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Virginia Woolf and the Natural WorldSelected Papers from the

Twentieth Annual InternationalConference on Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf and the Natural World

Selected Papers from theTwentieth Annual InternationalConference on Virginia Woolf

CLEMSON UNIVERSITYDIGITAL PRESS

Georgetown CollegeGeorgetown, Kentucky

3–6 June, 2010

Edited by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman

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Works produced at Clemson University by the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, including Th e South Carolina Review and its themed series “Virginia Woolf International,” “Ireland in the Arts and Humanities,” and “James Dickey Revisited” may be found at our Web site: http://www.clemson.edu/cedp. Contact the director at 864-656-5399 for information.

Every eff ort has been made to trace all copyright-holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the fi rst opportunity.

Copyright 2011 by Clemson UniversityISBN: 978-0-9835339-0-0

Published by Clemson University Digital Press at the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina. Produced with the Adobe Creative Suite CS5 and Microsoft Word. Th is book is set in Adobe Garamond Pro and was printed by Standard Register.

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To order copies, contact the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina 29634-0522. An order form is available at the digital press Web site: http://www.clemson.edu/caah/cedp/SCRTh emed_Iss_VWoolf.htm.

Cover design by Christina Cook.Frontispiece by Cathy Frank.

CLEMSON UNIVERSITYDIGITAL PRESS

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Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman • Introduction to Woolf and the Natural World ....viiAcknowledgments .........................................................................................................xiList of Abbreviations ....................................................................................................xii

Bonnie Kime Scott • Ecofeminism, Holism, and the Search for Natural Order in Woolf .... 1Carrie Rohman • “We Make Life”: Vibration, Aesthetics, and the Inhuman in

Th e Waves ........................................................................................................... 12Diana Swanson • “Th e Real World”: Virginia Woolf and Ecofeminism ............................. 24Cecil Woolf • Virginia and Leonard, as I Remember Th em ............................................ 35Elisa Kay Sparks • “Everything tended to set itself in a garden”: Virginia Woolf ’s Literary

and Quotidian Flowers: A Bar-Graphical Approach ................................................ 42Beth Rigel Daugherty • Taking Her Fences: Th e Equestrian Virginia Woolf .................... 61Laci Mattison • Th e Metaphysics of Flowers in Th e Waves: Virginia Woolf ’s “Seven-

Sided Flower” and Henri Bergson’s Intuition ........................................................... 71Erin Penner • Crowding Clarissa’s Garden ..................................................................... 78Rachel Zlatkin• Th e Flesh of Citizenship: Red Flowers Grew .......................................... 84Jane Lilienfeld • Th e Besieged Garden: Nature in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway and

Willa Cather’s One of Ours .................................................................................. 90Rebecca McNeer • Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian: Swimming and Diving as

Metaphors for Writing ............................................................................................ 95Patrizia Muscogiuri • “Th is, I fancy, must be the sea”: Th alassic Aesthetics in Virginia

Woolf ’s Writing ................................................................................................... 101Gill Lowe • Wild Swimming ...................................................................................... 108Vara Neverow • Th e Woolf, the Horse, and the Fox: Recurrent Motifs in Jacob’s Room

and Orlando ...................................................................................................... 116Jane Goldman • Th e Dogs that Th erefore Woolf Follows: Some Canine Sources for A

Room of One’s Own in Nature and Art .............................................................. 125Diane Gillespie • “Th e Bird is the Word”: Virginia Woolf and W.H. Hudson, Visionary

Ornithologist ....................................................................................................... 133Jeanne Dubino • Evolution, History, and Flush; or, Th e Origin of Spaniels ................... 143Kathryn Simpson • “Lappin and Lapinova”: A Woolf in Hare’s Clothing? ..................... 151Alice Lowe • “A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage”: Dining Well in Virginia

Woolf ’s Life and Work .......................................................................................... 157Kate Sedon • Moments of Aging: Revising Mother Nature in Virginia Woolf ’s

Mrs. Dalloway ................................................................................................... 163Barbara Lonnquist • Homeless in Nature: Solitary Trampings and Shared Errantry in

Cornwall, 1905 .................................................................................................. 169Xiaoqin Cao • “Walking over the bridge in a willow pattern plate”: Virginia Woolf

and the Exotic Landscapes .................................................................................... 174Diana Royer • Mining with the Head: Virginia Woolf, Henry David Th oreau, and

Exploring the Self Th rough Nature ........................................................................ 180Catherine W. Hollis • Virginia Woolf as Mountaineer ................................................. 184Verita Sriratana • “It was an uncertain spring”: Reading Weather in Th e Years. ............. 191

Table of Contents

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Elise Swinford • Transforming Nature: Orlando as Elegy ............................................. 196Derek Ryan • “Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us”: Digging Granite

and Chasing Rainbows with Virginia Woolf .......................................................... 202Dominic Scheck • Sundered Waters: Isolated Consciousness and Ostensible Communion

in Woolf ’s Narration ............................................................................................ 208Emily Hinnov • “To give the moment whole”: Th e Nature of Time and Cosmic (Comm)

unity in Virginia Woolf ’s Th e Waves......................................................................214Wayne Chapman • Spengler’s Th e Decline of the West and Intellectual Quackery:

Checking the Climate with Leonard Woolf and W.B Yeats ...................................... 221Luke Reader • Listening-in, Tuning Out: Leonard Woolf ’s Criticism of the BBC During

the 1930s ............................................................................................................ 228

Notes on Contributors .............................................................................................. 236Conference Program .................................................................................................. 240

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by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman

For the 20th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, people from around the world gathered at Georgetown College, amid the bluegrass and horses of Cen-tral Kentucky, to explore the theme Virginia Woolf and the Natural World. Th e call

for papers included a quotation from Th e Waves (1931)— “Sharp stripes of shadow lay on the grass, and the dew dancing on the tips of the fl owers and leaves made the garden like a mosaic of single sparks not yet formed into one whole. Th e birds, whose breasts were specked canary and rose, now sang a strain or two together, wildly, like skaters rollicking arm-in-arm, and were suddenly silent, breaking asunder”—that led scholars, students, common readers, and creative writers in myriad directions as they explored nature in the life and writing of Virginia Woolf. Panelists considered the nature of patriarchy, nature in the city, theories and philosophies of nature, nature as transformative, and science and technology as gateways into the natural world, among a host of other topics. As can be seen from the conference program (archived at http://www.georgetowncollege.edu/Departments/English/Woolf/) and these Selected Papers, nature was vital to Woolf ’s life experience and her conception and development of a modernist, feminist poetics.

Th e conference included an array of special presentations, many of which we are pleased to publish here. In the fi rst of three keynote addresses, Bonnie Kime Scott dis-cussed how Woolf ’s natural imagery, particularly as framed by marginal female characters, and her representations of earth goddess fi gures off er holistic, ordered moments. Th is pattern resonates with various ecofeminisms, which Scott presented with an eye toward providing theoretical structure for discussions to follow. Scott also provided an invaluable synthesis of previous scholarship on Woolf and nature. Carrie Rohman explored how Th e Waves describes the nonhuman dynamism of vibrational forces at work in the human characters, Jinny in particular. Th rough this reading, she discussed Jinny’s “creativity” as something rooted in our animal nature and connected to cosmic patterns. Rohman’s ap-proach suggests that the novel acknowledges life itself is an artistic performance, a claim that takes Woolf ’s posthumanism quite seriously. Closing the conference was Diana Swanson, who off ered ideas about how Woolf ’s writing can help further the quest to develop the non-anthropocentric and non-androcentric understandings of the world nec-essary to solving the environmental crises of the 21st century. Swanson off ered inspiring ideas about how what we do as Woolf scholars and teachers can help solve the ecological problems under discussion throughout the conference.

Elisa Kay Sparks’s special presentation provided a botanical encyclopedia, or index, to plant references in Woolf ’s works, which she found serving “as literal natural organ-isms, as artifi cial renderings of the natural, and as fi gurative strategies.” Accompanied by dozens of beautiful photographs and an architectural blueprint for a Virginia Woolf gar-den based on the frequency of specifi c fl owers, trees, bushes, and fruits in Woolf ’s works, Sparks’s talk set the stage perfectly for the array of conference panels to come. Similarly, Beth Rigel Daugherty shared her discovery of Woolf ’s surprisingly numerous references

Introduction

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to horses. Finding “cart horses, dray horses, race horses, plough horses, runaway horses, dead horses,” and many others galloping across the pages of the novels, letters, and dia-ries, Daugherty discovered the “Equestrian Virginia Woolf,” one “who might, after all, be at home in the horse capital of the world” (nearby Lexington, Kentucky). We were also honored to have with us Cecil Woolf, publisher of the Bloomsbury Heritage monograph series, whose talk on his memories of his aunt and uncle was moving, funny, and also thought-provoking for reminding us that Virginia and Leonard Woolf, while “two people . . . whose lives have become public property,” were also “real human beings, not charac-ters in some up-market soap opera.”

Gardens, fl owers, and parks provided rich fodder for several conference papers. In analyzing the seven-sided fl ower in Th e Waves, Laci Mattison connects Woolf ’s philoso-phy to Henri Bergson’s concepts of duration and intuition. Images like the fl ower reveal Woolf ’s use of assemblage to create something at once multiple and whole, and Woolf ’s conveying of our experience of time that goes beyond the self and even the human. Erin Penner complicates our understanding of nature in Woolf, suggesting that the natural is far from synonymous with “wild freedom” in her works. Rather, the garden in Mrs. Dal-loway (1925) is “a continuation of the social scene[s] that take place indoors, rather than an escape from it.” Rachel Zlatkin argues that in Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith’s connectedness to nature aff ords him a means of signifi cation denied him by the rhetoric of post-war England. Zlatkin draws upon ecocriticism to demonstrate how green space, such as Regent’s Park, may be contrived to heal or harm society’s most vulnerable citizens. Jane Lilienfeld also perceives the connections between natural imagery and war. In her paper on the work of Woolf and Willa Cather, Lilienfeld shows how the landscape at this historical moment is “perfect in propaganda” but “savaged in battle.”

Moving from land to water, Rebecca McNeer highlights the numerous references in Woolf ’s oeuvre to swimming and diving as metaphors for writing. Whether diving be-neath the surface to develop an idea, likening the rhythm of writing to that of the sea, or describing her brain as variously damp, bubbling, boiling, or freshly fl owing, Woolf found water imagery particularly well suited to depicting and understanding her creative pro-cess. Patrizia Muscogiuri also addresses Woolf ’s water and sea references. Taken together, she states, they constitute “a groundbreaking thalassic aesthetics” instrumental in shaping Woolf ’s political, philosophical, and feminist perspectives. Indeed, Gill Lowe examines the “wild swimming” of Rupert Brooke and Woolf, and defi nes this as “the liberation of entering what might be seen as an outlawed element; a secret ‘skinny dipping.’”

Animals large and small roam throughout the Selected Papers. Vara Neverow con-textualizes the many references to horses and foxes in Jacob’s Room (1922) and Orlando (1928), noting that both animals “are intrinsically categorized as ‘Other,’ and references to them are embedded within discourses that justify abuse and persecution.” Neverow also considers each novel’s more subversive or metaphorical references to horses, which have strong sexual connotations, and foxes, which come to represent freedom, wildness, and danger. In her paper on canine sources for A Room of One’s Own (1929), Jane Goldman discusses Woolf ’s adaptation of and departure from historical confi gurations of dogs in literature and art. Neither linking disparate species wholly nor reifying the ruptures be-tween them, Woolf instead tests and complicates the human-animal boundary. Diane Gil-lespie gives us a sense of Woolf ’s “familiarity and appreciation” for the work of naturalist

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W. H. Hudson, and specifi cally links the two writers through their intellectual attraction to birds. Jeanne Dubino’s close look at the “canine context” of Flush (1933) highlights the specifi c role of the spaniel. She notes that Woolf ’s “serious and whimsical” account of the dog’s origin includes, among other things, “a deep appreciation and knowledge of Darwinism.” With similar attention to historical contexts, Kathryn Simpson shows how elements of “Lappin and Lapinova,” with its animalized fantasy world, off er ways to inter-pret the story in relation to “Woolf ’s experience as a writer, her perception of her work in relation to the literary market and her political perspective, especially in relation to war.”

Writers continue to explore aspects of Woolf, the body, and bodily experience. Alice Lowe updates our view of Woolf ’s relationship to eating by emphasizing her apprecia-tion and enjoyment of food and her own pleasurable experience of cooking. With special consideration of Woolf ’s letters and diaries, Lowe suggests that “Woolf ’s priorities, her loves, were writing and reading, her friends and family, and her daily life, which included her walks, nature and food.” Kate Sedon sees Mrs. Dalloway revising the Western world’s Mother Nature archetype of the youthful, fertile woman. Th rough the novel’s aging fe-male characters, Clarissa Dalloway, Aunt Helena Parry, Lady Bruton, and the Battered Woman, Woolf privileges the experiences of aging women while also highlighting their socially and psychologically precarious position in a culture that devalues them.

Woolf ’s interactions with landscapes and the environment resonated throughout her life and work, with varying degrees of personal and political consequence. Barbara Lon-nquist discusses the profound eff ect on Woolf of her childhood summers at St. Ives along with her and her siblings’ return to Cornwall in 1905. Focusing on Woolf ’s Cornwall diary, Lonnquist fi nds Woolf contending with a longed for yet illusory childhood stability and a beautiful, beckoning, yet aloof coastal landscape. Xiaoqin Cao explains the role of the exotic landscape in Woolf ’s work through the lenses of orientalism, colonialism, and imperialism. While Woolf was not immune to the infl uence of Western attitudes, Cao argues, her work nonetheless functions as a harbinger of change in the perceptions of the Oriental among British artists. Diana Royer sees a connection between the ways in which Woolf and Th oreau “use nature philosophically to explore the self.” Catherine Hollis takes us into the world of the mountaineer and helps us to speculate about Woolf ’s would-be relation to that sport, in part by looking at some of Woolf ’s short stories. Hollis concludes that had Woolf “taken up mountain climbing, she would have found in the activity what her father did: mental and physical vitality, friendship, and pleasure.” Verita Sriratana understands the weather in Th e Years (1937) as a “technology of place.” By discussing the weather in relation to practical meteorology in England, she shows how the weather in Woolf ’s novel can represent a site of resistance and empowerment.

Several papers yield fresh insights into consciousness, subjectivity, and concepts of the self and the other in Woolf. Elise Swinford, for instance, views Orlando as a new kind of elegy. Although it is Woolf ’s only novel with no deaths, its use of natural myth and imagery, its linking of literature, gender, and loss, and its would-be poet who must “fi guratively replace his predecessor by mourning him through the writing of an elegy” renders it an innovative evocation of melancholia. Derek Ryan addresses a crucial term in Woolf studies, “granite and rainbow,” noting that while many scholars believe Woolf used the term to denote a strict binary, primarily that of truth and fi ction, she in fact extends and complicates the metaphor throughout her writing. Dominic Scheck similarly revises

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notions of intersubjectivity in Woolf, arguing that scenes of ostensible communion in her novels in fact evince the “sealed-off nature of consciousness.” Our sense of oneness with those around us is illusory yet crucial for making us feel less alone. Emily Hinnov examines the question of community in the context of fascism in Woolf ’s time. She suggests that narratives like Th e Waves represent “unity among humanity not based upon the hierarchical, mechanistic collective of fascism that would surely obliterate those designated as other.”

We also include here two papers from a panel on Leonard Woolf, illustrating the growing body of criticism on his intellectual and writing life. Wayne Chapman discusses both Leonard Woolf ’s and W. B. Yeats’s responses to Oswald Spengler’s ideas in the con-text of Th ird Reich politics. In doing so, he introduces readers to some of the most recent digitized resources pertaining to the fi gures central to his essay. Focusing on Woolf ’s BBC broadcasts of the 1930s as well as several of his letters and essays, Luke Reader sees Woolf as an important public intellectual, challenging, for instance, the BBC’s determination to present only middle and upper class views in its programming.

We wish to conclude our introduction by remarking on the energy and intellectual verve that writers brought to their scholarly work for this conference. Th ere is indeed something revitalizing that occurs when we attend to humans dwelling amidst and interacting with forces beyond the human; Woolf certainly addressed these issues in profoundly important ways. Th is collection, therefore, can be situated not only amidst the “greening” of modern-ism but also within broadly ecocritical and posthumanist trends in critical thinking. Th ose trends revise and reframe our accepted vision of what it means to be human, a project Woolf seemed entirely committed to. We believe these essays provide just such a bracing plunge for those who want to (re)immerse themselves in Woolf ’s world with a fresh perspective.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

What a lark, what a plunge it was to host the Virginia Woolf conference at Georgetown College! We would like to thank the many faculty, staff , students, and volunteers who gave so generously of their time, energy, and talents.

We are grateful to Dr. Bill Crouch and Dr. Rosemary Allen, President and Provost of Georgetown College, respectively, for agreeing to host the conference. Th anks also to the departments and programs that provided fi nancial support, including English, History, Biology, Kinesiology and Health Sciences, the Women’s Studies Program, the Honors Program, and Oxford Programs. Deep appreciation goes to the Kentucky Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Arts for a grant in support of the conference. Th e Kentucky Foundation for Women and the AAUW, Georgetown Branch, also donated to the cause, as did the International Virginia Woolf Society and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Miami University. Georgetown College professors Barbara Burch, Holly Barbaccia, Todd Coke, Christine Leverenz, Homer White, Ellen Emerick, and Brad Hadaway volunteered in various capacities. We greatly appreciate all of their help and enthusiasm.

A very special thanks goes to the Art Department at Georgetown College. Professor Juilee Decker, Chair, curated the art and book exhibit, and Professor Daniel Graham built the cases housing the books. Th e beautiful art work in conference materials stemmed from assignments created by Professor Darrell Kincer for his students throughout the year: Cathy Frank designed the conference poster and logo; Erica Janszen created the fl oral Web site design; Abby Watkins designed the conference program; and Ryleyanne Vaughan and Erica Miller designed the t-shirts. Th anks also to Jessica Shields, our Web master.

Many staff members made invaluable contributions, including Jo Anna Fryman in the Provost’s Offi ce, Shirley College in the Business Offi ce, Dustin Brown in Publishing/ Duplicating, Paula Faught in Auxiliary Services, Holly Hardesty in the campus bookstore, and Vickie Masterson at the Th omas & King Conference Center. Th anks also go to student volunteers Jasmine Gregg, Molly Hunter, Kyle Huskin, LeeAnn Haymond, Adriana Nunez, Elizabeth Pippin, and Sarah Carey, and also to Georgetown AAUW volunteers Gwen Curry, Linda Kubala, and Mary Ann Gaeddert.

We would like to thank the Program Committee who read and evaluated submissions: Beth Rigel Daugherty, Mark Hussey, Vara Neverow, Elisa Kay Sparks, Drew Shannon, Leslie Werden, Jeanne Dubino, Danell Jones, and Joyce Kelley. Th anks also to Wayne Chapman for his guidance in putting together this book of Selected Papers.

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Virginia WoolfStandard Abbreviations

(as established by Woolf Studies Annual)

AHH A Haunted HouseAROO A Room of One’s OwnBP Books and PortraitsBTA Between the ActsCDB Th e Captain’s Death Bed and Other EssaysCE Collected Essays (ed. Leonard Woolf, 4 vols.: CE1, CE2, CE3, CE4)CR1 Th e Common ReaderCR2 Th e Common Reader, Second SeriesCSF Th e Complete Shorter Fiction (ed. Susan Dick)D Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols.: D1, D2, D3, D4, D5)DM Th e Death of the Moth and Other EssaysE Th e Essays of Virginia Woolf (eds. Stuart Clarke and Andrew McNeillie,

6 vols.: E1, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6)F FlushFR FreshwaterGR Granite and Rainbow: EssaysHPGN Hyde Park Gate News (ed. Gill Lowe)JR Jacob’s RoomJRHD Jacob’s Room: Th e Holograph Draft (ed. Edward L. Bishop)L Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf (ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Traut-

mann, 6 vols.: L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6)M Th e Moment and Other EssaysMEL MelymbrosiaMOB Moments of BeingMT Monday or TuesdayMD Mrs. DallowayND Night and DayO OrlandoPA A Passionate ApprenticeRF Roger FryTG Th ree GuineasTTL To the LighthouseTW Th e WavesTY Th e YearsVO Th e Voyage OutWF Women and Fiction: Th e Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own

(ed. S. P. Rosenbaum)

ECOFEMINISM, HOLISM, AND THE SEARCH FOR NATURAL ORDER IN WOOLF

by Bonnie Kime Scott

The title of the 2010 Conference, “Virginia Woolf and the Natural World,” off ers a promising direction for both modernist studies and our understanding of Virginia Woolf. Th ere have been harbingers of this theme for many years. Natural images, in

phrases provided by Woolf herself, have long interested Woolf scholars and editors, going back to Aileen Pippett’s 1955 biography of Woolf, Th e Moth and the Star. Granite and Rainbow graced the title page of a 1958 collection of Woolf ’s essays and later Mitchell Leaska’s biogra-phy of Woolf. Ellen Tremper argued for Woolf ’connections to the Romantics, including their interest in nature, in her 1998 study, Who Lived at Alfoxton? Gillian Beer, whose titles Common Ground and Open Fields suggest the power of landscapes as liberating discourse, has provided numerous essays that connect Woolf to Darwinian plots, the discourse of physics, and the new geographic perspectives aff orded by the technology of the airplane. Holly Henry took on Woolf and the scientifi c discourse of astronomy. Both she and Jane Goldman have demon-strated that Woolf ’s aesthetics and her sensitivity to the environment defi nitely mix.

Woolf has also taken an environmental turn in recent conferences. In 2010, as in previous conferences, Elisa Kay Sparks led us down garden paths to a new appreciation of fl oral and horticultural dimensions of Woolf. Th e 2003 Conference “Woolf in the Real World” at Smith College off ered an amazing exhibit, “Virginia Woolf: A Botanical Perspective.” In recent pro-ceedings we fi nd Sparks, Goldman, Christina Alt, Alice Staveley, Pamela Caughie, and the au-thor, among others, bringing fl owers, insects, dogs, birds, landscapes, and scientifi c discourses to our attention, often allied to intersectional analyses of gender, race, and colonialism. Carrie Rohman has stalked animals as subjects of modernism, demonstrating that in this Woolf had important modernist company. Marianne DeKoven led off a recent issue of PMLA by taking stock of the growing fi eld of animal studies, including examples that relate to modernism.

In her own familial and historical contexts, young Virginia Stephen found numerous approaches to nature. Leslie Stephen encouraged natural history pursuits. He pushed Vir-ginia toward the typically feminine pursuit of botanizing on walks in the country during summer holidays, and when in London, strolled his children regularly through Kensing-ton Gardens, encouraged visits to the Natural History Museum, and entertained them with animal sketches. Gardening was prescribed as part of her therapy after Woolf ’s fi rst breakdown. Woolf knew the zoo and Kew, as well as women who loved their gardens—Caroline Emelia Stephen, with her “miniature Kew” in Cambridge, Violet Dickinson, and Julia Stephen, often associated with the gardens at St. Ives.

Th oby Stephen, Woolf ’s slightly older brother, was both mocked and embraced in diary and fi ction as a collector and observer of nature. His Notes on Birds and Mammals Observed in England, Wales and Parts of Europe 1902-1906 indicates that, like his sister, he was keenly aware of the characteristic motions of birds, noting in them behaviors that could serve human representation and satire—as in a sketch of “Chinese Geese—Pompos-ity.” Th e children’s family newspaper, Th e Hyde Park Gate News, reports that the “juveniles”

2 VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE NATURAL WORLD

found and observed, but did not disturb, nests and the eggs in their London environs. Th e household comings and goings of cats, rats, and especially dogs are both reported upon and fi ctionalized about in this publication, as is their avid collecting of insects. Vanessa Bell, as both as gardener and painter, was a sister artist with her own uses of nature; her sensitivity to color, light, abstraction, the interpenetration of interior with exterior spaces, and novel arrangements were invaluable to Woolf. Further, Woolf had a heritage of Victo-rian women in natural science, such as Eleanor Ormerod, Mary Kingsley, and Marianne North. Th ey served her as case histories of women’s struggles to gain an education and enter male-dominated and defi ned professions, and in some cases, more problematically, for their collaboration in the explorations of the fl ora and fauna of empire.

Applying the theoretical approaches of ecofeminism and the ordering principle of holism to Virginia Woolf poses numerous problems. Th ese include the discursive nature of “nature,” the applicability of ecofeminism to Woolf, and the adequacy of holism to describe her modern-ist form. Another of Woolf ’s fi gures, drawn from nature, will haunt this essay: “in the hollow of the wave,” a phrase that occurs in the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse (1927). Both “wave” and perhaps surprisingly “hollow” recur frequently and variously in her writing. Complex, ambivalent, brief, moving, tenuously secure, the phrase distills the order I seek.

Does ecofeminism off er appropriate theory for Woolf? It is a problem that ecology and recent theory of sustainability have long shown masculine and capitalist connections and bi-ases. Stacy Alaimo off ers a long list of reasons why feminists have resisted the widely-held assumption that women are closer to nature; men, to culture, including the ways that nature has been constructed as maternal and domestic, as well as subject to domination. How nature-focused was Woolf, given that she sought out places for women in the professions and claimed cityscapes as signifi cant environment? She and her characters take pleasure in fl ânerie: looking at shop windows, viewing crowds, visiting St. Paul’s or the British Library, shopping, attending the cinema, riding the train, watching traffi c, spotting an airplane. In writing she repeatedly strives for incandescence—electrical light. Much of recent Woolf scholarship, in the tradition of cultural studies, has attended to aspects of her modernity that are attuned to the mechanical, the technological, the commercial and the urban. Th e 2009 conference was themed “Woolf and the City.” Th e city, of course, does off er an environment and nature enters there.

