlight—‘for my genius.’ Then, putting on his hat again, he added, ‘Never cease to watch
whatever happens to you’” (155).
Works Cited
Allen, Judith. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.
Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
“Observe, Observe Perpetually”
221
Dusinberre, Juliet. “Virginia Woolf and Montaigne.” Textual Practice 5 (1991): 219-241.
Gillespie, Diane Filby. The Sisters’ Arts: the Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Syracuse and
New York: Syracuse UP, 1991.
Koutsantoni, Katerina. Virginia Woolf ’s Common Reader. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.
MacCarthy, Desmond. Portraits I. London and New York: Putnam, 1931.
Montaigne, Michel de. Essays of Montaigne. 5 vols. Trans. Charles Cotton. London: The Navarre Society, 1923.
Pollentier, Caroline. “Montaigne’s ‘Patron au-Dedans’ and Virginia Woolf ’s Conception of the Modern Patron.”
Notes and Queries (March 2008): 76-78.
Skrbic, Nina. Wild Outbursts of Freedom: Reading Virginia Woolf ’s Short Fiction. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger,
2004.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Artist and Politics.” The Moment and Other Essays. New York and London: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1974.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 19791985.
_____, “Montaigne.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4 1925-1928. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1994.
_____, “The Patron and the Crocus.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4 1925-1928. Ed. Andrew McNeillie.
London: The Hogarth Press, 1994.
_____, “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. Ed. Hermione Lee. London: Pimlico, 2002.
_____, Hyde Park Gate News, the Stephen Family Newspaper. Ed. Gill Lowe. London: Hesperus Press, 2005.
_____, “Professions for Women.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6 1933-1941. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. London:
The Hogarth Press, 2011.
Zwerdling, Alex. “Mastering the Memoir: Woolf and the Family Legacy.” Modernism/Modernity 10:1 (2003):
165-188.
WHO’S BEHIND THE CURTAIN?
VIRGINIA WOOLF, “NURSE LUGTON’S GOLDEN THIMBLE,”
AND THE ANXIETY OF AUTHORSHIP
by Kristin Czarnecki
P
ublished by the Hogarth Press in 1966 with pictures by Duncan Grant, “Nurse
Lugton’s Golden Thimble” is one of two children’s stories Virginia Woolf wrote. It
was discovered in 1963 by Wallace Hildick, who found it in the manuscript of Mrs.
Dalloway, which had recently been acquired by the British Museum. It was in the second
of the three large Dalloway manuscript notebooks amid pages depicting Septimus Warren
Smith’s final scene, when he hurls himself out the window at the approach of Dr. Holmes,
intent on separating him from his wife, Rezia. Just moments before, Septimus had been
helping Rezia sew a hat, adding felt and flowers and laughing with his wife in a lovely
and all too rare moment of lucidity. The children’s story is short, just a couple of pages,
about an old nurse, or governess, who is asleep as the story begins, having dozed off while
sewing a curtain with an animal pattern on it. As she sleeps, the animals spring to life; in
fact a whole village appears. As soon as Nurse Lugton begins to stir, however, the animals
flee in terror, and by the time she wakes up, they have resumed their frozen, lifeless stance.
Writing of his discovery in the Times Literary Supplement in 1965, Hildick speculates
about the story’s origins. Perhaps it provided a respite for Woolf from working out the
scenes of madness and suicide in Mrs. Dalloway. He wonders if the list of animals written on the reverse side of the page indicates a potential reworking of, or alternate to, the
Dalloway scenes set in Regent’s Park—as the park is not far from the Zoo, and among
these scenes is one of Peter Walsh dozing next to an “old nurse busily knitting” (Hildick).
Ultimately, Hildick feels certain of the story’s provenance: In a diary entry of September
7, 1924, Woolf writes of a delightful afternoon spent with her young niece, Ann, one of
Adrian’s daughters, leading Hildick to conclude that Woolf wrote the story specifically for
her niece, a theory corroborated by Leonard Woolf, who had not seen the story before
Hildick presented it to him. In fact Leonard gave it its title, “Nurse Lugton’s Golden
Thimble,” for as Hildick explains in the TLS, Virginia had not titled it: the original pages
had simply “The…” at the top. Furthermore, Geneviève Sanchis Morgan, who has devoted significant attention to the story, believes that because it concerns a woman sewing,
and was found in the Dalloway manuscript with scenes of Rezia sewing, it extols women’s
unique creative powers above all.
I see something else at play, however, apart from an affectionate gesture towards a
niece or the unequivocal celebration of women’s creative arts. I see Woolf ’s anxieties about
authorship, for Nurse Lugton is not just a benevolent old governess but also an “ogress”
who terrifies the creatures “in her toils” (CSF 161). Its animals free to roam only when
their captor sleeps, the story reflects concerns raised by Woolf throughout her works regarding pressures unique to female writers. The story’s shifting titles and audience reception also afford such a reading as well as insights into persistent stereotypes of Woolf in
contemporary culture.
Who’s Behind the Curtain?
223
In “The Hostess and the Seamstress: Virginia Woolf ’s Creation of a Domestic Modernism,” Geneviève Sanchis Morgan argues that “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble” “serves
as a microcosm for Mrs. Dalloway” and “marks Woolf ’s discovery of her own distinct
voice” (95). She finds the story in accord with the numerous scenes in Woolf of nurseries, domestic spaces, and women’s imaginative lives. Morgan also identifies the story’s
modernist characteristics—“its rejection of plot and resistance to closure” (96)—and sees
the story “balancing the details of the domestic realm with the rigors of a modernist aesthetic” (97). Moreover, the picture of Nurse Lugton sewing in a private domestic space
“illustrates [as does A Room of One’s Own] how exclusion from regular public experience
does not stunt the female artist’s growth or invalidate her vision” (98). She believes Woolf
deliberately placed the story amid scenes of Rezia sewing and goes on to link Nurse Lugton with Clarissa’s imaginative, anti-patriarchal domesticity in Mrs. Dalloway. While I
would not refute Morgan’s claims, I believe that, as with so many of Woolf ’s works, there
may be more to the story.
My first encounter with the story was the 1991 Harcourt picture book titled “Nurse
Lugton’s Curtain,” with watercolor illustrations by Julie Vivas. In the story, we see a lively
parade of animals tramping through grass and puddles and are told, “Over them burnt
Nurse Lugton’s golden thimble like a sun” (CSF 160). The zebras, giraffes, ostriches, tigers,
mandrills, marmots, penguins, and pelicans drinking from the lake was, Woolf writes,
“Really…a beautiful sight” (CSF 160), and throughout it all, “Nurse Lugton slept; Nurse
Lugton saw nothing at all” (CSF 161). Yet, the narrative says, the people of this land,
called Millamarchmantopolis, pitied the animals, “for it was well known that even the
smallest monkey was enchanted. For a great ogress had them in her toils…and the great
ogress was called Lugton” (CSF 161). She towers over them, Woolf writes, with a “face like
the side of a mountain” and “chasms for her eyes and hair and nose and teeth. And every
animal which strayed into her territories she froze alive” (CSF 161). They find release only
when she sleeps; when she wakes, they flee back into position.
The story is rich in its implications for authorship. To begin, we may consider the
woman sewing as the woman writing. If the sewer is the author, then the curtain is her
text, meaning the needle is her pen, signifying agency and power when used in tandem
with the thimble. Indeed, the story tells us that Nurse Lugton’s thimble is the animals’
life source. Yet the woman bringing the curtain to life is the same one causing its paralysis. Furthermore, a thimble covers, conceals, and protects, but from what, exactly,
does it offer protection when used with an implement of inscription? That question
changes when we consider the story’s title in the Harcourt picture book as well as in The
Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf: “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain,” a renaming that
displaces needle/pen for curtain/text, effacing the writer in focusing not on the creative
process but on the finished product. Nevertheless, a curtain, too, may be considered a
covering, protecting or perhaps hiding the author. Above all, I wondered what to make
of Woolf ’s casting of the female creator as monster—a concept she abhorred and wrote
against throughout her life. Is she substituting “for an ‘anxiety of influence’…what [Gilbert and Gubar] have called an ‘anxiety of authorship,’ an anxiety built from complex
and often only barely conscious fears of that authority which seems to the female artist
to be by definition inappropriate to her sex” (51)? The story certainly seems to manifest
one of Woolf ’s perennial concerns: the risk an author runs of compromising her text
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by imbuing within it her personal feelings or biases—the crux of Woolf ’s criticism in A
Room of One’s Own of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.1
Seminal essays by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes yield insights into the concept
of authorship I believe Woolf expresses in her story. In “What is an Author?” Foucault laments the ascendance of the author over the text throughout much of Western history. We
“recount the lives of authors rather than of [the] heroes” they write about, he states (890).
We become consumed with the author’s persona, and we do not tolerate literary anonymity (894). In “The Art of Fiction,” Woolf similarly laments the disproportionate amount
of attention paid to novelists rather than their words, noting, “while the painter, the musician, and the poet come in for their share of criticism, the novelist goes unscathed. His
character will be discussed; his morality, it may be his genealogy, will be examined; but his
writing will go scot-free” (CE2, 55). Several years earlier, in 1924, she had written with
glee in her diary of a letter she received from Ka Arnold-Forster expressing her dislike for
one of Woolf ’s pieces in the Criterion. “At once I feel refreshed,” Woolf says. “I become
anonymous” (D2 248). She was thrilled that Ka was willing to criticize the piece rather
than give it false praise because its author was a friend of hers. As Foucault argues, “In
writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing”—the work of the pen or
the needle—“nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating
a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears” (890). Foucault then likens
writing to a sacrifice akin to death—a “voluntary effacement” of oneself. “As a result, the
mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must
assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing” (891).
Rather than have her author figure die, Woolf has her sleep in “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble”; only when her persona is dormant or absent can her creation exist. In her
essay in praise of sleep, Anne Carson says she finds supreme consolation in coming at
life “from the sleep side” (20), and she appreciates Woolf ’s use of sleep as a means of
glimpsing events “as if from underneath” (23). She describes the “Time Passes” section
of To the Lighthouse as the “novel…fall[ing] asleep for twenty-five pages in the middle”
(22)—exploring silence, motionless furniture, and “moonlight gliding on floorboards”
(23) as shocking events drift by, bracketed, failing to cause a stir. “Woolf offers us, through
sleep,” she writes, “a glimpse of a kind of emptiness that interests her. It is the emptiness of
things before we make use of them, a glimpse of reality prior to its efficacy” (24). With an
image that seems apt for “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” Carson says, “Woolf likes to
finger the border between nothing and something. Sleepers are ideal agents of this work”
(24). No doubt Nurse Lugton fingers the border of the sewing in her lap before falling
asleep. With her self-consciousness at bay and her subconscious imaginings rising to the
surface—for as Woolf would write a few years later in A Room of One’s Own, “it is in our
idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top” (AROO
31)—she engenders a space free of constraints she might otherwise impose. When she
awakens, her creation falls subject to her egoism, inevitable when the author consciously
injects her will into the text.
Nevertheless, Foucault says, we perpetuate the cult of the author, sifting through
rough drafts, manuscripts, marginalia, deleted passages, workbooks, personal notes—even
laundry lists, he writes, because “[m]odern literary criticism…still defines the author the
same way: the author provides the basis for explaining not only the presence of certain
Who’s Behind the Curtain?
225
events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications.…
The author also serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts”
(895). Clearly Foucault offers food for thought for those of us gathered at a conference on
contradictory Woolf. He also recognizes the danger in conceiving of the author as genius,
as transcendent dispenser of wisdom, for the author then becomes an ideological figure,
a “necessary and constraining figure” who “impedes the free circulation” of fiction (900,
899). Viewed through this lens, “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble” not only reflects the
necessity of the disappeared author for the emergence of true creative expression but also
points to Septimus rather than Rezia as its source: Septimus driven to his death by an
authority figure whose role is to regulate errant citizens. No wonder Nurse Lugton’s huge
watchful eye paralyzes the creatures in the valley below.
In “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes too finds that writing begins the
moment “the author enters into his own death” (253), but while Foucault believes the
writer inevitably disappears into the text, Barthes considers this disappearance an act of
will—the modern scriptor’s conscious rejection of the belief that she deliberately calls
forth the words on the page. Woolf expresses a similar sentiment in “How it Strikes a
Contemporary,” written in April 1923, in which she attributes our love of the classics, and
their lasting impact, to those authors’ conscious relinquishing of “the cramp and confinement of personality” (CE2 159). Woolf finds Jane Austen adept at this, for “the little grain
of experience [she] selected, believed in, and set outside herself, could be put precisely in
its place, and she was free to make it…into that complete statement which is literature”
(CE2 159). The contemporary writer, on the other hand, “will only tell us what it is that
happens to himself ” (CE2 159). Writing in her diary two months later, she asks herself,
“Have I the power of conveying true reality? Or do I write essays about myself?” (D2 249)
Writing is about language, not authors, according to Barthes, and “language…ceaselessly
calls into question all origins” (256), for the “text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the
innumerable centers of culture,” and the “writer’s only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others…and so on indefinitely” (256). Linking a text to a specific
Author (capital A) is an act of tyranny imposing limits on the text, an act Barthes associates closely with the critic: “when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’—victory to the critic,” he writes (256).
Interestingly, Barthes uses sewing imagery to suggest how readers ought to approach
a text. Rather than try to “decipher” what we read—to “pierce” beneath the surface for a
“secret” or “ultimate meaning,” we must appreciate “the multiplicity of writing” and seek
to “disentangle” it, following the structure like “run[ning]…the thread of a stocking”
(256). Barthes’s word “pierce” conjures up Mr. Ramsay’s verbal assaults on his wife in To
the Lighthouse—his authoritative voice stabbing at her, insisting on his truth, while she,
preferring chance or inconclusiveness, sits knitting a stocking. The flash of her needles
here deflects the “fatal sterility of the male [which] plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare” (TTL 40). Woolf ’s sewers and knitters emerge as Barthes’s modern scriptors:
anti-authoritarian figures open to the multiplicity of language.
The same may be said of children, who often communicate in language of their
own that heeds no rules. Elizabeth Goodenough believes Woolf ’s fiction “celebrates the
consciousness of children: in their wonder and certainty,” she writes, “they embody the
purest kind of integrity a character can achieve” (184). That they rarely speak does not
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mean Woolf denies them a voice; rather she “calls attention to the interior being of children” (185), in keeping with her modernist, feminist aesthetics. In addition, Goodenough
finds Woolf working in a distinctly Romantic vein, not only exploring the inner world of
children but also attending to animals in many of her works, further elucidating “Nurse
Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” in which animals, not people, are under Lugton’s spell. In
fact, Michelle Levy considers the story an object lesson in respecting animals and “the
dangers to human beings of anthropocentricity” (148). Awake, Nurse Lugton fears the
animal world. “Even a little black beetle made her jump” (CSF 161), and as we know she
“condemns the animals to lifelessness” as she sews (Levy 148). Only in the dream world,
Levy observes, do “humans and animals interact peaceably,” and this alone is “worthy of
our attention and emulation” (148).
Goodenough traces the many depictions of children and childhood throughout
Woolf ’s works. The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and Jacob’s Room “are all studies of young
people approaching adulthood” (189), she reminds us, and in Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa envisions herself “a child, throwing bread to the ducks” (Woolf qtd. in Goodenough 196). In
To the Lighthouse, “the visionary intensities of the child are associated with the fierce struggle of the artist to create” (197), while in The Waves, “the process of maturation…is inherently destructive to creativity” (199). Katrien Vloeberghs concurs, stating, “In modernist
literary texts, the poetical appeal to the creation of a new language is repeatedly connected
to child figurations, for example with the fragmentary babbling of monosyllabic words in
Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves” (300). Bernard in particular would reject structured speech
for “a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when
they come into the room and find their mother sewing…(192)” (Woolf qtd. in Vloeberghs
300, emphasis added). Goodenough even says the death of Jacob Flanders may be seen as
an “ironic victory, for the hero escapes adulthood” (200), an idea which points again toward the possibility that Septimus’s leap out the window—and preservation of his dignity,
as Clarissa sees it—may have inspired “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble.”
In an essay called “High Modernism for the Lowest: Children’s Books by Woolf, Joyce
and Greene,” Hope Howell Hodgkins presents an entirely different take on Woolf and
children based solely on “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain.” She sees the story as further evidence
of modernist elitism. This children’s story is not for children at all, she says, citing “high
modern writers’ coolness toward childhood” (358) and “antinarrative bias” (361), not to
mention the “religious seriousness with which [Woolf ] regards her fiction” (358). Furthermore, in Hodgkins’s view, the story “contains little excitement” and has “a bland effect”
(361). James Joyce’s illustrated children’s book, The Cat and the Devil, receives similar criticism, for Hodgkins cannot conceive of such writers finding anything of value in writing
about or for children. Indeed “[t]heir novels for adults,” she says of Joyce and Woolf, “are
notoriously complex, appealing to a small, elite readership” (359). She also notes twice
that children have no “surrogates to sympathize with” in “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain” (361),
for children are nowhere to be found in the story—neither in Millamarchmantopolis nor
in Nurse Lugton’s nursery. Hodgkins does view Nurse Lugton as an “alter-ego for Woolf
and an image of the creative female unconscious” (361) but one that “suggests a fear of its
author, that of the artist who wants to avoid confronting the creative process lest its products die in their amber” (361). As I am arguing, however, Woolf confronts the creative
process head-on in her story to demonstrate the means by which creativity might occur
Who’s Behind the Curtain?
227
and thrive. For Hodgkins, however, “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain” stands as Woolf ’s affirmation that the modern author is “most productive in solitude”—that is, without children
(362). Turning from literary creation to procreation, or Woolf ’s lack thereof, Hodgkins
focuses on the author rather than the text, closing down meaning.
Wendy Lesser displays a similar stance in her 1991 New York Times review of “Nurse
Lugton’s Curtain,” called “A Drape of One’s Own.” She begins by saying she read the story
to a five year-old child, who said when it was over, “It has nice pictures, I like the words,
and it’s a good story” (qtd. in Lesser). For its intended audience, then, Lesser writes, the
story “would seem to be a success.” That seems beside the point, however, as her review
goes on to reify a well known, unflattering portrait of the author. “The publisher’s age
guideline says ‘7 and up,’” Lesser writes, “and for those of us on the higher end of that
scale, [the story] may remind us all too strongly of what is least likable about the author,” including “forced whimsy,” “self-congratulatory” imagery, and “overtones of class
snobbery.” Julie Vivas’s illustrations are not right, either, she complains, for they conjure
up a wild, free space for animals at odds with Woolf ’s “prissiness.” If nothing else, she
concludes, the story might serve as a lesson for children in “advanced punctuation,” for
it contains a lot of semi-colons. Lesser concedes that her (pseudo) knowledge of Woolf
tainted her response to the story and surmises, “the less you know about the author, the
more you’ll like this particular book.” Lesser, like Hodgkins, pulls back the curtain and
seeks her preconceived notion of the author behind it.
Given such visceral responses to the author, it appears that whoever changed the story’s title may have been on to something. Shifting from thimble to curtain draws attention
away from the creator and on to the creation. The curtain, then, does not protect or hide
the author; it blankets the reader with what is most important: the text. Nevertheless I
love reading about Woolf ’s life and have amassed biographies, drafts, deleted sections, and
juvenilia—and if someday someone discovers a laundry list, I will read that, too. Moreover, Jane Lilienfeld is among critics noting Woolf ’s “contradictory narrative impulses”
(123). She writes in her essay on Woolf and narrative theory of Woolf ’s insistence on
discarding the “‘damned egotistical self ’ (D2, 14)” (qtd. in Lilienfeld 123) from her work
and simultaneous advancement of a “feminist, socialist, pacifist” agenda (Jane Marcus
qtd. in Lilienfeld 123). “Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble,” however, and much of Woolf ’s
writing, reminds us to focus above all on the words, which do not spring consciously from
the isolated mind. Rather, as Woolf asserts again and again, the human mind and literary
creations are networks, spider-webs, fishing lines feeling the random tug of ideas, and “an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms” falling upon us to comprise Monday or Tuesday
(CE2 106). Disregarding the author, letting her sleep while we read, we enter more fully
into the life on the page.
Note
1.
See 68-69 in Chapter Four of A Room of One’s Own.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, 2nd ed.
Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. 253-257.
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Carson, Anne. “Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep).” Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera. New York:
Vintage, 2006. 17-40.
Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David
H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 889-900.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.
Goodenough, Elizabeth. “‘We Haven’t the Words’: The Silence of Children in the Novels of Virginia Woolf.”
Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature. Ed. Elizabeth
Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994. 184-201.
Hildick, Wallace. “Virginia Woolf for Children?” Times Literary Supplement 17 June 1965.
Hodgkins, Hope Howell. “High Modernism for the Lowest: Children’s Books by Woolf, Joyce, and Greene.”
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 32.4 (2007): 353-367.
Lesser, Wendy. “A Drape of One’s Own.” New York Times 19 May 1991.
Levy, Michelle. “Virginia Woolf ’s Shorter Fictional Explorations of the External World: ‘closely united…immensely divided.’” Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf ’s Short Fiction. Ed. Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth
Hoberman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 139-155.
Lilienfeld, Jane. “‘Must Novels Be Like This?’ Virginia Woolf as Narrative Theorist.” Virginia Woolf: Texts and
Contexts: Selected Papers from the Fifth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Beth Rigel Daugherty and
Eileen Barrett. New York: Pace UP, 1996. 123-128.
Morgan, Geneviève Sanchis. “The Hostess and the Seamstress: Virginia Woolf ’s Creation of a Domestic Modernism.” Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-readings. Ed. Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. 90-104.
Vloeberghs, Katrien. “Figurations of Childhood in Modernist Texts.” Modernism, 2 vols. Ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007. 291-305.
Woolf, Virginia. Nurse Lugton’s Golden Thimble. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966.
——. “The Art of Fiction.” Collected Essays, Volume 2. New York: Harcourt, 1967. 51-56.
____. “How it Strikes a Contemporary.” Collected Essays, Volume 2. New York: Harcourt, 1967.153-161.
____. “Modern Fiction.” Collected Essays, Volume 2. New York: Harcourt, 1967. 103-110.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1977 1984.