Even if we concede that Woolf ’s uses of nature are many, and that these have tremen-dous appeal to feminists attuned to the environment, we cannot and should not claim current ecofeminist perspectives as hers. How could they be, given the changes to the environment and global economies that have arisen since 1941, and the new concerns that have come with the increased intersectionality of feminist analysis in general? Th e term ecofeminism is usually dated back only to 1974, and hence is one of many strands of second wave feminism, which also took up the recovery of neglected women writers and their potential feminisms. Ecofeminism has divided, evolved, and engaged in self-critique and even one-upwomanship since its inception. Some strands of ecofeminism problema-tize holism as an adequate fi gure for the current global crisis of the environment.

Ecofeminism can be and has been arranged in many ways. I will consider fi ve op-tions, not all of them distinct from one another:

3Ecofeminish, Holism, and Natural Order

• Cultural and Radical Ecofeminisms • Environmental Justice• Psychological approaches• Philosophical and Sociological approaches• Non-human and post-human concepts

Much of second wave feminism is commonly assigned to cultural and radical categories, and despite subsequent critiques of its essentialism and revival of goddess rites, cultural feminism persists. Practitioners evoke women’s cultures, experiences and values, rediscovered in lost his-tories and rituals, and used to challenge the male-biased binaries of power characteristic of patriarchy—a favored term for Woolf.1 Arguably, with her theory of an “outsider’s society,” and evocation of the Classical goddess, Woolf anticipated cultural ecofeminism. Cultural eco-feminists cite both Woolf and her classicist friend Jane Ellen Harrison, quoting their works.

Environmental justice movements might be traced back to M.I.T.’s fi rst woman stu-dent, Ellen Swallow, with her concern for water purity and sanitation; the 1960s brought Rachel Carson’s assault on the eff ects of insecticides; the Chipko movement that worked to spare Indian forests in the 1970s reaches back centuries for its precedents. Today ecofemi-nists of this strand attend to localized and diverse experiences of women. Organizations, at the grass roots, are run predominantly by women of color, seeking toxic-free environments and agriculture. I think it likely that Leonard Woolf, as he tried to account for the decline in birds’ songs over the years in Sussex (58), was aware of the work of Rachel Carson; it is clear in novels such as Mrs. Dalloway and Th e Waves (1931) that Western impositions on colonial agriculture were not welcome, or an unqualifi ed success. Th ough showing a very diff erent class standpoint, Julia Stephen’s community work anticipates this line of ecofeminism.

Women’s psychological development, particularly in relation to the mother, semiotic language, and object relations, including relations to the natural world seen as a mother, fi gure as psychological contributions to ecofeminism.2 Th e construction of the self, as infl ected by gender, merged with or distinct from others, non-human others, and the environment, was an abiding concern for Woolf.

Philosophers and sociologists take ecofeminism into epistemology, critiques of enlighten-ment ideals of reason, and alternate ways of thinking about binaries, knowledge, and democ-racy. Karen Warren and Catriona Sandilands off er overarching views and critiques of eco-feminisms to date. As an ecofeminist literary critic, Alaimo has suggested, via a set of women writers, an alternate genre of undomesticated nature. One of the major debates in feminist theory has been over essentialism, seen as reductive, bio- and matra-centric, and determinist, as opposed to theories of social construction that contextualize and diff erentiate over time and geographical location and postmodern theories that bring subjectivity itself into question.

Th ere are diverse approaches to non-human and the post-human ecofeminism. Jose-phine Donovan and Carol Adams extend Gilligan’s concepts of women’s relational ethic into an “ethic of care” directed toward non-human others, their approach refi ning and extending cultural ecofeminism. Posthumanities can be represented by Donna Haraway, who, having started her research with primates, has broached human boundaries in both cyborg and animal directions, focusing most recently upon the ancient cultural union of humans with dogs. Communicating with and “becoming animal” has interested an array


of postmodern theorists, including Jacques Derrida and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guit-tari, the latter pair showing awareness of Woolf ’s relentless exploration of various forms of becoming and her own animal identifi cations. One of the useful terms Haraway has provided for new directions in ecofeminism is naturecultures—a recognition that, despite centuries of binary division between these two constructs, they are most profi tably under-stood as a merger, ever dependent upon one another for defi nition and sustainable order.

Th e natural world is an enormous system, of which humans are a demanding and an ever more invasive, dangerous part. When in favorable balance, aspects of nature work together, providing conditions for sustainable life. Cosmic events and “natural disasters” may introduce disorder, and a process of rebalancing of the natural world. Ecologists and ecofeminists are most concerned with the ways that humans, particularly powerful ones seeking control, have manipulated natural conditions to favor their own perceived needs, goals and superiority, usu-ally to the detriment of non-human beings, less dominant peoples, and the female gender.

Th ere are numerous possible ideas of holistic order just as there are numerous ecofemi-nisms. Deep ecology has long worked with the concept. Aldo Leopold’s celebrated 1949 essay, “Th e Land Ethic,” describes a holistic “biotic community,” of which “man is . . . only a member” (204-5). In decentering of “man,” Leopold may have had the generic man (men and women, anthropocentrism) in mind, though feminist philosopher Plumwood points out that through much of history anthropocentrism has really meant androcentrism. Posi-tive and negative aspects of holism have been actively discussed among ecofeminists, whose theorizing is far from complete. In cultural ecofeminisms, such as the work of Carol Christ, Charlene Spretnak and Starhawk, sacred female fi gures associated with the earth, seen in the holistic concept of the Gaia, or the earth goddess, were recovered and their myths renewed.3 Mother earth has a presence in the writing of innumerable Native Americans such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Marilou Awiatka, particularly in works that repudiate disrespect for the environment. French feminist analysis, as a practice related to deconstruction, has also contributed alternative models of environmental order, most notably in maternally-based rhythmic and fl owing semiotic language, seen as the precursor and essential foundation for the symbolic language of the father, and manifested in écriture féminine. Ecofeminists hold out the hope that nature may be used to establish a diff erent order, based on alternative eth-ics, boundaries, and democratic principles.

For concepts of the contingent and transitory nature of environmental order, Woolf could turn to new understandings of science in her day. Contemporary physics, inclusive of Einstein’s theories of relativity, wave theory and quantum mechanics, is now generally ac-cepted as an infl uence on Woolf ’s writing, its primary eff ect being to serve her more abstract renditions of nature, most notably in Th e Waves. Of particular interest to Woolf was wave-particle theory, which was useful in exploring an alternate concept of reality, and served her stylistic move away from realism (Beer, “Physics, Sound and Substance” 113). Woolf and these scientists held in common the idea that life is transitory and successive (115) and that simultaneity and rhythm were basic physical principals. Th ey further endorsed working outside of closed epistemologies. Ann Banfi eld encourages us to think of waves of sound and light, not just water, as “unsensed physical causes” (124). She suggests that, in accordance


with alternate particle theory, Woolf sees “an alternation of fl uid and solid” in the shape of the world (127), synthesized in Woolf ’s metaphor of “granite and rainbow” (148).

In literary writing quite generally, nature is used to stock similes, metaphors, and sym-bols. We began by noting several of Woolf ’s memorable phrases built from natural images, but applied to conceptual matters. Many natural images form a strong relation to the pri-mordial, as presumably they have been basic conceptual materials for the mind since the dawn of consciousness, experience Woolf explores through children such as Jacob Flanders and the six characters of Th e Waves. Such images promise fundamental needs of food and shelter, or warn of threatening creatures (including humans) to avoid. Evolutionary psy-chologists led by Edward O. Wilson suggest that language evolved from mental activities centered on these natural concerns. Observation of nature also provides orderly tropes of the human life cycle with images of fecundity, growth, ripening, decay, and of the passage time, or movement through the seasons. Such patterns are visible in the spring festival and other seasonal rites in early Greek drama, as presented by Jane Harrison in Ancient Art and Ritual. Th e fl owing or recurring rhythms of nature are further suggestive of musical and linguistic forms. Complex sacred female fi gures combine these images and off er explanatory narratives involving them. Metaphors provide range for imaginative interpretation and collaboration between reader and writer. In some instances nature may provide a model of organic unity that literary forms aspire to, reject outright, or submit to parody and play.

Woolf uses nature to assist her fresh approach to epistemology, in which she copes with the “damned egotistical self.” We can follow this in her diaries, through the research-er of A Room of One’s Own (1929), in tropes of authorial silence as early as Th e Voyage Out (1915), via Bernard in the course of Th e Waves, and even in her late essay, set in a primeval forest, “Anon.” In reordering things of the earth, Woolf may disperse the self into them, enter a collective of creatures, deconstruct patriarchal ideas of power and domination, and at least briefl y defy spiritual defeat and death.

Ecofeminists have since the 1970s cultivated the holistic myth of Gaia, an early Greek earth mother who brought forth the earth and its creatures from a void (Merchant 3). As Merchant notes in her own history of the fi gure, the Gaia myth was moved into the area of scientifi c popularization by James Lovelock, who encouraged a view of the earth as a “sin-gle living entity, capable of manipulating the earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts” (qtd. in Merchant 4). Th e goddess in her triple aspect represents life, death, and rebirth, and may be associated with sacred groves of trees, or caves evocative of the womb. Th ough the mythic approach is dismissed as dated cultural feminism by some ecofeminists, Gaia or Demeter/Persephone remains invaluable for studying Woolf ’s uses of nature, as a resource for modernist/feminist reinvention of the classics and of Oedipal-based psychology. Jane Harrison’s work on “primitive” rituals attended to people who heeded the periodicity of nature. Th e Greeks celebrated the annual renewal of spring through Persephone, rising annually from the earth. Forest people created rituals involving the sacred tree, which if paraded through the community brought promise of fruit.

Woolf ’s characters enter such sacred natural spaces. In Mrs. Dalloway the aging Peter Walsh seeks peace as a “solitary traveler” on an imaginary “forest ride” beneath “sky and branches he rapidly endows . . .with womanhood.” Peter constructs a mother earth fi gure: “this fi gure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from the troubled sea . . . as a


shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnifi cent hands com-passion, comprehension, absolution” (Mrs. Dalloway 56). In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe associates Mrs. Ramsay with images of a secret treasure chamber, a large jar, or a beehive dome (54-55), images that have been interpreted within lesbian ritual as well as maternal metaphor (Cramer 178-9). Similarly suggestive of female anatomy and defi ant of heterosexual norms for nature, the contemporary novelist Mary Carmichael lights up “serpentine caves” as she shows us two women working in a laboratory who “like” one another in A Room of One’s Own (83). Consistent with her own assessment of history in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf is much more apt to visit fl ower fi elds in the company of mother or daughter fi gures than battlegrounds con-tested by male heroes. Th e cultural power of the hero interests her, but Woolf ’s study takes in the “other,” more marginal, migratory members of society that surround the hero, sometimes constructing, sometimes deconstructing his values, as with Percival, the school friend idolized by his contemporaries in Th e Waves. Woolf is cognizant of the cultural pressures imposed on “others,” and imagines where they may derive their own strength.

Th e girl or the woman in a fi eld of fl owers suggests the myth of the great earth moth-er, Demeter (granddaughter of Gaia) and her daughter Persephone, and a collaboration of mother and daughter in rewriting myth and sustaining life. Elizabeth Abel and Madeline Moore, with their work on Woolf, were among the early second wave feminists who in the 1980s found a strong and affi rmative alternative to the male hero in the great goddess, with Moore selecting Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion as a possible source for Woolf ’s renewed sense of this mythology (42). With Woolf, both mothers and independent little girls fi nd their place in fi elds, collecting fl owers, as did Persephone ex-ploring her world. Demeter searches those same fi elds in a season of loss, after her daugh-ter’s abduction and rape, and arranges her seasonal recovery to the earth. Th ese are fi elds frequented by many of Woolf ’s characters, as they imagine loved ones bearing images of fl owers, and then make the cyclic descent into death.

Cam in To the Lighthouse collects Sweet Alice that she is reluctant to relinquish to the family’s guest, Mr. Banks. In a fuller expression of the myth, Mr. Tansley fantasizes Mrs. Ramsay “with stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets . . .Step-ping through fi elds of fl owers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen” (18). He interrupts his own story with the thought of how ridiculous it is, applied to a 50 year old mother of eight. Lily imagines Mrs. Ramsay at the time of her death “rais-ing to her forehead a wreath of white fl owers with which she went” (184). She constructs a similar mythic landscape for Prue Ramsay, following her death soon after marriage: “She let her fl owers fall from her basket, scattered and tumbled them on the grass, and, reluctantly and hesitatingly, but without question or complaint . . . went down too. Down fi elds, across valleys, white, fl ower-strewn—that is how she would have painted it” (201). Th us Lily has artistic uses for this myth of nature, which also may serve as a consolation for death in a cycle of nature. Similarly Woolf herself thinks of Katherine Mansfi eld “putting on a white wreath & leaving us, called away; made dignifi ed, chosen” (D2: 226), when facing the death of a writer whose dignity she did not always serve while she lived. Isa in Between the Acts (1941) is a grown woman and a mother, but echoing Swinburne, she reenacts Persephone’s journey: “‘Where do I wander?’ she mused. ‘Down what draughty tunnels? Where the eyeless wind blows? And there grows nothing for the eye. No rose. To issue where? In some harvestless dim fi eld where no evening lets fall her mantle; nor sun rises” (154-55). She is less assured.


Woolf ’s occasional crones off er another aspect of the triple goddess—the most no-table examples being the old woman stationed by the tube station in Mrs. Dalloway, her song resembling an ancient stream “soaking through the knotted roots of infi nite ages” (80), and Lucy Swithin of Between the Acts, fi nding her way back into her primordial origins in great rhododendron woods via her reading of Th e Outline of History. While these fi gures retain much of their magic for Woolf, other goddesses do not. Th e goddess of proportion and the goddess of conversion, as evoked by the narrator of Mrs. Dalloway, are fearsome forms associated with the power of the medical profession and the church, functioning quite apart from and to the detriment of nature. Th rough her entire career, Woolf likes to remind us of the oozing loam, decaying leaf matter, and remains of prehis-toric creatures that precede civilization, and in her last novel, Between the Acts, what might follow when civilization expires. Indeed, the primordial is a stronger category with Woolf than the more familiar modernist trope of the primitive. In selecting the primordial, she escapes some of the most questionably racist overtones of modernist primitivism or social Darwinism and merges human, with animal, with earth itself. Th ere is some comfort to be taken in accepting the continuity as well as the transience of all life.

Unity was quested and found in much Woolf criticism up through the 1980s. A gen-eration of critics, striving toward the order and balance sought in the poetry favored by the new critics, did fi nd reassuring aesthetic order in Woolf ’s novels. Alan Wilde suggests that into her middle phase, inclusive of Th e Waves, Woolf was off ering aesthetic closure that tended to leave behind the phenomenal world (142). More attuned to natural images, James Naremore fi nds that “In the face of the inevitable tragedy of time and death, she off ered the consolation of nature seen from a cosmic perspective, as in the inter-chapters of Th e Waves” (244). It seems to me that the cosmic order, as presented by Woolf, just as often seems to off er cosmic indiff erence, not consolation. Th ough interested in the quest for unity, Madeline Moore presents the temporary sense of order achieved by characters in terms of a cycle of thought: “In Th e Waves, the representative range of human pos-sibilities focuses upon an inevitable cycle wherein individuals are momentarily united with nature, experience both its exaltation and its nothingness, and, in order to preserve their autonomy, reemerge into the present of human eff ort” (219). Moore is skeptical of the achievement of unity by mature individuals. To her mind, the pastoral tradition fails adults. Seeking unity from community, they fi nd it only symbolically.

Gaston Bachelard attributed an “epistemological break” to the new physics that emerged in the early twentieth century. Th is decentered human consciousness as the source of knowledge, leaving the human subject with the feeling of being transcended by something beyond human control, yet also feeling “nourished and sustained by it” (McAllester Jones 4). Bachelard’s idea of the “new literary mind” working out “approxi-mate knowledge” through the use of “interwoven images” bringing together image and idea applies well to Woolf ’s uses of natural images (107-11). Indeed, he off ers his own analysis of the image of the tree in Woolf ’s Orlando (1928). By attending to the observer of nature, in the form of her characters, Woolf may show us the accumulation of images and ideas that work toward merger or unity, even if they do not achieve and sustain them. Images extracted from nature range in complexity from simple phrases to intricate associa-tions and holistic formations. Image clusters involving fl owers and plants or water are per-vasive. Human and non-human creatures (mammals, snails, birds, fi sh, insects) become


involved holistically with these clusters and with one another. Woolf ’s most memorable natural images rarely stand alone; they fuse with the identity of the animals or human be-ings who perceive them, or the birds and insects that move among them, many with their own perceptions and uses of nature’s off erings.

Among the most memorable and frequently cited examples of unity with nature in Woolf’s writing is her own “organic” perception from early childhood. As recounted in “A Sketch of the Past” and echoed in Between the Acts: “I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the fl ower itself was part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the fl ower; and that was the real fl ower; part earth; part fl ower. It was a thought I put away as be-ing likely to be useful to me later” (MOB 71). In seeing “the fl ower whole” her consciousness was brought to sudden awareness, emerging from the “cotton-wool” of everyday experience.

A mature Mrs. Dalloway off ers a puzzling fl ower image that suddenly draws attention to deeper matters of identity. “Th en, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over—the moment” (32). Th is perception is paired with Clarissa’s memory of having felt what a man might feel for a woman, a description that suggests orgasm even more strongly: “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 close, swollen with some astonishing signifi cance, some pressure of rapture which spit its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores!” (31). Th e match generates sudden illumination and exciting heat, another sensation. As a “sudden illumination,” it is fl eeting, and Clarissa’s thoughts of her narrow bed remind Judith Roof of her advancing age, and her half-burnt candle (98-99). But Woolf ’s images here naturalize lesbian feelings; with this acknowledgment comes a soothing cure.

Leaves, whether they are growing on plants or trees, or dispersed by human or natural forces have creative and/or protective signifi cance in many of Woolf ’s texts: Anon leads a troop of leaf-clad celebrants. Peter Walsh fantasizes a ride through the forest. Septimus Smith reads beauty in waving, brandishing, sun-dappled leaves of Regent’s Park, until the trees part to re-veal the horror of his beloved friend, Evans, dead in the war. In his last vision of Rezia, lovingly packing away his notes, she has “all of her petals . . . about her. She is as a fl owering tree, . . . a lawgiver, who had reached a sanctuary where she feared no one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle, a triumph, the last and greatest” (MD 144). Mrs. Dalloway is one of Woolf ’s strongest proponents of a holistic view, seen when she imagines “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, her self” (9). Orlando takes “Th e Oak Tree” as her long-term and fi nal challenge as a writer, the roots of an actual tree seemingly merging with her self as she lies beneath it. Louis compares himself to a green yew tree and feels “rooted in the middle of the earth.” Finally, Cam trails a leaf when she reluctantly responds to her mother’s summons in the fi rst segment of To the Lighthouse and its image stays with her in the fi nal pages of the book, as she strives for a sense of order beyond what her parents have off ered.

Cam has been much worried over by the critics, including Louise DeSalvo, who sees her as a victim of maternal neglect. Cam shares the aqueous imaginary of Rachel in Th e Voyage Out and Rhoda in Th e Waves, both characters who die in the course of their novels. Mrs. Ramsay compares Cam’s mind to a deep well with clear but distorting waters (TTL 58). Mrs. Ramsay has some idea of the sorts of images that distract her youngest daughter,


and many of these are taken from nature: “It might be a vision—a shell, of a wheelbar-row, or a fairy kingdom on the far side of the hedge; or it might be the glory of speed” (57). Th at evening she describes a fairy landscape to help Cam overcome her horror of a sheep’s skull hung in the nursery, and soothe her into sleep. Years later, as they sail to the lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay tries to get Cam to identify their house, receding on the shore, and tries to engage her in discussion about a new puppy. Instead, as she drags her fi ngers through the water, Cam draws from an array of images, reaching back to the leaf she had trailed behind her at the start of the Ramsays’ story:

All had streamed away. . . . From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there). And the drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here and there on the dark, the slum-berous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realized but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constanti-nople. Small as it was, and shaped something like a leaf stood on its end with the gold-sprinkled waters fl owing in and about it, it had, she supposed, a place in the universe—even that little island?” (192)

As would be true of characters in Th e Waves, Cam’s looking into the depths, and her image of the “fountain of joy” that “spurted up” are shared by other characters. Nancy is another gazer into the depths of the sea, on the small scale of the tidal pool. Her mother is associated with the ability “to pour erect into the air. . . a column of spray” (TTL 40). Cam fi nds her own sense of place, and Woolf leaves us to wonder whether she will be able to bring forth this beautiful mental collage into the negotiation of a realized world.

Woolf is attracted to “hollow,” sheltering spaces as they occur in nature, protecting butterfl ies, fl owers, mushrooms, birds, rabbits, or houses. She selects the word sixty times at important junctures in her novels. Th e image of “the hollow of the wave” comes from a brief sequence in the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse: “So soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave” (127). Th e leaf makes the wave not quite hollow, and the wave bestows motion on the leaf, like a miniature world, briefl y whirled. Th ough the birds are audible, it is doubtful that any human is present to apprehend this event. Nearby in the text, “Autumn trees . . . take on the fl ash of tattered fl ags,” reminding us of a war that could doom human life (127). Still, inspiring the leaf/wave simile, “green,” life “quickens,” begins anew. Th is set of leaf/wave bird images, though more active, is resonant with an earlier, simpler simile from Mrs. Dal-loway, where Rezia Smith is shown in all her vulnerability “like a bird sheltering under the thin hollow of a leaf” (65). Th e bird and the human of the simile are equally dependent upon the leaf to sustain them, but the leaf provides a scant, fragile shelter at best. Th e hol-low disappears as a wave crashes on the shore, but is ever present farther out.

Many of Woolf ’s most brilliant natural images occur in such collages of modernist fragments—bits and pieces, or a rapid series of apprehensions. Th ese are often the con-ceptions of characters in crisis or survivors of trauma—outsiders in search of a survivable system. Th e relevant passages also alarm readers concerning the sustainability of culture and the environment. In some cases, a character has the hope of regaining balance and


sustaining existence. Th e hallucinations of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, the work Rhoda does with abstract shapes, water, and bundles of fl owers in Th e Waves, and the men-tal collages of Cam in To the Lighthouse, Sara in Th e Years, and Isa in Between the Acts all fall into this category. Th e leaf turning in the hollow of the wave is representative of Cam at the close of To the Lighthouse. It involves gesture, performance, recollection, continua-tion. Cam, like many other struggling characters, is sustained by collecting and arranging complex images of nature to reconstruct an environment. Th ere is some hope that, by touching back to the primordial, the semiotic, sensual, or material, and by interlacing one character or creature’s set of perceptions to another’s, a new and diff erent cycle of human nature, or (to use Haraway’s term) natureculture, may arise.

Notes

1. Well-know examples include Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, Susan Griffi n’s Woman and Nature: Th e Roaring inside Her, Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein’s anthology, Reweaving the World: Th e Emergence of Ecofeminism, and Carolyn Merchant’s Earthcare: Women and the Environment.

2. Important texts are Julia Kristeva’a Desire in Language, Nancy Chodorow’s Th e Reproduction of Mothering, Carol Gilligan’s In a Diff erent Voice, and Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland, eds. Th e Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development—its very title derived from Woolf ’s fi rst novel.

3 See for example their work as contained in Diamond and Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World: Th e Emer-gence of Ecofeminism.

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“WE MAKE LIFE”: VIBRATION, AESTHETICS AND THE INHUMAN IN THE WAVES.

by Carrie Rohman

When I fi rst learned that Woolf ’s provisional title for Th e Waves (1931) was Th e Moths, I was reminded of an anecdote one of my dance colleagues passed along to me several years ago. Legend has it that someone once asked Merce

Cunningham—the late and extraordinarily great godfather of postmodern dance—why he so often set his movement to silence. Reportedly, he pointed to a moth that was fl itting around a light, and he left it at that. I want to evoke that moment at the beginning of this paper to think about movement, attraction, and the other-than-human in Woolf ’s novel.

Since Th e Waves is so often noted for its poetic qualities, I will begin this discussion with a claim about poetics. Th e question of the animal or of the inhuman as it is represented in poetry interests us particularly because poetics participates in the musical, the rhythmic, and the incanta-tory. More pointedly, as Jorie Graham repeatedly reminded her audience at the 2006 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, poetry must be understood as bodily experience. Graham was at some pains in her discussions that weekend to emphasize that reading and hearing poetry are not pri-marily mental, but corporeal processes. Th is claim is fairly startling; it gives us pause and opens onto a number of fascinating questions about the literary, the bodily, and even the creaturely.

Elizabeth Grosz’s recent discussions of art and the organic help us situate Woolf ’s poetics. Working among theories ranging from Deleuze, to French feminism, and her own re-reading of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Grosz asserts in an interview with Julie Copeland that we need to understand art as “the revelry in the excess of nature, but also a revelry in the excess of the energy in our bodies” (“Th e Creative Impulse” 2).1 Grosz makes the distinctly posthumanist claim that “we’re not the fi rst artists and we’re perhaps not even the greatest artists, we humans; we take our cue from the animal world. So what ap-peals to us? It’s the striking beauty of fl owers, it’s the amazing colour of birds, it’s the songs of birds” (2). Rather than being fundamentally about concepts or representation, Grosz maintains that art’s “fundamental goal is to produce sensations,” and “it’s about feeling something intensely [while] there may be the by-product of a kind of understanding” (3).

In what may fi rst seem a counterintuitive locating of the artistic outside of human prax-is, Grosz claims that the intersection of life itself with earthly or even cosmic forces serves as the occasion for what is fundamentally an aesthetic emergence. Grosz describes the “produc-tive explosion of the arts from the provocations posed by the forces of the earth . . . with the forces of living bodies, by no means exclusively human, which . . . slow down chaos enough to extract from it something not so much useful as intensifying, a performance, a refrain, an organization of color or movement that eventually, transformed, enables and induces art.”2 In the aforementioned interview, Grosz goes on to emphasize the way that her ideas decenter the traditional attribution of art to a transcendent, human function:

I think what’s radical about what I’m saying is that art isn’t primarily or solely conceptual, that what it represents is the most animal part of us rather than the

13“We Make Life”

most human part of us. Frankly, I fi nd it really refreshing, in a way, that it’s not man’s nobility that produces art, it’s man’s animality that produces art, and that’s what makes it of potential interest everywhere. (3)

Just as compelling is Grosz’s further claim that sexual diff erence lies at the heart of aesthetics. Th is idea is especially fascinating given Grosz’s well-known work in the areas of feminist and queer theory, disciplines which have tended to resist the “biological” framing of sexuality and gender. Pivotal to her position is understanding nature as dynamic rather than static, as something that is always opening toward the new and the future in a process of becom-ing. She emphasizes that, because animals attract mates through various “vibratory” forces, through color and through dance, through song and cadences, the aesthetic is linked to the workings of sexual diff erence in evolution. While I cannot rehearse Grosz’s entire argument here, I want to give you a suffi cient sense of this element of her discussion. In her discus-sion of music and sex, Grosz makes much of Darwin’s claims that mammals use their voices to attract mates. For Darwin, music is “seductive” and “dangerous”; it “intensifi es and ex-cites” (Chaos, Territory, Art 32).3 Th us there is “something about vibration,” or resonance, or rhythm, “even in the most primitive of creatures, that generates pleasurable or intensifying passions, excites organs, and invests movements with greater force or energy” (33). Birdsong, for instance, exists at a crossroads between sexuality and creativity.

It is important to clarify how Grosz suggests that reproduction does not need to be viewed as the primary telos of these processes. Rather, Grosz speculates that “[perhaps] sexuality is not so much to be explained in terms of its ends or goals (which in sociobio-logical terms are assumed to be the [competitive] reproduction of maximum numbers of [surviving] off spring, where sexual selection is ultimately reduced to natural selection) as in terms of its forces, its eff ects . . . which are forms of bodily intensifi cation. Vibrations, waves, oscillations, resonances aff ect living bodies, not for any higher purpose but for pleasure alone” (33). We need not see sexuality as biologically “determined” or rigidly heteronormative, but rather as a fl uid process of becoming that emphasizes pleasure.

Grosz goes on to note that “sexuality itself needs to function artistically to be ad-equately sexual, adequately creative, that sexuality . . . needs to harness excessiveness and invention to function at all” (64-65). Referencing the work of Alphonso Lingis, Grosz discusses the forces of sexual selection and the bodily manifestations of those forces as creatures invest in enhancing “the body’s sexual appeal” (66):

Th is calling to attention, this making of one’s own body into a spectacle, this highly elaborate display of attractors, involves intensifi cation. Not only are or-gans on display engorged, intensifi ed, puff ed up, but the organs that perceive them—ears, eyes, nose—are also fi lled with intensity, resonating with colors, sounds, smells, shapes, rhythms. (66)

Th us taste, pleasure, performance and staging all enter into the aestheticization of the body in sexual selection and evolution: “Art is of the animal precisely to the degree that sexuality is artistic” (70).

Grosz’s claims can be located within the Deleuzian framework that she outlines in her own discussion of the artistic. Deleuze rejects the notion that art is primarily to be


understood in terms of intention or representation. Rather, as Grosz explains, he suggests that “the arts produce and generate intensity, that which directly impacts the nervous system and intensifi es sensation. Art is the art of aff ect more than representation, a system of dynamized and impacting forces rather than a system of unique images that function under the regime of signs” (Chaos, Terrirory, Art 3). Readers will recognize the Deleuzian emphasis on intensities here, and Grosz reminds us that the idea of the aff ective in De-leuze involves a linkage between bodily forces and “cosmological forces,” a linkage that emphasizes human participation in the nonhuman.4

Grosz also reminds us of Deleuze’s conceptualization of the refrain and helps to clarify its function. She writes, “Th e refrain is a kind of rhythmic regularity that brings a minimum of livable order to a situation in which chaos beckons” (52).5 In music, for instance, the re-frain “wards off chaos by creating a rhythm, tempo, melody that taps chaos by structuring it through the constitution of a territory” (53). It is in her discussion of the Deleuzian refrain and the connection between cosmic and bodily forces that Grosz points to the very life rhythms that Woolf seems to recapitulate through her attention to waves: “Th ese rhythms of the body—the rhythms of seduction, copulation, birth, death—coupled with those of the earth—seasons, tides, temperatures—are the conditions of the refrain, which encapsu-lates and abstracts these rhythmic or vibratory forces into a sonorous emblem, a composed rhythm” (Grosz 55). Th e impact of this rhythm is most powerfully felt by bodies of the same species, but as Grosz often points out, these refrains are transmuted and transferred from cosmos to earth, from animal to animal, from animal to human and back, etc. In the case of Woolf ’s novel then, we want to ask after circuits of vibration, refrains that oscillate between the living and the cosmic, that open life onto excess and the artistic.

Perhaps most apparently, Deleuze’s concept of the refrain gives us a way to read the interludes. Th ese repetitions mark the most overt “natural” material in the text. Th e interludes attest to the inhuman rhythms, the cosmological forces that in one sense stand outside of narrowly human or conventionally humanist preoccupations.6 Early discussions of Th e Waves made claims to this eff ect. Frank D. McConnell’s 1968 essay, for instance, calls the interludes “deliberate and highly eff ective attempts to present a phenomenal world without the intervention of human consciousness, a world of blind things which stands as a perpetual challenge to the attempts of the six monologists to seize, translate and ‘realize’ their world” (qtd. in Goldman 82). While McConnell is clearly correct in one sense, he goes on to suggest that the very fi nal waves that crash on the shore at the novel’s end are “simply and sublimely irrelevant to Bernard, as Bernard to [them]” (Goldman 83). But the text, I think, does not suggest this kind of fi nal dis-connect between the natural world and Bernard’s world. It may be the case that Bernard is less connected than some of the other characters. McConnell goes on to characterize the “‘nature’ of the italicized passages” as “neither the anthropomorphic and sympa-thetic nature of the pastoral nor its malevolent but equally anthropomorphic contrary” (Goldman 83). It is here where Deleuze’s claims can help us, and really where concepts of the post-human open up a reading that need not be trapped by views of nature as either “sympathetic” and sentimentally human or hostile and violently anti-human. Because, as Grosz points out, the refrain allows us to understand how even the human is organized through vibrational patterns that are the most elementary cosmic forces. Here is Grosz on vibration and the refrain. Keep in mind that while she often uses the


musical refrain as her key example, she is aware throughout her discussion that these concepts apply to creativity and life forces in the broadest sense:

Refrains, then, are rhythmic, melodious patterns, small chants, ditties, that shape the vibrations of milieus into the harmonics of territories, the organization of a wall or barrier. Music is the reverse movement, the liberation of these harmonic and rhythmic patterns from their originating location and their placement into a double movement, both musically, beyond the smallness of the refrain and on, to the song, the tune, the sonata, the duet, the symphony, other forms of music, genres, and so on, to forms as yet not even conceivable on the plane of compo-sition; and spatio-temporally, beyond territory, to individuals, peoples, races, bodily movements, performances. (54)

I want to emphasize the permeability or “double movement” that Grosz outlines here to give us a way to think about the relationship not only between the interludes and the “regu-lar” text, but also the relationship between the waves and Woolf ’s human characters. If the interludes function as a refrain, notice their relationship to the normative text. Th e “small” chant or dittie is released from its “originating location,” and there is a vibrational movement between refrain and song. Th e continued elaboration of this pattern becomes eventually the symphony. Suzette Henke recently noted that the novel “might be compared to a musical symphony, whose theme is introduced in the lyrical interludes, then fully elaborated via the free indirect discourse of each persona’s introspective soliloquies” (128). Th e Deleuzian refrain helps us make even more sense of this notion, and Th e Waves as symphony strikes me as a particularly useful way to understand the novel. Moreover, the well-known fact that Woolf claimed to be writing the novel “to a rhythm not to a plot” is a powerful testament to the role of vibration in Woolf ’s creative process (qtd. in Henke 128).

Interestingly, Patrick McGee notes in his discussion of political dynamics in the novel that the interludes “make a signifi cant return of the repressed in the main body of Bernard’s fi nal monologue. No longer italicized, no longer safely confi ned to the margins,” he contin-ues, “the voice of the interludes erupts from within the discourse of the imperialist subject” (386). If we understand the interludes as the refrain, then it would only make sense that they appear and reappear in the main text. But we also need to address McConnell’s notion that the waves are utterly indiff erent to Bernard. In an extremely rigid sense, this may be true, but one of the deep ideological claims of Woolf ’s novel is in fact quite the opposite. Woolf ’s characters, albeit to varying degrees, participate in the vibrational forces that the waves monumentalize. Th e movement of the refrain and its resonance makes its way into individuals, and these forces are in fact the very roots of aesthetics. Th is is the direction of the investigation I want to undertake in Woolf ’s highly unconventional narrative.

It is a commonplace that children are “closer” to animals and nature than adults, and Freud gives us one means of theorizing this idea through his discussion of organic repression, which I have discussed elsewhere.7 Woolf sets up much of the novel’s natural and cosmic terrain in the opening section where the six fi gures are young children. Sight and sound dominate the lines that introduce the six characters. While there are too many impressions to recount here, looking at a few of them reveals how the aesthetic is already rooted in the oscillations of the natural world at the novel’s opening. Th e children notice


rings that hang and “quiver” in loops of light, leaves that gather “like ears,” “islands of light” that swim on the grass (9). Th ere is also a distinct emphasis on rhythm and vibra-tion. Rhoda hears a sound, “cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down” (9). Louis of course hears “something stamping,” “[a] great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps” (9). I simply want to take note of the movement and rhythm that characterize Woolf ’s images. We have phenomena that quiver, gather, swim, stamp, and oscillate in scale.

Louis’s much-analyzed vision of himself as a stalk rooted “down to the depths of the world” reinforces the claim that the aesthetic fi nds its roots in the forces of nature. “I am all fi bre,” Louis notes, “All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs” (12). He goes on to claim that he hears “tramplings, tremblings, stirrings round me” (12). Louis is comfortable at this level, acknowledging his participation in the tremors of the earth. What Louis is uncomfortable with, but cannot avoid, is the sexualization of art that Woolf and Jinny, especially, insist upon throughout the novel.

Woolf establishes Jinny’s centrality to the earthly or exo-human aesthetic discourse I’m interested in immediately in the novel, and she does this in part through an empha-sis on sexuality. As readers recall, one of the more emphatic and powerful motifs of the opening pages is the kiss, the kiss that Jinny gives to Louis, that Susan observes and is devastated by. Notice fi rst how Louis narrates the encounter: “She has found me. I am struck on the nape of the neck. She has kissed me. All is shattered” (13). Jinny’s version of the kiss highlights, among other things, the energy that Grosz connects with sexuality and creativity. Jinny was running, rather than standing still; she sees leaves moving, and they go on moving despite the seeming absence of a bird in its nest. She is frightened, running faster and faster, asking “What moved the leaves? What moves my heart and legs?” (13). In these early moments, the power of sexual energy is frightening to Jinny on some level, but notice how she connects, through her questioning, the movement of her own body with the movement of the natural world. By the paragraph’s end—after she kisses Louis with her heart “jumping” under her pink frock “like the leaves, which go on moving, though there is nothing to move them” (13)—she seems to accept the spiraling together of force, sexuality, and the impulse to excess, all of which are grounded in nature, animality and evolution. Th e paragraph ends with these revealing lines: “Now I smell geraniums; I smell earth mould. I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering fl ung over you” (13). Th ink of Cunningham’s moth here.

We should note several elements of this passage. Flowers are masterful at evolutionary excess. Why are fl owers so eternally a symbol of sexuality? Because in addition to off ering their aromas as pheromones to all who pass by, they also produce excessively attractive sexual “organs,” if you will, that are on display for potentially pollinating insects and for lovelorn humans to experience. And all of this, as Grosz points out in the interview I opened with, is manifested through a startling range of shape and color. Jinny smells gera-niums. And lest we be tempted to read the fl owers only in their abstracted sense, Jinny also smells earth mould. Her connection to nature is of the earth, not merely symbolic. I’m going to bracket the questions of dance and rippling since I want to treat those later in the essay. But note the paragraph’s fi nal lines, “I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering fl ung over you.” In these lines we should recognize a sexual territorializing that is not without its element of constraint, control, and captivity. Louis is caught in Jinny’s


net, but it is a net of light, so we mitigate this sense of capture to some degree; light seems less constraining than other more material “nets” we can imagine. Perhaps in one sense Jinny’s net of light functions more like a spotlight that reveals Louis in a way he dislikes.

Another signifi cant moment in the opening pages comes about when Rhoda is de-picted with her basin of petals. She wants “white petals that fl oat” when she tips the basin up (18). She drops a twig in as if it is a raft “for a drowning sailor” and uses a sprig of Sweet Alice to serve as lighthouse (18). Th is image is fascinating because we see Rhoda creating her own imaginary world, but in a sense more literal than we typically indicate by that phrase “imaginary world.” Rhoda’s is a tiny earth, replete with the powerful forces of tides and the respite of islands that her own ship reaches. Th at is, she fashions a miniature world of waves; demonstrating the act of artistic territorializing, she frames her own set of vibrations. Th is process is most clearly revealed when Woolf writes from Rhoda’s vantage: “And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves” (19). Rhoda seems to create her own waves in an isolated system. Perhaps this in-sulated recapitulation of the vibratory is meant to be contrasted to Jinny’s “intertwining” of her own bodily system with the actual forces of the earth, to borrow a concept from Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In other words, Rhoda may retreat toward a more artifi cial and representational world of her own because the forces that surround her are too overpower-ing. Jinny, while initially frightened by those forces, is nonetheless revealed as a character who becomes vibratory, or accepts her own becoming vibratory.

Words even take on an animal and oscillating nature in Woolf ’s opening segments. Th is development clearly connects the literary to the animal in Woolf ’s experimental text. After a passage in which Louis connects language to social and national distinctions and anxieties, three other characters refl ect upon the nature of words. For Susan they are like stones, but for Bernard words “fl ick their tails right and left as I speak them . . . Th ey wag their tails; they fl ick their tails; they move through the air in fl ocks, now this way, now that way, moving all together, now dividing, now coming together” (20). Dogs and birds, some of Woolf ’s favorite creatures, are used here to once again emphasize movement. Th e living quality of language, perhaps even the bodily quality of language that Jorie Graham empha-sizes seems literal in these moments. We should recall Garrett Stewart’s discussion of Woolf ’s “stylistic drift” here: Stewart was quick to remind us that Woolf claimed to want to “make prose move” as never before in this novel (qtd. in Goldman 129). Th e becoming-animal of language seems parallel to Woolf ’s intention. And this becoming is linked to enunciation for Bernard. “As I speak them,” he claims, words fl ick their tails or move in fl ocks. Perhaps Woolf uses the image of pack to emphasize the communal qualities or intertwining qualities of spoken language. I speak and you hear, and the words are carried as vibratory units that connect our bodies. Add to this Jinny’s claim that the words are “yellow and fi ery” and we have language that takes on a Jackson Pollock quality: it moves, it is full of color. It dances it splashes. When I saw the fi lm Pollock, directed by and featuring Ed Harris, I realized that Pollock was dancing with paint—he wasn’t just “painting”—and Woolf ’s depiction of lan-guage here seems quite similar. We might say Woolf dances with language.

Given all of this fl ocking and darting of language, it would be useful to turn at this moment to the relationship between birds, birdsong, music and art. We might want to ask how Woolf understands language as a kind of song, and I’ll continue to suggest that we have to recognize movement itself as crucial to Woolf ’s aesthetic in the novel.


Birds and birdsong are featured throughout the interludes, and these descriptions reveal how birds in Woolf point to the inhuman elements of aesthetics. But fi rst, let me detail how Elizabeth Grosz thinks about such questions. Darwin, Grosz reminds us, argues that music did not “evolve through natural selection but primarily through sexual selection” (Grosz 35). Music functions in evolutionary terms by creating pleasure and attracting one creature to another. In this sense, for Darwin, “it is perhaps birdsong that most clearly reveals the sexual nature of song, the productive role of sexual selection in the elaboration of the arts, and the mutual entwinement of the arts of decoration, performance, staging, and so on, with each other” (Grosz 36). Birdsong marks territory, highlights skills in the singer, attracts and mesmerizes other birds and creatures of other species. It also emphasizes emotion and marks the cultural acquisition of skills that are not reducible to instinct (37-38). Grosz make an important clarifi cation when she explains, “my claim is not that the bird infl uences the human, but that the songbird (and the songs of whales) accomplishes something new in its oratory, a new art, a new coupling of (sonorous) qualities and milieus that isn’t just the production of new musical elements . . . but the opening up of the world itself to the force of taste, appeal, the bodily, pleasure, desire—the very impulses behind all art” (39). Here is one of Woolf ’s descriptions of birdsong, from one of the novel’s interludes:

In the garden the birds that had sung erratically and spasmodically in the dawn on that tree, on that bush, now sang together in chorus, shrill and sharp; now together, as if conscious of companionship, now alone as if to the pale blue sky. Th ey swerved, all in one fl ight, when the black cat moved among the bushes, when the cook threw cinders on the ash heap and startled them. Fear was in their song, and apprehension of pain, and joy to be snatched quickly now at this in-stant. Also they sang emulously in the clear morning air, swerving high over the elm tree, singing together as they chased each other, escaping, pursuing, pecking each other as they turned high in the air. (73-74)

It’s not that Woolf ’s description replicates precisely Grosz’s Darwinian vision of birdsong, but rather that we notice the way in which Woolf ’s passage emphasizes elements such as the elaboration of emotion, the role of pursuit or sexual play, and the movement of natural musicalities, or as Grosz explains, “the playing out of a certain number of musical themes . . . to create natural sonatas, love songs, requiems” (39).

In a later interlude, Woolf’s description emphasizes even more clearly the “forcefulness” or excessive quality that Grosz identifi es in the becoming-artistic of the animal and natural worlds. She also pays attention to the coloration of birds, a sexual/artistic quality addressed by Darwin:

Each sang stridently, with passion, with vehemence, as if to let the song burst out of it, no matter if it shattered the song of another bird with harsh discord. Th eir round eyes bulged with brightness; their claws gripped the twig or rail. Th ey sang exposed without shelter, to the air and the sun, beautiful in their new plumage, shell veined or brightly mailed, here barred with soft blues, here splashed with gold, or striped with one bright feather. Th ey sang as if the song were urged out of them by the pressure of the morning. Th ey sang as if the edge of being were sharp-ened and must cut, must split the softness of the blue-green light. (109)


Here we have passionate song that bursts out of the creature, with enough power to “shat-ter” the tune of a fellow crooner. Or more powerfully, the song is represented as the “edge of being . . . sharpened” and ready to cut. Th is particular image, of being itself as a knife slicing through creation, is especially provocative for our purposes as it emphasizes a kind of sculpting or carving out of new energies and ontologies through a creative and sexually competitive activity.

But how do we connect such inhuman forces to the novel’s human characters? We do so by asking this question: how do Woolf ’s characters relate to the vibrational? How do the characters function as forces of creative rhythm, or in relation to forces of creative rhythm? And interestingly, it is Jinny who attracts one most in this respect. It is Jinny who seems most vibrational, and ultimately then, perhaps most creative or artistic, in the posthumanist sense. Th is claim runs contrary to our received wisdom about the char-acters, since Bernard and Louis are the novel’s practicing writers, and since Bernard and Rhoda are often linked to Woolf herself in a kind of quasi-biographical, quasi-theoretical register in Woolf criticism. Moreover, Jinny is sometimes reduced to the bodily, the sexual, and has famously been labeled a prostitute in Jane Marcus’s postcolonial reading of Th e Waves. More recently Henke characterizes her as a manic and careless moth whose activi-ties amount to restless modes of escape.8 Th ese readings of Jinny seem reductive and may overlook her signifi cance as a character. We need to think more deeply about Jinny, aes-thetics, and the forces behind Woolf ’s waves.

So let us return to Jinny, whose “natural happiness” others clearly envy in the novel (W 201). Jinny is characterized by undulating movement and her connections to move-ment, by the bodily as such and her attraction to materiality, and by an awareness of and appreciation for “qualia,” or qualitative experiential states. What I am calling Jinny’s “to-temic fantasy” in Th e Waves—the vision that seems to characterize her in the novel’s terms and that recurs throughout the text—helps us open our discussion of her character. In the novel’s second “chapter,” Jinny muses, “for winter I should like a thin dress shot with red threads that would gleam in the fi relight. Th en when the lamps were lit, I should put on my red dress and it would be thin as a veil, and would wind about my body, and billow out as I came into the room, pirouetting. It would make a fl ower shape as I sat down, in the middle of the room, on a gilt chair” (34). At fi rst glance, we might consider Jinny’s musings superfi cial, concerned with conventional notions of female beauty and fashion. We might even be tempted to spurn her attention to sexual attractiveness, secretly scold-ing her for catering to heteronormative defi nitions of women’s beauty and sexual avail-ability. Th ese temptations lead many readers to view Jinny as “shallow.” But we should not overlook the aesthetic-evolutionary aspects of Jinny’s fantasy. Normally, in winter, we cover ourselves with heavy clothes, but Jinny wants a dress that is “thin as a veil,” that bil-lows about. Th is detail suggests a more intimate connection between Jinny’s body and the dress; it moves with her, it reveals her physicality even in winter, it is part of her “energetic fi eld” in some sense, vibrating right along with her. And consider the fi nal image of this totemic passage in relation to the dress: “It would make a fl ower shape as I sat down, in the middle of the room, on a gilt chair” (34). Again, here, the fl ower serves as a signal of the excessive, sexualized nature of aesthetic force. Th e fl ower-dress envelopes Jinny, presents her in a performative gesture to her audience of onlookers. She is indeed center stage in


this pirouetting presentation of self, and we know from Grosz’s work that performance can be a central element of animal aesthetics. Moreover, the gilt chair reminds us how Jinny’s earthly, passionate becoming-fl ower is nonetheless accomplished through her at-tention to couture, in what must be a drawing-room of sorts. High-art or culture fi nds its roots in nature’s excesses, and we are reminded of Donna Haraway’s recent discussion of “naturecultures.”

Jinny’s sensibilities are revealed in connection to aff ect and movement, and she ex-plicitly links her sense of aesthetics or creation to the inhuman—to animality, the fl oral, and even to birdsong. In one passage that occurs near the center of the novel, when the characters are in their thirties, Jinny articulates what I would call one of the deep ideologi-cal premises of the text that has to do with creative forces manifested through what seem to be wildly divergent natural and cultural arenas:

In one way or another we make this day, this Friday, some by going to the Law Courts; others to the city; others to the nursery; others by marching and forming fours. . . . Th e activity is endless. . . . Some take train for France; others ship for India. Some will never come into this room again. One may die tonight. Another will beget a child. From us every sort of building, policy, venture, picture, poem, child, factory, will spring. Life comes; life goes; we make life. So you say. (176)

Th ere is much to say about this passage, especially in terms of the role of the mundane in relation to art, a theme addressed repeatedly in Woolf ’s work and in Woolf criticism. I want to emphasize the fi nal suggestion: we make life. If we pause to consider this seem-ingly “straightforward” assertion in Woolf ’s text, we recognize that it makes a claim utterly salient to our thesis. We don’t make art, or literature. We don’t live life or experience life. We make life. We create life. Could Jinny be recognizing the becoming-artistic of life itself in its inhuman manifestations? Th e paragraphs that follow this moment suggest as much.

In the next passage, Jinny links her “bodily” attunement with her Umwelt (or environ-ment) to movement and change in a specifi cally animal register. She seems even to reject a kind of representational or symbolic relation to the world around her. “[W]e who live in the body,” she begins, “see with the body’s imagination things in outline. I see rocks in bright sunshine. I cannot take these facts into some cave and, shading my eyes, grade their yellows, blues, umbers into one substance. I cannot remain seated for long. I must jump up and go. Th e coach may start from Piccadilly. I drop all these facts—diamonds, withered hands, china pots and the rest of it, as a monkey drops nuts from its naked paws. I cannot tell you if life is this or that. I am going to be buff eted; to be fl ung up, and fl ung down, among men, like a ship on the sea” (176). Th e cave seems to be Woolf ’s metaphor for a reductively sym-bolic or conceptual aesthetic that transmutes too drastically the qualities of various colors. Th is kind of creativity, the overly representational, is a stagnation for Jinny; it requires too much sitting or stillness. Like a monkey, she “drops” facts and moves into the crowd where she can join the larger forces of the people, to be “fl ung” about like a ship on the sea.