____. “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. Orlando: Harvest, 1989. 160-161.
____. Nurse Lugton’s Curtain. New York: Harcourt, 1991.
____. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt, 2005.
____. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, 2005.
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE RUSSIAN OXYMORON
by Claire Davison
T
he oxymoron is that intriguing, self-reflexive figure which sets two apparently
contradictory qualities side-by-side and leaves them to gently collide together. It
allows no dialectical resolution. Nor can any grammatical coordinator be inserted
to ease the tension between the terms. And, but or yet inserted into the nominal cluster
would help an oxymoron make sense, but would at the same time annul it. And let me
add, by way of a tangent, that as Nevill Forbes teaches us in his Russian Grammar, there
are not one but two “buts” in Russian, marking slight and stronger antithesis.1
Virginia Woolf ’s 1925 essay “A Russian Point of View” (E4 181-190) seemingly
flaunts contradictions or ambivalence, in terms of subject as well as authorial stance, creating an underlying tension that remains unresolved to the end. The title promises to reveal
what a Russian point of view is, only to offer points of view on the Russians. And whose
points of view? For all the essay’s foregrounded subjectivity and its inscription in the present tense, the opening pages do not just draw on Woolf ’s own publications on Russian
literature since 1917 but interweave her own recycled ideas with an intriguing mish-mash
of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russian voices, indirectly echoing John
Murry, Percy Lubbock, Maxim Gorky, Peter Kropotkin, Melchior De Vogüé, Maurice
Baring, Nikolai Brodsky and Arthur Clutton-Brock to quote but the most striking.2 It
compares translated Russian to language bereft of style or people bereft of clothes, claims
which can only intrigue coming from an author who not only signed translations, but
who in other writing posits clothes as the most unstable of signifiers,3 that can disguise
or obscure “the large and permanent things.” 4 The essay’s closing tangent retreats to the
gentle comforts of home, although so many Woolf essays welcome a little estrangement
in time or space to escape from domesticity (“Phases of Fiction” being the most striking
example), not to mention that “as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no
country. As a woman my country is the whole world”(TG 125).
Little wonder that by the end of the essay, when Tolstoy turns his telescope on “us” (a
very different Russian point of view), it inspires a sense of bewilderment. These intriguing
fillips might make more sense, however, if read in the light of a disconcerting note at the
end of her unpublished “Tchekov on Pope”: “not that we wish to throw a stone at [all the
books of all the Russians]; only at the view of them that prevails over here” (Rubenstein
185).5 My feeling is that “A Russian Point of View” might be that stone, or at least one
“half ” of it.
Now to Russia, Russian literature, Dostoevsky and The Possessed, all of which in
Woolf ’s era were the paragons of ambiguity. For Baring, Russia was “the land of paradoxes” (Baring xi), and for Gorky a nation divided by “two souls” (Graham 391). Dostoevsky,
most Russian of Russians, is the epitome of modernist ambivalence; as André Gide says,
“Je ne connais pas d’écrivain plus riche en contradictions et inconséquences que Dostoïevski; Nietzsche dirait ‘en antagonismes’” (67). The Possessed (whose title means the opposite)6 inspired Woolf to comment in her reading notes, “How violent these contrasting
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
230
effects are!…The delicious absence in foreign writers of all boundaries” (Rubenstein 166),
while its ostentatiously masked chronicler admits to being unable to explain the coexistence of contraries in his tale. As for the largely absent protagonist Stavrogin, he changed
destiny as the novel was composed; initially intended to represent the great sinner confessing an unspeakable crime, he becomes a cynically reluctant nihilist.
The recovered chapters, meanwhile, uncovered in Soviet archives in 1921 and first
published in England in 1922 in a translation by Virginia Woolf and Samuel Koteliansky,
flaunt ambiguity at work. Stavrogin’s confession is formal contradiction in itself, leaving a
perplexing deficit in the expurgated version, yet adding too much to the finished text. It
shows Stavrogin in dialogue with himself as an externalised other (the saintly Tikhon); it
also stages confession alongside the impossibility of confession.
Woolf ’s involvement as a translator can only extend contradiction into critical discourse. She can hardly have translated, having only the roughest of insights into Russian,
yet Koteliansky is only ever credited with rendering a rough version in his allegedly unreliable English.7 So what exactly did “translation” amount to and how can it be related to
Woolf ’s “own” work?
My conviction is that translating as an activity as well as a concept produced an essential and revealing dynamics in Woolf ’s creative work as much as in her critical reflections on language, translation and the meaning of meaning.8 It is a conviction I wish
to illustrate and justify here through a close reading of the collaborative translation of
“Stavrogin’s Confession.”9 By examining revealing passages from their work, alongside the
Russian original and later translations, I shall argue that the Woolf-Koteliansky achievement deserves recognition as a strikingly avant-garde translation.10
A first example below (Stavrogin’s depiction of his devils) offers rich insight into
compositional arrangement, verbal emphasis, and lexical choice:
And suddenly he related, in the shortest and most abrupt manner so that certain
words could hardly be understood, that he was subject, especially at nights, to
a kind of hallucination, that he sometimes saw or felt near him a spiteful being,
mocking and ‘rational’, ‘in various forms and in various characters, but it is
always one and the same and I always fly into a rage.’ (Woolf & Koteliansky 20)
The Russian texts reads:
И вруг он, впрочем в самых кратких и отрывистых словax, что иное
трудно было и понять, рассказал, что он подвержен, особенно по ночам,
некоторого рода галлюцинацияам, что он видит иногда или чувствует
подле себя какое-то злобное существо, насмешливое и «разумое», « в
разных лицах и в разных характерах но оно одно и то же а я всегда
злюсь…» (768).
A word-for-word rendering gives this:
And suddenly he, and yet in the shortest and most abrupt words, so that it was
sometimes hard even to understand, related, that he was subject, especially at
Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
231
night, to some sort of hallucination, that he sometimes saw or felt beside him
some spiteful being, ‘mocking’ and ‘rational’, ‘with various faces, and various
characters, but it is always one and the same, and [yet] I always get angry.’
What strikes in the Woolf & Koteliansky translation is the minute attention to the source
text: word order (except where comprehension might be endangered, as in separation of
the subject “he” and verb “related”), repetitions, superlatives, interruptions of the syntactic flow and punctuation. The effect is not only to produce a very literal translation,
but also one that is comparable to the source text in terms of imitative harmony: agitation, breathlessness or stumbling emphasis. The narrator or chronicler’s role is kept to an
absolute minimum, rarely enhancing or smoothing over the rough edges of the source,
something that later translations, concerned with producing more readable, fluid or lexically rich prose in keeping with standard criteria for judging “good” translation, tended to
do. Examples are italicised11 in the extracts below:
And suddenly, in words so brief and disconnected as to be somewhat obscure, he
began to speak of how he suffered, especially at night, from certain strange hallucinations; how he sometimes saw or felt close beside him an evil being, derisive
and ‘rational’: ‘ it shows different faces and assumes different characters, and yet is
always the same and always infuriates me’ (Yarmolinsky 696)
And suddenly he told him, although rather briefly and abruptly, so that some of
what he was saying was difficult to understand, that he was subject, especially at
nights, to some kind of hallucinations, that he sometimes saw or felt beside him
the presence of some kind of malignant creature, mocking and ‘rational’, ‘in all
sorts of guises and in different characters, but it is the same and it always makes
me angry’. (Magarshack 676)
The small detail of whether or not to privilege synonyms to avoid repetition — seen here
with the adjective разный (different)— proves essential as the text develops, as the three
examples below confirm. Woolf and Koteliansky follow Dostoevsky’s lead scrupulously in
terms of repetition, preferring insistence or obsession rather than stylistic elegance. Later
English translations, and (in the first two examples) the 1922 French translation, privilege
lexical and expressive variety in keeping with conventional style expectations:
Example 1. But I soon noticed that she was not in the least afraid of me but was
perhaps rather delirious. But she was not delirious either (Woolf & Koteliansky
36).
Но очень скоро заметил, что она совсем меня не пугается, а, может быть,
скорее в бреду. Но она и в бреду не была (783).
But very soon I noticed that she was not afraid of me at all, and that she was
perhaps delirious. But that was not the case (Yarmolinsky 710).
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
232
Mais non! Ce n’était pas du tout du délire! (De Schloezer 34)
Example 2. Very loudly a van entered the courtyard below. Very loudly (and
for some time before) a tailor, sitting at his window in the corner of the courtyard, sang a song. (Woolf & Koteliansky 37)
Очень громко въехала внузу во двор какая-то телега. Очень громко
(и давно уже) пел песню вуглу двора в окне один мастеровой, портной.
(783)
A cart rumbled noisily into the courtyard. In the corner of the courtyard a tailor
at his window had been singing a loud song for some time. (Yarmolinsky 711)
A cart of some kind drove noisily into the courtyard below. A workman, a tailor
perhaps, was singing very loudly at a window in one corner of the courtyard (and
had been doing so for some time). (Katz 768)
Un camion pénétra avec grand bruit dans la cour. Un apprenti tailleur chantait
à pleine gorge (depuis longtemps déjà) près de sa fenêtre, dans un coin de la cour.
(De Schloezer 36)
Example 3. I stood on tiptoe [на цыпочки] and began looking through the
chink. At that moment, standing on tiptoe [на цыпочки], I remembered that,
when I sat by the window and looked at the little red spider and fell into a trance,
I had been thinking of how I should stand on tiptoe [на цыпочки] and peer
through this very chink. (Woolf & Koteliansky 38)
I stood on tiptoe and looked through a crack high up. At the very moment
when I was rising on the tips of my toes I recalled that when I was sitting by the
window, looking at the little red spider, and was about to doze off, I had thought
of how I would lift myself on my toes so that my eye would be on a level with that
crack. (Yarmolinsky 711)
Another interesting feature of their translation is its scrupulous attention to tiny textual details: the spider that Stavrogin observes as he waits to see if Matryoshka will return
is described as “a tiny reddish spider” (Woolf & Koteliansky 37) (“крошечного красненького паучка,” 783) — the suffix “-ish” capturing the Russian diminutive which
is doubtless motivated by the need to avoid the positive connotations of the adjective
“red”— a detail that all subsequent translations have omitted. Similarly as the example
below shows, the encounter with the child Matryoshka when Stavrogin returns to the
house is rendered so as to preserve fine details in terms of repetition, precision and even
contradiction:
And suddenly she raised her tiny fist [свой маленький кулачок] and began
threatening from where she stood.…On her face was such despair [отчаяние]
Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
233
as was unendurable to see on a child’s face [в лице ребенка]. She shook her
tiny fist [свой маленький кулачок] at me all the while threateningly, and
nodded her head reproachfully. (Woolf & Koteliansky 36)
Again, a comparison with other translations confirms that Koteliansky and Woolf steer
clear of any affective connotations that may overstate Stavrogin’s depiction of the girl. The
Yarmolinsky translation for example prefers the more endearing “her little fist” and then
uses classic sentimental cliché to refer to the child:
And suddenly she raised her little fist at me and began to threaten me from where
I stood.…Her face betrayed such despair as was intolerable to see in a creature
so small. She kept on threatening me with her little fist and shaking her head in
reproach. (Yarmolinsky 710)
The French translation equally opts for a sentimental representation of childhood:
Son visage exprimait un désespoir pénible à voir dans un être si petit. (De
Schloezer 35)
Woolf and Koteliansky are also the only translators not to have resolved the striking ambiguity in the text created by the verbal choice “nodded her head.” All later translations
resort to the more morally logical choice “shaking her head”—she is after all accusing the
man who is confessing to having raped her. The Russian text, however, uses the verb кивала, from the verb кивать, meaning to nod assent. In other words they leave Stavrogin’s
text to unsettle, or to reflect the utterer’s own ambiguity.
Another interesting lexical detail is their translation of the metaphor when Stavrogin
abruptly decides to marry Lebydakin’s sister as a form of flamboyant self-imposed penance:
About that time, altogether for no definite reason, I took it into my head to
cripple my life, but in as disgusting a way as possible. (Woolf & Koteliansky 39)
The Russian verb искалечить indeed means “to cripple”, thus prefiguring his decision to wreck his life with the crippled simpleton. The detail is smoothed over in other
translations:
C’est alors que l’idée me vint —mais sans motif aucun—de gâcher ma vie de la
façon la plus bête possible. (De Schloezer 41)
It was at that time, but not for any particular reason, that I took it into my head
to ruin my life somehow or other, but only in as disgusting a way as possible.
(Magarshack 693)
Such minor details accumulate over the pages, inevitably playing a decisive role in the
connotative tissue of the text. They are what Edward in The Years describes when translating Greek as “little negligible words” which “revealed shades of meaning which altered
234
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
the meaning” (TY 48). In contemporary translation theory, they do not simply mark
individual choices in terms of form, but essential nodes (what the French philosopher
Pierre Cadiot refers to as the “profiling” and “thematising” of meaning), where form itself
is semantic. A telling example is that of grammatical subject or object, or whether verbs
are used passively or actively, thus constructing an implicit textual network in which the
speaking voice constructs or dismantles its own agency (a point I shall return to). Here
too, Koteliansky and Woolf ’s choices show a marked tendency to follow textual leads
to the letter, preferring syntax which in conventional terms might be deemed slightly
awkward to create a voice that sounds most like Stavrogin in Russian, and trying to put
the accent where it lay in Russia. A telling example is the syntactic arrangement chosen
to foreground the notion of the child’s “despair” in the extract above. The Russian word
“отчаяние” is cited by the French-Russian expert De Vogüe as an example of Russian
untranslatability, expressing, as he claims, the “ecstasy of suffering and a rebellion against
the actual” (De Vogüé 287). Certainly all translators concur on the choice of “despair” as
the only approximate rendering. But beyond the word’s immediate semantics, its syntactic
inscription in the sentence is paramount. The Russian text has the key noun as the grammatical subject of the sentence, delayed by a prepositional clause to enhance the semantic
and rhetorical emphasis on the word:
На ее лице было такое отчаяние, которое невозможно было видеть в
лице ребенка (783). (On her face was such despair…)
While Woolf and Koteliansky maintain this sentence structure, with “despair” as the delayed and heightened subject (“On her face was such despair as was unendurable to see on
a child’s face”), later translations opt for alternative wording that reduces the grammatical,
semantic and dramatic impact. In the first two cases, “despair” becomes the grammatical
object, while ”face” becomes the focal noun; in the third case, the use of the identifying
structure (there is / there are…) particularises the noun, reducing its conceptual or abstract resonance:
Her face betrayed such despair as was intolerable to see in a creature so small.
(Yarmolinsky 710)
Her face was full of such despair which was quite unbearable to see on the face of
a child. (Magarshack 691)
There was despair in her face, such as was impossible to see on the face of a child.
(Katz 467)
The effect as it builds up in the Woolf & Koteliansky version is to create an atmosphere
of necessary strangeness, “flooding the page with associations”.12 Stavrogin, they seem to
imply, should not and cannot be domesticated here for life in Cranford; indeed in Russian too he is undomesticated. Conventional translation theory still dominant in the early
twentieth century held that good translated prose should sound as if it had been spoken
by an Englishman, as a contemporary review in The Times makes clear:
Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
235
It is generally held that an English translation ought above all to be English, and
that the translator, having ascertained the meaning of his original, should be
guided by the laws of his own language in expressing it.13
In fact the old Dryden principle of making Englishmen of foreign authors still holds
strong to this day. In the introduction to the latest translation to date of Demons, Pevear,
the co-translator, claims to have favoured “natural English equivalents for the richly unnatural language of the original” thereby creating a sense of “thisness.”14 Yet by choice
or by instinct Koteliansky and Woolf steer clear of domesticating strategies, leaving the
original foreignness to trouble the textual surfaces in English.
Voicing and double voicing, those key features of Dostoevsky’s texts which dominated late-twentieth-century criticism of his oeuvre and were first traced in detail in early
Soviet scholarship, indeed feature largely in Koteliansky and Woolf ’s translation, while
they are very noticeably absent from all pre-1960s English and French translations (suggesting more polyphonic translations followed the discovery of Bakhtin, Voloshinov and
Grossman’s stylistic approaches first becoming available in the West). Not only is Stavrogin given a faltering voice (what Deleuze would call a stuttering voice) with telling stylistic
tremors, but so too does the voice of Tikhon, the saintly bishop and confessor, shift from
the poised to the stumbling as he attempts to define “unseemly” or “inelegant” crime.
His confusion reveals his own profound moral ambivalence, a key feature in Dostoevsky’s
aesthetic and moral vision. The conversation between the two men does not just pit evil
against saintliness, but dramatises the tensions within both men, making the sinner saintly, while the saint himself is tainted with sin:
‘Crimes, whatever they be, the more blood, the more horror in them, the more
imposing they are, so to say, more picturesque. But there are crimes shameful,
disgraceful, past all horror, they are, so to say, almost inelegant…’
Tikhon did not finish. (Woolf & Koteliansky 49)
В преступлениях, каковы бы они ни были, чем более крови, чем более
ужаса, тем они внушительнее, так сказать, картиннее; но есть преступления стыдные, позорные, мимо всякого ужаса, так сказать, даже
слишком уж не изящные…
Тихон не договорил. (796)
Tikhon’s struggle to find the appropriate words, his inelegant speech and his syncopated,
misleading syntax are therefore essential metaphoric, structural signifiers. Later translations favour rhetorical control and fluidity which cancel out the bishop’s own struggle
with the attraction of evil:
En general, quel que soit le crime, plus il y a de sang, plus il y a d’horreur, plus
grand est l’effet, plus il est pittoresque, pourrait-on dire. Mais il y a des crimes
honteux, ignomineux, à quoi l’horreur meme ne peut s’attacher, qui sont par trop
inélégants…(De Schloezer 54)
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
236
Crimes, no matter what they are, are the more imposing, the more picturesque, so
to speak, the more blood, the more horror there is; but there are truly shameful,
disgraceful crimes which are not redeemed by horror…’
Tihon did not finish his sentence. (Yarmolinsky 726)
Crimes, whatever their nature, are more impressive, more, as it were, picturesque,
the more blood and the more horror. But there are crimes that are shameful and
disgraceful quite apart from the horrors, crimes that are, as it were, a little too
inelegant…’
Tikhon stopped short. (Magarshack 702)
The way duality functions in Dostoevsky has been amply charted out in modern scholarship; I am not pointing to Dostoevsky’s poetics here, but to the way later critical insights
are already being intuitively inscribed into one early translation.
Similarly, the now classic traits of polyphonic narration, intertwining the voices of
author, chronicler and character (in Bakhtin’s terms) surface in the Woolf & Koteliansky
translation, where later, more fluent, renderings enforce narrative authority at the expense
of other voices that shift and perplex:
And now it suddenly seemed to him something absolutely different: that Tikhon already know why he had come, that he was already warned (although nobody in the whole world could know the reason), and that if he did not speak
first, it was because he was sparing his feelings, was afraid of his humiliation.
(Woolf & Koteliansky 18)
Here it is the confused agency of the verb “to seem” (“it suddenly seemed to him”, exactly
as in Russian ‘Ему с чево-то показалось’), making Stavrogin not the thinker or origin
of the impression but the passive recipient of intuitions coming to him irrespective of
his own volition, that is essential. All later translations grant Stavrogin far more control
(grammatical and existential) over his own mental landscape:
And now suddenly another notion occurred to him. (Yarmolinsky 694)
Then all of a sudden something quite different occurred to him. (Magarshack 674)
He suddenly felt that Tikhon already knew. (Katz 452)
He imagined somehow that Tikhon already knew. (Pevear & Volokhonsky 683)
Similarly, the intricate interweaving of two identities within the focalised passage, creating
doubts over who is thinking and who being thought about, remains startlingly ambivalent
in the Woolf & Koteliansky translation (“he” and “his” referring alternately to one or the
other man even within the same clause). Later translators tend to resolve such ambiguity
by resorting to the pluperfect tense and constructed subordinate or coordinated clauses or
by avoiding the repeated pronoun:
namely that Tihon already knew why he had come, that he had already been forewarned (although no one in the world could have known the reason) and that if
Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
237
he had not spoken first, it was in order to spare him, it was for fear of humiliating
him. (Yarmolinsky 694)
he felt that Tikhon already knew why he had come, that he had already been
forewarned about it (though no one in the whole world could have known the
reason) and if he did not speak first, it was because he was sorry for him and fearful
of his humiliation. (Magarshack 674)
He suddenly felt that Tikhon already knew why he had come, that he’d been
forewarned (even though no one in the whole world could have known the reason), and that if Tikhon hadn’t spoken first, it was merely to spare him and to avoid
humiliating him. (Katz 452)
Such moments recall the unthought thinking that Derrida would later explore in Parages,
“qui désarticule toute logique de contradiction,” apprehending desire before it is named
in language (152).
Similar examples of dialogic translating, maintaining the free indirect discourse of the
protagonist, rather than assimilating indirect utterance into the narrator’s more authoritative voice, can be seen for example in the passage when Stavrogin takes a last look at the
flat after Matryosha’s suicide:
Suddenly I took out my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since she went out
of the room. The conjecture was assuming the shape of a probability. But I determined to wait precisely fifteen minutes more. It also crossed my mind that
perhaps she had come back, and that perhaps I had not heard her. But that was
impossible: there was a dead silence, and I could hear the hum of every small fly.
Suddenly my heart began bounding [?] again. I looked at my watch; it was three
minutes short of the quarter. I sat them out, though my heart beat so as to hurt
me. Then I got up, put on my hat, buttoned my overcoat, and looked round the
room—had I left any trace of my visit? (Woolf & Koteliansky 38)
Again, the rather breathless tone of the narration, the abrupt, disarticulated clauses and
the apparent lack of a narrator’s stylistic intermediacy (as in clauses containing “perhaps”,
the lexical banality of the expressions, and the syntactic immediacy as if a voice were
recording thoughts directly, including a direct question at the end) reinforces the idea
that the voice is Stavrogin’s own. The difference becomes striking when the passage is
compared to the other translations:
Suddenly I whipped out my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since she went
out of the room. My guess was assuming the aspect of reality. But I decided to wait
for exactly another quarter of an hour. It had also crossed my mind that she might
have returned and that I might have failed to hear her. But that was impossible:
there was dead silence and I could hear the whirr of every midge. Suddenly my
heart started pounding again. I took out my watch; there were three minutes to
go; I sat them out, though my heart was pounding painfully. Then I got up, put
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
238
on my hat, buttoned my overcoat and looked round the room to make sure that I
had left no trace of my presence there. (Magarshack 692)
Suddenly I grabbed my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since she’d gone out.
Suddenly I grabbed my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since she’d gone out.