Once Jinny has entered “the fray,” she essentially exhibits for us the process of sexual selec-tion, with all the elements of taste, attractiveness, battle, territory and marking that Grosz (vis-à-vis Darwin) tells us originate in the animal world and reveal to us the fundamentals of art:


For now my body, my companion, which is always sending its signals, the rough black ‘No,’ the golden ‘Come’ in rapid running arrows of sensation, beckons. Some one moves. Did I raise my arm? Did I look? Did my yellow scarf with the strawberry spots fl oat and signal? He has broken from the wall. He follows, I am pursued through the forest. All is rapt, all is nocturnal and the parrots go scream-ing through the branches. All my senses stand erect. . . . We are out of doors. Night opens; night traversed by wandering moths; night hiding lovers roaming to adventure. I smell roses; I smell violets; I see red and blue just hidden. (177)

Notice how the pedestrian scene is suddenly transfi gured into one that takes place in the forest at night. Jinny, like a monkey in the previous passage, is now surrounded by screaming parrots, pursued by her mate. Her scarf signals in yellow and red whisps like a bird’s bright coloration. In fact, later in the passage, she generalizes the scene’s meaning by explaining that she hears the “crash and rending of boughs and the crack of antlers as if the beasts of the for-est were all hunting, all rearing high and plunging down among the thorns” (177). “One has pierced me,” she continues, “One is driven deep within me” (177). We should be reminded here of the signifi cance of territory in Deleuzian terms. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, the artist is “the fi rst person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark. Property, collec-tive or individual, is derived from that, even when it is in the service of war and oppression. Property is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard. As Lorenz says, coral fi sh are posters. Th e expressive is primary in relation to the possessive.”9 Grosz helpfully glosses this concept by reminding us that the “boundary is not self-protective but erotico-proprietorial: it defi nes a stage of performance, an arena of enchantment, a mise-en-scène for seduction that brings together heterogeneous and otherwise unrelated elements: melody and rhythms, a series of gestures, bows, and dips, a tree or a perch, a nest, a clearing, an audience of rivals, an audience of desired ones” (Grosz 48).

And if we have any doubt about Jinny’s experience, the following sentences near the end of this passage seem incontrovertibly to link her sensibilities to the becoming-artistic of the animal and inhuman worlds: “Now let us sing our love song—Come, come, come. Now my gold signal is like a dragon-fl y fl ying taut. Jug, jug, jug, I sing like the nightingale whose melody is crowded in the too narrow passage of her throat” (177).

As we continue to think about creating life, about movement and aff ect, I’ll turn to another crucial scene for Jinny in the novel. Th is is in fact the coming to fruition of what I called her “totemic fantasy” earlier in this essay. Woolf signals or hails this fantasy’s mani-festation not only when she begins the scene with the phrase “Here are gilt chairs in the empty, the expectant rooms…” but even more bluntly when later in the passage she has Jinny claim, “Th is is what I have dreamt; this is what I have foretold. I am native here. . . . Th is is the most exciting moment I have ever known” (101-102). Just as the earlier fantasy has led us to expect, the moment is a social one dominated by “taste, appeal, the bodily, pleasure, [and] desire” (Grosz 39). It is also especially compelling because of the central role that movement and dance play in it. You will remember that Jinny has arrived after dark at what seems to be a socially respectable dance hall. She describes her prepared self in sensory and artistic terms throughout the passage: “My silk legs rub smoothly together. Th e stones of a necklace lie cold on my throat. . . . All is exact, prepared. My hair is swept in one curve. My lips are precisely red” (101). And once again, in what would seem a spe-


cifi cally “cultural” milieu, where men are checking their ties and pocket-handkerchiefs, we have the most organic description of Jinny’s state of mind or of being: “I now begin,” she claims, “to unfurl, in this scent, in this radiance, as a fern when its curled leaves unfurl” (102). She continues in this scene to characterize herself as a plant that is rooted, but yet fl ows: “I fl utter. I ripple. I stream like a plant in the river, fl owing this way, fl owing that way, but rooted, so that he may come to me” (102). Dance may represent the most per-plexing of artistic forms to those who attempt to separate aesthetics from the bodily. In its way this is an obvious claim since for dancers the body is the instrument. Th e “formal” execution of forces, speeds, qualities and shapes all must be rendered by the body. Dance helps us think about the vibrational in its specifi city as bodily, and about the body’s re-sponse to and participation in forces and qualities that are clearly other than human. In Jinny’s totemic fantasy come true, dancing to music with her partner among the gilt chairs seems to frame a moment of the becoming-artistic of her life. Once she has settled on her partner, they begin their dance:

Now with a little jerk, like a limpet broken from a rock, I am broken off : I fall with him; I am carried off . We yield to this slow fl ood. We go in and out of the hesitat-ing music. Rocks break the current of the dance; it jars, it shivers. In and out we are swept now into this large fi gure; it holds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his hard, mine fl owing, are pressed together within its body; it holds us together; and then lengthening out, in smooth, in sinuous folds, rolls us between it, on and on. (103)

We can read the “fi gure” here as a frame. Notice how it functions to cordon off a “space” of sexual performance in which the life-forces of two bodies interact in a creative duet. Th e framing created by the music and dance seems clearest when Woolf writes, “it holds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls” (103). For Jinny, then, it makes sense that dance, the most bodily of aesthetic practices, fi gures so prominently in her totemic moment of becoming-artistic. Jinny is, after all, the one who spins, and pirouettes, and fl utters. Her attraction to dance emphasizes the active force in art, the aff ective, that which resists hardening into concepts.

So we might understand Jinny as being positively tied to or actively participating in the vibrational. As the scene above demonstrates she makes life itself artistic; she is in herself, in the unfolding of her own life or being, perhaps the most creative character in Th e Waves, if we understand the artistic as the opening up of life itself to rhythm, desire, and excess. And if we understand the artistic to have its roots or its tentacles well beyond the human. Th us, when we are told that Louis has known little “natural happiness,” we instinctively think of Jinny as his foil. Th e formally or conceptually artistic in this text are potentially less creative than Jinny, who some suspect may be a call-lady.

All of this opens our awareness to one of Bernard’s observations, a statement that re-veals his own recognition of Jinny’s mode: “We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumined and everlasting road” (146). But the creations here are hardly restricted to human worlds. Rather, the creative force that Woolf reveals,


especially in characters like Jinny, opens the human onto its own participation in the in-human. Woolf understands that force, intensity, art and movement connect the human, the animal, the earth, and the cosmos.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Grosz, “Th e Creative Impulse,” interview by Julie Copeland, Sunday Morning Radio National, 14 August 2005, 2.

2. Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia, 2008), 3.3. All subsequent citations of Grosz are from Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. 4. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),169.5. For further discussion of the refrain, see especially chapters ten and eleven in Gilles Deleuze and Félix

Guattari, A Th ousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press, 1987).

6. It is important to note here the Deleuzian reading of Th e Waves that Beatrice Monaco presents in her recent book Machinic Modernism: Th e Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce (New York: Pal-grave, 2008). Monaco’s reading has points of overlap with my own, and she compellingly discusses Woolf ’s novel as “a narrative ‘organism’ which pulses with cosmic, territorial and artistic life” (162). Monaco emphasizes the machinic elements of the novel, while I am more interested in the aestheticization of life.

7. See the introductory chapter in Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (Columbia University Press, 2009).

8. See Henke, p. 135.9. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Th ousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 316.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Th ousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

___. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.Goldman, Jane. Columbia Critical Guides: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Th e Waves. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1998.Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University

Press, 2008.___. “Th e Creative Impulse.” Interview by Julie Copeland. Sunday Morning Radio National. August 14, 2005.

<http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/s1435592.htm>. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Henke, Suzette. “Th e Waves as Ontological Trauma Narrative.” Virginia Woolf and Trauma: Embodied Texts. Ed.

Suzette Henke and David Eberly. New York: Pace University Press, 2007.Marcus, Jane. “Britannia Rules Th e Waves.” In Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century “British”

Literary Canons. Ed. Karen R. Lawrence. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. 136-62.McGee, Patrick. “Th e Politics of Modernist Form; or, Who Rules Th e Waves?” Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader.

Ed. Maren Linett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.Monaco, Beatrice. Machinic Modernism: Th e Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce. New

York: Palgrave, 2008.Rohman, Carrie. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

“THE REAL WORLD”: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND ECOFEMINISM

by Diana L. Swanson

Thank you, Vara, for that very generous introduction. It’s an honor and a pleasure to be giving the closing keynote for this wonderful conference. Th ank you, Kris-tin, for inviting me to give this talk. Everyone, please join me in thanking Kristin

for all the work she did to organize this 20th annual conference and congratulating her on its success!

I titled this talk “the real world” because Woolf uses the phrase to describe what she tries to capture in words. I also chose this title because I believe that real oak trees—to go back to an opening exchange at this conference—are more important than our words. But our words can help determine whether oak trees survive.

As ecofeminism teaches us, whether oak trees survive also has much to do with whether we, as a species, confront and do away with the misogyny and male dominance that mark most if not all of our societies.

So what might be the relationship of Woolf ’s thought to ecofeminism? Woolf is un-doubtedly a formative thinker in the history of feminism in Western civilization. But can Woolf off er insights and approaches useful to us as we grapple with the ecological crisis of the 21st century and the ways that patriarchal gender ideology and arrangements contrib-ute to human destruction of environments and species?

You see from these opening questions that, for this presentation and the discussion I hope will follow, I am not so much interested in using ecological feminism and ecological literary criticism to analyze Woolf ’s literary works. Rather I am asking how Woolf can help us today in our quest to develop the non-anthropocentric and non-androcentric understandings of the world necessary to changing human behavior towards the other-than-human world. Can Woolf be a guide or at least a helpful fellow hiker on the trail as we learn to live in ecologically responsible ways?

I believe that the solution to our global and local environmental crises lies in chang-ing our modes of thinking and therefore our actions. We need a paradigm shift that de-centers both man and homo sapiens. To misquote Th oreau: in imagination is the salvation of the world.

Th inkers as diverse as Australian ecofeminist philosopher and environmentalist Val Plumwood and American Christian theologian and Biblical interpretation professor Wal-ter Wink confi rm this idea that we must call upon imagination. In Environmental Culture: Th e Ecological Crisis of Reason, Plumwood points out the widespread ecological denial that diverts human energy and resources into debates about whether there really is a serious en-vironmental problem (and apparently in some political circles right now the seriousness of the Gulf oil spill is being questioned) rather than in taking action on solutions to climate change, pollution, habitat destruction, etc. She asserts that “the ecological crisis is not just or even primarily a crisis of technology, but is rather a crisis of rationality, morality, and imagination” (97-98). Walter Wink makes a similar point in diff erent language: “We

25“The Real World”

are living in an apocalyptic time disguised as normal, and that is why we have not responded appropriately. If we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction, as some scientists tell us we are, our response so far has been scarcely commensurate to the challenge” (161). Both Plumwood and Wink assert that rationalism as we know it is not an adequate response to our environmental crisis. I underline “as we know it” because I am not arguing against rea-son or science but rather taking up Plumwood’s distinction between reason and rational-ism as a particular form of reason that is radically detached and oppositional to the body.

Plumwood’s major argument in her fi rst book, Feminism and the Mastery of Na-ture, is foundational to much of ecofeminist thought and similar arguments have also been developed and supported by many other feminist thinkers of various schools of thought. Th is argument goes as follows. Human/nature, mind/body, subject/object du-alism and the identifi cation of reason and mind with the human (and man in particular) and instinct, the body, emotion, and irrationality with women and the nonhuman has been a major cause of our ecological problem. Th is dualistic worldview has concep-tualized other-than-human beings as passive, inferior “natural resources” legitimately available for human use and exploitation. Th is way of thinking assigns the status of subject to men and object to everyone and everything else, living and nonliving. Our ethical systems, seeing only human beings as “thou,” see all else as “it,” thus justifying our destruction of nonhuman lives and of the natural environment. More recently, the technological developments of the last 100 years have so intimately shaped our daily lives, at least in the so-called developed world, that we experience ourselves as largely separate from and independent of “nature.” We have become so distanced that we must learn once again to see, hear, and feel the rest of nature and to imagine the nonhuman as connected to us and ourselves as part of the natural world. According to Plumwood, in this dilemma “we can turn to certain kinds of imaginative literature which write na-ture as agent, re-subjectivising and re-intentionalizing the non-human as an ethical and intentional subject of narrative” (53-54).

Walter Wink also asserts the importance of imagination. In his book, Th e Human Be-ing: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man, he uses the nuclear crisis during the Cold War as an example of the failure of rationality and the success of imagination in confront-ing an overwhelming problem.

“Nothing can save us that is possible,” the poet W. H. Auden intoned over the madness of the nuclear crisis.“We who must die demand a miracle.” Th e miracle we received came about because people like the physician Helen Caldicott re-fused to accept nuclear annihilation. She forced her hearers to visualize the ef-fects of their inaction. Imagination . . . is the sole organ capable of conveying a truth so overwhelming that we cannot take it in. (160)

Carol Cohn’s now-classic study, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” supports Wink’s view. As a participant observer at a university center on de-fense technology and arms control, she discovered a world of “extraordinary abstraction” in which intellectuals built the reasoning “used to explain why it is not safe to live without nuclear weapons” (688) and in which “there seems to be no graphic reality behind the words, as they speak of ‘fi rst strikes’ . . . and ‘limited nuclear war’” (690); “over and over


I found I could not stay connected, could not keep human lives as my reference point” (708-709). Dualistic, rationalist, and technology-driven visions led us to this ecological moment. Science and technology as usual will not solve the ecological crisis. Masculinist rationalism disconnected from emotion and the body, modes of reason that conceptualize feeling as opposed to rationality, will not chart a new direction.

Imaginative literature can help us break out of the subject/object dualism that struc-tures and constrains our worldview in Western culture. We need literature that calls us to participate in ecological ways of seeing and to reimagine the real world. We need literature that can teach us how to pay attention to the reality of beings and things beyond the man-made environments—both physical and virtual—in which we now spend so much of our time. We need literature that can help us imagine nonhuman beings as having perspec-tives, meaning, and purposes. We need literature that models for us a practice of praise for and wonder at what is beyond us.

So I have two central questions: 1) Can Woolf ’s work help us to understand how feminism is important for en-

vironmentalism, that is, how solving the problem of gender and women’s oppression is necessary for solving the environmental crisis? As an aside here, my point is not that doing away with the oppression of women will, lo and behold, solve the environmental problem too, but rather that if we don’t address the oppression of women and the femi-nine we won’t fully address environmental destruction and vice versa—each is necessary though not suffi cient to the other.

2) Can Woolf ’s writing help us imagine the reality and subjectivities of other-than-human beings?

I: ECOFEMINISM AND WOOLF’S FEMINISM

Clearly, not just any literature will do in order to help us develop ecological imagi-nations and de-activate our dualistic thinking. Metaphors, such as Mother Earth and the Virgin Land, and narratives of the hero, of exploration, adventure, and the frontier, among others, have participated in creating the instrumentalist, exploitative mode of see-ing the natural world as studies such as Annette Kolodny’s Th e Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters have shown. Th ese metaphors and narratives imbue various literary genres from epic to lyric to drama to the novel, and from canonical fi ction to science fi ction and fantasy. (Th e violence and destruction perpetrated by the English scientists and adventurers in Arthur Conan Doyle’s science fi ction novel Th e Lost World [1912] off ers just one example contemporary to Woolf.)

So how do we tell things diff erently? Science fi ction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Th eory of Fiction” off ers, I think, part of an answer. In this essay, Le Guin tells us that, while researching and planning Th ree Guineas (1938) Woolf wrote a “Glossary” in her notebooks, and among the entries are heroism, defi ned as “botulism,” and hero, defi ned as “bottle” (150). Apparently Woolf identifi ed the hero or warrior as poisonous to life. Le Guin agrees, and in place of the story of the spear, the hero, the hunter, the warrior, Le Guin off ers the story of the carrier bag, the gatherer, the trickster, the survivor. Le Guin says:


Th e trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get fi nished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story . . . the life story. . . . People have been telling the life story for ages, in all sorts of words, and ways. Myths of creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels. . . . Th e Hero has decreed . . . fi rst, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is confl ict, and third, that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it. I diff er with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fi tting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. Th ey bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us. (152-153)

Th e novel as carrier bag or container. Th e narrative as not confi ned to a story of confl ict in the form of exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement. Le Guin clearly connects the male-centered anthropological theory of Man-the-Hunter with the confl ict-centered theory of what makes a good story. Th e two go together. Th e inaccuracy of these theo-ries is that they exclude women and the feminine from the human and the valuable; the danger of these theories is that they valorize violence, war, death, and sacrifi ce for abstract goals such as honor, freedom, and nation while they negate cooperation, peace, survival, and the maintenance work of daily living.

Le Guin’s ideas are consonant with Woolf ’s ideas about the novel and women. One of the common complaints about Woolf ’s novels is that they lack action, plot, even char-acter. What people are identifying is that her novels lack heroic action, plot, and character, and even go so far as to mock heroism—perhaps the most famous example being her characterization of Mr. Ramsay’s heroic approach to philosophy and to life. (Paula Gunn Allen in “Kochinnenako in Academe” from Th e Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions argues convincingly that what constitutes a story at all is culturally defi ned and can diff er greatly.) In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf was one of the fi rst critics to point to the masculine bias of the literary canon: “it is the masculine values that prevail. . . . Th is is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. Th is is an insignifi cant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefi eld is more important than a scene in a shop—everywhere and much more subtly the diff erence of value persists” (77). In her case, whether or not it was true for all the moderns, Woolf ’s endeavors to make “the accent [fall] diff erently from that of old,” as she puts it in “Modern Fiction,” have much to do with shaping an unheroic narrative in which “there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style” (CR1: 150).

Like Le Guin, Woolf also describes the novel as a container for emotions and mean-ings, only Woolf tends to use architectural imagery. In A Room of One’s Own, for example, she describes the novel as a

structure leaving a shape upon the mind’s eye, built now in squares, now pagoda shaped, now throwing out wings and arcades, now solidly compact and domed


like the Cathedral of Saint Sofi a at Constantinople. Th is shape. . . starts in one the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it. But that emotion at once blends itself with others, for the ‘shape’ is not made by the relation of stone to stone, but by the relation of human being to human being. (74)

However, interestingly, Le Guin describes “home” as “another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people” and the shrine or museum as containers for the sacred (152). Architects themselves talk about buildings as containers creating certain shapes and se-quences of spaces that evoke certain feelings and enable certain kinds of activities within them. Th e meaning of the architecture is discovered, and in part created, by the user.1 Woolf often says similar things about the novel—that its meanings are not conveyed di-rectly, expositorily, but rather the reader apprehends through reading, through experienc-ing the text and putting the pieces together. Mark Hussey in Th e Singing of the Real World discusses Woolf ’s interest in writing about nonverbal states, experiences, and realities and describes this aspect of Woolf ’s novels as follows: “the meaning can only emerge as part of its overall context; by shaping round what is unsayable, it is ‘said’ in the act of reading” (111). See also Patricia Laurence’s important study Th e Reading of Silence.

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf warns that the overly masculine narrative, single-focused and ego-focused, obscures everything beyond the masculine “I.” Her narrator describes reading a new novel by “Mr. A” and says that “after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page . . . . a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I.’ One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking, I was not quite sure” (103). Th us, this insistently masculine and privileged vision (“polished for centuries by good teach-ing and good feeding” at the great public schools and universities [104]), which Woolf contrasts to her ideal of androgyny and incandescence, obscures both women and nature, making them both unreal and secondary to the hero.

Th us, I hope I’ve started to answer my fi rst question; Woolf ’s ideas about fi ction help to clarify the connection between the ecological crisis and patriarchy. If the stories that drive our culture have been “Man Against Himself,” “Man Against Society,” “Man Against Nature,” then Woolf critiques these master narratives and argues that we need alternatives.

Woolf ’s novels off er alternative narratives that de-valorize the story of the hero and revalue the story of life. Her fi rst two novels, I think, are structured in somewhat more traditional and teleological ways than her later ones. In Th e Voyage Out (1915) Woolf uses the bildungsroman and in Night and Day (1917) she uses the courtship plot, although various critics have pointed out how Woolf chafes against and to some degree rewrites the requirements of these genres. From Jacob’s Room (1922) on, however, Woolf creates nar-rative structures that do not present us with a central confl ict and lead us—THOK!—to a clear resolution. Her later novels, rather, focus on connections, disconnections, conti-nuities, discontinuities; their narratives are webs of time, people, places, animals, plants, insects, and things that are woven, broken, and rewoven.

We all know that each of Woolf ’s novels has a diff erent structure and a diff erent method and thus addresses the challenge of creating a nonpatriarchal plot diff erently; I don’t need to belabor that point. Th ere isn’t time to look at every novel, so I am taking Th e Years (1937), one of my favorite novels, and one I think is still under-appreciated, as


an example. Tonya Krouse, in her paper on the politics of nature in Th e Years on Friday, off ered a signifi cant analysis of how the novel moves away from a teleological model of time. She showed how the descriptions of the natural world intrude on the plot, displace conventionally signifi cant events, interrupt conversations, disrupt urban and domestic spaces, as well as connect scenes to one another. I would add that the motif of Eleanor’s dot with rays, which repeats throughout the story as she does the household accounts, sits at a committee meeting, attends the family party at the end of the novel, is emblematic of the narrative trajectory of the novel which is patterned on the moon and the sun that rise and fall and “slowly, wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the weeks, the years [that pass] one after another across the sky” (4), conveying a sense of time as cycling and repetitive, a kind of spiral dance. Th e sunfl ower on the tiles decorating the buildings Eleanor had built for the poor repeats this shape of a center with rays coming out from it and thus connects this narrative structure with the projects of housing and helping that Eleanor pursues and with the focus on cooperation, the maintenance work of living, and the cycles of birth and death that Le Guin’s “life story” is about.

A Room of One’s Own connects this literary experimentation to women’s emancipa-tion and to nature. At the end of the book, she advises the young women who make up her audience to “escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves” (118). I fi nd it very suggestive that Woolf says “the sky, too, and the trees.” Earlier in the book, her narrator says that, when she inherited 500 a year, “my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing fi gure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky” (39). Woolf is certainly not alone in English literature for con-necting the open sky or the open sea with freedom. Conventionally, however, the freedom referred to is freedom from the domestic, the feminine, the repetitive. Woolf, however, connects the sky with the emancipation of women and with her critique both of women’s forced restriction to the domestic sphere and of the devaluation of domestic creativity. She asks women to look out the window and, more, to walk out and fi nd out what their own way of seeing tells them about the sky and the trees. For women, she says, “are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost”—or a tree?—“without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert or Chas. must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fi ne woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est à moi. And, of course, it may not be a dog, I thought, . . . it may be a piece of land or a man with curly black hair” (52). Here Woolf suggests that women’s turning our eyes to the sky or the trees may be in the service of fi nding a non-possessive, non-imperialist approach to our relations as human beings to the earth and the sky as well as other people. IF, that is, we hold on to the diff erences of psychology, perspective, and knowledge that our unpaid-for education has developed, as Woolf warns us in both A Room of One’s One and Th ree Guineas; if we try to form feminist visions that off er true alternatives—for all sexes and genders—rather than ask for equal participation in the same old story, the same old plot, the same round and round of the mulberry tree.

In the language of current standpoint theory, we might say that Woolf ’s challenge to women is a challenge to develop the subversive potential of women’s social location into a


counter-hegemonic ecological standpoint and we can extend that challenge to all of us to fi nd subversive epistemological potential in our own social locations.

II: THE REALITY AND SUBJECTIVITIES OF OTHER-THAN-HUMAN BEINGS

2. So we come to my second question: the question of how to see, how to reimag-ine the real world, how to look at other-than-human nature in a way that promotes ecological relations between ourselves and the rest of the world. Can Woolf show us ways of seeing that are not possessive—not my woman, my land, my dog, my lumber, my oil? Can Woolf ’s writing help us imagine the reality and subjectivities of other-than-human beings?

Several of Woolf ’s short stories from the years between Night and Day and Jacob’s Room experiment with ways to get beyond the human-centered point of view. In “Th e Mark on the Wall,” Woolf ’s narrator, unlike Mr. A, does not obscure the tree but tries to imagine the life experiences of a tree:

the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. . . . Th e song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes. (CSF 82-83)

Rather than personifying the tree, that is, imagining what a human being would feel like being a tree, the narrator tries to imagine how a tree feels. Th us, this narrator imagines the subjectivity of a nonhuman being, taking seriously the possibility that a tree—usually excluded from subjectivity even more than animals and birds—has a per-spective on the world. Note the phrases “must sound,” “must feel,” which indicate the speculativeness of this passage. Th e narrator thus indicates awareness of the uncertainty of her tree portrait and openness to another view. In this way, the narrator is starting to imagine the world from a nonhuman perspective, starting to shift the human from the center.

Perhaps the most stunning short story in this regard is “Kew Gardens.” Th e third person narrator is settled fi rmly in one fl ower bed and describes the people walking past only to the extent that they are within ear and eye shot of the fl ower bed. Th e patches of sunlight and shade play over the backs of the human beings as they do over the pebbles and the snail in the fl ower bed beneath the red, blue, and yellow blooms. Th e human be-ings are in the same relation to the sun and Kew and its trees as the snail is to the sun and the fl owers. Woolf also creates a snail’s eye view of the world:

brown cliff s with deep green lakes in the hollows, fl at blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture—all these objects lay across the snail’s progress between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other


human beings. np.

And again we hear bits and pieces of human conversation.Th us, the rhythm of the story goes back and forth between the human wanderers

in Kew and the nonhuman. Th e story asks us to give up our focus on people and their desires and goals which are implicitly compared to the snail’s goal, and the thrush’s and the butterfl ies’. Instead of giving us insights into and resolutions of the human beings’ relationships and problems, the story asks us to be open to the possibility that the other-than-human beings present in the same place as the human characters also have goals and problems and make decisions. Th e story also asks us to experience rhythm, shape, color, light, texture, and to experience them from the snail’s perspective as much as from the perspective of the human beings. Reading this story is a sensuous and contemplative experience rather than the pursuit of a linear narrative and the fate of a character. Woolf asks us to sit still and pay attention to the nonhuman as well as the human and to pay attention to our bodily senses, especially to sight and sound, and the experiences and thus the knowledge our senses give us.

Historians of science have traced the role of Kew Gardens in the development of botany and of empire building. In each of their studies, historians Lucile H. Brockway, Richard Drayton, and John Gascoigne show how Kew, which began as a royal pleasure garden that displayed the culture and power of the king, became a center of botanical research in the ser-vice of the empire as well as a public park. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, botanists were sent out from Kew around the world to gather specimens and study the fl ora of the globe and eventually to create a network of botanical gardens throughout the empire. Th is work and expense was justifi ed to the government by putting Kew and the other botanical gardens around the empire to work for the benefi t of commercial agriculture, making pos-sible viable plantation production of such valuable goods as cinchona (quinine), rubber, and sisal. Woolf ’s story “Kew Gardens” suggests that what has been viewed instrumentally as “natural resources” has its own presence and subjectivity, lives alongside us and with us even as we use and study it for our own purposes whether commercial or aesthetic.

G.A. Cohen in Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality defi nes an agentic being, a being that has agency—as “an independent centre of value, and an originator of projects that demand my respect” (qtd. in Plumwood 239). In this sense of the term—as beings that have independent value, as beings who are ends in themselves not just means to our human ends, and as beings that originate their own actions and purposes—other living beings, from snails to birds to dogs, even to bacteria, do have agency. In “Kew Gardens,” Woolf writes of all living beings as indeed having agency that we can and should respect.

Woolf ’s story “Th e Mark on the Wall” also shows a snail as having agency through the revelation at the end of the story that the mark on the wall is a snail. Th is discovery jerks the narrator out of her musings, requires the narrator to get out of her own mind and realize the impossibility of human control of the other-than-human world. She cannot control where snails go nor entirely what they mean. In Chapter IV of Jacob’s Room, while Mrs. Pascoe is inside her cottage, a bumble-bee visits a foxglove; while Mrs. Pascoe goes to her well for water, the bee visits the teasle and then buzzes back to Mrs. Pascoe’s garden patch, and a peacock butterfl y spreads its wings on the teasle. Th e bee and the butterfl y are doing their chores, too.


Th e number and variety of references to the nonhuman world in Jacob’s Room are re-markable. Th ese references include a St. John’s Wort bush, more butterfl ies, snow, fi elds, wind, streams, rooks, trees, moss, convolvus moths, clouds, furze bushes blackened by frost, a bunch of twigs fl oating down a stream and catching on a rock, dawns and sunsets, waves, stars, storms, sparrows, wild red cyclamen, tortoises, a fl ock of wild ducks. Some of these references may develop symbolic meanings, such as the bee in Mrs. Pascoe’s garden which may reference bee goddesses of the ancient Mediterranean world—Bonnie Scott mentioned these goddesses in her keynote; the purple aster beaten to the ground in the fi rst chapter as well as the many other purple fl owers in the book foreshadow death and mourning as Elisa Sparks so graphically demonstrated in her presentation; and the wild grasses and the foxes on Dodd’s Hill certainly suggest untamed sexualities in Mrs. Jarvis and Mrs. Flanders as Judith Allen and Vara Neverow have discussed. However, the presence, variety, and detail of these references to animate and inanimate parts of the nonhuman world are in excess of what would be suffi cient for symbolic uses. Also, they do not, for the most part, instigate or develop any human events or conversation among the human characters but seem to be present for the readers to notice, to pay attention to. I’m reminded of one of the mantras of this conference: “Nothing is simply one thing.” As Mayuko Nakazawa pointed out earlier in this conference in her discussion of trees in Th e Waves (1931), these nonhuman presences are both part of the outer world and part of the human symbolic world. Jacob’s Room repeat-edly calls attention to what usually goes unnoticed by human beings at least in the industrial world of Woolf ’s England and the postindustrial world of Europe and North America today. By repeated references to the nonhuman, the novel calls attention to the fact that plants, animals, and insects, waters, winds, and sky are there, are always with us whether we notice them or not. “Reality,” “life itself,” includes the nonhuman in its ongoing, unending being and variety. Th us Woolf creates a constant weaving in and out of the nonhuman presence throughout the book’s fabric, a repeated reminder that the world is larger than human be-ings, their relationships, and their creations—be those creations a stone cottage on a cliff in Cornwall or the Acropolis in Athens.

Similarly in Th e Years, the pigeons coo at various points in the novel, coming and going on errands and in relationships of their own. Pigeons “shuffl ed in the tree tops, let-ting fall a twig or two” on the fi rst page of the novel (3) and “the pigeons were shuffl ing on the tree tops” on the second-to-last page (433). In between, the pigeons croon, “Take two coos, Taff y, take two coos . . . . tak” over and over. Kitty hears them in Oxford; Elea-nor, Sara, and Rose hear them in London; Edward has trouble hearing them although he does tell us they are wood pigeons (433). Th e opening scenes of each chapter describe the weather—the wind, sun, rain, clouds, cold, warmth—and their eff ects on the landscape, birds, animals, insects, and people, repeated reminders that all of us, human and nonhu-man alike, are subject to these natural, cosmic forces beyond our control. In Plumwood’s words, we human beings are “positioned equally and along with the whole cast of non-humans in the drama of the ecological world” (51-52). Th is understanding of ourselves as equally a part of the ecological world is what we need to fully take in and act upon if we are to respond adequately to the ecological crises of our time.

Th us, the snails, the pigeons, the cows, the trees, the asters, the bees, the wind and rain are synechdoches for the nonhuman and at certain points—as many papers at this conference have shown—they are symbols of human ideas or concerns. However, the


use of synechdoche and symbol does not require that these nonhuman beings and things become merely literary objects of human use. Although they create meanings in Woolf ’s texts through representing the vast and various reality of other-than-human being and sometimes through referencing literary and philosophical traditions, they are still also meaningful as individual snail, thrush, aster, bee. Th eir identities do not merge with hu-man identities. Woolf’s texts underline their material presence and subjectivity at the same time as they operate as synechdoche or symbol. In fact, the synechdoches could not work and mean as they do without the snail, thrush, fl owers, bee retaining their specifi city and subjectivity.

Woolf asks us to read in a way that challenges conventions: fi rst, to refrain from as-suming nature is a metaphor for human concerns; and second, when images of nature do work metaphorically, to see the vehicle and the tenor, the bee and the mythic vision of female divinity and creativity, as equally real and signifi cant, both as the unity that cre-ates the metaphor and as distinct—one a living being and one a human idea. Pigeons are members of the dove family and thus their presence in Th e Years underscores the novel’s theme of war and peace. In a more irreverent manner, so do “the sparrows and starlings making their discordant chatter round the eaves of St. Martin’s, [whitening] the heads of the sleek statues holding rods or rolls of paper in Parliament Square” (89). However, the pigeons, sparrows, and starlings, I argue, are also references to pigeons, sparrows, and starlings and their co-residence in this world with human beings. Functioning as a symbol does not negate the specifi city of the particular being described.

Woolf ’s texts ask us to recognize and pay attention to other-than-human beings as our fellow inhabitants of this earth and to imagine their subjectivities and purposes; her texts ask us to recast our understanding of ourselves as a species that is equally part of the ecological world. Woolf ’s writing also asks us to reimagine the plots of our lives—both in-dividual and collective. If we were actually to rise to these challenges, we would radically change our decision-making about our own projects. (We would also behave diff erently in our own backyards—literally. I highly recommend Sarah Stein’s wonderfully written and innovative Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards.) We would think very diff erently about “progress” and “success.” We would think very diff erently about ethics and the cost-benefi t ratios of economic development—say of deep-water off -shore oil drilling, for example. At this point in time, we don’t enter the lives of algae, birds, fi sh, shrimp, marsh grasses, trees into our ethical and economic calculus as valuable in themselves and with a right to their lives. And we should. As teachers of and writers about Woolf ’s novels, essays, and short stories, we can invite our students and colleagues to en-gage in the reimagining of the life story of this earth and participate in what may be the most important work at hand—creating a new ethos of respect for, attention to, wonder at, and delight in the other-than-human world. We can help to birth the paradigm shift.

Notes

1. Conversation with my brother, Scott M. H. Swanson, architect.

Works Cited

Allen, Paula Gunn. “Kochinnenako in Academe : Th ree Approaches to interpreting a Keres Indian Tale.” Th e Sa-cred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. 222-244.


Brockway, Lucile H. “Science and Colonial Expansion: Th e Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens.” American Ethnologist 6.3 (1979): 449-465. <http://www.jstor.org/> Accessed 14 June 2004.

Cohn, Carol. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs 12.4 (1987): 687-718.Dick, Susan, ed. Th e Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.Drayton, Richard. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World. New

Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.Gascoigne, John. Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age

of Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Hussey, Mark. Th e Singing of the Real World: Th e Philosophy of Virginia Woolf ’s Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State

University Press, 1986. Kolodny, Annette. Th e Lay of the Land: Metaphor As Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel

Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.Laurence, Patricia Ondek. Th e Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition. Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1991. Le Guin, Ursula K. “Th e Carrier Bag Th eory of Fiction.” Th e Ecocriticism Reader. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and

Harold Fromm. Athens: Th e University of Georgia Press, 1996. 149-154.Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: Th e Ecological Crisis of Reason. London and New York: Routledge,

2002.Stein, Sarah. Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards. Boston and New York: Houghton

Miffl in, 1993.Wink, Walter. Th e Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002.Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. (1922) NY: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950.—. Kew Gardens. (1919) A facsimile edition of the 1927 Hogarth Press edition with decorations by Vanessa

Bell. London: Hogarth (Chatto & Windus), 1999.—. “Th e Mark on the Wall.” (1917) In Susan Dick, ed. 77-83.—. “Modern Fiction.” Th e Common Reader: First Series. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. NY: Harvest/ Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1953, 1984.—. A Room of One’s Own. (1928) NY: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957.—. Th e Years. (1937) NY: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965.

VIRGINIA AND LEONARD, AS I REMEMBER THEM

by Cecil Woolf

Of the one or two questions in life that I prefer to duck, perhaps the most frequent comes from that daunting and amiable creature, the Bloomsbury enthusiast. “What was she like?” they ask.

In an essay on Dr. Johnson’s friend, Mrs Hester Th rale—one of the last things she wrote—Virginia says, “Th e more we know of people the less we can sum them up. Just as we think we hold the bird in our hand, the bird fl utters off .” You won’t be surprised when I tell you that it never crossed my mind, all those years ago, that one day I should have to stand up in front of an illustrious audience, many of them “Woolf specialists,” and speak to them about those pivotal members of Bloomsbury, Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Leonard was my uncle, one of my father, Philip’s, elder brothers.

I wonder if by a concerted eff ort of imagination, we can go back mentally over sev-enty years to the late 1930s, the eve of the Second World War, when I was a schoolboy of about twelve or thirteen. Let us visit the small Sussex village of Rodmell, where Leonard and Virginia had their country house. Th ey had bought it in 1919 and until the war came, used it as a weekend and holiday home. Most of the village consists of Th e Street, as it’s called, which runs off the main Lewes-Newhaven road. On either side Th e Street is lined with chalkbound fl int garden walls, behind which are cottages, most of them inhabited by farm workers. Th is is a time before Rodmell, like so many villages, became gentrifi ed dor-mitories where residents commute daily to London. Th en it had a Post Offi ce, a general store, a blacksmiths and a pub. Only the pub has survived.

After a few minutes’ walk we reach a long, two-storey wooden clapboard house on the right, which lies a few yards back from the road. Pushing open the garden gate of Monks House is the signal for what seems like a pack of furiously barking dogs to descend upon us. A brick path leads past the end of the house to a huge garden and orchard. Th e garden is a kind of patchwork quilt of trees, shrubs, fl owers, vegetables, fruit, roses and crocus merging into Brussels sprouts and gooseberry bushes. In the background one glimpses garden statues among the undergrowth, like peeping toms. Th is leafy, fl owery Eden, which died with Leonard himself, deserves a study in itself.

From one of the several greenhouses my uncle emerges to welcome us with a warm, friendly smile. Knowing what children like, he fumbles in a capacious pocket and pro-duces a bag of his favourite mint humbugs. Leonard is in his early sixties, of medium height, lean, still tanned from the Ceylon sun and weatherbeaten by the English climate, with a shock of silver hair. His eyes are bright blue, deep set under bushy eyebrows, and his face is deeply lined. His head, which juts forward, is long and spare: he has the rug-ged profi le of an Old Testament prophet, Isaiah smoking a pipe. He is wearing ancient corduroy trousers and his jacket is of coarse tweed. His country shoes are heavy, made of good leather—looking back I’m reminded of Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse—and one notices that round his woollen tie is an opal ring. His voice is tremulous—the voice of a man perhaps twenty years older. I almost forgot to tell you that perched on his shoulder


is a tiny monkey, a marmoset called Mitzi. Such is the interest today in Bloomsbury that someone has written a book about this endearing pet.

Puffi ng on his briar pipe, which requires frequent relighting, Leonard takes us round, proudly showing his Worcester Permains, Cox’s Orange Pippins, his prize marrows, the extensive collection of succulents, the lupin plant that has become a tree and so much more. He is a huge enthusiast and an expert horticulturist.

In a small wooden cabin on the far side of the garden, where she writes, the watch propped against the inkpot and the barking dogs tell my aunt that it is time to break for lunch. Virginia strolls across the lawn, and looking back I wonder what it was she was writing that day. Was it her biography of Roger Fry, or her last novel, Between the Acts, or just a talk to be given to Rodmell Women’s Institute, of which she was honorary treasurer? Both Leonard and Virginia took an active part in the life of the village.

I remember her fi gure as tall and slim. Her pale face is very pointed and dominated by large, hooded eyes, which fi x one and penetrate sometimes uncomfortably. She is no longer the beauty we all know from Beresford’s iconic photograph, but still an attractive woman. Her hair is grey and wispy. Her clothes are long, dark and dowdy; here in the country her stockings may have a large hole or two and she wears a dreadful, long mackin-tosh. If that sounds like the stage version of the goose-girl, let me say that her bearing and demeanor is unmistakably that of the grande dame. Th e impression is of an intense per-sonality. I doubt whether many people took liberties with her. Her manner is friendly but undemonstrative; she looks at you directly, her speech is incisive. It is an individual voice, developed before the great British fl attening, when people’s manner of speaking might, quite apart from any aff ectation of class, become personal speech. Her talk is shrewd and speculative, withholding nothing. She is unhurried in what she says—confi dent, very confi dent: I wonder if memory misleads me here: but perhaps that apparent confi dence covers a great depth of insecurity.

As we go into the house, the impression we have is how cluttered and untidy it all is. Th e walls are lined with books, there are books on the tables and chairs and piles of books on the fl oor. Between the shelves are pictures, mainly by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry. Th e books even climb up the stairs to the upper fl oor. Monks House always seemed an appropriate name for such a chilly house in winter, though it wasn’t until his last year that Leonard discovered that no monk had ever lived there! After Leonard died the house and garden passed to the University of Sussex, who rented it out to visiting scholars. One of the tenants was the novelist Saul Bellow, who unwisely came in winter and found the house so cold and draughty that he moved out after about a week. Not for the feint-hearted.

At a time when grown-up relatives expected their well brought-up nephews and niec-es to address them as uncle, aunt or cousin, it was a mark of Leonard and Virginia’s lack of formality or stuffi ness that they were just plain Leonard and Virginia to me.

Lunch is brought in by a servant and helpings are decidedly meagre—perhaps ham or a small portion of white fi sh; Virginia eats very little. Conversation is lively, boisterous even, full of surprises, of unpredictable questions, fantasy, books, politics and laughter. I’m reminded of Ezra Pound in his Cantos:

37 VIRGINIA AND LEONARD, AS I REMEMBER THEM

And they want to know what we talked aboutOf letters and tragedies and music,Both of ancient times and our own,And men of unusual genius,Both of ancient times and our own,In short, the usual subjects of Conversation between intelligent men.

We talk of everything, that is, except Virginia’s own writing. She has an enormous cu-riosity about other people’s lives. “Observe perpetually,” Henry James advised the aspiring novelist. She fi res salvos of questions at me and seems genuinely interested in the answers. She is fascinated by the detail and has a minute eye for inconsistency. Despite her rather somber appearance, Virginia could be extremely humorous. Th e image she has in some people’s minds of a sad and deeply depressed woman is false. (Nicole Kidman in the movie Th e Hours springs to mind.) Depressed she certainly was at times, but she was not gener-ally sad. Quite the contrary. Leonard remembered that during the First World War, when they sheltered in the basement of their London lodgings from enemy bombing, Virginia made the servants laugh so much that he complained he was unable to sleep. My own clear recollection of her is of a fun-loving, witty and at times malicious person. Leonard himself had a dry and laconic sense of humour. He had a nice sense of the ridiculous and liked now and then to break out. To many people Virginia appeared an intimidating and formidable fi gure and they were mortally afraid of her. Certainly she had an unfortunate way, at times, of causing acute embarrassment. Virginia was writer and woman, but fi rst and foremost writer. In one of her diaries she says, “I want fun. I want fantasy.” New acquaintances were sometimes devastated when she had fun and fantasy at their expense.

Th e Woolfs knew some people called Easedale whose son was a talented young musi-cian. Leonard and Virginia had attended a concert at which his music was performed. Mrs. Easedale had, most unwisely, told Virginia that she had mentioned her son to the famous conductor Sir Henry Wood. Some time later, at a social gathering, Virginia announced to the assembled company, “Mrs. Easedale is the bravest woman I know—she went into a big London restaurant straight up to Sir Henry, who was surrounded by a crowd of admiring ladies and said, ‘Sir Henry, my son is a genius’—now you go on with the story,” Virginia continued in that charming, playful way of hers. Of course, she continued herself: “You see, she has a son who is an unknown, distinguished composer.” Next she talked of the recital; the most interesting she had ever attended; the Easedales were the most advanced family in the world, setting to music words no one else would dare; and the most modern of music—all this delivered in a half-serious, half-humorous way. Th is trick of blowing up a few facts into something quite diff erent and then inviting a bystander to “go on with the story” was not uncommon with her, and while friends may have thought it amusing, to the uninitiated it was excruciatingly cruel. I don’t think she was aware of the cringing embarrassment such behaviour caused. Neither can I recall ever being the victim of what Leonard called her “tak-ing off ”—using a prosaic incident or statement to create a mountain of fantasy.

Th ese “takings off ” were, I suppose, partly the novelist giving full rein to her imagi-nation and partly a manifestation of that child-like freedom from everyday banality and inhibition which were part of her nature.


In the morning, when I stayed at Monks House, I would take up my aunt’s breakfast to her bedroom. I sometimes noticed scattered on the fl oor small scraps of paper—these were notes she had jotted down in the night, a phrase or a word to be used in her writing.

Monks House is a museum now. Like Hawarth Parsonage and other literary shrines, you get little sense of the house in which those two people lived and worked. Inevitably, everything has been tidied; there’s no aroma of wood smoke, fl owers and pipe tobacco, all of which made Monks House a charming place.

My own home was in the Buckinghamshire countryside, where my father was what was called an agent, or land agent, to a wealthy landowner, James de Rothschild. Jimmy Rothschild was a Cambridge-educated Frenchman, member of the banking family and Liberal member of parliament, who had married my father’s fi rst cousin, Dolly Pinto. My father managed Jimmy’s vast estate at Waddesdon—very much a full-time job. Leonard and Virginia visited us from time to time before wartime petrol rationing made such jour-neys diffi cult. I remember on one such visit, I must have been quite small, leading Virginia by the hand to show her a very curious grotto or cave which had been built into the side of a steep hill, about ten minutes’ scramble from our house. Try to envisage a chamber with a vaulted roof, say ten feet by ten with about two feet of water and a stone pedestal in the centre. It was reputed to go back to the dawn of history. My aunt was clearly entranced by this mysterious place and the stillness. To demonstrate the echo, I called her name, Vir-ginia, and she called back Ce-cil.

While Leonard and my father puff ed on their pipes in another part of the grounds, talking no doubt of books and the gathering political storm in Europe, when she returned from the grotto Virginia might be talking to my mother. She invariably steered the con-versation round to the Rothschilds. Like Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia knew the rich “are diff erent from you and me” and relished every indiscrete detail of their privileged lives.

In those pre-war years and early in the Second World War, I also stayed with Leon-ard and Virginia at their house in Bloomsbury, 52 Tavistock Square, where they rented two fl oors at the top of the house and carried on their publishing business, the Hogarth Press, in the basement. Th e Woolfs had started their publishing business in 1917 as a kind of hobby. Th at basement was a center of frantic activity; clerks toiled, telephones rang, authors and sales representatives (known in those days as “travellers”) came and went, car-riers delivered and when the packer failed to keep pace, no one—not even Virginia—was exempt from this chore. I needed no encouragement to join in and I can remember my fi ngers becoming red and cut with doing up parcels of books. Th ose were the days before jiff y bags and cellotape. Th e offi ce staff and packer worked on a large table, like a ping-pong table, at the front. Th e manager occupied what in Victorian times had been a butler’s pantry. Th e basement of 52 Tavistock Square was uncompromisingly functional and the atmosphere informal. As for the décor, the walls were a dingy cream and the lights had dark green shades. It doesn’t sound in the least exciting, I know, but to a schoolboy it was all very exhilarating.

At the rear, built over what had once been a back yard, I remember a large room lit by a skylight which my aunt used as her study—a room not quite of her own. Here were stored the stock, vast piles of books wrapped in dusty brown paper, some bound and oth-ers in the form of fl at sheets. Anything that was not required immediately or could not be found room for elsewhere was stacked here—pictures by Vanessa and other artists, books,


manuscripts, old records and fi les. Here my aunt would write steadily from about 10 till one every day, oblivious of her surroundings, uninterruptible when deep in thought, but ready enough when her watch showed that she had fi nished her work, to take part if needed in the bustle of activity going on outside her studio.

Virginia did not mind so long as her own writing table was inviolate and no one touched her vast pile of notebooks, rough drafts, time sheets, and manuscripts in various stages of completion. She might mislay all sorts of personal belongings or forget some small domestic errand but she could always, I think, fi nd just the book or paper she need-ed for her own work from the midst of apparent confusion. John Lehmann, the poet, who was their manager at that time, confi rms my recollection of the studio as a forest and also the holiest part of the house. To Winifred Holtby, the novelist, it was a submarine cave in which one moved among books and papers as among rocks and ledges of that underwater world which so fascinated Virginia’s imagination.

As in Sussex, so in London Virginia was an energetic walker. I had the strong feeling, however, that London was where she belonged naturally. I remember a number of regular walks we took together, notably to the British Museum Library, which was virtually round the corner from Tavistock Square, and to the London Library. Virginia had close links to the London Library, since her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, had been President of the Library. She had made friends with one of the staff there, a Mr. Cox, who had known the great Victorian essayist, Th omas Carlyle.

Th e Hogarth Press was a very personal business, as every good publishing house should be. I didn’t know it then, but looking back I think of the basement of 52 Tavistock Square as where in a sense I began my publishing career—a lifelong love aff air with books and publish-ing. Other occupations intervened briefl y, like some years of soldiering and years in a family stock jobbing business and some years in the antiquarian bookselling world before I set up my own publishing imprint, fi fty years ago in 1960. And perhaps a quick word on Leonard himself as a publisher. He was humane and had good literary judgement, a healthy respect for money and the ability to make crude commercial decisions.

I was a schoolboy at boarding school when I learnt of Virginia’s death in 1941. I had been privileged to be taught by and become a friend of an outstanding English teacher, the Shakespearean and Miltonian critic, G. Wilson Knight. It was he who told me of her last, lonely walk along the swollen River Ouse and her decision to end it all. She had left a suicide note and her walking-stick was found fl oating in the river. At an inquest held later, the Coroner, who was evidently unaware of her long history of mental breakdowns, attributed her death to the “general beastliness of things happening today.”

In 1941 Virginia Woolf ’s death was not headline news, particularly at that stage in world history. When an author dies obituaries are published in the newspapers and those who had dealings with him or her write to Th e Times, to place on record their memories. In a short time the author is no longer news and is quietly consigned to oblivion. Th en, if he is fortunate, after a certain number of years, perhaps few, perhaps many, depending often on circumstances having nothing to do with literary merit, he or she will be remem-


bered and restored to public favour. Virginia Woolf is, of course, a notable example of this. In her case, it was twenty years before her writings were rediscovered by a multitude of readers worldwide.