My hypothesis reached the stage of probability (Katz 469)
Then I got up, covered myself with my hat, buttoned my coat and glanced round
the room to make sure everything was in place and there were no signs that I had
come. (Pevear & Volokhonsky 700)
There remains the intriguing question of the verb “bounding” in the Woolf & Koteliansky
translation: why “bound” rather than “pound”? Of course, the manuscripts, incomplete as
they are, may reveal that this was a type-setter’s oversight, that equally escaped the vigilant
eye of the proof reader. It could be an example of Koteliansky’s imperfect mastery of English making him muddle the two plosive phonemes [b] and [p]. But it might also reveal
a fine example of what Lawrence Venuti calls “foreignising” translation, maintaining the
harsh beat of the Russian verb (биться), while intensifying the semantics of the verb in
English: a bounding heart would after all suggest thrill and anticipation, rather than the
panic and terror conventionally associated with “pounding.”
What I am underlining is a sharp tension between the rather facile suggestion in “A
Russian Point of View” that ultimately the Russians can’t be translated, and the glaringly
contradictory proof in “Stavrogin’s Confession” that not only the vulgar facts and features
of the text, but also its heft and hold can be exquisitely rendered in English. The mistake,
of course, is to engage dialectically in the contradiction; the contradictory pulse comes
not from the act of translation but from within the text itself that both desires and resists
translation, the very site, in Derrida’s terms where the intraduisible and the traductible (the
untranslatable and the traducible) come into contact. Koteliansky and Woolf ’s translation
stops short of an elegant, canonical translation, enabling the Russian text to resist full assimilation, or to linger on as an intertextual music. The notion that a text has a rhythm
of its own, which can yet be woven into a translation as the site where two languages,
cultures and mindsets rub, has surfaced in translation studies only in the past decade.15
It posits the orality and rhythm of the text in translation as the site of its ethical performance, perceiving difference and respecting it.
One final example offers a superb illustration of this rhythmic, musical rendering, in
keeping with the pulse and impulse of the Russian text:
Wild and confused were these revelations, as if indeed they came from a madman. And yet Nikolai Vsevolodovich spoke with such strange frankness, never seen in him before, with such simplicity, quite unnatural to him, that it
seemed as if suddenly and unexpectedly his former self had completely disappeared. (Woolf & Koteliansky 21)
Дики и сбивчивы были эти открытия и действительно как бы шли
от помешанного. Но при этом Николай Всеволодович говорил с такой
Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
239
странною откровенностью, не виданною в нем никогда, с таким простодушием, совершенно ему несвойственным, что, казалось, в нем
вдруг и нечаянно исчез прежний человек совершенно. (768)
Bizarres et confuses étaient ces révélations qui paraissaient vraiment être le fait
d’un dément. Mais Nikolaï Vsièvolodovitch parlait en meme temps avec une franchise si extraordinaire, avec une sincérité si étrangère à son caractère qu’il semblait que l’homme ancien avait complètement et subitement disparu en lui. (De
Schloezer 653-4)
These disclosures were wild and incoherent, and really seemed to come from a madman. And yet Nikolai Vsyevolodovitch spoke with such strange, unaccustomed
frankness, with a candour so entirely foreign to him that is seemed as though his
former self had suddenly and unexpectedly disappeared. (Yarmolinsky 696)
These revelations were wild and confused and really seemed to come from a madman. But at the same time Stavrogin spoke with such strange frankness, never
seen in him before, with such simple heartedness, which was so out of character
as far as he was concerned, that one could not help feeling that his former self had
suddenly and quite unaccountably disappeared. (Magarshack 676)
These revelations of his were wild and incoherent and indeed seemed to come
from an insane person. All the same, Nikolai Vsevolodovich spoke with so strange
a candour, such as had never been observed in him before, and with such completely
uncharacteristic sincerity that it seemed as if his former self had suddenly and
unexpectedly vanished once and for all. (Katz 455)
The later translations are equally precise in semantic terms, but not until the most recent
translation does the “Russian music” begin to resurface again:
These revelations were wild and incoherent, and indeed came as if from a crazy
man. But, for all that, Nikolai Vsevolodovich spoke with such strange sincerity,
never before seen in him, with such simple-heartedness, completely unlike
him, that it seemed the former man, suddenly and inadvertently, had vanished
in him completely. (Pevear & Volokhonsky 680)
And from this musical, ethical perspective, the question of who actually translated suddenly becomes immaterial. Koteliansky and Woolf ’s (for the times) unconventional, dialogic rendering of the text’s own multiple layers of utterance, prior to any academic charting of dialogism, could only have come about at the meeting point where two specialist
non-specialists—the acutely intense Russian émigré, and the acutely sensitive English author—gained access within a cross-lingual act to each other’s other side of language. The
translation is not resolved in one direction or the other, but takes place between boundaries, at the very site where contradiction, in the non-agonistic, contrapuntal sense, begins,
where two languages gently collide, and the differences between them resist resolution.
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
We are left with discourse that is agitated internally, undecided, two-faced, double voiced,
double accented.
They thus achieve what I have called an avant-garde translation, an oxymoron if
ever there was one. In conventional terms, translation is bound to be derivative, ancillary. The avant-garde translation marks an aporia in the era’s critical discourse or aesthetic
codes, anticipating, however instinctively or unconsciously, narrative, stylistic or formal
challenges to doctrine or doxa that are yet to be charted. In the present case, their translation anticipates not only our heightened stylistic and critical understanding of textual
polyphony, but it also largely predates the critical appreciation of stylistic barrenness that
Barthes would call language’s “degré zero”, inspired by Camus’s own textual explorations
of Dostoevsky that work their way into l’Etranger.
Little wonder that Woolf should fall short of a precise definition of the Russian point
of view. Like Benjamin, she takes language seriously enough to know that sometimes
meaning can only be approached tangentially, fleetingly. And the tangent is, after all, the
closest that a geometrical figure can get to the oxymoron, as the circle and the line, the
finite and the infinite, gently collide, and—but—yet must then separate.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
First published in 1916, Nevill Forbes’ Russian Grammar remained a reference in Russian language studies
throughout the twentieth century.
The echoes reveal common but not necessarily compatible aesthetic and critical appreciations of Russian
literature in the early twentieth century, particularly in terms of Chekhov’s art of lingering incompletion,
Dostoevsky’s whirlpool passions and Tolstoy’s infallible eye. See for example: Murry’s Dostoyevsky, 31-32;
Baring 56-7 and 101; Lubbock 269; Kropotkin 185-186; Graham 391; De Vogüé 230-4; Clutton-Brock
289; Brodsky 95.
The point is developed by Natalya Reinhold in “A Railway Accident” (237-48). The paradigm of clothes
and nakedness and their shifting connotations is used by Baring to explore Dostoevsky’s characters (Baring
133), while Dostoevsky uses the story of the swine and the naked madman (from the Gospel of Luke) as
the epigraph to The Possessed. In Murry’s words, “At first, Stavrogin was to have been the man clothed and
in his right mind, while the devils, entering into Verhovensky, Kirillov and Shatov, drive them down the
steep into the sea.” (“Dostoevsky Possessed” 702)
See Woolf ’s 1917 review “The Russian View”: “And yet, in spite of its formlessness and flatness, she produces an effect of spirituality. It is as if she had tried to light a lamp behind her characters, making them
transparent rather than solid, letting the large and permanent things show through the details of dress and
body” (E2 342).
First published in appendix form in Roberta Rubenstein’s Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View
(175-191).
As recent translators’ preference for the more literal title Devils, or Demons implies, the Russian title Бесы
means those possessing, rather than those possessed. Early English translations were doubtless influenced
by the French title, Les Possédés, which was commonly read in Britain before Mrs Garnett’s translation was
published. Intriguingly, in the manuscripts of their translation of the missing chapters, Woolf and Koteliansky use the title The Possessed, but then strike it out.
For the question of whether Woolf can actually be deemed a translator, rather than a copy-editor, see Rubenstein (8-10), Reinhold (“Russian Voyage Out” 11), and Laura Marcus (Introduction, Translations from
the Russian xiv). For a fuller insight into Koteliansky’s language skills and the regrettable critical tendency
to insist on his eccentric or faltering English, see Claire Davison’s “Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky and
British Modernism.” Translation and Literature 20.3 (Nov. 2011): 334-347.
For Woolf ’s exploration of translation as a leading metaphor in her fiction, see Dalgarno.
As Reinhold observes, “Obviously, our knowledge of ‘the Russian theme’ in Virginia Woolf ’s work shall
not be complete without a comparative study of the Russian source texts and her co-translations.” (“A
Railway Accident” 243).
Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron
241
10. My approach is therefore one of comparative translation, and does not extend to the drafts and revisions
made by the translators during the translation process. A certain number of the Woolf & Koteliansky
manuscripts have been preserved, as Furman revealed in 2006, and are available in the Maj Ewing collection at UCLA. These provide a slightly different and entirely fascinating perspective, as proved by Rebecca
Beasley’s paper “Woolf ’s Translations” at the Glasgow conference.
11. All italics in the quoted texts are mine. Italics will systematically point to target-oriented, hypertextual
translation strategies. I will use bold text to foreground stylistic details in the source text and related sourceoriented features in the translations.
12. I am slightly misquoting Woolf ’s notion at the end of “A Perfect Language”: “With the best will in the
world the translators are bound to stamp their individuality or that of their age upon the text. Our minds
are so full of echoes that a single word such as ‘aweary’ will flood a whole page for an English reader with
the wrong associations”. (E2 118) The idea, however, is being expressed to back up her conviction that
“some knowledge of the language is a possession not to be done without”, which she certainly attempted
to apply to Russian as well. The effect of a rush of associations, though no longer seen in terms of “wrong”
or “right”, is now an essential criterion in assessing what Barbara Folkart calls the “valency” of translation.
13. The quote is from a contemporary review of Nadine Jarintsov’s Russian Poets and Poems, which proposes
translations that go against such criteria: “Mme Jarintsov thinks it of capital importance to reproduce these
peculiarities of her originals.” The reviewer is unconvinced (Duff 367).
14. In all fairness, it must be underlined that this claim appears in stark contradiction with Pevear’s argument
one paragraph earlier: “The terms ‘smooth’ and ‘natural’ are used almost automatically in praise of what are
thought to be good translations. Their appropriateness is not self-evident. Dostoevsky’s prose is all about
movement and life, it has great forward momentum, but there is nothing smooth about it. A smooth translation of Dostoevsky would be what Paul Valery called a ‘résumé’ that annuls resonance and form.” (xxxi)
In fact, this most recent translation is certainly the starkest and most uncannily evocative of the Russian
textual movement, evincing a translation strategy which most closely recalls that of Woolf & Koteliansky.
15. Notion largely explored by the French philosopher and critic Henri Meschonnic, whose works are unfortunately little known in the English-speaking world on account of their being rarely available in translation.
Works Cited
Baring, Maurice. Landmarks in Russian Literature. 1910. London: Methuen, 1960.
Brodsky, Nikolai. “The Unfulfilled Idea”. Trans. V. Woolf and S.S.Koteliansky. Translations from the Russian,
1922-23. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. Southport: Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, 2006. 95-107.
Clutton-Brock, Arthur. “Leo Tolstoy.” TLS 10 September 1908. 289.
Dalgarno, Emily. “Virginia Woolf: Translation and ‘Iterability’.” Yearbook of English Studies 36.1 (2006): 145156.
De Vogüé, Melchior. Le Roman Russe. Paris: Plon, 1897.
Derrida, Jacques. Parages. 1986. Revised edition. Paris: Galilée, 2003.
Dostoevsky, F.M. Besi (Бесы). 1871. Saint-Petersburg: Azbuka-Classica, 2005.
——. Stavrogin’s Confession and The Plan of The Life of a Great Sinner. Tr. S. S. Koteliansky and V. Woolf. Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1922.
——. “La Confession de Stavroguine.” Trans. Boris de Schloezer. Nouvelle Revue Français 19 (June 1922): 647665; (July 1922): (30-57).
——. The Possessed. Trans. Constance Garnett, with foreword and translation of the suppressed chapter “At
Tihon’s” by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. New York: The Modern Library, 1936.
——. The Possessed. Trans. David Magarshack. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953.
——. Devils. Trans. Michael R. Katz. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1992.
——. Demons. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Duff, James. “The Problems of Translation.” TLS, 2 August 1917. 367.
Folkart, Barbara, A Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2007.
Forbes, Nevill. Russian Grammar. 1916. Third edition, revised and enlarged by J. C. Dumbreck. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1983.
Furman, Yelena. “Translating Dostoievskii, Writing a Novel of Own’s One: The Place of ‘Stavrogin’s Confession’
in the Creation of Mrs Dalloway.” Modern Languages Review I04 (2009): 1081-1097.
Gide, André. Dostoïevski: articles et causeries. 1922. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.
Graham, Stephen. “The Position of Maxim Gorky.” TLS, 17 August 1916. 391.
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
Kropotkin, Peter. Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature. (First edition: Russian Literature, 1905). New York:
Knopf, 1915.
Lubbock, Percy. “Dostoevsky.” The Times 4 July 1912. 269.
Merezhkovsky, Dmitry. Tolstoy as Man and Artist, with an essay on Dostoevsky. London: Constable, 1902.
Meschonnic, Henri. Ethique et politique du traduire. Lagrasse: Verdier, 2008.
Murry, John Middleton. Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study. London: Secker, 1916.
——. “Dostoevsky Possessed.” TLS, 2 November 1922. 702.
Reinhold, Natalya. “Woolf ’s Russian Voyage Out.” Woolf Studies Annual 9 (2003): 9-11.
——. “A Railway Accident: Virginia Woolf translates Tolstoy.” Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace UP, 2005.
237-48.
Rubenstein, Roberta. Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View. New York: Palgrave, 2009.
Woolf, Virginia & S. S. Koteliansky. Translations from the Russian, 1922-23. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. Introduction
by Laura Marcus. Southport: Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, 2006.
Woolf, Virginia. The Years. 1937. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. 1992.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N.Clarke. New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1986-2011.
——. Three Guineas. 1938. London: The Hogarth Press, 1986.
“A DIALOGUE…ABOUT THIS BEAUTY AND TRUTH”:
JORGE LUIS BORGES’S TRANSLATION OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S ORLANDO
by Rebecca DeWald
Tan compleja es la realidad, tan fragmentaria y tan simplificada la historia, que
un observador omnisciente podría redactar un número indefinido, y casi infinito, de biografías de un hombre, que destacan hechos independientes y de las
que tendríamos que leer muchas antes de comprender que el protagonista es el
mismo.
(Borges, Vathek 107)1
“Oh! if only I could write!” she cried (for she had the odd conceit of those who
write that words written are shared). She had no ink; and but little paper. But
she made ink from berries and wine; and finding a few margins and blank spaces
in the manuscript of “The Oak Tree,” managed, by writing a kind of shorthand
to describe the scenery in a long, blank verse poem, and to carry on a dialogue
with herself about this Beauty and Truth concisely enough.
(O 92)
A
rgentinian writer and polyglot Jorge Luis Borges—he spoke several European languages, as well as Old Norse—translated Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928) in 1937,
nine years after its initial publication in the UK. Published on the initiative of
Victoria Ocampo in her publishing house Sur in Buenos Aires, Borges’s translation was very
popular in Spanish-speaking countries,2 to the extent that it was not re-translated until 1993
(Leone 223). However, the text has been interpreted as being contrary to what Woolf might
have had in mind: feminist readings of Borges’s text have often focused on passages where
the Spanish version does not fully cater for a feminist perspective, or even contradicts it.
I am going to recast this debate in order to investigate whether Borges’s translation of
Orlando posed (or still poses) a threat to feminist readings of Woolf’s text. I will describe some
differences between the English and Spanish language system which might trigger problems
in translation, and analyse how Borges’s solutions have been and can be interpreted. Further,
I would like to return to feminist criticism, in the form of feminist Translation Studies, in
order to examine how this enables a reading of the translated Orlando which is based on the
presumed equality (rather than a hierarchy) of the original text and its translation.
Part I: Linguistic Difficulties and the Translator under Attack
There has been a tendency in criticism to interpret every change Borges made in his
translation in terms of a feminist/anti-feminist dichotomy. Clara Malraux, who translated A
Room of One’s Own into French, thinks that she was only able to translate Woolf because she
was herself a woman (Ayuso 242, n2). Although this particular distinction is not the most
common one used to critique Borges’s translation, feminist readings are often grounded on
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
the assumption that Borges uses his masculine stance abusively, to alter the text. Mónica G.
Ayuso, for example, writes that in Borges’s Orlando, “[h]is presence is more clearly felt in
the rendering of gender.…In his handling of gender he adopts a critical masculine presence
which sabotages the text” (249). Leah Leone uses similar terms in her argument that Borges
neutralizes or even sabotages the text, to the extent that the Spanish version, unlike the
English one, cannot be regarded as a fundamental text for feminist and queer studies (224).
One difficulty lies in Spanish grammar. For example, the possessive pronoun in Spanish does not distinguish between gender, that is “his” and “her” are equally rendered by
“su.” Another difference is that the personal pronoun is generally omitted in Spanish sentences. A literal translation of “he has” would be “él tiene”, but is often rendered as simply
“tiene.” “Tiene”, then, can also mean “she has” (from “ella tiene” which becomes “tiene”).
In these instances, the language is capable of allowing gender ambiguity if desired.
Leone is at times frustrated with Borges’s use of this peculiarity of the Spanish language, and argues that the Argentine writer followed an agenda which did not agree with
that of Woolf (in the way she perceives it). Arguments can however be made in favour of
Borges’s use of the facilities provided by the Spanish language, as well as against it. One
example is the following famous passage which both Ayuso and Leone use to underline
their points: “we have no choice left but confess – he was a woman” (O 87). This reads in
Spanish: “Debemos confesarlo: era una mujer” (Borges, Orlando 84).3 Leone argues that
by shortening the first half of the sentence, the surprise effect of the English version is lost
in the translation (230). “He” and “woman” create a friction in the sentence, an apparent
contradiction, which might shock the reader. By omitting “he”, the impact on the reader
disappears.
A counter-argument, however, can be formulated as follows: The passage continues
with a description of how little Orlando’s new sex affects him, as if nothing major had
changed. “We must confess” instead of the more flourished “We have no choice left but
confess” creates an almost scientific neutrality: these are the facts, there is no doubt about
them or any leeway for interpretation. Borges’s translation stresses the interpretation that a
sex change is not particularly remarkable. The biographer’s explanation “Orlando had become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been” (O 87, my emphasis) is followed by the use of the pronoun “their”
(which then needs the clarification that “his” will have to be substituted for “her”, “he” for
“she” from this point onwards) and is rendered as follows: “Orlando se había transformado en una mujer – inútil negarlo. Pero, en todo lo demás, Orlando era el mismo” (Borges,
Orlando 84; my emphasis).4 Just as Woolf, Borges keeps “a woman” (“una mujer”) in the
first sentence, and a masculine designation (“he had been”; “el mismo”) in the second sentence. Ayuso takes issue with the following sentence: “The change in sex, though it altered
their future did nothing whatever to alter their identity” (O 87) and the use of the plural
pronoun “their” which Borges renders as singular “su”: “El cambio de sexo modificaba su
porvenir, no su identidad” (Orlando 84). Borges thus, she says, “nails the masculine much
faster” (248). This interpretation, however, assumes “su” is a masculine pronoun only,
whereas it is both the masculine and the feminine pronoun, as shown above. By using it,
Borges acknowledges the ambiguity of Orlando’s gender, but does not make an issue of it.
The interwoven usage of the ambiguous “su”, initiates a subtle development which allows
for a less static gender determination.
“A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
245
Ayuso claims that “[w]hen Borges translates literally and accurately, his voice is that
of a purveyor of high culture responsible for transmitting, as transparently as he can, the
ideas he received and so greatly admired. In this instance he positioned himself vis-à-vis
Woolf ’s text almost as an absence” (249). Both this remark, and the one previously cited,
are clearly generalizations: even Leone admits many instances in which Borges translates
gender in a gender-neutral fashion. Borges is being criticized not only as a male translator—as a man making use of a woman’s text—but as male translator: as translator who
does more than simply offer an objective rendition of the foreign language text, who
oversteps his responsibilities. In short, whenever Borges translated literally or fluently, he
did a good job. Borges, like every translator, has to face criticism for not producing what
Lawrence Venuti calls a “fluent” translation, which gives the illusion of a source text, not
a translation. The translator’s task is to remain invisible.5
The essential problem of the criticism of Borges’s text is that it is paradoxical. Critics
tend to criticise Borges, the translator of Orlando, for intervening too much in the text.
Simultaneously, he is treated as if he were an author whose texts were factual accounts expressing his personal opinion. This latter claim is particularly ironic, given that Borges, the
great master of illusion, would be quite capable of inventing an alter ego, and would not
necessarily express his personal opinion in a text. The second problem with a biographical
reading of his translation is that Borges did everything possible to obscure the authorship
of the translation of Orlando. He often claimed that it was actually his mother, Leonor
Acevedo de Borges, who had translated Orlando, or had at least contributed to it (Ayuso
245). Consequent speculation, such as by Gargategli Brusa, has gone as far as to attribute
both texts to Jorge Luis’s father, Jorge Guillermo Borges (qtd. in Willson 159).
More arguments suggest that Borges did not hijack Orlando to disseminate an antifeminist message. If he had wanted to publicise such a message, he could have resorted
to a more direct means, such as a critical essay, or a book review of Orlando. The latter,
in particular, would have been easy for Borges to publish, as at the time he earned his living writing film and literature criticism.6 He also maintained good connections with the
(mainly male) literary and publishing circles in Argentina and Spain.
It is true that Borges did not develop a great esteem for Woolf ’s Orlando until later.
What he seems to have liked about the book might not coincide with contemporary
readers’ first impressions: He was particularly taken by its musicality, which he finds both
in the prose and in the composition “of a limited number of themes that return and
combine.” Orlando, he says, combines “Magic, bitterness, and happiness” (Borges, Capsule 174). This suggests that Borges’s interest in Orlando may not have been centred on
its feminist, gender-crossing aspects. However, these two approaches are not necessarily
exclusive. Borges chose to stress different themes in the text, themes that differ from a
purely feminist reading.