Th e end of the Second World War found me a young soldier. When I eventually resumed life as a civilian, Leonard off ered me a fl at in his London house, the house he leased in Westminster after the house in Bloomsbury was bombed and Virginia had died. Th e Hogarth Press was at about that time to become part of the larger publishing house of Chatto and Windus. Leonard still worked several days a week at the press. I saw him fre-quently, and over the years we both got to know each other a great deal better. I think, to some extent, he came to regard me as a surrogate son, the son he and Virginia never had. I think he regretted not having children, but it was a decision they had made. Leonard had consulted doctors early in their marriage, and because of Virginia’s history of mental instability, been advised against having children.

After business, he would knock on my door at teatime and we would indulge in the ritual of strong tea and buttered toast. All his life he, and other members of the Woolf family, suff ered from a pronounced inherited tremor, which particularly aff ected his hand. As he raised the teacup his hand would shake to such an extent that, at times, he would put his handkerchief round the back of his neck and use it to haul the tea to his mouth. (As children this procedure was something that had caused a great deal of suppressed amusement.) Virginia believed that his tremor had altered his life.

Sometimes we would go out for a hot curry in an Indian restaurant, or to the theatre. Leonard was always very good company. No one who writes or talks about him, however, can avoid mentioning his carefulness and austerity. It has to be admitted that my uncle did not enjoy a worldwide reputation for doling out largesse. Everyone who knew Leonard had stories of his over-developed sense of economy, particularly with money, and most of us came to regard this as an endearing foible. I was at the theatre one evening with him. Sitting next to Leonard was an elderly clergyman who, throughout the fi rst half of the play, was eating from a box of chocolates with unusually noisy wrappings. When the lights went up for the interval and his neighbor left his seat, Leonard spotted a chocolate which had fallen on the fl oor at his feet. He promptly produced a handkerchief, dusted down the chocolate and popped it in his mouth. When Leonard wrote a letter or paid a bill, I don’t think he ever used a new envelope. He invariably crossed out the old name and address, wrote in the new one, pasted it down at the back and posted it. Even the blank back of a letter you had sent him would be recycled for the carbon copy he often kept of his cor-respondence. An example to us all in these environmentally conscious times.

I was staying at Monks House in the 1950s and after a particularly austere supper, I strolled out to the village pub, the Abergavenny Arms, in search of nourishment. I asked the landlord if he could provide a sandwich or a pie—anything—and in the course of con-versation he asked me if I happened to be staying at Mr. Woolf ’s. When I admitted that I was, he wagged his head knowingly, “Yes, they all come in here for a bite after dinner.” T.S. Eliot once told me that Leonard had once invited him to lunch at 24 Victoria Square. Lunch, it turned out, was a greasy pork pie and a bottle of ginger pop!

It must have been about this time that I accompanied Leonard to Brighton, where he went round the bookshops, soliciting orders for Hogarth Press publications. In those days publishers would make a point now and then of visiting booksellers themselves. After


a long morning tramping round the town, Leonard asked me if I was ready for lunch. When I said that I was, he disappeared into a nearby baker’s shop. A few minutes later he emerged and produced from his pocket a notebook in which he wrote, in a shaky hand, what he had bought for our lunch—“Two bread and butter rolls 2 pence.”

Now, I mention this incident not only to illustrate Leonard’s carefulness with money, but also to show his obsession with accounting for his expenditure. Everything was re-corded. Th e yield of every fruit tree in his orchard; the score of games of bowls on the lawn; the profi t or loss of every Hogarth Press publication; the cost of every holiday, less, of course, the notional expenditure had they stayed at home. Th ose of you who know his highly readable fi ve-volume autobiography will probably agree that much of the interest lies in the detail. Was this habit of recording the minutiae of everyday life a habit he had formed when he was a district offi cer in that outpost of the British Empire, Hambantoto, or was he one of nature’s administrators, with the heart and soul of an accountant?

But these are surely trivia in the broad sweep of things. Without withdrawing a word of what I have just said, I must tell you that Leonard was not a mean man. Th e truth is that he was an extraordinarily good, warm-hearted and generous man—a loveable man—whose unstinting devotion to his wife not only kept her alive but happy and enormously creative for some thirty years of their marriage.

I have talked of two people every detail of whose lives has become public property. But it is sometimes forgotten that these were real human beings, not characters in some up-market soap opera. Th eir marriage was a very loving one and very productive. Virginia had written in her last note to Leonard, “You have given me the greatest possible happi-ness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier . . .” Th ey both worked enormously hard writing their books, sitting on all those committees and, not least, building a fi ne publishing house. When I think of Vir-ginia, I think of her as I remember her, rather than as I have so often read of her. I know that a great deal eludes me, as it eludes all of us who have ever thought of the strangeness of being. At fourteen and less, few, very few people are suffi ciently mature to take in and fully treasure the experience of meeting and enjoying the company of someone touched if not by the hand of God, then at least by genius. But what is important above all else is that her books have given her a future she could never possibly have imagined.

And when I look back on all this, I wonder how on earth I could have failed to record, for you, every single word that was spoken in those far-off days. In extenuation, I would like to remind you of what Virginia herself said about being a child at 22 Hyde Park Gate when the poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson dined with her parents and remembering the great man saying only, “Please pass the pepper.” Like her, I was in the happy trance of youth, almost exclusively self-absorbed, or at any rate myopic.

“EVERYTHING TENDED TO SET ITSELF IN A GARDEN”:VIRGINIA WOOLF’S LITERARY AND QUOTIDIAN FLOWERS

A BAR-GRAPHICAL APPROACH

by Elisa Kay Sparks

In Avrom Fleisham’s early (1975) monograph on Virginia Woolf (a book which repays re-reading) he describes Woolf ’s practice of what he calls, after Northrop Frye, an “en-cyclopedic” modernist style dependent on a vast network of allusions (xi), and quotes

William Empson’s plaint “If only there was an index, showing what had been compared with what” (ix). As the daughter of a biologist, I am naturally drawn to large taxonomic schemas, and so in this paper what I am going to try to do is provide something of a botanical encyclopedia/index to plant references in Woolf ’s fi ction and some of her non-fi ction, correlating these published and shaped references as much as possible to mentions of actual plants in her diaries and letters. For this talk I will focus in particular on fl owers, though of course fl owers do inevitably turn into fruit, and trees also often burst into fl ow-er, so rigid categories are not always possible. When I fi rst set out to locate and record all these plant references (some fi ve years ago), I began by simply counting and making lists. But after a while, I began to realize I needed to make some further distinctions. Flowers (and plants in general) appear in at least three diff erent registers in Woolf ’s work: as literal natural organisms, as artifi cial renderings of the natural, and as fi gurative strategies. My statistical fl ower counts don’t make these distinctions, but my subsequent analysis does.

I’d like to begin with some general, overall discoveries, including a grounding in Woolf ’s sources of knowledge about fl owers and the plant world in general. Th en I will proceed to talk through the use of fl owers in more or less chronological order, starting with the diaries and moving from novel to novel. I will end by showing you a design for a potential Virginia Woolf Garden, an idealized rendering of a garden space incorporating the plants she mentions most often. (See Fig. 2).

I suspect we all have the sense that there are a lot of fl owers in Woolf ’s work and that generally speaking they probably mean something. Previous scholarship on Woolf ’s blos-soms has been incidental and pretty fragmented, mostly written in response to individual works, “Kew Gardens” and Mrs. Dalloway having perhaps garnered the most commentary. Th is ground-breaking work by Pat Cramer , Lee Edwards, Diane Gillespie, Jane Goldman, Justyna Kostkowska, Bonnie Kime Scott, Kathryn Simpson, Janet Winston, and Marilyn Zorn (among others) has established several thematic trends in Woolf ’s use of fl owers and fl ower imagery, analyzing how fl owers appear in Woolf ’s work as traditional literary/arche-typal allusions, as microcosmic, subterranean versions of the subconscious, as mechanisms for linking people, as lesbian codes, as references to painting and to her sister, as structural device/design elements, for their color as part of symbolic clusters of color relations. My paper will develop and elaborate on these trends, in particular on Woolf ’s use of fl owers as part of a complex of images describing initiation into adult sexuality and her concomitant ambivalence about fl owers as symbols and instruments of female gender socialization.

43Literary and Quotidian Flowers

FIRST FLOWERS

Flowers are an integral part of Woolf ’s life from early childhood. Her late autobio-graphical “A Sketch of the Past” begins with a series of early memories or scenes, all of which are associated with fl owers. Her fi rst memory was of seeing a pattern of red and purple and blue anemones on the black fabric of her mother’s dress (MOB 64). Th e next memory, of lying in the nursery at Talland House in St. Ives and hearing the waves break behind a yellow blind, is also associated with fl owers, the “great starry blossoms, with purple streaks and large green buds” of the passion fl owers growing up the wall to her mother’s balcony (MOB 66). Her third memory is of the sensual rapture she felt looking down on the red and gold apples, the pink fl owers, and the grey and silver leaves of the gardens, which “gave off a murmur of bees” (MOB 66). Numerous other statements establish the garden at St. Ives as Woolf ’s own private Eden, the beginning of all her memories: “Th ere at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery” (MOB 67). And she returns to the site as many have documented, again and again, from Jacob’s Room, to To the Lighthouse, to Th e Waves.

Let’s go back to the literal fl owers of Virginia Stephen’s early world. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was her fi rst fl ower master. As early as July 1892 (when she was ten), the Hyde Park Gate News reported that “Mr. Stephen is a botanist on a minor scale. He is now endeavoring to teach his children the names of the plants in the neighborhood [of St. Ives]” (qtd. In Lowe 79). A few days later we learn that he is “pressing plants previous to transmitting them to an album” (Lowe 83–4). Th e young reporters add, “Th is habit of collecting fl owers makes it necessary for him to take numerous walks in which he delights” (Lowe 84). From an early age then, Virginia was exposed to fl owers from a scientifi c, bo-tanical perspective, and looking for and naming plants as part of long walks was a practice that lasted throughout her life (as is amply demonstrated in the diaries). Young Virginia’s ready absorption of her father’s teaching is also shown by the specifi city with which she names the remembered plant life of Cornwall: not only the escallonia hedge, Jacamanna clematis and passion fl owers, but also the mesembryanthemums and Osmunda she cata-logues in “A Sketch of the Past” (MOB 111, 76, 115).

All the horticultural knowledge and fl oral raptures Virginia Stephen stored up in Cornwall were, however, initially quite separate from her botanical experiences in the city of London. Th e fi rst mention of fl owers in Woolf ’s own writing comes in January 1897, when at age 15 she and her half-sister Stella go to buy fl owers to take to a tea party (PA 19 ), inaugurating the association of buying fl owers with parties (“Mrs. Dalloway thought she would buy the fl owers herself ”). In her study of Favored Flowers Catherine Ziegler presents four practices characteristic of the late nineteenth-century culture of fl owers:

One group of practices helped establish class identity and social status through elaborate displays of fl owers. . . in the decoration and presentation of the home. A second category of fl ower work involved customs related to female identity and sexuality, particularly the practice of women wearing fresh fl owers—often the gifts of male admirers. Rituals and religious practices dominate another economically important group of fl oral activities connected with birth, death, marriage, and motherhood. (23)


Th is fi rst journal mentions fl owers in all of these contexts. Tulips, violets, daff odils, and anemones are taken as gifts to parties or visiting (PA 56, 51); white roses, red tulips, and carnations are among the many fl owers bought for Stella’s wedding (PA 68). Flowers are also mentioned as (often competitive) projects grown by Virginia and Vanessa in the small, ashy garden in the back of 22 Hyde Park Gate where they planted pansies, lobelia, sweet peas and geraniums (PA 89, 99) and as seasonal markers in nearby Kensington Gardens where, after her mother’s death and her own subsequent breakdown, Virginia was assigned to walk daily (almond trees and crocuses are the fi rst harbingers of spring [PA 39, 48, 52 ]).

In these early diary entries we begin to pick up a major theme in Woolf ’s treatment of fl owers: a certain ambivalence derived from her association of fl owers with the enforced serenity of bucolic therapy and also the stifl ing rituals of the social world. As she would later record in “A Sketch of the Past,” she always associated the smell of fl owers with her mother’s funeral: “Th e hall reeked of fl owers. . . . Th e scent still brings back those days of astonishing intensity” (MOB 92). Th is memory appears in several novels including in Th e Voyage Out where the smell of broom brings back to Rachel “the sickly horrible sensation” of her mother’s funeral (VO 35), in Th e Waves where Bernard imagines Percival covered over with lilies and exuding “this lily-sweet glue” (265), and in Th e Years where, after her mother’s death, Delia is “pent up” for days “in the half-lit house which smelt of fl owers,” lilies, white tulips, white lilac, and even more lilies (85, 83, 84).

VIOLET DICKINSON AND FRIENDS

A certain ambivalence about fl owers carries over into Virginia’s relations with her second fl ower master, Violet Dickinson, who, according to Ellen Hawkes, “came to play a major part in Woolf ’s life, serving as a surrogate mother, an older sister, a confi dant, and tutor in her reading and a mentor for her writing” (Hawkes 271). A redoubtable gardener who was friends with Kate Greenaway as well as William Robinson, whose treatises on the “wild garden” began the 19th-century garden fashion we now call “Eng-lish cottage style,” 1 and later a devoted fan of Gertrude Jekyll, its leading exponent, Violet Dickinson off ered Virginia an alternative to the botanical instruction of her fa-ther, a legacy of delight in color and design, while at the same time intensifying her suspicions about conventional associations of fl owers and femininity.

As Virginia’s friendship with Violet deepened in the years following Stella’s death, there is evidence that Virginia had at least heard of the leading fashionable gardeners in Dickinson’s circle. In April 1903 the Stephen family stayed in Surrey near several Jekyll gardens (Rudicoff 131), only about four miles from Munstead Wood, Jekyll’s own home and garden showplace. On January 28, 1905, Virginia notes in her diary that she actu-ally met Mr. Robinson—“the gardener and designer of grates, an interesting man” while visiting Violet’s house in London (PA 231). By 1907, Virginia was familiar enough with gardening personalities to tease Violet about her preoccupation with her “Jeyklls, [her] new puppies, and [her]budding trees” (L1: 291). And Jeykll was also well-known to Woolf ’s later friends. Ethyl Smythe was one of a trio of musicians who performed at Munstead Wood in 1923 (Festing 238). Roger Fry commissioned Jeykll to design the garden at Durbins (Spalding 110), at least some features of which were adopted in the garden at Charleston.


I want to take a couple of minutes here to digress a bit about Gertrude Jekyll and speculate on her possible infl uence on Virginia Woolf. Trained as a painter, Jekyll’s main claim to fame was as a colorist. 2 It was she who began to arrange fl owers in the garden in clumps of complementary and adjacent colors. (Complementary colors are opposite each other on the color wheel, like red and green; adjacent colors are next to each other, like green and blue). She massed red, yellows, and oranges together to form “hot” cores for perennial borders, put purple, pinks, and blues together for cool contrast, and used greys and whites to provide a neutral background at the ends of fl ower beds. I know it may be a little far-fetched, but in recording all the appearances of fl owers in Woolf ’s work, I did notice a consistent predominance of red and yellow pairings: Rodney has a jar full of red and yellow tulips and there is a bowl of tawny red and yellow chrysanthe-mums at Katherine’s house in Night and Day (73, 98); a bowl of red and yellow dahlias appears in the “Times Passes” section of To the Lighthouse (130), and Candish arranges yellow and red roses and red carnations in Between the Acts (35). (And this is a very ab-breviated list. ) Woolf also often displays Jekyll’s trick of contrasting a clump of bright color against white or grey: think of how the red, blue, and yellow of the fl ower petals in “Kew Gardens” are refl ected upon the smooth grey back of a pebble or disappear into the silver grey of a water drop (CSF 90).

Gertrude Jeykll was, as was Violet Dickinson herself, a powerful model of an inde-pendent woman who made a space for herself in the world. In “Friendship’s Gallery,” her 1907 tribute to Violet Dickinson, Virginia Stephen described her friend’s building of “a cottage of her own” as one of history’s great revolutions (Hawkes 288). But Violet was also friends with an older, more conservative set of gardening women, among them Kate Greenaway. I bring in Kate Greenaway because in addition to her charming children’s books, she also compiled a fascinating little guide to the Language of Flowers, the Victorian code by which lovers could communicate their otherwise unspeakable feelings.

I don’t have time to fully explore the connections here, but I’ve made a digest of some of the more interesting fl ower meanings for you (see Appendix I: Digest of Flower Symbolism). Woolf often uses fl owers in ways which clearly correspond to these sym-bolic conventions, many of which are still in common use: red roses signify passion-ate love, white roses and lilies, innocence; asphodels are associated with death, as are willows and yews. But there are some interesting specifi cities in Greenaway’s catalogue which shed some possible new light on Woolf ’s associations with certain fl owers. Th e anemone, so often associated with her mother, signifi es “forsaken”(8); the China Rose is “Beauty always new” (12). Th e repeated appearance of cherry trees in “Friendship’s Gal-lery” seems much more appropriate when we learn that they signify “Good education” (Greenaway 12), and it is certainly provocative that the checkered frittillary, mentioned twice in “Friendship’s Gallery” and later associated with Vita Sackville-West, is identi-fi ed by Greenaway with “persecution” (12).

Th e other old-fashioned gardening friend of Violet Dickinson’s that I want to men-tion is Mrs. C.W. Earle, author of Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden, which Virginia read in the summer of 1897 (PA 118). Earle’s chatty semi-memoir is a good example of the conservative cast of late nineteenth-century fl ower culture for in it Earle argued against formal schooling for the upper-class girl because she feared it would “destroy . . . her adaptability for a woman’s highest vocation. . . marriage and motherhood” (328).


Perhaps it is this advice on raising daughters that caused Virginia to object to Violet’s staying with Mrs. Earle in March 1904 when she claimed that “I never read such positive nonsense as her books are” (L1: 133).

THE WORKS

Th e issue of women’s education and the association of fl owers and gardening with women’s growth, development, and socialization becomes a major motif in Woolf ’s mature work. Very early on, she had begun to play with the image of young women coming of age as fl owers beginning to bloom in ways quite parallel to how Amy King’s Bloom (2003) docu-ments the systematic use of fl oral metaphors to discuss feminine sexuality throughout the nineteenth century. In July 1903, in a brief exercise entitled “Th oughts upon Social Success” (which the editor speculates was originally sent to Violet Dickinson for criticism) (PA 167, n. 4), Virginia Stephen fantasizes that the young women she sees at parties only come into existence after dinner: “Th ey spring up all over the drawing room like hyacinths in June. By daybreak they are faded—a little crumpled perhaps—never mind—they fold themselves in sleep—to wake once more when the sun has set” (PA 167–8).

THE VOYAGE OUT (1915)

As Woolf ’s fi rst novel, Th e Voyage Out confi rms the foundational signifi cance of the garden and fl oral imagery as part of a complex of images often associated with processes of growth and initiation. Perhaps in part because of its conscious imitation of post-impres-sionist visual technique, especially the abstraction of visual fi elds into patches of primary color, relatively few fl owers are specifi cally named. Instead Woolf gives us patches of color and light and mostly generic plants: a shrub “bearing among sparse leaves a voluminous purple fl ower” (91), “bushes with wax-like fl owers” (91), “the trees and the landscape appearing only as masses of green and blue” (173). Th ose fl owers and plants that are mentioned by name are most frequently evoked in association with England or “civiliza-tion” and are often artifi cial or imagined, such as Clarissa Dalloway’s fantasy of “fi elds of hollyhocks and violets in the mid-ocean” (42). Once the party has landed, they repeatedly compare the tropical vegetation to that of England, imagining that “chilly crocuses and nipped violets” are starting to grow in the early spring (VO 96). Mrs. Th ornbury tells the story of how a Mrs. Umpley triumphed over adversity by growing roses (113), and Mrs. Flushing dreams of a little house in Ireland where one “could lie in bed in the mornin’ and pick roses outside the window with one’s toes” (199).

Only a few plants in South America are named, and these are almost all trees: cy-press, cedar, olive, and the fl owering magnolia—the plant which, despite being named only twice, is most frequently associated with Rachel, often in contrast to unnamed red fl owers. Th is juxtaposition of white and red is clearly symbolic of Rachel’s liminal status. Th e gigantic white fl owers of the magnolia are repeatedly described as waxy, while the red fl owers are often already picked, severed at their stalks. At the very beginning of the novel, there is a last view of England where: “In thousands of small gardens, millions of dark-red fl owers were blooming, until the old ladies who had tended them so carefully came down the paths with their scissors, snipped through their juicy stalks, and laid them upon cold


stone ledges in the village church” (31). Rachel repeats this clipping and arranging action in the middle of the novel when she sits in the shade of a tree and “pick[s] the red fl ow-ers with the thin green leaves which were growing beneath it,” laying “them side by side, fl ower to fl ower and stalk to stalk” (174). Th e image of Rachel herself as a fl ower who is cut off before the moment of her full bloom, before any fruit can set, is also presaged early in the novel when Helen Ambrose pulls the tight little buds of chrysanthemums out of a vase on board ship and lays them on the table cloth “arranging them fastidiously side by side” while accusing the servants of mistreating them (15); one assumes that they did not condition them before putting them in the water, so they will not open out into full bloom, which is precisely Rachel’s problem. When Rachel and Hewett return from their visit to the jungle, newly engaged, “Th e red fl owers in the stone basins were drooping with the heat, and the white blossoms which had been so smooth and thick only a few weeks ago were now dry, and their edges were curled and yellow” (326). Rachel can survive nei-ther as the waxy preserved virgin nor as the independent, passionate red blossom.

NIGHT AND DAY (1919)

A more conventional novel, Night and Day only slightly extends Woolf ’s use of fl ow-ers and fl ower imagery. Th e range of plants (twenty-four named varieties) is slightly larger than in Th e Voyage Out (eighteen), with no need to fake an unfamiliar exoticism. 3Al-though Night and Day is, like Th e Voyage Out, a female initiation story, there is little use of the blossom motif to describe Katherine’s progress towards marriage. Since the novel is set in London, most of the fl owers are already cut, and appear as incidental decorations in vases or bowls or tucked into buttonholes. Th e one place where fl owers get really interest-ing is near the end of the book when Denham and Katherine meet in Kew Gardens—which as I have said before often functions in Woolf ’s work as a liminal, democratic space where diff erent classes can mingle (see my “Loopholes of Retreat”). While sitting on a bench with Katherine, Denham uncovers “with the point of his stick a group of green spikes half smothered with dead leaves” (330). His knowledge of the Latin name of the plant inaugurates a new phase in their relationship, revealing his hidden botanical lore and promoting him to a level of expertise which helps to balance his stature with Katherine. Katherine sees fl owers only as “variously shaped and coloured petals” but to Denham they are “living things endowed with sex, and pores, and susceptibilities” (331). At this mo-ment, Katherine is described in the text as being in “the fl ower of youth” (331), but inter-estingly in light of the failed botanical process in Th e Voyage Out, the identifi cation of the woman with fl owers is critiqued and refused. While visiting the Orchid House, Denham has a momentary vision in which Katherine’s beauty is “strangely emphasized by the fan-tastic plants, which seemed to peer and gape at her from striped hoods and fl eshy throats” (331), but instead of indulging in the comparison, he looks beyond it to appreciate Kath-erine’s autonomy, her “contemplative, considering gaze,” her lack of need of anything he could give her (332). It is this ability to grant Katherine her independence that lays the foundation for their agreement to have a “perfectly sincere and perfectly straight forward friendship” (337), which of course opens up the possibility of their eventual union.


MONDAY OR TUESDAY (1921)

As experimental works, the short stories in Monday or Tuesday return to some of the painterly eff ects sought in Th e Voyage Out, especially in”Kew Gardens” where the red, blue, and yellow fl owers act as a kind of complementary color wheel that gradually turns into the adjacent colors of blue and green, dissipates into white butterfl ies, and returns again into yellow, red, and blue, repeating the typical sequence of colors in a Jekyll gar-den. Some of the plants mentioned in these stories seem to evoke Woolf ’s immediate environment. Th e only plants she mentions in diaries and letters as growing in the sizeable garden behind Hogarth House are apple trees and the red rambler roses. At Asham, as in “A Haunted House,” apples are often mentioned, along with a number of traditional garden fl owers. One interesting addition is a defi nite note of sarcasm towards Victorian botanical conventions in the way that Aspidistras and ferns are used as comic screening devices in “An Unwritten Novel.”