Part II: Feminist Translation Studies—
A Dialogue between Male and Female
An alternative feminist analysis of Borges’s Orlando can be pursued in a different
context, that of feminist translation studies. In the introduction to Gender in Translation, Sherry Simon points out the gendered discourse of translation: “The hierarchical
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authority of the original over the reproduction is linked with imagery of masculine and
feminine; the original is considered the strong generative male, the translation the weaker
and derivative female” (Simon 1). In other words, a translation is supposed to be the weak,
humble and docile derivative of the strong and procreative original text. In the same way,
the vocabulary used to describe the good translator (“invisible,” “transparent”) and the
bad translator (the one who alters, changes, intervenes, imposes) reflects this dichotomy.
Ayuso’s accusation of Borges abusing his masculine stance in translating Orlando is a case
in point (see further above). Borges transforms the text although a translator is not supposed to do that if s/he wants to remain invisible and that is what turns him or her into
a “masculine” translator.
The quotation could also be interpreted as Woolf ’s Orlando, as the original, being a
masculine text, Borges’s Orlando, the translation, a feminine one. The subject of the text
itself—Orlando’s ambiguous gender identity—though, makes it clear that there cannot
be a clear dichotomy between the two. Simon thinks it is this dichotomy between male
and female which is connected with a hierarchy between source text and translation and
that needs to be questioned. Feminist translation studies, then, focus on neither one of the
gendered poles, but rather concentrate on the “writing project” (Simon 2), thus avoiding
the divide between masculine and feminine. There cannot be fidelity to either of the poles,
either source text or target text, but only to the process of translation.
As Efraín Kristal remarks, Borges’s goal in translating was to create not a definitive
version, but a “convincing work of literature” (87). This is based on his belief that any
translation (or, indeed, any text) is only ever a rewriting (Arrojo 31). In Kristal’s words:
“In summary, for Borges a translation is not the transfer of a text from one language to another. It is a transformation of a text into another” (32). Borges realizes that a text changes
over time, and that there is no possibility of creating a timeless work. In light of this, it
might be possible to suggest that he was more devoted to the process of translation than
its outcome. This also implies that the text should be regarded as independent of its author, or at least that the focus should be on the text rather than the author’s motives in its
production. Is it then possible to speak of a feminist translation in form which might not
qualify as a feminist translation in content? Following Simon’s approach, such a text can be
achieved if we can regard original and translation as equals. And equality between the two
is what feminist translation theory and Borges’s approach to translation have in common.
This stance—the assumed equality between the two text genres—enables a dialogue
between the two.7 The publishing context of Borges’s Orlando, for example, was completely different from that of its English original in the UK in 1928: literature and politics
in Argentina were still mainly male dominated and the emancipatory movement was not
as advanced in Argentina as it was in the UK. All these circumstances had an influence on
the book’s reception.
If it did not become a foundational text for feminists in South America, Borges’s
Orlando did, however, achieve something else. Orlando was the first of Woolf ’s novels to
be translated into Spanish (only preceded by the “Time Passes” section from To the Lighthouse, Lázaro Lafuente 1) and the first one to appear in Latin America. It therefore created
a first impression of the author for Latin American readers which considerably differed
from the one English readers may have had at this point (Willson 17). One consequence
of this is that Woolf is regarded by many Latin American Studies scholars to have paved
“A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
247
the way for Magical Realism, and the immensely popular Boom literature. Gabriel García
Márquez, maybe the best known writer of the Boom generation, admitted that Woolf ’s
Orlando was a major influence on his work, particularly on his most well-known book,
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Leone 223).
Borges’s Orlando triggered a development which became an entire movement in
Latin America and, in turn, triggered a school of criticism which can now serve again
to reinterpret Woolf ’s text from a different angle.8 It is a mutually enriching dialogue.
Borges’s perception of a dialogue best describes the collaboration involved: “Dialogue
for me is not a form of polemics, of monologue or magisterial dogmatism, but of shared
investigation” (qtd. in Bradford 48). A translation as a dialogue between source text and
target text, between author and translator, is a joint project in which both texts and both
writers participate in order to discover new aspects in both texts.9
Part III: Context and Conclusion
This dialogue, then, would not be possible without the translation. Sergio Waisman
asks provocatively: “Does the translator not, in a way, actually ‘create’ what is ‘original’
about the source text…by deciding which elements of the source merit an attempt at
‘faithful reproduction,’ however such a thing is defined?” (56-57). The translator becomes
visible—and should be visible in order to enable a dialogue, not just between author and
translator, or between texts, but also between text and context. The following passage exemplifies this idea: “So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change
was visible in Orlando, which is to be found if the reader will look at page 101, even in
her face” (O 120, my emphasis). No images are included in the Spanish version; Borges
therefore renders the passage as follows: “A fuerza de usar faldas por tanto tiempo, ya un
cierto cambio era visible en Orlando; un cambio hasta de cara, como lo puede comprobar
el lector en la galería de retratos” (Orlando 112; my emphasis).10 Instead of referring back
to a different part of the text, Borges imagines a new reality, one in which portraits of Orlando exist in a gallery outside the book. This adds to the confusion between fictionality
and reality by incorporating context into the text.
Like the reference to a potentially existing gallery outside the book, the change of
Woolf ’s intradiegetic narrator—one who is placed in the plot—to an extradiegetic narrator in Borges’s text—one outside the fictional environment—contributes to the confusion
between fact and fiction.11 The effect produced is that of a classic narrative: a story told by
someone to someone else. It also conforms to the pattern of Chinese boxes: a text within
a meta-text within a meta-meta-text, and so on. The borders of the text become vague.
This appears to be part of his method to make the narrator appear more like a biographer,
to contrast her/his rational syntax with the account of Orlando’s emotions. It adds to the
illusion of the biography and dissimulates the fictionality of the text, just to point at the
inherently fantastical nature of a subject who lives over 300 years and who changes from
man to woman.
Arguments can be made for Borges’s Orlando being both a gender-disruptive and a
non-gender-disruptive text, and this may well have been the translator’s intention. Borges
created a slippery text which crosses borders: borders of gender (through his use of the ambiguous “su” throughout, as one example); borders between author and translator (Borges
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the translator offers his interpretation, stresses his points of interest); borders between
original and translation (in creating a dialogue between the two); and borders between
text and context (by continuously referring to the outside of the text).
Discussing Borges’s attitude to Babel, the presumed origin of translation through the
creation of multiple languages, Waisman says: “Borges does not consider Babel to represent a loss. Multiplicity and difference are not a disaster for Borges, but a field of potentiality” (Waisman 44). A dispersal into linguistic disunity, just like in translation, occurs
in one of the most beautiful scenes in Orlando: “and Orlando, standing there, cried out
Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine! and he answered her Orlando! and the words went
dashing and circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher,
further and further, faster and faster they circled, till they crashed and fell in a shower of
fragments to the ground; and she went in” (O 171). Orlando and Shelmerdine used to
share their own, particular language. When Shelmerdine leaves, the language disperses
into mere fragments. The Spanish (literal) rendition of “fell in a shower of fragments” is
“se estrellaron hechas trizas” (Borges, Orlando 154)—a mere coincidence which implies
the beauty of the stars (“estrellas”) and the splendour of this new dispersal of meaning
which contains potential rather than loss.
Notes
1.
“Reality is so complex, so fragmentary, while history is simplified to the extent that an omniscient observer
could edit as many as infinite biographies of one man, all recounting independent facts, and we would
need to read a substantial number of them to realize that the protagonist was one and the same” (my
translation).
2.
Both Orlando and the preceding A Room of One’s Own in Borges’s version became standard texts for
Spanish-speaking readers (Ayuso 242).
3.
“debemos”/“we must” (from “nosotros debemos”)
“confesarlo”/ “confess it”
“era”/ “(he or she) was”
“una mujer”/ “a woman”
4. “Orlando has turned into a woman – unnecessary to deny it. But in all other aspects Orlando was the same”
(My translation and emphasis).
5.
“A translated text…is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers and readers when it reads fluently,
when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance
that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text – the
appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the ‘original’” (Venuti 1).
6. Incidentally, this also explains why he was so familiar with Woolf ’s work. Borges contributed regularly to
Sur (Ayuso 241), and made a living from publishing in El Hogar (Ayuso 243).
7.
The dialogue I have in mind is based on Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality which posits that a text
is always linked to other sources. Michael Payne thinks that for Kristeva “no text is just itself, that all are
dialogical even when they do not explicitly allude to any others” (178). “Texts,” in Kristeva’s terms, include
multiple origins, written and oral, text and context.
8. See, for example Channing who argues that Magical Realism “disrupts modern realist narrative expectations, destabilizes normative oppositions, blurs and transgresses boundaries, is an act of subversion, and
most importantly, I believe, creates a space for diversity” (11).
9.
What both texts also have in common, and what is stressed even more by the reception of the Spanish text,
is the question and the impossibility of biographical writing (Leone 233).
10. “After having worn skirts for such a long time, a certain change was visible in Orlando; a change in her/his
face, as the reader can verify in the portrait gallery” (My translation).
11. Patricia Willson argues, supported by Leone, that the use of an extradiegetic narrator serves to undo the
effect of a “psychological novel” which Borges disliked (Leone 227).
“A Dialogue…about this Beauty and Truth”
249
Works Cited
Arrojo, Rosemary. “Translation, Transference, and the Attraction to Otherness: Borges, Menard, Whitman.”
Diacritics 34.3/4 (2004): 31-53.
Ayuso, Mónica G. “The Unlike[ly] Other: Borges and Woolf.” Woolf Studies Annual 10 (2004): 241-51.
Bradford, Matías Serra. “Red Herrings and Other Distractions: Borges in Conversation.” PN Review 194.36.6
(2010): 47-51.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Sobre el ‘Vathek’ de William Beckford.” Obras Completas II. Ed. Carlos V. Frías. Buenos
Aires: Emecé, 1974. 107-10.
——. “Capsule Biographies: Virginia Woolf.” Trans. Esther Allen. Selected Non-Fictions. Ed. Eliot Weinberger.
New York: Penguin Books, 1999. 173-174.
Channing, Jill. “Magical Realism and Gender Variability in Orlando.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 67 (2005): 11-13.
Kristal, Efraín. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002.
Lázaro Lafuente, Luis Alberto. “The First Translation of Virginia Woolf ’s ‘Time Passes’ Facts, Mysteries and
Conjectures.” The Grove 10 (2003): 71-83. Web. 10 Aug 2011. <http://dspace.uah.es/dspace/bitstream/
handle/10017/6895/First%20Spanish.pdf?sequence=1>
Leone, Leah. “La novela cautiva: Borges y la traducción de Orlando.” Variaciones Borges 25 (2008): 223-236.
Payne, Michael. Reading Theory: An Introduction to Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993.
Salomone, Alicia. “Virginia Woolf en los Testimonios de Victoria Ocampo: Tensiones entre Feminismo y Colonialismo.” Revista Chilena de Literatura 69 (2006): 69-87.
Simon, Sherry. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York:
Routledge, 1996.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
Waisman, Sergio Gabriel. Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP,
2005.
Willson, Patricia. La Constelación del Sur: Traductores y Traducciones en la Literatura Argentina del Siglo XX. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores Argentina, 2004.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. 1928. London: Vintage Books, 2004.
——. Orlando. Traducción de Jorge Luis Borges. Trans. Jorge Luis Borges. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana,
1968.
“AS I SPIN ALONG THE ROADS I REMODEL MY LIFE”:
TRAVEL FILMS “PROJECTED INTO THE SHAPE OF ORLANDO”
by Leslie Kathleen Hankins
I want more than ever to travel with you; it seems to me now the height of my
desire, and I get into despair wondering how it can ever be realized. Can it, do
you think? (Vita to Virginia, January 29 1927, Letters of Vita 165)
The cinema’s ability to bring to us in our plush-covered seats a second-hand experience of travel is one of its saving, if not artistic, graces (Anon, Vogue, November
1924, 100)
V
irginia Woolf enjoyed not only travel writing, but also travel film; her fiction
bears traces of her pilgrimages to picture palaces for travel adventures. One of
Woolf ’s first diary comments about film—from January 15, 1915—describes a
barge floating through Baghdad (D1, 18-19). Woolf ’s fascination with travel was not
hers alone. As travel took off in post-World War I Britain, it filled the glossy Nation
and Athenaeum Travel Supplement (Summer 1925),1 Hogarth Press travel books by Vita
Sackville-West, and travel advertisements and articles in Vogue. The armchair traveler who
sits comfortably in a cushy armchair by the fire or by the window reading of traveler’s
exploits—or perhaps planning her own—is a familiar image in Woolf ’s work. Yet, because
new windows for travel fantasies opened up in the 1920s, the comfortable chair by the
library window was replaced, or at least supplemented, by yet another comfortable chair
before a very modern type of window: the plush seat in the modern picture palace. Travel
shorts, along with other “actualities” filled British film programmes in the early decades
of the twentieth century; Woolf writes of her pleasure in such films as “real” films (as opposed to adaptations or film dramas) in the holograph drafts of her 1926 article on cinema.2 Cinéastes delighted in travel films; modernist poet, H. D., in her poems “Projector”
and “Projector II: Chang” in Close Up in 1927 celebrates the way cinema can provide the
travel experience to those who cannot travel:
vision returns
and with new vision
fresh
hope
to the impotent;
tired feet that never knew a hill-slope
tread
fabulous mountain sides;
[…]
waves sparkle and delight
the weary eyes
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251
that never saw the sun fall in the sea
nor the bright Pleaiads rise. (H. D. “Projector” 50-1)
Picture palaces, trade shows and the London Film Society screened such travel films as
Captain Angus Buchanan’s Crossing the Great Sahara (1924), Adrian Brunel’s travelogue
burlesque, Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924), Merian Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, and
Marguerite Harrison’s epic 1925 film, Grass, and portions of Claude Friese-Greene’s experimental colour travel film, The Open Road (1924-5), to name just a few.3
In Early November 1924, an article “Travel Films” in Vogue appeared alongside a
half page advertisement for Bean Cars; though the language and ideas mesh well with Iris
Barry’s other work, this piece is unsigned. “Travel Films” refers to Nanook, the Wonderful
London series, Cannibals of the Southern Seas, Crossing the Sahara, Trailing African Wild
Animals, The Lost Tribe, Climbing Mount Everest, and Mountains of the Moon—as well
as Wembley, the film about the British Empire exhibit. Anticipating the opportunity to
screen Climbing Mount Everest, forthcoming at the Scala, the author claims that such
travel films provide an experience that is real: “Our sedentary journey will be remote from
reality, but even so, for all those of a grave and curious nature (the nature, that is, that
makes great lovers of travel-pieces) this unique film should provide not only sensations
but a real experience” (Early November Vogue 1924, 100). The writer puts it succinctly:
“The cinema’s ability to bring to us in our plush-covered seats a second-hand experience
of travel is one of its saving, if not artistic, graces” (100). In a section heralding “THE
PLEASURES OF FILM TRAVEL” the Vogue author further explains that a spectator has
the time, or the vantage point, to absorb these film travels more fully than it is possible to
absorb experiences of actual travel:
The cinema somehow abstracts views of lakes and mountains, rivers and villages;
it gives one bodily ease, and so the eye is free to absorb to its utmost, as it cannot before those lakes and mountains themselves. Can Wembley come properly
into question? In any case, how much more of the Exhibition one saw on that
convenient film than after even several visits there in person! It is the same with
all one’s travels—they come up fresh and enriched when the motion picture
spreads them before one again. And then, returning to our ideal travel film, how
infinitely pleasanter, save for the very intrepid, to go Crossing the Sahara in the
cinema than in the flesh (100).
In “The Cinema” in 1926 Woolf concurs, as she analyses the curious effect of watching
films of actuality:
the brain sees at once that they have taken on a quality which does not belong to
the simple photograph of real life […] From this point of vantage, as we watch
the antics of our kind, we have time to feel pity and amusement, to generalize,
to endow one man with the attributes of the race. Watching the boat sail and the
wave break, we have time to open our minds wide to beauty and register on top
of it the queer sensation—this beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish
whether we behold it or not (E4 592).
Travel films transported cinema spectators on epic adventures akin to Orlando’s
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
252
adventures in Constantinople or among the gypsies. Crossing the Great Sahara of Angus
Buchanan’s epic journey from 1922-3 (with cinematography by T. A. Glover) played in
London for three months at the beginning of 1924. That film and the travel film genre it
represents inspired the first of the burlesques of filmmaker Adrian Brunel, who (with his
assistant Lionel Rich) made Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924), a romping mockumentary
playing with stock footage, droll intertitles, editing mismatches and witty surprises. In the
Late September 1924 issue of Vogue, a short article by Iris Barry, “The Autumn Cinema,”
encourages the young satiric British producer to produce more of his witty films, like
his “brilliant skit on travel films, Crossing the Great Sagrada, [which] “made all Wardour
Street weak with astonished merriment when it was shown privately” (78). Brunel’s burlesque travel films provide rich links to Woolf ’s mock-biography/mock-travelogue novel,
Orlando. His burlesque deflates the high style or epic grandeur of the title cards of the
conventional silent documentaries, and plays tricks on the viewer that anticipate Orlando’s
mock biographer and trickster passages.
Along with the black and white travel shorts and burlesques in picture palaces, Woolf
also had access to at least one acclaimed experiment in color travel film on March 25,
1924, at the Holburn Empire; she reviews this in a paragraph in N&A on April 5, 1924:
I was given the opportunity to see a demonstration of a new colour film process by Mr Friese-Greene. The inventor’s results probably compare favourably
with other colour films, but they are very uneven in merit. The quiet-coloured
scenes of English country are much the most successful; anything like a bright
colour tends immediately to produce an oleographic effect. That is, of course,
not peculiar to Mr Friese-Greene’s process. It almost looks as if nature’s brighter
colours which harmonise pleasingly when seen in three dimensions acquire an
unpleasantly garish quality when represented in two (E3 403-4).
The audience at the University of Glasgow Contradictory Woolf conference screened some
of Friese-Greene’s experiments, selected segments of The Open Road described in the British Film Institute booklet accompanying the dvd:
The journey, from Land’s End to John O’Groats and back to London, was made
in a Vauxhall D type. The travelogue format provided the ideal way to profile
the colour process because the natural world was more of a challenge than the
contrived studio set. Iconic landmarks would be instantly recognizable to the
audience…. The car sets out from Land’s End and the first startling image is that
of the artist Lamorna Birch at work in Lamorna Cove. St. Michael’s Mount and
St Ives follow before arriving at Plymouth. The journey continues through South
Devon depicting picture postcard villages and seaside resorts: Exmoor with a hunt
in progress, Wells Cathedral, and the beach at Weston-super-Mare. In Cardiff we
see the city centre from the top of a tram, a student rag and the Docks (2-3).
Such a cinematic motor tour fits the 1920s rage for the motorcar; motor travel was posh,
adventurous and omnipresent, featured in popular publications, in advertisements, and on
the front and back covers of Vogue. A modernist woman driver and an ultra-modern car
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Poster for The Open Road film by Friese-Greene, courtesy of the
British Film Institute, Stills, Posters and Designs Department.
grace Lepape’s January 1925 Vogue cover, for example. Friese-Greene’s road trips with color
film were well received in trade shows; The Open Road, filmed in 1924-5 (the segments
Woolf saw were prototypes) was intended to be shown in serial format as shorts in picture
palaces;4 “Although it was made for theatre exhibition, the first nine episodes of The Open
Road were first presented at trade shows in November 1925 and billed as ‘A Wonderful
Series of Short Productions taken during a motor tour, by the new all British Friese-Greene
Natural Colour Process’” (8). Recently, the British Film Institute, with the support of the
Eric Anker-Petersen Trust, restored the film and released it as a region 2 DVD.5
“Projected into the shape of Orlando”
My God, Virginia, if ever I was thrilled and terrified it is at the prospect of being
projected into the shape of Orlando. (Vita to Virginia October 11, 1927: Letters
of Vita 238)
In addition to the pioneering color film segments, which I argue stayed in her mind,
Woolf saw other travel films in the 1920s; a letter from Vita Sackville-West from February
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
19, 1927 reminds her of the time they screened the 1925 film Grass together in the summer of 1926: “For a whole fortnight I shan’t be able to write to you or to anybody, while
we are camping. You remember when I dragged you to see the film called ‘Grass’?” (Letters
of Vita 173).6 Vita suggests in her February letter to Virginia that she will be replicating
the film, Grass, in her travels and in her introduction to Twelve Days recounting that adventure, Vita
pens this cinematic image: “I look back as through
a telescope, and see, in the little bright circle of
the glass, moving flocks and ruined cities” (Twelve
Days 10). Woolf had many reasons to associate
Vita with the travel film Grass, and with cinema in
general, so it is not surprising that when Virginia
penned her mock-biography of Vita, it should contain cinematic references. And, such references do
help explain some odd moments in the text. I have
often found the scenery shifts in Orlando—when
she witnesses England from Persia and Persia from
England—a bit baffling, but I supposed that if one
were going to accept change in genders and sexes
and across centuries, one ought not quibble about
a few quirky projections of scenery. However, such
vignettes do reward closer study. Has Nature, as
Still by Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack from the narrator slyly suggests, “played her a trick or
the film, GRASS. Courtesy of Milestone
worked a miracle”? Or are they perhaps trick films?
Film and Video.
I suggest that within Orlando Woolf produces and
projects her own travel films, while referencing such travel films such as Grass and The
Open Road—and perhaps winking in the direction of Brunel.
In the most striking example, Orlando appears to screen travel films of England while
she is in Turkey:
So she was thinking, one fine morning on the slopes of Mount Athos, when minding her goats. And then Nature, in whom she trusted, either played her a trick
or worked a miracle—again, opinions differ too much for it to be possible to say
which. Orlando was gazing rather disconsolately at the steep hill-side in front of
her. It was now midsummer, and if we must compare the landscape to anything it
would have been to a dry bone; to a sheep’s skeleton; to a gigantic skull picked white
by a thousand vultures. The heat was intense and the little fig-tree under which Orlando lay only served to print patterns of fig-leaves upon her light burnous.
Suddenly, a shadow, though there was nothing to cast a shadow,7 appeared
on the bald mountain-side opposite. It deepened quickly and soon a green hollow showed where there had been barren rock before. As she looked, the hollow
deepened and widened, and a great park-like space opened in the flank of the hill.
Within, she could see an undulating and grassy lawn; she could see oak trees dotted
here and there; she could see the thrushes hopping among the branches. She could
see the deer stepping delicately from shade to shade, and could even hear the hum
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of insects and the gentle sighs and shivers of a summer’s day in England. After she
had gazed entranced for some time, snow began falling; soon the whole landscape
was covered and marked with violet shades instead of yellow sunlight. Now she saw
heavy carts coming along the roads, laden with tree trunks, which they were taking,
she knew, to be sawn for firewood; and then there appeared the roofs and belfries
and towers and courtyards of her own home. The snow was falling steadily, and she
could now hear the slither and flop which it made as it slid down the roof and fell
to the ground. The smoke went up from a thousand chimneys. All was so clear and
minute that she could see a daw pecking for worms in the snow. Then, gradually,
the violet shadows deepened and closed over the carts and the lawns and the great
house itself. All was swallowed up. Now there was nothing left of the grassy hollow, and instead of the green lawns was only the blazing hill-side which a thousand
vultures seemed to have picked bare. At this, she burst into a passion of tears, and
striding back to the gipsies’ camp, told them that she must sail for England the very
next day (O 110-2).
These imaginary film clips call to mind
the prototypes of The Open Road projected
onto a bare mountainside of the Bakhtiari
Mountains from the film Grass. In Orlando, I argue, these cinematic passages pay
homage to the films Grass and The Open
Road. But why?
Considering Woolf’s turf battles with
cinema, and her contradictory, feisty attitude towards that medium, would she
be likely to choose to simply replicate film
within her prose? That, I doubt. Rather,
within Orlando, Woolf’s fictional “films”
craft a new medium of her own, adding in
sound and color, 3-D immersion and spatial
and temporal fantasies—as seasons change,
and films appear and disappear projected in
outdoor performance spaces. She does not
simply borrow from film; she re-directs it;
outperforming film, her “momentary as“Suddenly, a shadow, though there was nothing to
sembly of colour, sound, movement sug- cast a shadow, appeared on the bald mountain-side
gests that here is a scene waiting a new art to opposite. It deepened quickly and soon a green holbe transfixed” (“The Cinema” N&A 595). low showed where there had been barren rock before. As she looked, the hollow deepened and widSo far, so good. But, so what? Are these ened, and a great park-like space opened in the flank
cinema-surpassing passages merely evidence of the hill.”
of Woolf upstaging cinema with her own
spectaculars? Or, do they have a more subtle function in the text? The novel, dedicated to
Vita, is, as I have argued before, full of messages and lesson plans for her:8 Woolf ’s “film
clips” may prove no exception. One can read Woolf’s magic words and screens as cinematic
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equivalents of Vita’s love letter within a letter, opening to a secret sharing. As Virginia and
Vita used their love letters and Passenger to Teheran as coded shared texts, Virginia uses films
to unite them. Readers may delve into Woolf’s strategic move if we examine how her “travel
films” function in the narrative, on the surface, and tunneling beneath. Virginia toys in Orlando with gratifying Vita’s travel lust through magic movies and hints of motorcar trips, witnessing, for example, her admiration of Vita’s prowess as a driver. The text invites more travel
trips, motor or movie, using narrative travel film passages; references to The Open Road may
signal an invitation to a road trip with Vita, for example. The cinematic projections through
time and space in Orlando also alleviate some of the anxieties and miseries of travel separation. The travel talk that filled their love letters testifies to the woe caused by Vita’s travels.
Vita’s letters are filled with invitations to Virginia, expressing a desire to travel abroad with
her; such invitations may have been Vita’s method of coping with the longing of separation.
Flattered as she may have been by Vita’s wishes to have her travel to Persia, or to a camp on
the Bakhtiari trek, Virginia rarely encourages such extravagant desires, using instead a different strategy, crafting replies that echo a title card in The Open Road: “Why travel abroad?”:
I’ve just been buying cigarettes in the Tottenham Court road—rivers of silver,
breasted by plumes of gold: omnibus and shops equally beautiful—Why go to
Persia when the T. Ct. Rd. is like that? (March 15, 1927 L3 347)
Damn you Vita, why do you insist upon taking the world by the scruff of its
neck and shaking it? Why these great and gallant ways? being so adventurous
and athletic and Spartan? So we lose a fortnights friendship (L3 347).
Perhaps Virginia responds here to Vita’s earlier invitation (penned while Virginia was writing To the Lighthouse): “Is it all west coast of Scotland? I think I had better take you there, in
the blue motor” (April 17, 1926 Letters of Vita 122). Though the two did finally take a trip
to France together, the real gift of travel—and cure for separation—Virginia gives Vita is
in her fiction, Orlando. Using film clip portals, Orlando gives the gift of travel without the
pangs of separation, with instant gratification instead of long deferred reunions. Through
her projection of travel film clips, Woolf magically speeds up the travel process in a way
that satisfies the desire of separated lovers for instant reunion. She fulfills Vita’s wishes to be
wafted at times to Persia, but creates a way to travel without leaving each another.
Revisiting Woolf’s essay on the cinema provides some clues about Woolf ’s inspiration
for her cinematic travel strategy in Orlando. Phrases stand out: “No fantasy could be too
far-fetched or insubstantial” (E4 595); “The past could be unrolled, distances could be annihilated” (E4 352); “And those terrible dislocations which are inevitable when Tolstoy has
to pass from the story of Anna to the story of Levin could be bridged by some device of
scenery” (E4 352). The essay suggests that cinema has potential, but Woolf, in Orlando,
creates projections even more magical than those she imagines for film futures. She makes
moving pictures: pictures that move one emotionally, or pictures that move one spatially and
temporally. If in Mrs. Dalloway Woolf crafted tunnels behind her characters to bring in the
past as she had need of it, by installments, in Orlando she crafts tunnels between author and
subject—Virginia and Vita—projecting inviting cine-portals. Orlando’s magic screens in the
mountainside invite the spectator into an interactive space that transports them. These portals, “annihilating distances” and forming a “bridge” from some device of scenery, connect
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Vita in Persia and Virginia in England. Not surprising, given the fantasy setting of the novel,
the “screen” opening in the bare mountainside conjures up the opening in the bare rock in
the tale of Aladdin—when Aladdin rubs the magic lamp and says the magic words.
Perhaps because Vita so often tried to lure Virginia to travel, Orlando grants that wish,
but with a twist, projecting fantasy films of instant transport. The rhetorical trick of providing a fantasy in lieu of reality is one Woolf employs in her essays regularly; a striking example
is the conclusion to the essay Woolf penned November 29-30, 1928, “Flying Over London,”
in which, after a lengthy description of a flight over London, the narrator undercuts all that:
As a matter of fact, the flight had not begun; for when Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood
stooped and made the engine roar, he had found a defect of some sort in the machine, and raising his head, he had said very sheepishly, “’Fraid it’s no go today.”
So we had not flown after all” (210 CDB).
But, to be contradictory—as the conference theme invites and demands—readers do fly
in Woolf ’s essay “Flying Over London,” just as in Orlando readers travel and stay at home
too. Woolf uses travel—actual, imaginary, or cinematic—to inspire far-reaching flights of
fancy for her fiction, love, and life: “As I spin along the roads I remodel my life” (April
24, 1931, L4 321)
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
That armchair traveler is apparent in Vanessa Bell’s cover for the N&A Travel Supplement of 1925 with a
globe, book and view out a window to a cathedral. Let us imagine, since facts are hard to come by, that it
is a library window looking out at St Pauls, from which the armchair traveler is planning a trip. For a black
and white photograph of the cover, see the Virginia Woolf Bulletin Issue No. 35, September 2010, p.19,
and the discussion in Notes and Queries by Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke, 16-18.
I discuss the “actualities” in more depth—and Woolf ’s response to them in her holograph drafts of “The
Movies”—in “An Archive in the City.”
Brunel’s travel burlesque was shown at the London Film Society on Sunday April 10, 1927; the programme
notes, “this is an abbreviated edition of the first of Mr. Brunel’s burlesques. Mr. Brunel played all the parts
and the picture was therefore made at a cost of £90” (Amberg 59). The programme dates the film as 1923
and allots ten minutes for the shortened version. Another of Brunel’s relevant burlesques is his droll short, Cut
it Out (1925) which targets British film censorship; his treatment of the censors is particularly intriguing in
light of Woolf’s scathing send up in print of the Three Ladies, mock muses advocating censorship in Orlando.
Thanks to Stuart N. Clarke, who alerted the Virginia Woolf listserve to the release of the films on dvd by
the BFI. An additional film on the dvd is of note for Woolf studies; Claude Friese-Greene’s Across England
in an Aeroplane, (1919-20) is a “short aerial tour of the West Country” “tinted images show well-known
holiday resorts [and] “the famous Cornish Riviera Express travelling along the coastline” (11).
www.bfi.org.uk. The BFI restored version contains 65 minutes of digitally restored highlights; the informative booklet notes: “The Open Road is Claude Friese-Greene’s pioneering film travelogue, shot between
1924 and 1926. The film is a series of 26 episodes, taking the form of a journey through Britain by car,
from Land’s End to John O’Groats, with a final episode shot in London in August 1926” (8).
The fabulous crew at Milestone Film restored the film, and released it on dvd as Grass: A Nation’s Battle for
Life in 1992 as part of the Milestone Collection. At their website, www.milestonefilms.com, they post a
wealth of material about the film, including press kits with archival treasures, including the “script” of the
title cards of Grass. Merian Cooper wrote a book about the filming of Grass, published in 1925. Milestone
has also restored and re-released Chang, the film named in the subtitle of H. D.’s “Projector II” poem.
It is telling that this passage echoes Woolf ’s shadow references in “The Cinema.”
See Hankins 1997.
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Works Cited
Amberg, George. The Film Society Programmes 1925-1939. New York: Arno Press, 1972.
Close Up: A Magazine Devoted to the Art of Films (1927-33). Ed. Kenneth Macpherson & Bryher, 1927-1933,
Volumes 1-10, Arno Series of Contemporary Art. New York: Arno Press, 1971.
DeSalvo, Louise and Mitchell Leaska, eds. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. New York. William
Morrow Quill Press New York 1985.
H. D. “Projector (a poem).” 1927. Close Up. 1:1. July 1927: 46-51. (reprinted (2007) Gender in Modernism: New
Geographies, Complex Intersections. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Illinois UP, 2007. 848-851.
Hankins, Leslie K. “An Archive in the City: ‘True Pictures’ and Animated News Films of Suffragettes in the
Holographs of Virginia Woolf ’s ‘The Movies’ in the Berg Collection.” Woolf and the City: Selected Papers
of the Nineteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Elizabeth Evans and Sarah Cornish. Clemson:
Clemson U Digital P. 2010: 173-177.
——. “Virginia Woolf ’s ‘The Cinema’ Essay: Sneak Previews of the Holograph Pre-Texts through Post-Publication Revisions.” Woolf Studies Annual 15 (2009), 135-175.
——. “Cinéastes and Modernists: Writing about Film in 1920s London,” Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Illinois UP, 2007. 809-858.
——. “Orlando: ‘A Precipice Marked V’ Between ‘A Miracle of Discretion’ and ‘Lovemaking Unbelievable: Indiscretions Incredible.’” Lesbian Readings of Virginia Woolf. Eds. Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. New
York: New York UP, 1997. 180-202.
Sackville-West, Vita. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A.
Leaska. New York: William Morrow, 1985.
——. Passenger to Teheran. London: Hogarth Press, 1926.
——. Twelve Days. London: Hogarth Press, 1928.
“Travel Films” Early November 1924 Vogue (London): 100.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Cinema.” The Nation and Athenaeum. 3 July 1926. 381 383.
——. “The Cinema.” The Arts (New York). June 1926. 314-16. Rpt. McNeillie, ed. E4. 348-54.
——. “The Cinema/The Movies and Reality.” Rpt McNeillie, ed. E4. 591-95.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. A. McNeillie (vols. 1-4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5-6), London:
Hogarth Press, 1986-2011.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press,
1975-1980.
——. Orlando: A Biography. 1928. Ed. Maria DiBattista. San Diego, Harcourt 2006.
Filmography
Across England in an Aeroplane (UK, 1919-20, silent). Dir. Claude Friese-Greene. Bonus on the DVD The Open
Road. BFI
Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness. Dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. (1927), 1992 Milestone
Film & Video.
Crossing the Great Sagrada. Dir. Adrian Brunel. (1925) The British Avant-Garde in the Twenties: Close Up and
the Film Society. G.B. 1924-1936. PAL video. Black and white. Silent and sound. 82 m. [12 page insert/
booklet, essay by Michael O’Pray] n.d.
Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life. Produced and directed by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoesack. and Marguerite Harrison. 1925 Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. Artwork and Summary: 1992 Milestone Film &
Video. Image Entertainment MCMXCIX 71 minutes.
The Open Road: A cinematic postcard of Britain in the 1920s. Dir. Claude Friese-Greene. 1924-5. 64 minutes.
Restoration British Film Institute. N.d. [16 page booklet included]
Websites
Milestone films: http://www.milestonefilms.com/movie.php/grass/
Press kits Milestone film: http://milestonefilms.com/presskits.php
Press kit for Grass: http://milestonefilms.com/pdf/grassPK.pdf
BFI on The Open Road: http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/openroad/
TRAVESTY IN WOOLF AND PROUST
by John Coyle
T
here is what might be called a Proustian moment in Chapter 7 of Jacob’s Room
(1922), but it is not really a Proustian moment, more a travesty of one. An image
on which the famous madeleine episode depends is dismissed as a faddish distraction for dinner parties. Here is Proust:
And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain
bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are
without character and form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and
twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or
people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden
and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk
of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of
Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being,
town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (Swann’s Way 51)
In describing how the whole of the Combray of the narrator’s childhood emerges from
a cup of tea, Proust deploys a conceit whose success depends on a flirtation with the
bathetic and grotesque. Disproportion and the possibility of comic deflation are never
far away when Proust is in this mood, especially in metaphors of transformation and
creation. After writing his first prose poem about the steeples of Martinville the young
Marcel clucks like a hen who has laid an egg, the work as a whole is compared to a
“boeuf en daube” and to a dress as well as to a cathedral, and time, in the final sentence
of Le Temps Retrouvé, has us teetering on the stilts of the years. Stiltedness is courted
frequently, deliberately, in both the overarticulated syntax and overelaborated imagery of
Proust’s metaphorical flights.
Woolf ’s invocation of the paper flowers is sardonic, even a little condescending, the
elaborated lyricism of Proust undone by briskness:
About this time a firm of merchants having dealings with the East put on the
market little paper flowers which opened on touching water. As it was the custom also to use finger-bowls at the end of dinner, the new discovery was found
of excellent service. In these sheltered lakes the little flowers swam and slid; surmounted smooth slippery waves, and sometimes foundered and lay like pebbles
on the glass floor. Their fortunes were watched by eyes intent and lovely. It
is surely a great discovery that leads to the union of hearts and foundation of
homes. The paper flowers did no less. (JR 68)
What for Proust was a sacramental moment becomes a mere conversation piece, Proust’s
metaphor, like the novel itself for Woolf at the time, relegated to the order of gossip. I say
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at the time since Woolf had not yet read Proust. She finished the first draft of Jacob’s Room
on 4th November 1921, and on 21st January 1922 she mentions to E.M. Forster that she
is still to take the plunge: “Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports.
It seems to be a tremendous experience, but I’m shivering on the brink, and waiting to be
submerged with a horrid notion that I shall go down and down and perhaps never come
up again” (L2 499). “Everyone is reading Proust.” Everyone else, that is.
The metaphor of submersion, a troubling one, is maintained in a letter to Roger Fry,
Saturday 6th May 1922, where Woolf proposes to sink herself in Proust: “I have the most
violent cold in the whole parish. Proust’s fat volume comes in very handy. Last night I
started on vol 2 [A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur] of him (the novel) and propose to sink
myself in it all day. Scott Moncrieff wants me to say a few words in an album of admiration. Will you collaborate? If so, I will: not otherwise” (L2 525). The editors of Woolf ’s
letters gloss volume 2 as A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, but Woolf will have been in fact
reading the second volume of Swann’s Way in Scott Moncrieff’s translation. A l’ombre did
not appear until 1924. The letter continues in a fascinating passage which evokes a tone
of eroticised panic under the spell of Proust’s writing, especially at the level of the sentence
as she conflates the desire for expression with the idea of writing as erotic experience:
“Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly see out the sentence.
Oh, if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration
and saturation and intensification that he procures—there’s something sexual in it—that I
feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone
so stimulates the nerves of language in me; it becomes an obsession” (L2 525). She is so
“stimulated” and “saturated” that she must give up reading and pick up the pen. The parenthesis “there’s something sexual about it” comes across as a modest acknowledgement
of the force of surrounding words: “titillates,” “desire,” “cry,” “vibration,” “saturation,” “intensification,” “procures,” “sexual,” “feel,” “seize,” “stimulates,” “nerves”. It is all summed
up in the phrase “the nerves of language”; she feels she can write like that, but she is also
passing on the pen, writing so that the reader might feel similarly.
On the 3rd of October 1922, she is writing again to Fry of her “great adventure” being
Proust, gasping with both amazement and a sense of pleasure which she insists again is
physical. (Ulysses, at the time, gets shorter shrift.)
My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that?
I’m only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am
in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at
last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this
beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and
gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect
serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses; to which
I bind myself like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finished—my
martyrdom is over. I hope to sell it for £4.10. (L2 565-66)
By April 1925 Woolf is confessing in her diary to being “embedded,” blending images of
sex and submersion. She continues:
Travesty in Woolf and Proust
261
Since I wrote, which is these last months, Jacques Raverat has died; after longing to die; & he sent me a letter about Mrs Dalloway which gave me one of the
happiest days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well,
nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The
thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost
tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough
as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom. And he will I suppose both
influence me & make me out of temper with every sentence of my own. (D3 7)
The phrase “as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom” presents a formulation which, by combining enduring hardness and materiality on the one hand (catgut—
which never comes from cats, by the way—continues to be useful and create beauty long
beyond the lifespan of the creature which provided it) with a sense of the evanescent and
immaterial on the other, gives a pre-echo of what was to become for Woolf a summative phrase, “granite and rainbow”—granite being fact and rainbows being the shifts of
personality and consciousness. There is a difference, though, in that the catgut and the
butterfly’s bloom belong in the sphere of the animal. Granite and Rainbow (1958) is of
course the title of a posthumous collection of essays, the term featuring in one of those
essays, “The New Biography” (1927), and also in Orlando (1928) written two years after
the diary entry on Proust.
The opposition operates along temporal co-ordinates as well, with the enduring
weighed against the fleeting in an insistence on capturing both simultaneously, and Woolf
and Proust share a fascination with the multiple forms of duration, both in a Bergsonian
sense, about consciousness and time, and in a narratological sense, as in Gérard Genette’s
study of Proust, where duration features as one of the aspects of narrative time. Proust
combines the sweep of decades with the miniaturised analysis of an instant, and in his
most celebrated sections like Combray employs what Genette call the pseudo-iterative,
describing what is said to have happened repeatedly over a series of spring holidays with a
level of detail which would be more appropriate to a single event. This is one of the challenges which Proust sets Woolf.
When Harold Nicolson met Proust in 1919, at two dinners associated with the Paris Peace Conference, their conversation turned on two topics. One was homosexuality.
Nicolson noted in his diary “We discuss inversion. Whether it is a matter of glands or
nerves. He says it is a matter of habit. I say, ‘surely not.’ He says, ‘No—that was silly of
me—what I meant was that it was a matter of delicacy.’” “He is not”, Nicolson records,
“very intelligent on the subject” (224-25). Which subject? Intelligence or habit? Either
way, this is a bit rich, even for the Ritz. The other topic of conversation, at an earlier dinner, an equally “swell affair,” was time, and the relation of time both in terms of historical
event and of everyday routine. When Nicolson responds to Proust’s request to tell him
how the committees work, he starts off by saying “Well we usually meet at 10, there are
secretaries behind.” “‘Non, non’, says Proust: ‘n’allez pas trop vite’—don’t go too quickly.
You arrive at the Quai d’Orsay. You climb the stairs. You go into the room. And then’.”
“So,” continues Nicholson, “I tell him everything. The sham cordiality of it all; the handshakes, the maps: the rustle of papers: the tea in the next room: the macaroons. He listens
enthralled, interrupting from time to time. ‘Mais précisez, mon cher monsieur, n’allez pas
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trop vite’” (224-25). Nicolson was a serious diplomat engaged with the drawing of new
European boundaries and writing copious and detailed memoranda about the momentous events of his time. He was equally assiduous as a writer who produced biographies of
Verlaine, Swinburne, Byron and Tennyson. To be told to slow down thus, that his detail
was insufficient, would have been disconcerting.
This takes us, via two unusually intimate degrees of separation, from Proust back to
Virginia Woolf and the writing of Orlando in 1927, a year when one of the big hits was a
song called “I’ve Danced with a Man, Who’s Danced with a Girl, Who’s Danced with the
Prince of Wales.” Elizabeth Shore, in “Virginia Woolf, Proust and Orlando” rightly points
out that many of Woolf ’s supposedly Proustian traits—the idea of character as something
multiple and indefinite, the shared use of metaphor and image—predate her reading of
Proust. Shore does say, however, that moments of Proustian recollection are more likely to
be found in Orlando, a novel which is itself much preoccupied with questions of time. In
Orlando, Woolf combines the sweep of centuries with moments of pause. The artificialities of calendar and clock are evoked, then pointedly suspended. When Orlando pauses
to summon his thoughts and material, Time freezes like the ice on the river, becoming
itself something solid, if transiently so, yet the headlong, giddy rapidity of Woolf ’s prose
is somehow freed, unabated. Even the reading of Proust is suspended as Woolf flits over
the surface like a skimming stone.
As the anxiety of influence may also be an anxiety of impotence, the fear that what
one is writing is no more than a travesty, in Proust the apprenticeship of the young writer
is stalled by various parodies of what his work might become. Such is the nature of the
pastiche of the Goncourt Journal in Time Regained, while in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en
fleur the diplomat M. de Norpois advises Marcel to put aside his prose poem in homage
to Bergotte and follow the example of a young acquaintance of his, “who has recently produced two volumes, one The Sense of the Infinite on the Shores of Lake Victoria and a short
treatise, less weighty but written with a lively, not to say cutting pen, on the Repeating Rifle
in the Bulgarian Army which put him quite in a class by himself ” (Within a Budding Grove
488-89). Orlando transforms a similar anxiety into a flight, as Woolf put it, into comedy,
into travesty of the respected forms of biography and history. Woolf ’s anxiety is repaired
by the headlong ease and light-heartedness of a masquerade. It is also an exercise in travesti, in the original French sense of the word, and Proust and Woolf show themselves to
be equally interested in both senses, the slow intensities in Proust being compensated for
by a series of quick-change acts, as games are played with identity and sexuality as well as
with time and duration. The young girls in blossom are, at first sight, splendidly boyish.