JACOB’S ROOM (1922)

Th ere is a signifi cant effl orescence of fl ora in Woolf ’s next novel, Jacob’s Room, a jump from forty-two diff erent species in Night and Day to fi fty—in a novel three-fi fths as long. In terms of fl owers the harvest is an order of magnitude greater, from fourteen varieties to thrity-six (see Appendix II: Bar Graph of Plant Frequencies over Time). In fact, there are more diff erent kinds of fl owers mentioned in Jacob’s Room than in any other novel by Woolf, one of those surprising facts you come across when you start doing statisti-cal surveys.4 Some of this has to do with the many locations of the novel—Cornwall, Cambridge, London, Greece—but some is certainly associated with the move to Monk’s House in 1919 and Woolf ’s absorption in the pleasures of a country garden. In April 1921, as she is planning to start writing Jacob’s Room, she remarks that the hyacinths are blooming (D2: 28); in May the gladioli are “standing in troops” (D2: 43); in August she is picking sweet peas and roses (D2: 57); and in September, the asters are beaten to the ground by rain (D2: 66). A year later, two months before she writes the last words of the novel, she describes the garden at Monk’s as “a perfect variegated chintz: asters . . . zinnias, geums, nasturtiums” (D2: 138). I see Leonard as Woolf ’s third plant master, and under his tutelage, her knowledge of fl owers increased exponentially, as we will see in subsequent novels.

Although, like Th e Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room is the story of a failed initiation, a “trun-cated bildungsroman” (McNees liv), fl owers are not used to describe Jacob’s maturation, confi rming the gender association of the blooming metaphor with femininity. Instead Woolf uses the conventional, pastoral symbolism of purple fl owers being emblematic of the premature death of young men. Th ere is a preponderance of purple fl owers early in the book, many of them growing wild, with phallic spikes or spires. In the fi rst chapter alone we fi nd three appearances of a purple aster: fi rst lit up on the lawn as Mrs. Flanders and Jacob come home from the beach (JR 12); then “trembling violently” in the wind of an on-coming storm (13) and fi nally (as in the garden at Monk’s) “beaten to the earth” by the pouring rain (14). Sea-holly and blackberries are also mentioned in this chapter (10, 11). Both have spiky, composite structures: sea holly (Eryngium maritimum) is a silvery


lavender thistle with a cone-shaped fl ower-head; blackberries, while not fl owers, have the same shape, fi erce thorns, and their juice is certainly purplish/red. Lilacs droop in the churchyard where Mr. Flanders is buried in the next chapter (16), and appear twice in the Cambridge chapter (35, 40) as do chestnut blossoms (38), which are white or pink, but have a torch-like shape similar to sea holly and lilac. In Chapter Two, Johnny fi nds and brings a brown-spotted orchid leaf to Mrs. Flanders on Dods Hill (19); one wonders if this is a misplaced variety of the common Cornish spotted orchid Dactylorhiza fuchsii var. cornubiensis which has a large composite spike of lavender fl owers and grows in marshy areas. Purple clover and teasle (JR 24) continue Woolf ’s unorthodoxly weedy procession of purple fl owers: purple or red clover (Trifolium pretense) has an infl orescence shaped very like blackberries, and the teasle (Dipsacus fullonu) is, like sea holly, a form of thistle with greener foliage but a similar lavender fl ower head, shaped something like a pine cone. Other purple fl owers in the novel include violets, which appear fi ve times, iris, cherry pie (otherwise known as heliotrope), pansies, and passion-fl ower.

One other notable trend in Jacob’s Room is the increasing appearance of artifi cial fl owers, in particular the paper roses with which Jacob is be-decked, like a king or sac-rifi cial victim (JR 75; Neverow li). And it is only a few pages later that the little “bright lives and swift dooms” of the artifi cial paper fl owers which “open on touching water” are compared to the fading of real fl owers (JR 83). Here we learn that “chrysanthemums are the worst”—fade most quickly—while “carnations pay best”—last longest (83). One wonders if it is a coincidence that when Woolf returned to London in December of 1920, right in the middle of writing Jacob’s Room, she had recorded women in the Strand crying out, “Remember the Glorious Dead & holding out chrysanthemums” (D2: 79). Chrysanthemums, while not purple, continue the elegiac motif of associating fl owers with premature death.

About this time, I am sure you are all looking at your watches and wondering how I am going to make it through the next six novels, not to mention a Room of Own’s Own and “A Sketch of the Past.” I know I have over-lingered on the fi rst works, but I hope I’ve given you some idea of the potential insights that can be gained from a compre-hensive look at fl ower images. For the next works, I am going to have to streamline my remarks, contenting myself with some statistical observations and quick suggestions.

MRS. DALLOWAY (1925)

While usually thought of as the most fl oral of all Woolf ’s novels, Mrs. Dalloway in fact has only forty plant varieties, fewer than Jacob’s Room, or any of the novels which followed except Flush and Th e Years (See Appendix 2: Plant Varieies Over Time). With twenty-three named species, it also has fewer varieties of fl owers than the previous novel (which had thirty-fi ve), and nearly the same number as Orlando (twenty-fi ve), Th e Waves (twenty), or Th e Years (twenty-two). However, in terms of sheer numbers of fl owers named in the text, it does tower over the rest with a total of 103 fl owers mentioned.(See Appendix 3: Number of Flowers per Book.) What is particularly notable in Mrs. Dalloway is the in-sistent predominance of roses, which appear thirty-nine times, in contrast to their nearest competitor, the also vibrantly red carnation, which appears ten times. Roses are the single most frequent fl ower in all of the works I investigated for this paper, the only fl ower that


appears in every single work (See Appendix 4: Rose Frequency). One of the reasons for the persistence of the rose in Woolf ’s work is its versatility: of course there are multiple symbolic meanings for roses (they take up an entire page in Greenaway), but Woolf also deploys them in more symbolic registers than any other fl ower, and Mrs. Dalloway can serve as a prime example of this. Roses appear most frequently in Mrs. Dalloway as cut fl owers, fi guring prominently in the scene in the fl orist shop where they are laid out in wicker trays in a way reminiscent of the regimentation in Th e Voyage Out (13). Often bought as gifts (as by Richard for Clarissa or by Rezia to brighten the room she shares with Septimus), they are also surprisingly often brandished like weapons: while dreaming of the solitary traveler, Peter has visions which are “dashed in his face like bunches of roses” (57), and crossing Green Park, Richard defends himself from a “female vagrant” by “bearing his fl owers like a weapon” (116). Th is violent gesturing with roses seems somehow aligned with their hyper-reality/artifi ciality. Noticing how many women now use make-up, Peter thinks, “Every woman, even the most respectable, has roses blooming under glass, lips cut with a knife” (71). And of course the roses on Septimus’s wallpaper also become hyper-real; though the red fl owers begin to grow through his fl esh in Regent’s Park, they are immediately associated with “the thick red roses which grow on [his] bedroom wall [paper]” (68).

Mrs. Dalloway also returns to a critique of the blooming motif of Woolf ’s early work, not just in Elizabeth’s aversion to people calling her a “hyacinth” or a garden lily (134), but also in Peter’s recognition of women’s new, post-war freedom: “that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immoveable. On top of [young people] it had pressed; weighed them down, the women especially, like those fl owers Cla-rissa’s Aunt Helena used to press between sheets of grey blotting paper” (162).

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927)

I’m not sure I have that much new to say about To the Lighthouse. Of course it is the locus classicus of all Woolf ’s Cornwall references: from the geraniums growing in the pots on the terrace to the jacmanna clematis and passion fl owers growing up the walls, and the red-hot pokers marking the view to the bay. 5 Th e blooming motif is brought up tangentially: Cam’s refusal to give a fl ower to William Bankes could be read as an assertion of autonomy, and as Jane Goldman points out, the white and purple fl owers associated with mourning and Mrs. Ramsay—hyacinths and lilies (TTL 184); violets and asphodel (211)—are also evoked in the imagery of Prue’s one-year marriage: “dropping the fl owers from her basket, ” she disappears “across valleys, white, fl ower-strewn” (Goldman 180, 182; TTL 204).6

One particularly notable use in To the Lighthouse concerns the association of fl owers with the Victorian past through evocation in snippets of 19th-century poetry. Th e same device is used in A Room of One’s Own, where the frequency of passion-fl owers, roses, and apples derives from quotations by Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, and is turned into farce in Freshwater, where the exuberant repetition of a limited number of insistently English fl owers—daisies, primroses, and roses—is part of the parodic humor of the piece.


ORLANDO (1928)

Because it is so much a country book, almost all of the plants in Orlando are wild or garden-grown, and like Jacob’s Room, it represents another quantum leap in the extent of Woolf ’s plant lore. Th ere are a total of sixty-two diff erent species mentioned in Orlando, as opposed to fi fty in Jacob and forty in Mrs. Dalloway. Although its concentration on English history makes Orlando a book dominated by oak trees and roses, since it was dedicated to and written for Woolf ’s fourth fl ower-master, Vita Sackville-West, it shows a new interest in woodland plants and a botanical palette that refl ects Vita’s love of both the Kentish and the Persian countryside. Besides the twenty-fi ve diff erent species of fl owers mentioned, there are nine species of fl owering trees, enough to constitute a new category of fl ora, as many fruit and vegetables as in To the Lighthouse, and a greater variety of other trees and bushes than any previous novel. (See counts in Appendix 2.) Some of the plants are used by Woolf to characterize diff erent ages of British history and literature, but Woolf ’s knowledge of garden history is at best sketchy and is sometimes confl ated with her much more detailed knowledge of the history of English prose style. (See my “Bloomsbury in Bloom”). One topic I wish I had time to develop, however, is her use of vegetables as comic relief from what sometimes becomes the over-earnest solemnity of fl ower references.

THE WAVES (1931)

As the most encyclopedic of all Woolf ’s novels, Th e Waves encompasses the larg-est variety of plants, a total of seventy-two named species. Th e garden motif reappears regularly in the interludes as part of Woolf ’s attempt to keep “the sound of the sea and the birds, dawn, & garden subconsciously present, doing their work underground” (D4: 10–11). Of obvious interest are the ways that particular plants are parceled out among the various characters: Jinny, described by Bernard as “like a crinkled poppy” (252), is also associated with cultivated geraniums, ferns, and azaleas (13, 101, 74). Louis, with his deep knot of oak roots, sees fi elds of golden bristle and red poppies (66) and imagines sinking down into green depths fl ecked with dahlias or zinnias (167). Neville, of course, compulsively remembers the apple tree he associates with death (24, 124). Susan is connected to roses and the hollyhocks which were Vanessa’s favorite fl owers (41, 98, 100, 172, 192), but also with the farming fecundity of Leonard; responsible for the over-growth of cabbages in the novel (54, 99, 172 ), she has pear-shaped eyes, “full of turnips and cornfi elds” (211). Rhoda continues the association of white and purple fl owers with death from Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse: as a child, she chooses the white petals over the red ones (18), and is drawn to daisies (45, 64); the wreathes she weaves of cowbind and May are also colorless, and it is she who memorializes Percival with violets (159, 164).

But to me, the most interesting aspect of the botanical imagery in Th e Waves is the development of what I call the “Urpfl anze” theme—the image of the fl ower as a unifi ca-tion of consciousness. Th is is embodied primarily through the red carnations which are usually evoked by Bernard (59, 127, 229). At the reunion dinner at Hampton Court Bernard remembers “the red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant


when we dined together with Percival” and expresses the unity of the group saying it has “become a six-sided fl ower made of six lives” (229). Each of the six characters experiences this moment diff erently: for Neville it is a consolidation of monarchy, for Louis a return to children holding hands, for Jinny a brief triumph over the “iron gates” of devouring time (TW 228), for Susan an affi rmation of love, and for Rhoda, a momentary vision of a structure that makes sense—the “square . . . stood on the oblong” that reoccurs through-out Th e Waves as the image of a “our dwelling place” (TW 228; also 163, 205), which I always interpret as a house standing over an oval garden—perhaps a memory of that fi rst garden at Talland House.

THE YEARS (1937)

Th e Years is one of Woolf ’s most fl oral novels, with almost as many varieties of fl ower as Orlando and more actual fl owers mentioned than any novel except Mrs. Dalloway. (See Appendix 2.) It is also the third highest on roses—not counting all the times that the character Rose’s name is mentioned. I think the thing I fi nd most interesting about

Fig. 1: Ordinance Survey of Talland House


fl owers in Th e Years is how they are implicated in temporal transitions. Whether the blue fl ower in the painting of the fi rst Rose Pargiter can be seen or not seems to be something of an index of the vision of freedom in the book: in 1908 Martin notices that the fl ower in the grass has been obscured by “dirty brown paint” (149); when the war is over in the Present Day section, the painting has been cleaned and the “little sprig of blue” is visible again (325). But the fl owers of the past will not do for the present; Eleanor looks at the picture of her grandmother “as if to ask her opinion,” but as in A Room of One’s Own the characters are cut off from the comforting Victorian fl oral legacy of their ancestors: her grandmother “has assumed the immunity of a work of art. . . smiling at her roses. . . indif-ferent to right or wrong” (327). Delia seems to demonstrate how the younger generation deals with fl owers, her ambition to do away with the “absurd conventions of English life” (398) being embodied in the party she gives at the Estate Agency, where the offi ce tables are strewn with fl owers: carnations, roses, lilies, and daisies “fl ung down higgledy-piggeldy” (398). Th ey may not live long out of water, but they are cheap and their beauty is easily replaceable.

BETWEEN THE ACTS (1941)

If I had time to do justice to the fl oral imagery of Between the Acts I think I would return to Monk’s House, and explore how that garden provides a setting for the novel by correlating the plants mentioned to the record of plants Leonard bought in the later thirties. Asparagus is certainly Virginia’s favorite vegetable; Leonard ordered fi fty roots in February of 1936; geraniums were and are everywhere at Monk’s House; Leonard ordered clematis in 1935 and 1938—perhaps one of them was the variety known as Old Man’s Beard (ref-erenced in Between the Acts). He also ordered carnations, hydrangeas and new varieties of roses (mostly climbing) every year from 1935–40, and fritillaries in September, 1938. (All plant order information comes from Leonard Woolf ’s Garden Account Book, LWP II 3 I, Sussex University).

Considering that Between the Acts is Woolf ’s shortest novel (not counting Flush), it mentions quite a variety of plants—fi fty in all, as many as appear in Jacob’s Room, though fewer than in Orlando or Th e Waves. Th e twenty-one varieties of fl owers named are on a par with Th e Years (twenty-two), Th e Waves (also twenty-one) and Orlando (twenty-fi ve). As is common in Woolf ’s works, and as might be expected in a book so concerned with the history of England, roses predominate, appearing twice as many times (twenty-four) as lilies, the next most frequently mentioned species, which appear twelve times (not dif-ferentiating between water lilies and land lilies and not counting the six times Sir Lilyliver Spaniel is mentioned by his full name). Geraniums show up four times, rhododendrons three times, violets and carnations twice (if you count carnations and pinks as the same species). Despite its reputation for elegiac despair, Between the Acts is one of the fruitiest of all Woolf ’s novels, with almost as many diff erent kinds (eight) as Th e Waves. Among other types of plants, lavender appears most frequently (seven times)—usually in connection with memories and the Victorian Age—and hay, straw, and corn appear six times each (unless hay and straw are seen to be the same species.)


CONCLUSION

So what do we make of these many fl owers and their probable meanings? Statistically there are some conclusions. Woolf refers to, by my count, ninety-four fl owers by name (see Appendix V: All the Flowers Named). Th e rose is by far the most frequent fl ower, in part because of its liminal use as both a natural plant and an artifi cial representation of one on teapots and wallpaper and in paper. Th is fi ctional frequency is paralleled by the popu-larity of roses in the fl ower trade at the end of the nineteenth century (Ziegler 2). Even now, according to Amy Stewart’s 2007 study of the fl ower business, Flower Confi dential, roses account for “more than double the amount spent on the next most popular fl ower, chrysanthemums,” in today’s market (126).

Violets are the next most frequent fl owers; often sold by beggars on the street and prized for their scent they were one of the most popular fl owers for women to wear at the turn of the century (Ziegler 27), and in Woolf are often associated as well with other purple fl owers of mourning.7 Th ey are actually tied with carnations, the long-lasting mod-ern substitute for the rose (by 1950, according to Zeigler, the most popular of all cut fl owers [36]).8 Next come lilies—white and associated with both innocence and death. After that, there is a big drop to the next tier of fl owers: geraniums, tulips, lilacs, dahlias, crocuses, and hyacinths.

And the meanings of all these blossoms? Th ey are of course various. But I like to think of fl owers as part of the “scaff olding in the background” that Woolf refers to in “A Sketch of the Past” (73). And I fi nd myself agreeing with Bonnie Kime Scott that fl owers often “provide a strategy for writing about the body” (Scott, “Husk” 375). While Woolf rejects the Victorian identifi cation of young girls blooming into sexuality as too dangerous, con-sidering how often such blossoms are prematurely cut and regimented into arrangements, she retains a version of that image in her vision of the fl ower in the garden as “the whole,” also recorded in “A Sketch of the Past”: “I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the fl ower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the fl ower; and that was the real fl ower; part earth; part fl ower” (MOB 71). Th is “moment of being” gives Woolf a feeling of satisfaction which she compares to the sense of wholeness she gets from putting things into words, a way of seeing the “pat-tern” of how we are all connected behind the “cotton wool” of life (MOB 72). Plants and fl owers, then, are part of the very web of life that Woolf weaves, independent yet con-nected to everything else in her world and work.


Notes

1. On William Robinson see Uglow, A Little History of British Gardening 24–6 and Chapter Seven of Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement by Judith B. Tankard, 98–114, which deals with both Robinson and Jekyll.

2. For a brief introduction to Jekyll’s career see Bisgrove’s Introduction to the New Illustrated Edition of Jekyll’s Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden.

3. My fl ower counts for this paper are as accurate as I could make them; however, I have been combing through the books again, using the CD-Rom to verify, and I continue to fi nd fl owers I had missed. Flower counts in my forthcoming book for the Bloomsbury Heritage Series should be even more comprehensive (and will include all of the short stories as well).

4. Orlando, Th e Waves, and Between the Acts all have more species of plants but not nearly the variety of fl ow-ers.

5. Further study has convinced me one of the fl aws of a too autobiographical account of the novel is the circu-lar habit of reading the garden in To the Lighthouse back into St. Ives, assuming that if a fl ower is mentioned in the novel, it must have grown at Talland House.Th e trailing geraniums in the urns along the terrace where Mr. Ramsay stalks and rants are never named by Woolf as being grown at Talland House. Photos of the front of the house show us urns fi lled with fl owers (Smith, plate 37f ), but since they are in black and white, it is impossible to confi rm they are geraniums. Geraniums did and still do grow in profusion at Monk’s House. Similarly, the red hot pokers that stand sentry at the break in the hedge (not specifi ed in the

Fig. 2: Design for a Potential Virginia Woolf Garden


novel as escalonia) are never mentioned in “A Sketch of the Past” or other sources documenting the fl ora at Talland House. Perusal of the gap in the hedge between the upper and lower gardens at Talland House shows no signs of pokers (Smith College 37c). Th ey do grow now, along the path to the beach that leads down from Talland House, and we know that they were and still are a prominent feature of the garden at Monk’s House from photos taken of Virginia and Leonard standing next to a spectacular clump of them (Humm, Snapshots 129)

6. Goldman also points out that purple and green have more positive and energizing connotations as suff rage colors (see Goldman 68–71, 179, 180, 192–3 and passim).

7. Ziegler points out the importance of fragrant fl owers in the 19th century, especially “primroses, stocks, car-nations, violets, roses, [and] tuberoses. Th e latter, with their strong scent and waxy texture, often appeared at funerals.

8. More carnations are sold than roses, but more money is spent on roses.

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—. “‘Pearls and the Porpoise’: Th e Years—A Lesbian Memoir.” Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings. Ed. Eileen Bar-rett and Patricia Cramer. New York UP, 1997. 222–240.

Earle, Mrs. C.W. Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden. 1895; rpt and enl. London: Th omas Nelson & Sons, n.d.Edwards, Lee R. “War and Roses: Th e Politics of Mrs. Dalloway.” Th e Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist

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Spaldi ng, Frances. Roger Fry: Art and Life. 1980; Black Dog Books, 1999.Stewart, Amy. Flower Confi dential. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007.Westman, Karin E. “Th e First Orlando: Th e Laugh of the Comic Spirit in Virginia Woolf ’s ‘Friendships Gal-

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(1980): 141–47.


APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

Digest of Flower Symbolism fromTHE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS

Kate Greenaway. London: Routledge 1884. Rpt. Dover, 1992.

8 Garden Anemone . . . Forsaken Apple . . . Temptation Asphodel . . . My regrets follow you to the

grave10 Bud of White Rose . . . Heart ignorant of

love11 Cabbage . . . Profi t Carnation, Deep Red . . . Alas! For my

poor heart Carnation, Yellow. . . Disdain12 Cherry Tree . . . Good education Chequered Fritillary. . . Persecution China Rose. . . Beauty always new Chrysanthemum, red . . . I love Chrysanthemum, Yellow. . . Slighted

Love13 Colchicum . . . My best days are past Corn . . . Riches14 Cypress . . . Death. Mourning15 Dahlia. . . Instability Daisy . . . Innocence16 Elm. . . Dignity17 Fern. . . Fascination18 Foxglove . . . Insincerity19 Germanium, Scarlet . . . Comforting.

Stupidity20 Goat’s Rue . . . Reason21 Hollyhock . . . Ambition. Fecundity22 Hyacinth, White. . . Unobtrusive loveli-

ness23 Iris . . . Message Ivy. . . Fidelitiy. Marriage26 Laburnum . . . Forsaken.

Laurel . . . Glory27 Lilac, Purple . . . First emotions of

love Lily, White. . . Purity. Sweetness Lime Trees (Linden) . . . Conjugal

love31 Oak leaves . . . Bravery Oak Tree . . . Hospitality Osier . . . Frankness Osmunda . . . Dreams32 Passion Flower. . . Religious Supersti-

tion Pea, Sweet . . . Departure Pear Tree. . . Comfort33 Plane Tree . . . Genius Plum Tree . . . Fidelity Pomegranate . . . Foolishness Poppy, Red . . . Consolation Poppy, Scarlet. . . Fantastic extrava-

gance34 Primrose. . . Early youth Evening Primrose . . . Inconstancy Pyrus Japonicus. . . Fairies’ fi re36 Rhododendron . . . Danger. Beware39 Southernwood. . . Jest. Bantering41 Tulip . . . Fame42 Violet, Blue . . . Faithfulness43 Water Lily . . . Purity of Heart44 Willow, Weeping . . . Mourning45 Yew . . . Sorrow46 Zinnia . . .Th oughts of absent friends


APPENDIX III: FLOWER TOTALS APPENDIX IV: ROSES

APPENDIX II: PLANTS OVER TIME

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Voya

ge

Nigh

t & D

ay

M o

r T

Jaco

b

Mrs

. D

Ligh

thou

se

Orla

ndo

Room

Wav

es

Flus

h

Year

s

Sket

ch

BTA

Variety of Total Plants

Flower Varieties

Fruits

Vegs

Trees & Bushes

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

Frie

ndGa

llVo

yage

Nigh

t & D

ayM

or T

Jaco

bM

rs. D

Ligh

thou

seO

rland

oRo

om

Wav

esFl

ush

Fres

hWYe

ars

Sket

chBT

A

Roses

Roses

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Frie

ndGa

llVo

yage

Nigh

t & D

ayM

or T

Jaco

bM

rs. D

Ligh

thou

seO

rland

oRo

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Wav

esFl

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Fres

hWYe

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Sket

ch BTA

# of Flowers

# of Flowers


AnemoneAsphodel AsterAutumn CrocusAzalea

BegoniaBroomBluebellsBog MyrtleBroomButtercup

CamilliaCarnationCherry BlossomCherry Pie (Heliotrope)Chestnut blossomChrysanthemumClematis CloverConvulvous (Morning

Glory)Cowbind (Bryony)Cow ParsleyCyclamenCrocuses Daff odilDahliaDaisyDandelionDelphiniums

EglantineElder BlossomEscalloniaEvening Primrose

Flags (yellow Iris)Forget-me-notFoxglove

FritillariesFuchsia

GentianGeraniumGorse

HeatherHeather BellsHibiscusHollyhockHyacinthHydrangea

Iris

Jacamanna (var. of clematis)Jonquil

Laburnum (fl owering tree) LarkspurLilacLilyLily of the Valley

MagnoliaMay (Flowering Hawthorn)Meadow SweetMesenbrantheum (Ice Plant)

Nasturtium

Old Man’s Beard (possible var. of clematis)

Brown-spotted OrchidOrchidOrchisOsier

PansiesPassion-FlowerPeach BlossomPlantainPrimrosePoppyPurple CloverPurple NightshadePyrus Japnica (Japenese

Flowering Quince)

Red-Hot PokersRhododendronRose

Sea-HollySnowdropsSouthernwood Sweet AliceSweet PeasSunfl owerSyringa

TeasleTh istleTobacco PlantTulip

VerbenaViolets

Water-LiliesWisteria (sp. wistaria)

Zinnia

APPENDIX VAll the Flowers Named in Fictional Works + ROOM and THREE GUINEAS

TAKING HER FENCES:THE EQUESTRIAN VIRGINIA WOOLF

a reading by Beth Rigel Daugherty

First, I want to thank Kristin Czarnecki for asking me if I knew of any horse refer-ences in Virginia Woolf. My casual reply, that I had noticed a repeated phrase about Woolf‘s “taking her fences,” led to my being here right now!

I must also thank Mark Hussey without whose CD-ROM I could never have put this “narrative” together. But many times I wanted to curse! Do you realize how many references to horses there are in Virginia Woolf ’s work? All sorts of horses—cart horses, dray horses, race horses, plough horses, runaway horses, dead horses. Who knew? Like Elisa Sparks with her fl owers, I was overwhelmed by what I found. By the time I skimmed through all the hits for “horse” in the letters and diaries and the novels, I had fourteen handwritten pages of lists, one reference per line. I then looked up and typed those I thought were most representative or interesting, which gave me a pool of 35 double-spaced pages of quotations. Please real-ize, too, that although it occurred to me to search for other words, like “steed” and “gallop,” and “pony,” I stopped with “taking fences“ and “horse”! I also never got to the essays, which means I will not be using the passage about the thoroughbred from “Middlebrow.”