The epistemology of the closet, the dynamics of sexual orientation, always tend towards
a transformation of male to female: the male the chrysalid stage and the female the new.
I will end with two scenes of writing. First, in Orlando, and in the pause between fingering the quill and the plunge of quill into inkhorn, we read the following passage, a deliberation about unwieldy sentences, granite and rainbow, memory, sewing and seamstresses:
As this pause was of extreme significance in his history, more so, indeed, than
many acts which bring men to their knees and make rivers run with blood, it
behoves us to ask why he paused; and to reply, after due reflection, that it was
for some such reason as this. Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon
Travesty in Woolf and Proust
263
us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and
stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery,
so that even now (the first of November 1927) we know not why we go upstairs,
or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of
a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their
glasses to the horizon; Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets,
we make answer ‘Yes’; if we are truthful we say ‘No’; nature, who has so much
to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further
complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us—a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying
cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil—but has contrived that the
whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory
is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and
out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what
follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting
down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand
odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and
dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a
gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which
no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering
and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights. (O 59)
There is no evidence that Proust read Woolf, but he would have enjoyed the juxtaposition of a policeman’s trousers with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil. Shore, in the article
previously cited, compares the invocation of memory as seamstress with an earlier passage
where the shuttle of the years weaves threads between seemingly independent memories,
but misses a crucial passage towards the end of Time Regained, in which Proust’s narrator
also dwells on which metaphor is best for the composition of his resolved work. The image
is of dressmaking rather than tapestry, reminding the reader that the novel she is about to
finish is not just a cathedral of art but also a grandly comic costume drama:
And—for at every moment the metaphor uppermost in my mind changed as I
began to represent to myself more and more clearly and in a more material shape
the task upon which I was about to embark—I thought that at my big deal table,
under the eyes of Françoise, who like all unpretentious people who live at close
quarters with us would have a certain insight into the nature of my labours…I
should work beside her and in a way even as she would have worked herself (or
at least as she had worked in the past, for now, with the onset of old age, she
had almost lost her sight) and, pinning here and there an extra page, I should
construct my book, I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply
like a dress. Whenever I had not all my “paperies” near me, as Françoise called
them, and just the one I needed was missing, Françoise would understand how
this upset me, she who always said that she could not sew if she had not the right
size of thread and the proper buttons. (Time Regained 1090)
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Works Cited
Nicolson, Harord. Peacemaking, 1919. London: Constable, 1945
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. 3 vols. Trans. C. K. Scott- Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
Shore, Elizabeth. “Virginia Woolf, Proust and Orlando.” Comparative Literature 31.3 (Summer1979): 232-245.
Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. 1922. Oxford: Published for the Shakespeare Head Press by Blackwell, 2004.
——. Orlando: a Biography. 1928. Oxford: Published for the Shakespeare Head Press by Blackwell, 1998.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1975-1980.
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984.
WOOLF, YEATS, AND THE MAKING OF “SPILT MILK”
by Wayne K. Chapman
E
ven as the great poet that Virginia Woolf discerned and studied in what she called
“legendary” encounters at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s beginning in late 1930 (D3
329-32; L4 250, 253), W. B. Yeats’s occultly philosophic “Dove or Swan” section
of A Vision (1925), might have been playfully mocked in Orlando, insofar as the history
of art and the story of women and fiction coalesce in the progress of a Zeitgeist inspired
by Vita Sackville-West and her family history. If this is an example of contradictory behavior, Yeats was almost as reluctant to read the novel as he was to undertake, in multiple
encounters, Joyce’s Ulysses, much preferring to either of those works Lawrence’s Women in
Love. He wrote to his wife, late in 1932, that he found the latter “a beautiful enigmatic
book. I feel in sympathy with him as I do not with Virginia Woolf ” (CL Intelex 5774). At
first, Woolf found Yeats difficult to understand. But, at another party at Lady Ottoline’s,
he flattered her by acknowledging that he was writing about her later novel The Waves,
which, with Joyce’s Ulysses and Pound’s Cantos, suggested to him “a deluge of [mental and
physical] experience breaking over us and within us” (qtd. in D4 n255).
Hermione Lee devotes three pages, in her life of Woolf (574-7), to the first encounter
as an illustration of Woolf’s mixing together contradictions in the accounts she made in her
diary and letters. Lee draws on the testimony of Lady Ottoline and Walter de la Mare, but
not on Yeats, for some reason. Thus I will present the evidence of Yeats’s unpublished correspondence, particularly a letter to his wife of 8 November 1930, and drafts of the poem he
wrote inside the back cover of his rather heavy travel book, Johann Erdmann’s A History of
Philosophy, trans. Williston Hough, vol. 2: Modern Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin,
1924).1 As Yeats said, “Spilt Milk” was “the upshot of my talks and a metaphor of Lady Ottoline’s,” in spite of Virginia’s exaggerated recollection of her own share of the conversation.
So in a way, this paper is as much about this mutual friend as it is about Woolf and Yeats.
Briefly considered at this point is an unpublished fragment by Woolf on Ottoline
Morrell (Berg TS M55), in which the atmosphere of Lady Ottoline’s gatherings at Garsington, no less than their hostess, comes alive in remembrance:
When one remembers indeed that drawing room full of people, the pale yellows
and pinks of the brocades, the Italian chairs, the Persian rugs, the embroideries,
the tassels, the scent, the pomegranate[s,] the pugs, the pot pourri, and how
one would be swept from the big room and the crowd to a little room alone
with Ottoline, where one was [pl]ied with questions about life.…There were
quarrels and intrigues. Ottoline may have been a Medusa; but she was not a
passive Medusa. She had a great gift for pulling <drawing> people under. Even
Middleton Murry[,] it is said[,] was pulled down by her among the cauliflowers
<vegetables> at Garsington.2
The fragment describes the “lustre and illusion” that had “tinged” the Bloomsbury Group
before World War I, and the Garsington gatherings, Woolf wrote, “to exclaim rap[sodi]cally,”
266
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
were exciting because “the whole place was full of ‘lustre and illusion.’”
Yeats maintained an extensive correspondence with Ottoline Morrell from 1911 until
her death in 1938. Woolf ’s metaphor of the Medusa, “pulling” or “drawing people under,”
compares with the figure in Yeats’s poem “The Mermaid,” in which “A mermaid found a
swimming lad, / Picked him for her own, / Pressed her body to his body, / Laughed; and
plunging down / Forgot in cruel happiness / That even lovers drown” (CP 222). The poem
refers to Olivia Shakespear, to whom Yeats lost his virginity in 1896, but Yeats and his
much younger English wife, George, who were “fond” of Lady Ottoline and she “fond of
us,” believing her “as good as she is kind & gracious,” “wonder[ed] how so many slanders
ha[d] been spread about her” (CL Intelex 4082) and prized the gossip they took away
from her parties, which they frequented as residents of Oxford in the early 1920s. After
one such, for example, Yeats gossiped to his wife about Mr. and Mrs. Bertram Russell and
a Miss Baker, “known as ‘the sky bride’ [possibly ‘shy bride’] because she ran away twice
from the church door” (CL Intelex 4219); hence, Ottoline, Yeats, and the other guests discussed “whirlpools,” which became Yeats’s shorthand for a person (usually a woman) who
causes such trouble for oneself that others are drawn into it. The term denoted a human
whirlpool as well as a person who is drawn under a whirlpool’s spell. Lady Ottoline, like
Lady Gerald (Dorothy) Wellesley, later the Duchess of Wellington—whom the Woolfs
consulted on poetry at the Hogarth Press despite Leonard’s general disliking—had become one of Yeats’s “rich women,” whom Auden glibly derided in his famous elegy, along
with Yeats himself and the Irish weather.
As for Virginia Woolf, who first met Yeats in 1908 although he could not remember
the occasion, she began reading him with heightened interest once the transitional stage of
his style had been reached in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919; see L2 352). In April 1928,
she pronounced in the New York Herald Tribune, among her winter reading of “nothing
which made a very deep impression,” that The Tower, then only recently published, “contains [Yeats’s] best, deepest and most imaginative work,” the exception “for which alone
the winter was memorable” (E4 542-3). The next week, she reviewed the book in the Nation & Athenaeum, edited by Leonard, repeating her verdict that “years seem to have dried
up the Celtic mist, to have braced the nerves and sharpened the senses of this particular
poet, so that he reverses the usual order and is a better poet in his age than in his youth”
(E4 545). There was no condescension, as there had been when the young Joyce met Yeats
for the first time and declared that the meeting had occurred too late in the poet’s life to
do his poetry any good. Woolf, instead, admired how Yeats’s “verse runs so nervously, so
idiomatically” like “some one talking,” the “lines all grown together with meaning, massive, and incapable of disintegration.…The poems are difficult, not through obscurity
of language, but because the thought lies deep and turns strangely” (E4 545). And so it
seems that with a kind of giddiness she entered in her diary, on 8 November 1930, as a
worshipful school girl3 might:
I pressed his hand when we said goodbye with some emotion: thinking This is to
press a famous hand: It was Yeats, at Ottoline’s last night. He was born in 1865
so that he is now a man of 65—& I am 48: & thus he has a right to be so much
more vital, supple, high charged & altogether seasoned & generous. I was very
much impressed by all this in action. (D3 329)
The Making of “Spilt Milk”
267
At the same time, her enthusiasm for the poet seems little tempered when she wrote to
her sister:
I went to Ottoline’s yesterday, and must unsay my abuse, as there I found Yeats,
whom I think (naturally, wrongly) our only living poet—perhaps a great poet:
anyhow a good poet; and there was also [Walter] de la Mare.…Being now almost
incapable of discretion I said all the wrong things about poetry and we had a
long discourse.…I agreed with many of Yeats’s views; and he is surprisingly sensible. He has grown tremendously thick, and is rather magnificent looking; in
fact seeing how seldom one meets interesting people…this was a great success.
(L4 250)
Yet in less than a week, Woolf would burlesque the scene, playing down Yeats’s sensibility
and feigning little interest in the content of Yeats’s and de la Mare’s side of the conversation: “over my head it went—for what do I know of the inner meaning of dreams.…And
then—dreams and dreams; and then stories of Irish life in brogue; and then the soul’s
attitude to art” (L4 253). And hence the talk became “more and more rapt” until Lady
Ottoline raised, with a “sepulchral effect,” her black ear trumpet to hear, confessing her
deafness to essentially all of what had been said in an epiphany (for Virginia) of “all I admire her for” (L4 253-4). This characterization is a contradiction and the point of Woolf
biographer Hermione Lee.
In contrast, Woolf ’s diary account of the same conversation seems scrupulous to
record as many of the details as possible. She cites there de la Mare’s dream stories, and
she recalls the gist of Yeats’s vehement interpretations of them from what she surmised to
be the “complete psychology” of A Vision, which he was then revising and of which she
thought herself woefully ignorant. “And so on to dreaming states, & soul states; as others
talk of Beaverbrook & free trade—as if matters of common knowledge” (D3 329). They
spoke of pictures, painters, and poems—a good deal on the works of Milton before turning to modern poetry: “Yeats said that ‘we,’ de la M. & himself, wrote ‘thumbnail’ poems
only because we are at the end of an era.…Most of emotion is outside their scope” (D3
330). On this assertion Woolf said that she had made an interjection:
All left to the novelists I said—but how crude & jaunty my own theories were
beside his: indeed I got a tremendous sense of the intricacy of the art; also of its
meaning, its seriousness, its importance, which wholly engrosses this large active
minded immensely vitalised man. Wherever one cut him, with a little question,
he poured, spurted fountains of ideas. (D3 330)
Woolf does not say, as Lady Ottoline notes in her diary, that on the whole she “was very
silent & didn’t say much” and “seemed rather to shrivel & have the wind taken out of her
sails,” due to “certain limitations” derived from “living always amongst intellectuals” (qtd.
in Lee 576). Nor is there a shred of resentment, as in de la Mare’s account of the meeting, at playing second fiddle to Yeats: “This is Yeats: I must remember every word” (qtd.
in Lee 577), he wrote. Woolf seems to have struck the latter attitude in her letter to Ethel
Smyth, when she reported the epiphany of the ear trumpet, the dramatic conclusion not
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
268
mentioned in Woolf ’s diary. She says in the letter that she’d “cried out, in the midst of all
the poetry, Heavens Ottoline, are you deaf?” (L4 253).
Like the story of “Rashōmon,” this tale of the encounters bears another witness: Yeats
himself. For, when he came to visit Ottoline on 7 November 1930, it was after stopping at
John Masefield’s little theatre, where, he said, he sat through “a long eulogy on my work &
myself—very embarrassing—& then five girls with beautiful voices recited my lyrics for
three quarters of an hour. I do not think the whole audience could hear but to me it was
strangely overwhelming”; in this letter of November 8th to his wife, he added: “Yesterday
I met De la M[a]re & Virginia Wo[o]lf at Lady Ottoline’s and here is the upshot of my
talk and a metaphor of Lady Ottoline’s” (CL Intelex 5404). Then he quoted without title
the quatrain published as “Spilk Milk” in Words for Music Perhaps (1932). Without knowing the personal context, one might generalize to give the poem a universal reference,
natural enough when reading it beside the Arnoldian eprigram “Nineteenth Century and
After” in the Collected Poems (240). But in Yeats’s letter, the pronoun “We” epitomizes four
individuals: he, Ottoline Morrell, Walter de la Mare, and Virginia Woolf.
We had such thought;
That such deeds have done,
Must ramble on—thinned out
Like milk on a flat stone[.]
Especially, the poem epitomizes Yeats’s own sense of his side of a performance. Not to cry
over spilt milk is an idiom that may have nothing to do with ear trumpets though perhaps
with shared admiration for Ottoline Morrell that other people miss, as Woolf said, when
confronted by her more “obvious tortuousness and hypocrisy” (L4 253-4). The version
of the poem that Yeats sent his wife had two rehearsals and a later draft, all penned with
pencil cancellations, inside the back cover of the second volume of Johann Erdmann’s A
History of Philosophy (1924). The volume’s so-called Modern Philosophy featured Leibnitz,
Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others,4 not all of whom were of interest to him at
that time. The image of milk thinning on a stone—a “flat stone” for two drafts and the
letter version—was surely the “metaphor” (or simile) Yeats credited to Ottoline as it was
the most stable element in the composition, residing in the last line as often happens in
epigrams. The poem’s relation to Yeats’s reading of “modern philosophy,” however defined,
seems kindred to his early affection for aphorisms and pithy, enigmatic sayings and to the
difficulty of trying to articulate a complete philosophy, or “psychology,” of his own as reflected in much of what he had said in response to de la Mare’s promptings. Virginia seems
to have caught in her diary account the main idea as far as the constituents of “we” being
the poets Yeats and de la Mare. The following transcription is based on work by David R.
Clark in the Cornell manuscript series:
We that had such settled thought
Such
All duties fixed & known
Are poured & thinned, & [?dabbled] out
Like milk on a flat stone
The Making of “Spilt Milk”
269
We that had such thought
That
And such great deeds had done,
Must ramble on
But Ramble now – thinned out
Like milk on a flat stone
Nov 1930
We that have so done & thought
That
We that have done & thought,
That have thought & done,
Must ramble & thin out
Like milk spilt on a stone. (Yeats, “Spilt Milk” 268-9)
The first and second versions make assertions about “settled thought” with puzzlingly indefinite references for the adjective “such” in line 1, compounded by “such
duties fixed & known” and “such great deeds had done” in line 2, simplified to “such
deeds have done” in the letter draft. Some progress is made between the first and second versions as passive construction (“Are poured & thinned” etc.) is discarded for active voice (“Must ramble on—thinned out”). After judging the second draft sufficiently
complete to deserve a dating (“Nov. 1930”), Yeats hit on a better way to begin the poem:
“We that have so done & thought / That…[have thought & done].” The adverbial “so”
(like “such”) is then dropped, creating the rhythmical effect of tedium in the repetition
and transposition of the phrase “done & thought”: “thought & done,” in lines 1 and 2.
“We”—understood from Woolf ’s account to be Yeats and de la Mare in their writing
of “thumbnail” poems at the end of an era, but also Woolf and Lady Ottoline on the
occasion—“Must ramble & thin out” thought as well as work “done” with their talk
“Like spilt milk on a stone,” dribbling and dabbling instead of pooling as the metaphor
might have suggested. As the “upshot” of an experience, the self-evaluation of a “talk”
viewed competitively as a performance for other performers, the poem says that for Yeats
the experience was less impressive than being overwhelmed by the five beautiful voices
that captivated him at Masefield’s theatre with his own lyrics, flattery and embarrassment aside. In time to come, Woolf would encounter Yeats more frequently at social
gatherings, becoming accustomed to his enthusiasm for subject-matter unusual among
Bloomsburyites, making him a curiosity as well as an “interesting person” to study. She
was not mistaken about the vitality and suppleness of his intellect even if he seems to
have become less interesting to her after that first close observation of 1930. The fact that
she failed to read how the occasion struck him is extraordinary. But perhaps something
is to be said for the avuncular poet behind the “famous hand” that bade her goodbye
with emotion—that he should keep silent except to his wife. The story made good copy
though not a great poem.
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
270
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
For permission to quote from these unpublished materials, I am grateful to A. P. Watt Ltd., on behalf of
the W. B. Yeats Estate, and to the Trustees of the National Library of Ireland.
Thanks to The Society of Authors, on behalf of the Virginia Woolf Estate, and to the New York Public
Library (Lenox and Tilden Foundations). The transcription is my own and only partial, as indicated by
ellipses. Strikethoughs and interpolations (standing in angle brackets) are Woolf ’s although editorial intrusions (in square brackets) are mine for the sake of reading.
Later, Woolf found that Yeats had much the same effect on her niece, Angelica, whose “twin passions” in
1934 were Yeats and Lady Ottoline (L5 355). On Yeats, Woolf recalled for Ottoline’s amusement the following snippet of conversation: “[Angelica--] ‘Oh how I shall boast about it at school.’ [Woolf--] ‘But what
did he say[,] Angelica?’ [Angelica--] ‘Oh I dont know—it was just wonderful—seeing them all’” (L5 357).
O’Shea reports an inscription inside the front cover: “(On development of Berkeley’s thought / Herman Cohen)” possibly by Yeats, who left interlineal scorings and marginal strokings on pp. 182-4 (on
Leibnitz’s notion of monads in relation to God), p. 188 (on Leibnitz’s view of the Eucharist), p. 246 (on
sensuous and rational motives of willing), and pp. 374-97 (on Kant and the Transcendental Aesthetic, the
Transcendental Analytic and the Metaphysics of Nature, and the Transcendental Dialectic and Practical
Philosophy).
Works Cited
Erdmann, Johann. A History of Philosophy. 3 vols. Volume 2: Modern Philosophy, Trans. Williston Hough. London: Allen and Unwin, 1924.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922.
Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love. 1920. London: Martin Seeker, 1921.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage, 1997.
O’Shea, Edward. A Descriptive Catalog of the W. B. Yeats Library. New York: Garland, 1985.
Pound, Ezra. Draft of XXX Cantos. London: Faber and Faber, 1928.
Woolf, Virginia. Autobiographical fragment on Lady Ottoline Morrell and Pre-World War I Bloomsbury. Typescript. M55. The Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library.
[Cited in the text as Berg TS M55.]
——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie. New York and
London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4: 1925-1928. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1994.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-1980.
——. Orlando, A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1928.
——. The Waves. London: Hogarth Press, 1931.
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Gen. ed. John Kelly. Oxford: Oxford UP [Intelex Electronic Edition], 2002. [Cited as CL Intelex, followed by Accession number.]
——. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 1997. [Cited in the text
as CP.]
——. “Spilt Milk.” In Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems: Manuscript Materials. Ed. David R. Clark.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999. 268-9.
——. The Tower. London: Macmillan, 1928.
——. A Vision. 1937. London: Macmillan 1962.
——. A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon certain Doctrines attributed to Kusta Ben Luka. London: privately printed for subscribers only by T. Werner Laurie, 1925.
——. The Wild Swans at Coole. London: Macmillan: 1919.
FIGURES OF CONTRADICTION: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S RHETORIC OF GENRES
by Sara Sullam
C
ontradictory Woolf: I believe there is hardly a topic where Woolf ’s contradictions
are more evident than in her relationship with poetry, with poets, with poetic
forms. In fact, while adjectives such as “poetic” or “lyrical” are often resorted to
when dealing with her literary output, Woolf never published a line of poetry. And even
when she tried to write poetry, it was in a definitely contradictory spirit, evident, for instance, in the title of her poem Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush
Above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville. Furthermore, among the things she insists on “not
knowing,” beside Greek and French, we find poetry: Woolf might have felt so confident
as to give advice to a young poet, answering the question “about poetry and its death”
(E5 308), but, at the same time, she did not hesitate to claim that “[t]he lack of a sound
university training has always made it impossible for me to distinguish between an iambic
and a dactyl” (E5 308).
But, I may say, poetry—and the same could be argued for Greek and French—plays
a crucial role in Woolf ’s literary achievement. Woolf was well aware of the importance
of literary genres: of course, they may be debunked, discarded; their boundaries may be
blurred; but there they are, one has to deal with them. And Woolf did not refrain from
her task: as a writer, she tried to realize a blend between prose and poetry; as a critic, she
dedicated several essays to her understanding of literary genres; and, last but not least, the
Hogarth Lectures on Literature series stands as a further confirmation of her interest in the
notions of genres and subgenres. Those were very important not only for the sake of literature, but also, from the publisher’s point of view, for sales: this is evident, for example,
in her diary entry on the launch of Orlando: “Not a shop will buy save in 6es&12es. They
say this is inevitable. No one wants biography. But it is a novel, says Miss Ritchie. But it
is called a biography on the title page, they say. It will have to go in the biography shelf.
I doubt therefore that we shall do more than cover expenses—a high price for the fun of
calling it a biography. And I was so sure it was going to be the one popular book!”(D3
198). Even when she hired John Lehmann at the Press—thus endorsing and supporting
young writers (W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood first and foremost)—she did not fail
to remark that “[h]e [Isherwood] does the prose, A.[uden] the poetry” (D5 59), thus assuring herself that both genres were being covered.
In this essay I will focus on Woolf ’s critical understanding of genres, unravelling the
rhetorical strategies she used to plead the cause of fiction. I will try to show how, while she
starts using rhetoric and its tropes to tackle the contradiction between prose and poetry,
Woolf finally elaborates a “rhetorical” notion of these two genres. In this claim I refer to
Northrop Frye’s notion of “generic criticism,” as formulated in the fourth essay of Anatomy
of Criticism: “The basis of generic criticism is in any case rhetorical, in the sense that the genre is determined by the conditions established between the poet and his public” (246-47).
The publication of the six-volume edition of Woolf ’s essays has invited a new reading
of the writer’s understanding of genres; the chronological arrangement of the edition calls
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for a reconsideration of the relevance of poetry and literary genres in Woolf ’s artistic development. In fact, poetry, poems, poets and poetic forms populate Woolf ’s critical opus:
while the young critic appears to be interested in poets’ letters, in finding what we may
call the “private voice of poetry,” in the immediate aftermath of WWI, she begins asking
herself why the young men who fought in the trenches resorted to an obsolete genre like
poetry with its fixed form to convey their war experience, as we read in an early essay,
“These Are the Plans”: “Poetry is a much safer refuge than prose. A large number of the
young men who left behind them enough verse to fill a little book before they were killed
evidently wrote poetry because it allowed them to express their feelings without a sense
of irreticence. This rhyme, this metre, these old poetical phrases, serve as a mask behind
which the writer dares say something that he would blush to say with the inflection of
everyday speech in prose” (E3 73). I think “irreticence” is a keyword in Woolf ’s statement:
not only because it is a Woolfian coin,1 but also because it introduces the opposition
between silence and outspokenness, between being reticent and being irreticent (another
adjective used mainly by Woolf, later on, in her Letter to a Young Poet, 1932). The same
opposition, conveyed, as we will see shortly, by tropes of silence, is the same that structures
Woolf ’s early critical discourse on prose and poetry. For it is with a reticentia that she begins to plead the cause of prose.
In 1922, confident with the success of Jacob’s Room, in an essay with the revealing title
of “English Prose” (a review of Logan Pearsall Smith’s A Treasury of English Prose) she goes
as far as to express her “wonder and amazement” at the young men’s persistence in writing
poetry: “For though English poetry was a fine old potentate —but no, I dare not breathe
a word against English Poetry. All I will venture is a sigh of wonder and amazement that
when there is prose before us with its capacities and possibilities, its power to say new
things, make new shapes, express new passions, young people should still be dancing to
a barrel organ and choosing words because they rhyme” (E1 171). Concluding Woolf ’s
review, this statement is indeed in a relevant position; no surprise, therefore, that it may
resort to a very effective rhetoric, one that demands attentive reading. Woolf starts off
with a truncated utterance,2 which in rhetorical terms is defined as reticentia: “[T]he omission of the expression of an idea, made known by breaking off a sentence already begun,
sometimes also explicitly confirmed afterwards:…reticentia has several motives, which may
be divided into two groups. The first of these groups comprises only one motive: that of
emotion, which is broken off by the reconsideration of the concrete situation…The second
group is marked by the calculating (and so not directly emotive) interruption of the idea”
(Lausberg 394-5). Woolf ’s truncated utterance on poetry is very contradictory, since “for”
is followed by the conjunction “though,” introducing a concessive clause, which creates a
huge expectation in the reader. However, after the typical Woolfian “for”—whereby we
would expect a declarative statement, something giving a turn to the argument—we find a
“though,” pulling the sentence “backwards,” creating even more expectation. An expectation that is, however, frustrated by Woolf ’s reticentia, which very well expresses the awe she
still feels in 1922 in front of the “fine old potentate.” Prose and poetry are defined as two
domains, two territories that, from now on, Woolf will define through a spatial metaphor:
before her, the potentate, seems to overlook on a “space of silence,” represented by the dash,
where Woolf the critic still fears to tread. The Queen that fiction is—so reads the preceding sentence—seems to be helpless when faced with poetry. Feeling that she is running the
Figures of Contradiction
273
risk of being irreticent, of surrendering to emotion, Woolf—to use Heinrich Lausberg’s
words—prefers to “break off”, to consider the “concrete situation”; in her case, English
literature in 1922. Actually, her reticentia is just a way to downplay her stance on the question, which would otherwise sound overassertive. For after her truncated utterance, Woolf
resorts to yet another trope, praeteritio, defined by Lausberg as “the announcement of the
intention to leave out certain things [which] implies the mentioning of these things” (393).
Contradictory Woolf, indeed, since praeteritio expresses the very essence of contradiction.
Using both reticentia and praeteritio, Woolf proves a consummate rhetorician: as a
matter of fact, the two figures are contiguous; both are figurae per detractionem, resorted
to when the speaker deliberately wants to leave some things out. Even more significantly,
both are related to silence (aposiopesis, the Greek word for reticentia, contains the word siopesis, coming from siopein, to be silent). Interrogating Woolf ’s alleged silences on poetry,
one finds her voice in prose. With “English Prose” Woolf establishes her rhetorical dialectics: from now on speaking of poetry will mean speaking of prose and vice versa. Although
she “dare not breathe a word” on English poetry, breathe she did, and repeatedly.
Woolf ’s first ramble within the precincts of the “fine old potentate” happens in the
company of Thomas De Quincey. Written in 1926, “Impassioned Prose” is a seminal essay
for Woolf ’s relationship with poetry: as a matter of fact, when she was writing it, she addressed a cry of despair to Vita: “and I’m reading De Quincey, and Richardson, and again
De Quincey—again De Quincey, because I’m in the middle of writing about him, and my
God Vita, if you happen to know do wire whats the essential difference between prose and
poetry—It cracks my poor brain to consider” (L3 281). No more reticentiae or preteritio:
this time the rhetorical figure opening Woolf ’s reflection on poetry and prose is a tautology, a trope that can be viewed as the opposite of contradiction. “Poetry is poetry and
prose is prose” (E4 361): Woolf laments the poorness of such a statement, her whole essay
is meant to debunk it, to contradict it; it is better to be reticent than to state the obvious.
The dismay Woolf expresses to Vita actually conveys Virginia’s difficulty—or better,
the sense of challenge—in tackling a contradictory figure like De Quincey. Was he a poet?
Was he a prose writer? Both, Woolf seems to suggest. He wrote both prose and poetry but
he decided his vocation lay towards prose, and invented “modes of impassioned prose,”
in which to express his most private visions. De Quincey thus becomes a key figure, one
who challenged fixed definitions of genres: “But happily there are in every age some writers who puzzle the critics, who refuse to go in with the herd. They stand obstinately across
the boundary lines, and do a greater service by enlarging and fertilizing and influencing
than by their actual achievement” (E4 362). Once again, Woolf resorts to a spatial metaphor: De Quincey “enlarged” the notion of genres, he fertilized prose with poetry. In this
sense, Woolf saw him as a precursor, as a model for the cross-fertilization between the two
genres that she was practicing in her fiction writing, as someone “who with only prose
at his command—an instrument hedged about with restrictions, debased by a thousand
common uses—made his way into precincts which are terribly difficult of approach” (E4
367). In order to really debunk the easy tautology according to which “prose is prose, and
poetry is poetry,” however, Woolf knows that she has to deal with a thorny issue, which
haunted De Quincey’s writing, that is, “purple patches,” periods so ornate and elaborate,
that they break the flow of prose: “A prose writer may dream dreams and see visions, but
they cannot be allowed to lie scattered, single, solitary upon the page. So spaced out they
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CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
die. For prose has neither the intensity nor the self sufficiency of poetry…Prose must be
connected on this side and on that” (E4 363-64).
It is not surprising that Woolf should express such concerns at the same time when
she was writing To the Lighthouse, looking for a prose form that could accommodate—
“lodge”—expressiveness within the flow of prose. In September, that same year, she would
write in her diary: “I think I can spin out all their entrails this way; but it is hopelessly
undramatic. It is all in oratio obliqua. Not quite all; for I have a few direct sentences” (D3
106-7). Oratio obliqua: what is it if not free indirect style?3 This was Woolf ’s response to
the “purple patch”: a form able to convey expressiveness (with all its markers) without
interrupting the flow of prose.4 Woolf the critic is now confident enough to ransack the
“fine, old potentate,” or at least to plan future rambles into the territories of poetry. The
title of her 1927 essay on the subject is telling: “Poetry, Fiction and the Future.”
“Poetry, Fiction and the Future” marks a turning point in Woolf ’s stance on literary
genres, since it somehow represents a dialectic solution to the two previous essays. Woolf
does not need to resort to any rhetorical device to make her point. It is in this essay that
she moves from rhetoric, intended as device, to a rhetoric understanding of genres, as
defined by Frye. In “Poetry, Fiction and the Future,” Woolf seems to take up the question
raised in 1919: What does it mean to write poetry today? To which she adds: How should
the critic consider poetry?
Differently from 1922, though, Woolf is no more in “wonder and amazement”; in
fact, she is confident enough to provide an explanation on the present state of things when
she writes: “For our generation and the generation that is coming the lyric cry of ecstasy
or despair which is so intense, so personal and so limited, is not enough” (E4 429). The
problem, though, is not only the writers’, but also the critics’: in “Poetry, Fiction and the
Future” Woolf tackles the issue from a “functional” perspective. Within the literary system
of the modern age “prose is going to take over—has, indeed, already taken over—some of
the duties which were once discharged by poetry.…That cannibal, the novel, which has
devoured so many forms of art will by then have devoured even more” (E4 434). Such
reflections very well resonate with theories of the novel elaborated in those years or shortly
after, most notoriously by Mikhail Bakhtin in his “Epic and Novel,” where we read: “In
an era when the novel reigns supreme, almost all of the remaining genres are to a greater
or lesser extent ‘novelized’.…In an environment where the novel is the dominant genre,
the conventional languages of strictly canonical genres begin to sound in new ways” (5-6).
Prose and poetry, therefore, are no more two terms of a contradiction; there is no
fixed, no essential difference between the two genres. What changes is the relationship
that a writer has with his audience: the only possible answer to the question “whats the
essential difference between prose and poetry” is therefore to be found in a rhetorical
perspective, one addressing the historical development of the writer-reader relationship,
and not in poetics. A confirmation of this is provided by Woolf ’s attention to what Frye
would later define the “radical of presentation,” a notion lying at the backbone of his generic criticism: “The basis of generic distinctions in literature appears to be the radical of
presentation. Words may be acted in front of a spectator; they may be spoken in front of a
listener; they may be sung or chanted; or they may be written for a reader” (Frye 246-47).
To the decisive statement “we are going in the direction of prose” (E4 435), Woolf added
some crucial remarks as to the nature of future fiction: “And it is possible that there will
Figures of Contradiction
275
be among the so-called novels one which we shall scarcely know how to christen. It will be
written in prose, but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will have
something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose. It will be
dramatic, yet not a play. It will be read, not acted” (E4 435). Woolf ’s words also resonate
with Flaubert’s famous letters to his lover Louise Colet:5 “J’en conçois pourtant un, moi,
un style: un style qui serait beau, que quelqu’un fera à quelque jour, dans dix ans, ou dans
dix siècles, et qui serait rythmé comme le vers, précis comme le langage des sciences…
La prose est née d’hier, voilà ce qu’il faut se dire. Le vers est la forme par excellence des
littératures anciennes. Toutes les combinaisons prosodiques ont été faites, mais celles de la
prose, tant s’en faut” (79). However, while the Flaubertian connection confirms Woolf ’s
concerns for the aesthetic legitimation of prose (see Philippe), her preoccupation goes beyond aesthetics, in that the elaboration of a new form, in her view, is ultimately triggered
by the reader, by the reading public.
Such reflections would accompany Woolf until her death: in her last essays—“Anon”
and “The Reader”—her rhetorical understanding of genres finds further formulation,
confirming Woolf ’s deep and acute understanding of the dynamics of the literary system,
of the interaction between artists, their public and modes of cultural production. The figure of Anon, the poetic voice of English literature, is followed from its beginnings in oral
popular poetry, through its encounter with the European tradition, to its transformation
into the canonic voice of English literature, embodied by Elizabethan drama. There comes
a moment, though, when the voice of Anon is silenced, when—to use Woolf ’s words—he
is “killed”. This occurs with the invention of the printing press: “It was the printing press
that finally was to kill Anon. But it was the press also that preserved him. When in 1477
Caxton printed the twenty one books of the Morte D’Arthur he fixed the voice of Anon
forever.” (E6 583). This is when the reader comes into existence, therefore being a creation
of the modes of literary production and establishing a rhetorical relationship with the
artist, be him a poet, an essay writer or, later, a novelist: “That theatre must be replaced
by the theatre of the brain. The playwright is replaced by the man who writes a book. The
audience is replaced by the reader” (599).6
No wonder then, that for the author of the Common Reader, the definition of genres
should be—to use Frye’s terms—rhetorical. As a matter of fact, two years after “Poetry,
Fiction and the Future,” Woolf wrote what she herself defined “some theory about fiction”
(D3 50). Her “theory” would result in Phases of Fiction, originally intended as a volume of
the Hogarth Lectures on Literature, ideally to be read in tandem with Herbert Read’s Phases of English Poetry (1928). The long essay, though, was published in instalments on The
Bookman but never became a volume. With Phases of Fiction Woolf openly formulates the
“rhetoric of genres” that she has been elaborating in her previous essays. With the intention
of tracing the development of fiction, Woolf deliberately chooses not to adopt a historical
perspective; rather, she writes: “very briefly and with inevitable simplifications, an attempt
is made to show the mind at work upon a shelf full of novels and to watch it as it chooses
and rejects…There is no saying, for they change so much at different ages, that one appetite is better than another. The common reader is, moreover, suspicious of fixed labels and
settled hierarchies” (E5 84). Then, if not diachrony, what should guide the reader through
the province of fiction? In her preparatory notes, Woolf writes “I don’t think it’s a matter of
‘development’ but something to do with prose & poetry, in novels” (D3 50). As a matter
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
276
of fact, the sections into which the essay is divided go from the “Truth Tellers,” through
“The Romantics,” “The Character-Mongers and Comedians,” to the “Psychologists” and
the “Satirists and the Fantastics,” and, finally—and, I would say, not all all surprisingly—to
“the Poets”—among whom Woolf enrols George Meredtith, Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë
and, needless to say, Marcel Proust. The transitions from one stage to another are triggered
by a new need on the part of the reader. These needs, in their turn, are seen as influencing
the development of fiction. And, in spite of claiming that the future lies “in the direction
of prose”—for “The Poets” of the last section, after all, are novelists who “cannibalized”
poetry—, in the name of her “dynamic” view of literature, Woolf leaves the future open.
Hers remains an indication of method, one against fixed definitions:
for some reasons not here to be examined, fiction is the most hospitable of
hosts;…“the novel,” as we still call it with such parsimony of language, is clearly
splitting apart into books which have nothing in common but this inadequate
title.7…And prose…is still so youhful that we scarcely know what powers it may
not hold concealed within it. Thus it is possible that the novel will come to differ
as widely from the novel of Tolstoy and Jane Austen as the poetry of Browning
and Byron differs from the poetry of Lydgate and Spenser. In time to come—but
time to come lies far beyond our province. (E5 83-84)
And it is with yet another reticentia that Woolf ends her “theory.” This time, however, the
“but” following the dash only confirms Woolf ’s reticence. Actually, she has already said
what she had to say. Prescriptive theories, though, are not her cup of tea; she does not
want to run the risk to be irreticent. Prose is too vast a province to be enclosed and schematized in a single essay, be it also “some theory about fiction.” Its future, its definitions
are open to be constantly negotiated.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
The OED dates the first occurrence of the term to 1919, with Woolf:
1919 V. WOOLF Night & Day xvi. 211 Rodney might begin to talk about his feelings, and
irreticence is apt to be extremely painful.
a1941 V. WOOLF Captain’s Death Bed (1950) 112 Those irreticences and hyperboles which
the voice of the speaker corrects in talk.
It is worth noting, moreover, that for the adjective “irreticent” the OED provides once again an example
from Woolf:
1932 V. WOOLF Let. to Young Poet 6 Therefore you could afford to be intimate, irreticent, indiscreet
in the extreme. Even more interesting is the fact that the adjective is used in relationship to young
poets.
On Woolf ’s truncated utterances see also Ratcliffe, Caughie, and Bowlby.
On free indirect style and poetry in Woolf see Sullam.
Free indirect style makes it possible to assign expressive elements—such as exclamations, and invocations—to a third person subject pronoun (and therefore to a third person point of view). For a thorough
study of the subject see Banfield.
From a diary entry we learn that Woolf was an avid reader of the French novelist’s correspondence: “Really
reading Flaubert’s letters I hear my own voice cry out Oh art! Patience. Find him consoling, admonishing.
I must get this book quietly strongly daringly into shape” (D5 25). The catalogue of Woolf ’s library lists
the following titles: Flaubert, Gustave. Correspondance. Paris: Charpentier, 1905-07. 4 vols. Vols. 1 and
3 only. ——. Correspondance. Édite par Caroline Commanville. Nouv. éd. Paris: L. Conard, 1926-33. 9
Figures of Contradiction
6.
7.
277
vols. VW—presentee, binder, annotations. LW—inscriber (King & Miletic-Vejzovic, online version). For
further discussion on Woolf and Flaubert see Sullam and Patey.
In the opening chapter of Il patto narrativo (which, with its strong focus on Frye has been a source of
inspiration for my reflections on Woolf and genre), Giovanna Rosa quotes the Russian formalist Jury Tynjanov, who in 1929 observes how “during hard times, the reader is resorted to each time the literary word
comes to a stillstand” (35). Interestingly enough, in “Anon [and] The Reader” Woolf writes: “in times of
public crisis, the writer exclaims: I can write no more” (E6 601); it is from such remarks, coupled with her
concerned interest for the bafflement created by new media (“A new art comes upon us so surprisingly that
we sit silent, recognizing before we take the measure,” E6 595), that her understanding of the reader’s role
and function within the literary system originate.
Prose, fiction, novel: these three terms would deserve an essay by themselves. Needless to say, their slippery
definition did not escape Woolf ’s sensibility: once again Woolf resonates with Frye, who, in the introduction to the Anatomy of Criticism, writes: “We have, as usual, no word for a work of prose fiction, so the
word ‘novel’ does duty for everything, and thereby loses its only real meaning as the name of a genre” (13).
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Michail. “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel.” 1938. The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays. 1981 Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 2006. 3-40.
Banfield, Ann. Unspeakable Sentences. Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. London: Routledge,
1982.
Bowlby, Rachel. “The Dotted Line.” Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 1997. 137-148.
Caughie, Pamela. “Ellipses: Figuring the Feminisms in Three Guineas.” Textualizing the Feminine. Ed. Shari
Benstock. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1991. 123-62.
Flaubert, Gustave, Correspondances. 4 vols. Ed. Jean Bruneau. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2000.
Lausberg, Heinrich. Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Studies. 1960. Leiden; Boston;
Koeln: Brill, 1998.
Oxford English Dictionary. Web. Accessed 10 January 2012 <www.oed.com>.
Patey, Caroline. “Flaubert’s Ghosts: The sage of Croisset and British Modernity.” Cross-Channel: French Literature and British Culture. Ed. Andrew Radford. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Philippe, Gilles. “L’invention de la prose.” La Langue littéraire: Une histoire de la prose en France de Gustave Flaubert à Claude Simon. Ed. Gilles Philippe and Julien Piat. Paris: Fayard, 2009. 323-44
Ratcliffe, Krista. “A Rhetoric of Textual Feminism: (Re)Reading the Emotional in Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas.” Rhetoric Review 11.2 (Spring, 1993): 400-417.
Rosa, Giovanna. Il patto narrativo: La fondazione della civiltà romanzesca in Italia. Milano: il Saggiatore-Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, 2008
Sullam, Sara. “‘In the direction of prose’: Virginia Woolf and the Question of Poetry.” Dissertation, Università
degli Studi di Milano, 2009.
——. “‘It is all in oratio obliqua’: appunti sulla ricezione inglese dello style indirect libre.” Letteratura e letterature
4 (2010): 135-50.
The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short-title Catalog. Compiled and edited by Julia King and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic; foreword by Laila Miletic-Vejzovic; introduction by Diane F. Gillespie. Web. Accessed 10 January 2012 <http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/OnlineBooks/woolflibrary/woolflibraryonline.htm>.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNellie. New York,
NY: Harcourt Brace, 1977–1984.
——. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. A. McNeillie (vols. 1-4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5-6), London:
Hogarth Press, 1986-2011.
——. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. London: Hogarth Press,
1975-1980.
DO NOT FEED THE BIRDS:
NIGHT AND DAY AND THE DEFENCE OF THE REALM ACT
by Ian Blyth
F
or quite some time, it seems, critical orthodoxy has had it that Virginia Woolf ’s
second novel, Night and Day (1919), has nothing to say about the events and experiences of the First World War.1 If the topic is raised, all too often the response has
been to brush it aside, or to refer to Katherine Mansfield’s damning review in The Athenaeum on 21 November 1919, and especially her closing paragraph: “We had thought
that this world was vanished for ever, that it was impossible to find on the great ocean
of literature a ship that was unaware of what has been happening. Yet here is Night and
Day, fresh, new and exquisite, a novel in the tradition of the English novel. In the midst
of our admiration it makes us feel old and chill: we had never thought to look upon its
like again!” (1227).2 Once this has been done, critical orthodoxy would have us move
on: nothing to see here, et cetera. But then, being “unaware of ” something and being
uninterested in it are two very different things. Consider for instance Woolf ’s comment
in March 1917 concerning contemporary novels about the conflict: “we do not like the
war in fiction,” she wrote, explaining that this “prejudice” derived from “the feeling that
the vast events now shaping across the Channel are towering over us too closely and too
tremendously to be worked into fiction without a painful jolt in the perspective” (“New
Novels” 104). And even if we accept that Woolf did not intend to write directly about
the war in Night and Day, and the above suggests that she did not, there remains the possibility that her novel still bears the imprint of small but significant traces of the war—a
“little admixture of the alien and external,” as she described it in a leading article in The
Times Literary Supplement on 10 April 1919 (“Modern Novels” 189). In a 1989 essay in
the Journal of Modern Literature, for example, Helen Wussow used a Bakhtinian analysis
of the language in the novel to suggest that “Night and Day is about conflict,” and that
“In the contentions involving her characters, Woolf not only reflects the hostilities of the
First World War, but she also reworks our idea of war so that we perceive discord within
dialogue” (Wussow 71-2). It has also been suggested that the novel’s concluding chapter,
which takes place during “a June night” (535), is set just before the outbreak of war on 4
August 1914.3 Indeed, the motif of lamplight which runs through chapter XXXIV (as it
does to a lesser extent through the novel as a whole)—“The lamps were lit” (528) is how it
begins, Mary’s “light” is seen “burning behind a thin yellow blind” (532), and towards the
close Katharine and Ralph look back at Katharine’s house, “the friendly place, burning its
lamps” (535)—might be compared in this context to the comments of the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey (Viscount Grey of Fallodon), in his account of 3 August 1914: “It was
getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking.
My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words: ‘The lamps are going out all over
Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time’” (ii.20). Grey’s memoirs were not
published until 1925, of course, so it cannot be said that Woolf was alluding to his comments in Night and Day, but that does not stop us from taking note of the similarity in
Do Not Feed the Birds
279
the imagery, and of its reoccurrence in Jacob’s Room (1922), where “The lamps of London
uphold the dark as upon the points of burning bayonets” (131). There is, clearly, more
than one way to read writing about the First World War.
With the above in mind, what I would like to look at here is the possibility that
in the actions and interactions of the characters in the Night and Day we might see
something of the war on the home front, as it was experienced by Woolf and other dissenting non-combatants. One of the key “admixtures” in this context, I would suggest,
was the raft of emergency legislation introduced via the “Defence of the Realm Act.”
The first “Defence of the Realm Act” was brought in on 7 August 1914, three days into
the war; an amending act was added on 28 August, and on 27 November these two acts
were brought together into the “Defence of the Realm Consolidation Act, 1914”—this
“Consolidation” act repealed the two earlier acts, and it is the act to which most historians are referring when they speak of the “Defence of the Realm Act,” or “DORA” for
short (see Bone 1-2; Hansard).4 In essence, DORA established the terms under which
the civil legal system would operate for the duration of the war. Its initial provisions
were relatively brief, and limited in their scope: no-one was to lend assistance to or communicate with the enemy; the safety of the home forces was to be secured; the Army
and Admiralty could gain access to or acquire private lands and waterways, and also
avail themselves of some or all the output of any factory (or indeed the factory itself ) in
which “arms, ammunition, or warlike stores or equipment, or any articles required for
the production thereof, are manufactured”; and finally, both courts-martial and courts
of summary jurisdiction (i.e. magistrates and sheriffs courts) were empowered to enforce
these laws (see “Defence” 1-5). However, from the outset DORA also had a potentially
much wider reach, as was made clear in its opening sentence: “His Majesty in Council
has power during the continuance of the present war to issue regulations for securing the
public safety and the defence of the realm” (Bone 2; “Defence” 1). In practice, this gave
the government (via the Privy Council) an unprecedented degree of power, so much so
that by the end of the conflict eighty-six Orders-in-Council had been issued under the
auspices of DORA, bringing into law two hundred and sixty-one Defence of the Realm
Regulations (Bone 3). These regulations ranged from familiar provisions, such as the
imposition of the blackout (see “Defence” 77-9, 477-98), and numerous rules and orders
concerning the production and rationing of the food supply (see esp. “Defence” 261325),5 to the more obscure. It became an offence, for example, “If any person…without
lawful authority or excuse kills, wounds, molests, or takes any carrier or homing pigeon
not belonging to him” (93); and also, infamously, an order was issued to “prohibit whistling or the making of any other loud noise for the purpose of summoning cabs between
the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. within the administrative County of London” (499; see
also 80). The implications of all of this for civil liberties were profound. As the historian
Andrew G. Bone notes, there had been “no parallel in any previous national emergency.
A string of notoriously oppressive laws had been enacted in the 1790s to counteract the
influence of the “British Jacobins.” But neither the Pitt nor the later Ministries of the
French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras had wielded a statutory power as sweeping
and general as that conferred on the executive by DORA” (5; see also 10-24). Tellingly,
when the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, was advised in July 1915 that it might be
desirable for parliament to confirm the legality of the Defence of the Realm Regulations,
280
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
he decided against this on the grounds that there was “some danger in suggesting that we
have exceeded our powers” (qtd in Bone 2).
The early years of the war were of course a troubled time for Woolf—it is unlikely,
for instance, that she would have been aware in the summer of 1915 of the reaction to
Clive Bell’s anti-war pamphlet, Peace at Once (burned by order of the Lord Mayor of London)—but by early 1916 her health was returning and she was becoming occupied with
the question of applications for exemption from military service for Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, David Garnett and others (as she would be again in October 1917, in the case
of Leonard Woolf ); there were discussions of the rights and wrongs of conscientious objection; and towards the end of the year she was reading (although not enjoying) Bertrand
Russell’s lectures on pacifism (see Lee 345-7; Spalding 147; Glendinning 200-3). These
were all matters that were addressed in one or more of the rules and regulations of the Act.
1916 was also the year in which Woolf began writing Night and Day. This is significant,
because in addition to the main narrative thread of a seemingly conventional drawingroom comedy, there are much darker currents running through the novel—and not just in
its conflict-ridden language. Consider, for example, all of the surveillance and subterfuge
that takes place. Ralph Denham is an inveterate watcher of people. When he does so in
his lunch-hour in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (163), or from the window of coaching inn in Lincoln (240-1)—probably the White Hart on Bailgate, by the way—this seems innocent
enough; but then what are we to make of his lurking, rather sinisterly, beneath the lamppost across the street from the Hilbery’s house in Cheyne Walk (439)? Katharine Hilbery’s
movements, as well as those of her on/off fiancé William Rodney, and her ingénue cousin
Cassandra Otway, are also under observation from the equally tenacious, and if anything
even more sinister, Aunt Celia. When Aunt Celia confronts Katharine “in private” (426)
in the drawing-room about Cassandra and Rodney, and then, after Katharine has made
her aunt leave and tells the newly arrived Rodney what has been happening—“‘She has
been spying upon us,’ she said, ‘following us about London, overhearing what people are
saying’” (432)—and subsequently goes on to reject Rodney’s renewed proposal of marriage
and to inform him “Cassandra loves you more than I do” (434), the much discussed Cassandra, we learn, has all this time been eavesdropping—or should that be spying?—behind
a curtain (426-35). Even Cassandra’s and Rodney’s letters to each other, while not actually
written in invisible ink (prohibited by Regulation 24a on 10 May 1916—see “Defence”
96), nevertheless have a certain clandestine undercurrent to them—or at least on Rodney’s
(and Katharine’s) part they do. Might we see in all of this some echoes of how it felt to be
one of the suspect minority who did not support the war? The rigidity with which the rules
and regulations of the upper-middle-class drawing-room were observed, and the manner
in which the emergency powers of a supposedly democratic nation state were enforced, are
not as dissimilar and as unconnected as might at first appear. Indeed, Woolf pursued a similar line of argument to this in the 1930s with Flush (1933) and The Years (1937) and so on.
To continue with this theme of parallels with the 1930s, we might also observe that
the three central characters in Night and Day’s ménage à cinq are all, to some extent or
other, “outsiders”: Mary Datchett, Ralph Denham and Katharine Hilbery, each in their
own fashion, and each with varying degrees of success, cultivate a studied “indifference”
to the conventions of family and social life; and they share with Peggy from The Years the
desire that they might each somehow find a way of “living differently” (see TG 309-14;
Do Not Feed the Birds
281
TY 371). (The other two other characters in this ménage, William Rodney and Cassandra
Otway, while certainly eccentric, perhaps fall a little short of the mark for true “outsider”
status.) Of course, we could argue that in the case of Night and Day this is simply a reflection of Woolf ’s experiences in the early years of Bloomsbury, a time when “everything was
going to be different. Everything was on trial” (“Old Bloomsbury” [1921-2] 185). And
yes, in part it is. But when viewed from the perspective of her work in the 1930s, it becomes apparent that there might also be another dimension to these aspects of her novel.
Even if Mary, Ralph and Katharine cannot be said to be actively demonstrating how one
might “prevent war” (cf. TG 153 and passim), their actions nevertheless appear to point
towards the expression of some form of oblique protest against the war. Of the three main
protagonists, Ralph’s outsider status is arguably the most fully developed. He habitually
takes his meals separately from the rest of his family, for instance (in the company of a
“tame and, apparently, decrepit” pet rook, no less—see 20-31; quote is from 21); and in
chapter XVIII he talks of giving up his career to go and live in a cottage and “write the
history of the English village from Saxon days to the present time” (see 228-35; quote
is from 234)—an act of renunciation as abstract and timeless as the sentiment admitted
to by Woolf two decades later in Three Guineas (1938): “still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child’s ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm
tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes”
(313). Ralph also has an interest in, and an affinity with, London’s sparrows. We get to see
this in chapter XIII, when Mary encounters Ralph during his “lunch hour…in Lincoln’s
Inn Fields”, and she joins him as he feeds the sparrows “their daily scattering of bread
crumbs” (163). Ralph’s attempts to “get [a sparrow] to settle on [his] arm” are thwarted
by “A child…bowling its hoop through the concourse of birds”, and he complains that
the gardens should be free of children so people like him can enjoy the company of sparrows and other birds in peace. “London’s a fine place to live in”, Mary concludes, ignoring
Ralph’s complaints. “I believe I could sit and watch people all day long. I like my fellowcreatures” (164-5). The focus here has shifted to people, not birds, but in the following
chapter, when she remembers this scene, Mary’s thoughts keep turning back to Ralph’s
sparrows (see 170-1, 175-6). We see much later (in chapter XXXIII) that the thought of
Ralph’s pet rook assures Katharine of his “capacity…to alleviate [the sufferings of humanity]” (507); Mary’s memory in chapter XIV of Ralph feeding the Lincoln’s Inn sparrows
appears to also confirm his status as an early prototype of the outsider.
We can reasonably accurately date the composition of this scene: the original manuscript draft of chapter XIII was written around November 1916, and aside from one or
two differences which we’ll come to shortly, it is fairly close to the published text.6 In the
months that followed, London’s sparrows came under attack from much fiercer antagonists than boys with hoops. So-called “Rat and Sparrow” clubs were being revived across
the country; and in January 1917 The Times carried articles and letters on the subject of
“Destructive Birds” and “The Sparrow Pest”, in which sparrows were cast in the role of the
“enemy” of agriculture.7 On 11 June 1917, the following report appeared:
Feeding Birds With Crusts
Mrs. Sophia G. Stuart, 76, of Knaphill, was at Woking on Saturday fined £2
for feeding sparrows with bread.
282
CONTRADICTORY WOOLF
A police sergeant said he found a quantity of bread cut into small pieces
scattered at the front and back of Mrs. Stuart’s house in Englefield-road and he
collected half a pound of these pieces. When he spoke to the defendant she said
she had fed the birds for years and would continue to do so.
In her defence Mrs. Stuart said she was a member of all sorts of bird societies. All she did was to use the bottom crusts of the loaves, which were frequently
unclean, and also crusts which she could not eat. Bread was not wasted if given
to fellow creatures whether they went on two legs or four. “The birds are my
children,” she added, “and I have a dog which is my son, I have nothing else to
love since my poor boy was killed in Mesopotamia.”
Mrs. Stuart had fallen foul of the “Wheat, Rye and Rice (Restriction) Order, 1917”,
which had come into force on 20 April (replacing the “Waste of Wheat Order, 1916”);
the order reserved these commodities “for human food”, and stated that “No person shall
waste or permit to be wasted any flour or other article [containing flour]” (see DRM
278-9).8 Two pounds was a lot of money in 1917—the equivalent of a month’s wages for
a “housemaid,” for example.9 If Woolf had read this, it is likely to have struck her as an
extremely harsh penalty for such a small act of kindness—an example of the arbitrary and
pervasive brutality of war, perhaps. And there’s the question: did Woolf read this report?
The indicator is that expression “fellow creatures”. It is used by Mary in the published
novel (as we have seen), but it does not appear in the manuscript, where Mary uses the
expression “fellow men” instead (see “M22”). Why, and when, did Woolf change this sentence? The expression “fellow-creatures” also appears in The Voyage Out (1915) (199) and
Jacob’s Room (96), as well as in A Room of One’s Own (1929) (90). It occurs just the once in
all four of these texts. Was this merely a stylistic tic which Woolf ’s first three novels (and
A Room of One’s Own) had in common, we have to ask ourselves? Or, in the case of Night
and Day, did Woolf read the above report in The Times, notice the similarities in the description of the case to the events described in her previously drafted chapter, and go back
(possibly to the now lost typescript copy of her novel) and revise this crucial expression
from “fellow men” to “fellow-creatures”? It is likely we will never know, but there is surely
enough ambiguity to allow for either scenario; and when this is considered alongside the
various other instances in which her novel appears to be making some sort of oblique
reference to the war, it suggests that there may well be a good deal more to be said about
Night and Day and the First World War than critical orthodoxy would have us believe.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
See, for example, Levenback 27 n. 13, 115. Night and Day is also not discussed in any great detail in
Hussey’s Virginia Woolf and War, although in his opening chapter Hussey does highlight several links between the novel and war, especially those discussed in Wussow—see below, and Hussey, “Living in a War
Zone” 8.
See also Coroneos 198-9, 205.
Audience question. Glasgow, 10 June 2011.
Two more amending acts (one curbing the application of the Act in courts-martial, the other controlling
the supply of munitions) were added in March 1915; a third amendment, relating to the “Liquor Trade”,
was added in May 1915; these were followed, in December 1916, and March and June 1918 respectively,
by another three separate but related acts: the “Defence of the Realm (Acquisition of Land) Act, 1916”; the
Do Not Feed the Birds
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
283
“Defence of the Realm (Food Profits) Act, 1918”; and the “Defence of the Realm (Beans, Peas and Pulse
Orders) Act, 1918” (see Bone 1-2; Hansard).
More regulations in this area were to follow, as Bone (3 n. 4) notes: “With the publication of the sixth edition [of the DRM] in September 1918, the flood of orders relating to the supply and production of food
and war material were hived off into 3 different volumes”.
Chapter XIII was not dated in the draft, but the opening page of chapter XII was dated 11 October, and
chapter XIV was begun on 28 November 1916 (see “M22”).
See “A Correspondent” on “Destructive Birds”; letters to the editor on this subject by Young, Kay Robinson, Tomlinson, Prickett, and “J. E. B”; Chamberlain on “The Sparrow Pest”; and a letter to the editor on
this subject by Gill. See also the letters to the editor on the subject of “Birds and Orchard Pests” by Morley,
Gillman, and Kershaw; plus “Our Agricultural Correspondent”—especially the two paragraphs headed
“The Sparrow Plague”.
Immediately above the report about Mrs. Stuart was another, “Former London Mayor Fined £50”, detailing the prosecution of “John William Lorden, ex-mayor of Wandsworth, a contractor, and a director of
the Aerated Bread Company, [who] was fined £50, with costs, for unlawfully using bread otherwise than
as human food”. “Evidence was given that, on 18 May, three sacks of bread, weighing 2 cwt., were sent
from London…for feeding poultry.” Lorden’s defence counsel “admitted that some of the bread was fit for
human consumption”.
Cf. Vanessa Bell to Virginia Woolf, 24 September 1917: “I want a house parlourmaid, but there is practically no parlour work. She need not wait at table, only bring in the courses when I ring. Otherwise it is all
housemaids work…wages I suppose about £24”—qtd in Lee 354-5.
Works Cited
“A Correspondent.” “Destructive Birds: The Enemies to Crops.” The Times. 18 January 1917. 11.
Bell, Clive. Peace at Once. Manchester and London: National Labour Press, 1915.
Bone, Andrew G. “Beyond the Rule of Law: Aspects of the Defence of Realm Acts and Regulations, 19141918.” Doctoral dissertation. McMaster University, 1994. <http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/1786>
Chamberlain, G. H. “The Sparrow Pest.” The Times. 26 January 1917. 6.
Coroneos, Con. “Flies and Violets in Katherine Mansfield.” Women’s Fiction and the Great War. Ed. Suzanne
Raitt and Trudi Tate, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 197-218.
Defence of the Realm Manual. 4th edn. London: HMSO, 31 May 1917.
“Feeding Birds with Crusts.” The Times. 11 June 1917. 4.
“Former London Mayor Fined £50.” The Times. 11 June 1917. 4.
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Gillman, Arthur N. Letter to the editor. The Times. 11 June 1917. 4.
Glendinning, Victoria. Leonard Woolf: A Life. London: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
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Hussey, Mark. “Living in a War Zone: An Introduction to Virginia Woolf as a War Novelist.” Virginia Woolf and
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——. ed. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality and Myth. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991.
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Levenback, Karen L. Virginia Woolf and the Great War. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999.
Mansfield, Katherine. “A Ship Comes into the Harbour.” The Athenaeum. 21 November 1919. 1227
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APPROACHES TO WAR AND PEACE IN WOOLF:
“A CHAPTER ON THE FUTURE”
by Karen L. Levenback
B
ut, you may say that nearly twenty years after the publication of Mark Hussey’s collection Virginia Woolf and War and more than ten years after the publication of my
own Virginia Woolf and the Great War there is little left to say on the contradictory
topics of war and peace in regard to Virginia Woolf.
Yet, interest in the topics continues to grow and is
of international concern (as seen, for example, in
Jane Goldman and Bryony Randall’s forthcoming
collection, Virginia Woolf in Context). Like Virginia
Woolf, speaking of the Great War in the first decade
after the Armistice, we can see, in the shadow of
9/11 and the second decade of the 21st century, that
there has been “[a] shift in the scale…ma[king] us
perhaps too vividly conscious of the present” (CE2
157). These words, taken from “How It Strikes a
Contemporary” (1925), can clearly be applied to
today’s world, reflecting internationalism and the
fluidity of boundaries that are now the currency of
post-modernist/twenty-first-century criticism, and
it is in the contemporary approaches to the war
This poster was part of the National Student writings of Virginia Woolf herein assembled that
Strike Against War on 13 April 1935, commemorating the day that the United States we confront both her cultural realities and our own.
entered the Great War. Courtesy of The Drawn from Jane Wood’s edited collection, The
Bancroft Library, University of California, Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf’s Writings
Berkeley.
(2010), this roundtable is composed of a representative from each of four distinct yet blurred lines of discussion.1
With the ubiquitous presence of war, in whatever context and according to whatever
grotesquely varied definition, interest in the topic and its realities has burgeoned and its
study accepted into the canon, not only in the English-speaking world, but internationally; a reality made the more apparent at academic conferences, in college classrooms, in
published writings, in popular culture, and on the Internet. Technology not only underscores advances in the war machine, as Donna Haraway and Mark Hussey have made
clear, but suggests the international connectiveness and reach of Woolf and her ideas.
Consider the following Internet search results for “Woolf and war”:
GOOGLE SCHOLAR SEARCH RESULTS
31,000 (1 Feb. 2009)—42,000 (21 May 2011)[—44,300 (30 July 2011)] 2
WORLDCAT SEARCH RESULTS
500 (1 Feb. 2009)—1074 (21 May 2011)[—1,151 (30 July 2011)]
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286
GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS
4,230,000 (1 June 2011)—[4,820,000 (30 July 2011)]
While the numerical value and signification of Internet search-frequency are problematic,
having as much statistical value as we are willing to grant, they do suggest a continued
growth in concern and engagement both within the scholarly community and outside,
both before and after the conference dates.
We no longer countenance Leonard Woolf ’s comment that his wife was “the least
political animal…since Aristotle invented the definition” or Quentin Bell’s belief that
Woolf ’s interest in the war was negligible, evidenced not only in published writings (including those of well-known scholars around the world3), but in course offerings and in
the topics covered in this conference—including two sessions on war—in addition to this
roundtable on the subject. Woolf is no longer seen as existing in an ahistorical dimension
and we no longer have to argue that there is a place for noncombatants and particularly
women in the history of war. We see the topic addressed in pedagogical approaches and
Internet exchanges on the Woolf listserv and elsewhere.4 We see articles and books on the
subject, including, most recently, The Theme of War and Peace in Virginia Woolf ’s Writings:
Essays on Her Political Philosophy (2010), and before that anthologies and studies by Margaret Higonnet, Wayne Chapman and Janet Manson, and Allyson Booth.
The time has now come for the interconnectiveness of Woolf, women, and war to
be recognized as a viable standard for analysis and action in the twenty-first century. As
I write in Virginia Woolf and the Great War, “Our own historical moment suggests that
a reading of Woolf must take to account not only how the context of war informs her
life and her work, but also how her life and work inform our understanding of war. The
blurring that was part of Woolf ’s project in the years between the wars has taken over
our vision of the world today, now that war itself has been deconstructed in the media
and its horror integrated into the pattern of our lives” (158). The question is no longer if
women in general and Woolf in particular can inform the discussion, but rather how far
and in what terms. Using approaches that blur historical parameters, each individual on
the panel gives voice respectively to explorations of image, trauma, pedagogy, and gendered politics. By isolating these four major approaches to Woolf ’s war writing, the panel
eschews any effort to tell the whole story, while clearly pointing to both contemporary
modes of seeing and those that may be applied in the future to a cultural history that
recognizes the centrality of Woolf, women, and war.
The first speaker, Stuart Clarke, represents “Woolf, War and Image,” linking meaning conveyed and tensions between aspects of image and the culture of war.5 Central to
Clarke’s contribution is the violence that anticipates, represents, and follows imaging of
war—and how Woolf informs the lived experience of both combatants and noncombatants obscured by the series of snapshots considered “history.” Deep concern with image
is a starting point for Clarke’s contribution, which suggests a deep appreciation of both
“visual rhetoric” and the face of war. Moreover, an extraordinary, empathic response to the
actual torture imposed and experienced in military action harkens back to Julia Briggs’s
characterization of World War 1 as fought largely by “civilians in uniform” (93). Referencing the torture and killing of a woman in Chechnya by a “former army officer” in a
Approaches to War and Peace
287
Guardian article (Tom Parfitt) and Eileen Barrett’s findings that 90% of the casualties of
wars in the 1990s were civilians, Clarke reaffirms his belief that “[o]nce again, as so often,
Virginia Woolf still has something relevant to say to us today” (Wood 118).
The second speaker, Lolly Ockerstrom, representing “Woolf, War, and Trauma,” addresses the g