From my original pool of quotations, I have cobbled together (another Woolfi an phrase) a reading, not an analysis. I have had to leave out a lot of other good passages. But here, in 52 passages, in her own words, is the Virginia Woolf who might, after all, be at home in the horse capital of the world. I will not interrupt her words with comments or context, but I have occasionally inserted a name in place of a pronoun and I have often cut out bits to save time. Except for the prologue and the epilogue, the passages follow a rough chronological order. Th e source for each passage follows it.

PROLOGUE

And as I watched her lengthening out for the test, I saw, but hoped that she did not see, the bishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the patriarchs and the peda-gogues all at her shouting warning and advice. You can’t do this and you shan’t do that! Fellows and scholars only allowed on the grass! Ladies not admitted without a letter of introduction! Aspiring and graceful female novelists this way! So they kept at her like the crowd at a fence on the race-course, and it was her trial to take her fence without looking to right or left. If you stop to curse you are lost, I said to her; equally, if you stop to laugh. Hesitate or fumble and you are done for. Th ink only of the jump, I implored her, as if I had put the whole of my money on her back; and she went over it like a bird. But there was a fence beyond that and a fence beyond that. (AROO 93-4)

I

Th e streets were full of horses. Th e streets were littered with little brown piles of steaming horse dung which boys, darting out among the wheels, removed in shovels. Th e


horses kicked and reared and neighed. Often they ran away. Carriages crashed together I remember in High Street; horses went sprawling; they shied; they reared; wheels came off . Th e street rocked with horses and smelt of horses. Th e horses were often gleaming, spick and span horses, with rosettes in their ears; the footmen wore cockades in their hats; foam fl ecked the bright silver harness; coronets and coats of arms were painted on panels and among the sounds of the street—the tap of hoofs, the rush of wheels—one heard a jingling and metallic noise as the harness shook and rattled. (“A Sketch of the Past” 122)

II

When father was reading to us in the evening, Enid MacKenzie in her night gown and Mr M’s fur coat came in. Th eir servants room had caught fi re–Gerald rushed over, and poured pails of water over the place–Th en came roaring down the street a fi re engine –shouting and halloaing. Th e men jumped off in a moment and found that the fi re had succumbed to pails of water before their arrival. Leaving three of their men, they galloped off again–A crowd had followed them, and stood gaping in the street. Th en came four more fi re engines–the men swearing at fi nding nothing to do. Soon they mounted, the crowd yelled and the horses cantered away–So ends the fi re….(PA 20; 20 Jan. 1897)

III

Down I came one winter’s evening about 1900 in my green dress; apprehensive, yet, for a new dress excites even the unskilled, elated. [. . .] [George] at once fi xed on me that extraordinari-ly observant scrutiny with which he always inspected our clothes. He looked me up and down for a moment as if I were a horse brought into the show ring. Th en the sullen look came into his eyes; [. . .] It was the look of moral, of social, disapproval, as if he scented some kind of insurrection, of defi ance of his accepted standards [. . .] He said at last: “Go and tear it up.” He spoke in a curi-ously tart, rasping, peevish voice; the voice of the enraged male [. . .] (“A Sketch of the Past” 151)

IV

I have been splashing about in racing society since I saw you—that is dined with George at Lady Carnarvons—young Lady C. this time, thank God. It was the night of the Kemptown races, and we talked about horses all night, which are probably more interest-ing than books (L1 189; May 1905, to Violet Dickinson)

V

[. . .] but tonight I was fairly whirled round by the wind & the rain. Th e only guide I had was the crunch of gravel beneath my feet–I could neither see nor hear. Suppose a cart advanced I should embrace the horse before I saw him. (PA 381; 1908, Wells and Manorbier)

VI

I almost went to see the British horses yesterday with Violet. But every ticket was sold—it would have been a sight, and Violet’s knowledge of horsefl esh is profound I

63Taking her Fences

expect. Besides, she would have known half the country squires. Th ere is something very racy about her. (L1 399; 6 June 1909, to Nelly Cecil)

VII

I’ve just been riding in Richmond with Leonard. Great fun, though the horse was surprised. (L1 505; July 1912, to Violet Dickinson)

VIII

We want to buy 2 horses. Can you recommend any? Isn’t there a hunting peeress of your acquaintance who would part with a thoroughbred on condition we loved him? I only know one huntress, and she is now incapable, owing to marriage. [. . .] We sew [sic] articles over the world—I’m writing a lot for the Times too, reviews and articles and biographies of dead women—so we hope to make enough to keep our horses. (L2 23; 11 Apr. 1913, to Violet Dickinson)

IX

Tomorrow we go down to Asheham, where we have fi rst to survive a visit from Lytton-Desmond, and then to relapse peacefully into a rural life, which now centres round a horse—to buy a horse seems to be as diffi cult as to write a novel, but I think we may be on the track of one now. (L2 26; 16 May 1913, to Ka Cox)

X

We are very hot, having chased a horse vainly round a fi eld. It is a wonderful night, and you I suppose are attending some great ball [. . .] (L2 30; [?28] May 1913, to Nelly Cecil)

XI

Even at tea the fl oor rose beneath their feet and pitched too low again, and at dinner the ship seemed to groan and strain as though a lash were descending. She who had been a broad-backed dray-horse, upon whose hind-quarters pierrots might waltz, became a colt in a fi eld. (VO 70)

XII

“Th ere will soon be very few hansom cabs left,” said Mrs. Elliot. “And four-wheeled cabs—I assure you even at Oxford it’s almost impossible to get a four-wheeled cab.”

“I wonder what happens to the horses,” said Susan.“Veal pie,” said Arthur.“It’s high time that horses should become extinct anyhow,” said Hirst. “Th ey’re dis-

tressingly ugly, besides being vicious.”But Susan, who had been brought up to understand that the horse is the noblest of

God’s creatures, could not agree, and Venning thought Hirst an unspeakable ass, but was too polite not to continue the conversation.


“When they see us falling out of aeroplanes they get some of their own back, I ex-pect,” he remarked. (VO 133)

XIII

On Saturday we saw the horse show, & I had a look at Queen Alexandra’s poor old effi gy, still painted like a wildrose, though she is about 75 [. . .] (D1 288-89; 8 July 1919)

XIV

“And it isn’t what our husbands get, but what they are. I used to dream of white horses and palanquins, too; but still, I like the ink-pots best. And who knows?” [Mrs. Hilbery] con-cluded, looking at Katharine, “your father may be made a baronet to-morrow.” (N&D 212)

XV

[Mary] loved the steep cliff of [Ralph’s] forehead, and compared it to the brow of a young Greek horseman, who reins his horse back so sharply that it half falls on its haunch-es. He always seemed to her like a rider on a spirited horse. And there was an exaltation to her in being with him, because there was a risk that he would not be able to keep to the right pace among other people. (N&D 227)

XVI

A real Bank Holiday [ . . .] & we spent it properly going to Hurlingham to see polo [. . .]. You get the impression that the turf is india rubber—so lightly do the horses spring—touching it & up again—Captain Lockit galloping down with his stick like a Persian rider with a lance. A large white ball is then thrown in the midst. Th e horses twirl [. . .] dance their paws, twist on their tails like cats; [. . .] only as they come past you hear a roar in the nostrils. But the bounce & agility of them all knotted together pawing the ball with their feet indescribable; passing in a second from full gallop to delicate <dribbling> trot as the ball is dribbled almost between their feet. [. . .] Th e horses become suddenly big when they gallop straight at you & their pace alarming. At a little distance the most graceful & controlled of movements. (D2 41-42; 24 May 1920)

XVII

A few moments before a horse jumps it slows, sidles, gathers itself together, goes up like a monster wave, and pitches down on the further side. Hedges and sky swoop in a semicircle. Th en as if your own body ran into the horse’s body and it was your own fore-legs grown with his that sprang, rushing through the air you go, the ground resilient, bod-ies a mass of muscles, yet you have command too, upright stillness, eyes accurately judg-ing. Th en the curves cease, changing to downright hammer strokes, which jar; and you draw up with a jolt; sitting back a little, sparkling, tingling, glazed with ice over pounding arteries, gasping: “Ah! ho! Hah!” the steam going up from the horses as they jostle together

65Taking her Fences

at the cross-roads, where the signpost is, and the woman in the apron stands and stares at the doorway. Th e man raises himself from the cabbages to stare too.

So Jacob galloped over the fi elds of Essex, fl opped in the mud, lost the hunt, and rode by himself eating sandwiches, looking over the hedges, noticing the colours as if new scraped, cursing his luck. (JR 101)

XVIII

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have—positively—a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang—there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often. (JR 141)

XIX

And as usual I want—I want—But what do I want? Whatever I had, I should always say I want, I want. Yet it comes over me that to sit on the grass at the Horse Show tomor-row with Leonard will be very contenting. (D2 247; 13 June 1923)

XX

& altogether we have worked at full speed since May & that is I’m persuaded the root & source & origin of all health & happiness, provided of course that one rides work as a man rides a great horse, in a spirited & independent way; not a drudge, but a man with spurs in his heels. (D2 259; 28 July 1923)

XXI

“Well, and what’s happened to you?” [Clarissa] said. So before a battle begins, the hors-es paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines on their fl anks; their necks curve. So Pe-ter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each other. (MD 43)

XXII

Th ey were going to Sir William Bradshaw; she thought his name sounded nice; he would cure Septimus at once. And there was a brewer’s cart, and the grey horses had upright bristles of straw in their tails; there were newspaper placards. It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy. (MD 81)

XXIII

Th e ‘principle’ which I fi nd intermittently guiding my life is—to take one’s fences. Heaven knows how I’ve dreaded them! (D3 42; 14 Sept. 1925)


XXIV

All the rest of the news is motor car gossip. We fl ash through Sussex almost daily; drop in after dinner; visit ruins; muse by retired moats, of which Sussex is full; surprise Colonels—it is a perfect invention. What we did without it passes comprehension. Most of the Victorian horror seems explicable by the fact that they walked, or sat behind stout sweating horses. (L3 418; 3 Sept. 1927, to Lytton Strachey)

XXV

Heaven be praised for it, the problem of space remained, [Lily] thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. Th e whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfl y’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffl e with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses. (TTL 171)

XXVI

I think of Vita at Long Barn: all fi re and legs and beautiful plunging ways like a young horse. (L3 479; 13 Mar. 1928, to VSW)

XXVII

Stretching her arms out (arms she had learnt already, have no such fatal eff ects as legs) [Orlando] thanked Heaven that she was not prancing down Whitehall on a war-horse, not even sentencing a man to death. (O 119)

XXVIII

[Orlando] rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. (O 139-40)

XXIX

Once, presumably, this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings, and the chapel itself was marsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Teams of horses and oxen, I thought, must have hauled the stone in wagons from far countries [. . .] (AROO 9)

XXX

How to end, save by a tremendous discussion, in which every life shall have its voice—a mosaic—a—. I do not know. Th e diffi culty is that it is all at high pressure. I have not yet mastered the speaking voice. Yet I think something is there; & I propose to

67Taking her Fences

go on pegging it down, arduously, & then re-write, reading much of it aloud, like poetry. It will bear expansion. It is compressed I think. It is—whatever I make of it—a large & potential theme—wh. Orlando was not perhaps. At any rate, I have taken my fence. (D3 298; 28 Mar. 1930)

XXXI

Th e sun, risen, no longer couched on a green mattress darting a fi tful glance through wa-tery jewels, bared its face and looked straight over the waves. Th ey fell with a regular thud. Th ey fell with the concussion of horses’ hooves on the turf. Th eir spray rose like the tossing of lances and assegais over the riders’ heads. (TW 108)

XXXII

“He is dead,” said Neville. He fell. His horse tripped. He was thrown. [. . .] His horse stumbled; he was thrown. Th e fl ashing trees and white rails went up in a shower. Th ere was a surge; a drumming in his ears. Th en the blow; the world crashed; he breathed heav-ily. He died where he fell.” (TW 151)

XXXIII

“And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider fi rst spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair fl ying back like a young man’s like Percival’s when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fl ing myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” (TW 297)

XXXIV

And we’ve been to a village wedding and seen the bridal party perched on kitchen chairs driven off in a great blue wagon, drawn by colossal farm horses with ribbons in their tails, and little pyramids of bells on their foreheads. (L4 338; 27 May 1931, to VSW)

XXXV

And now we have been to Lewes races & seen the fat lady in black with parts of her person spilling over the shooting seat on which her bulk is so insecurely poised: seen the riff raff of sporting society all lined up in their cars with the dickies bulging with picnic baskets: heard the bark of bookies; & seen for a second the pounding straining horses with red faced jockeys lashing them pound by. What a noise they made—what a sense of muscle hard & stretch--& beyond the downs this windy sunny day looked wild & remote; & I could rethink them into uncultivated land again. (D4 120; 5 Aug. 1932)


XXXVI

I’ve been asked to write in the Times about my father for his Centenary. [. . .] but at the moment my head is full of him. One thing you would have liked—his extreme sincer-ity; also unless I’m partial, he was beautiful in the distinguished way a race horse, even an ugly race is beautiful—[. . .] (L5 100; 7 Sept. 1932, to Ethel Smyth)

XXXVII

And then all this incandescence led to the galloping horses in my heart the night before last. I lay in bed reasoning that I could not come smash. Death I defy you, &c. But it was a terrifi c eff ort, holding on to the reins. So at 2.30 I woke L. & asked, very reasonably, for ice, which he got me. And my horses calmed down—he was so sensible. (D4 129; 2 Nov. 1932)

XXXVIII

Lord Lord, why cant I what is called seize life by the forelock and ride it like a race horse? Why must I eat through a vast incoherent dinner now this instant? Why is it cold, why am I fated to wear silk stockings for the American friends of a friend who is the dumbest man in the world? Why must Leonard put on a dinner jacket and a black tie? (L5 186; 30 Mar. 1933, to Ethel Smyth)

XXXIX

[. . .] now, tomorrow, I mean to run it off . And suppose only nonsense comes? Th e thing is to be venturous, bold, to take every possible fence. One might introduce plays, poems, letters, dialogues: must get the round, not only the fl at. Not the theory only. And conversation; argument. How to do that will be one of the problems.

And I am once called out to draw lots in our Derby sweepstakes. No favourite this year they say. (D4 161; 31 May 1933)

XL

[driving in a downpour through Wales and onward through] much green & prosper-ous country, till we reached Worcester & took up lodging for the last time at the Star. Leonard told me not to stare so at the other tea drinkers, but I fi nd it diffi cult not to gaze at these real English, these dwellers in the very heart of the land, who talk of horses & games all the time, & meet their men friends in the lounge, & sit drinking & laughing & bandying county gossip under pictures of famous race horses. Horses rule England, as salmon rule Ireland. (D4 218; 8 May 1934)

XLI

Th e death of Kipling has set all the old war horses of the press padding round their stalls. (D5 8; 19 Jan. 1936)

69Taking her Fences

XLII

“I am Pargiter of Pargiter’s Horse,” [Rose] said, fl ourishing her hand, “riding to the rescue!”She was riding by night on a desperate mission to a besieged garrison, she told herself. She

had a secret message—she clenched her fi st on her purse—to deliver to the General in person. All their lives depended upon it. [. . .] All their lives depended upon her riding to them through the enemy’s country. Here she was galloping across the desert. [. . .] She had only to cross the desert, to ford the river, and she was safe. Flourishing the arm that held the pistol, she clapped spurs to her horse and galloped down Melrose Avenue. (TY [1880] 27-28)

XLIII

[Eleanor] was late. [. . .] She ran; she dodged. Shopping women got in her way. She dashed into the road waving her hand among the carts and horses. Th e conductor saw her, curved his arm round her and hauled her up. She had caught her bus. (TY [1891] 101)

XLIV

All along the silent country roads leading to London carts plodded; the iron reins fi xed in the iron hands, for vegetables, fruit, fl owers travelled slowly. [. . .] On they plod-ded, down this road, that road, keeping close to the kerb. Even the horses, had they been blind, could have heard the hum of London in the distance; and the drivers, dozing, yet saw through half-shut eyes the fi ery gauze of the eternally burning city. (TY [1907] 129)

XLV

It was hotter than ever. Horses’ noses hissed as they drank from the troughs; their hoofs made ridges hard and brittle as plaster on the country roads. (TY [1911] 192)

XLVI

[Martin] fi xed his eyes on a pillar-box. Th en he looked at a car. It was odd how soon one got used to cars without horses, he thought. Th ey used to look ridiculous. (TY [1914] 235)

XLVII

Streets empty. Faces set & eyes bleared. In Chancery Lane I saw a man with a barrow of music books. My typists offi ce destroyed. Th en at Wimbledon a Siren—people began running. We drove, through almost empty streets, as fast as possible. Horses taken out of the shafts. Cars pulled up. Th en the all clear. (D5 317; 10 Sept. 1940)

XLVIII

For [Isa’s] generation the newspaper was a book; and, as her father-in-law had dropped the Times, she took it and read: “A horse with a green tail . . .” which was fantastic. Next,


“Th e guard at Whitehall . . .” which was romantic and then, building word upon word, she read: “Th e troopers told her the horse had a green tail; but she found it was just an ordinary horse. And they dragged her up to the barrack room where she was thrown upon a bed. Th en one of the troopers removed part of her clothing, and she screamed and hit him about the face. . . .” (BTA 20)

XLIX

“Th at,” [Bartholomew] indicated the man with a horse,” was my ancestor. He had a dog. Th e dog was famous. Th e dog has his place in history. He left it on record that he wished his dog to be buried with him.”

Th ey looked at the picture.“I always feel,” Lucy broke the silence, “he’s saying: ‘Paint my dog.’’“But what about the horse?” said Mrs. Manresa.“Th e horse,” said Bartholomew, putting on his glasses. He looked at the horse. Th e

hindquarters were not satisfactory. (BTA 49)

L

Every one of our male relations was shot into that [great patriarchal] machine at the age of ten and emerged at sixty a Head Master, an Admiral, a Cabinet Minister, or the Warden of a college. It is as impossible to think of them as natural human beings as it is to think of a carthorse galloping wild maned and unshod over the pampas. (“A Sketch of the Past” 153)

EPILOGUE

On the whole I like the young womans mind considerably. How gallantly she takes her fences--& my word, what a gift for pen & ink! (D2 17; 4 Feb. 1920, upon rereading VO)

Works Cited

Hussey, Mark, ed. Major Authors on CD-ROM: Virginia Woolf. Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Media, 1997. CD-ROM.

Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. 1941. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1969. —. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie. 5 vols. New York: Har-

court, 1977-1984. —. Jacob’s Room. 1922. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1978. —. Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt, 1975-1980. —. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Orlando: Harvest/Harcourt, 2005. —. Night and Day. 1920. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1948. —. Orlando, A Biography. 1928. Ed. Maria DiBattista. Orlando: Harvest/Harcourt, 2006. —. A Passionate Apprentice: Th e Early Journals: 1897-1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt, 1990. —. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Introduction Mary Gordon. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1981. —. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. 2nd ed. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt, 1985. —. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Foreword Eudora Welty. New York: Harvest/Harcourt, 1981. —. Th e Voyage Out. 1920. New York: Harvest/Harcourt, 1948. —. Th e Waves. 1931. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1978. —. Th e Years. 1937. New York: Harvest/Harcourt, 1965.

THE METAPHYSICS OF FLOWERS IN THE WAVES : VIRGINIA WOOLF’S “SEVEN-SIDED FLOWER” AND HENRI BERGSON’S

INTUITION

by Laci Mattison

Virginia Woolf ’s Th e Waves (1931) questions epistemology and ontology and, in so do-ing, becomes a novel concerned with the “thing-in-itself.” Kant, in Critique of Judg-ment (1790), posits that we can never reach the “thing-in-itself” because the intuition

which would give us a full understanding or experience of this “thing” is impossible. However, within the framework of modernist philosopher Henri Bergson’s theory of metaphysics, we will recognize how we might intuit the “thing-in-itself.” Rhoda asks in Th e Waves: “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” Like Rhoda, we want to “see the thing” (163), and, while we have been told by Kant and others that we will never be able to approach the “thing” fully, Woolf ’s writing suggests otherwise.

In the fi rst dissertation on Woolf, published in 1935, Ruth Gruber writes that Woolf “is too innately creative, too inherently Bergsonian to be called Bergson’s imitator. It is conceivable that she would have found the way without him” (49). Gruber’s comments on the thematic bridge between Woolf ’s aesthetics and Bergson’s philosophy come as no surprise, especially as Bergson experienced immense popularity during the time she wrote Virginia Woolf: A Study. Currently and in part because of the publication of Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism, the English edition of which was published in 1988, a reinvigorated Bergson is once again popular. As with Gruber’s perceptive comments, current schol-ars have not failed to identify the integral connection between Modernism—especially Woolf ’s work—and Bergsonism. Mary Ann Gillies cites Th e Waves as a “Bergsonian work” (126) in Henri Bergson and British Modernism (1996); Merry Pawlowski utilizes Bergso-nian time in her more recent analysis of “feminine space” in Th e Years (2008). And, Angela Hague, in Fiction, Intuition & Creativity (2003), defi nes intuition through Bergson, Wil-liam James, and Jung (among others) as she traces intuition in Woolf ’s creative process, concluding that “[i]n Th e Waves Woolf achieves the triumph of intuitive form that she sought throughout her career” (275). Extending these and similar arguments that propose a productive coupling of Woolf ’s work with Bergson’s, this paper affi rms that, like Berg-son’s philosophy, Woolf ’s fi ction calls for a new metaphysics, a redefi nition of the “thing” through duration, intuition, and assemblage.

To exemplify Woolfi an metaphysics in Th e Waves, I take the “seven-sided fl ower” as a point of departure. In Woolf ’s work, even fl owers have political or, here, philosophical im-portance. When Bernard, Susan, Neville, Jinny, Louis, and Rhoda assemble for Percival’s farewell dinner, a red carnation on the table transforms. Bernard thinks:

We have come together (from the North, from the South, from Susan’s farm, from Louis’s house of business) to make this one thing, not enduring—for what endures?—but seen by many eyes simultaneously. Th ere is a red carnation in that vase. A single fl ower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided fl ower, many


petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves—a whole fl ower to which every eye brings its own contribution. (127)

Th is fl ower, instead of exhibiting fi xed or essential qualities, fl uctuates precisely because of the collection assembled around it. Notably, when the six meet for dinner after Percival’s death, they will gather around another fl ower, but one with only six sides. As Bernard says in the above passage, they are “making”—creating—the seven-sided carnation in the moment. However, the fl ower they create does not last beyond that moment (or, at least, “endures” only in memory). And, even in the moment, the “making” is a process. Th us, this passage, like much of Woolf ’s writing, necessitates a particular temporality: “real time” (or, moments of being) in distinction to “clock time.” As we will see in a further contextualization with Bergson’s philosophy, we must consider the duration of the fl ower because the method of intuition “already presupposes duration” (Bergsonism 13).

Th e Waves, like Woolf ’s other fi ction, returns again and again to this theme of time, the principle theme of Bergson’s philosophy. Often in Woolf ’s fi ction, diff erent modes of time intersect; or rather, ordered (masculine) time interrupts moments of being. For instance, at one point in Th e Waves, Bernard and Neville’s moment of being is interrupted by clock time. Bernard blames Neville, “who had been thinking with the unlimited time of the mind” but then “poked the fi re and began to live by that other clock” (273; emphasis added). Th is “other clock” is one of habit (or, “non-being” as Woolf puts it in Moments of Being). Th e “other clock” represents spatialized time that orders our lives into seconds, minutes, hours, translating our qualitative experience into something quantitative. In Ber-nard’s and Neville’s shared moment of being, their identity spreads outward, “grows rings” in a stream of being. But, when the tick of a clock interrupts, this intuitive sense of self, which is not essential but continually fl uctuating in experiential connectivity, is lost.

Bergson’s philosophy, like Woolf ’s fi ction, is preoccupied with the distinction between the “time of the mind” and “that other clock.” Th roughout his work—publication dates which range from 1889 to 1934—Bergson focuses on the concept of durée (duration). Berg-son argues that “usually when we speak of time we think of the measurement of duration, and not of duration itself. But this duration which science eliminates, and which is so dif-fi cult to conceive and express, is what one feels and lives” (Creative Mind 12). As Bergson posits, science is not the only discipline that spatializes time; philosophers are especially implicated in his critique. Bergson states that the practice of philosophy “has been to study space, to determine its nature and function, and then to apply to time the conclusions thus reached. Th e theories of space and time thus become counterparts of one another” (13). Time is spatialized in Western science, philosophy, and, more often than not, literature. However, as Woolf recognizes in her fi ction, this spatialized time does not correspond to our lived experience. Past and present, as Bergson argues and Woolf ’s fi ction affi rms, are not so easily separated. Furthermore, the so-called “present,” according to Bergson, is always already the “past”1; so, the “past” and “present,” in continual comingling, become arbitrary distinctions. As we will see, it is precisely intuition which allows us to experience this dura-tion—not time in segments but time as a fl uctuating, non-spatial continuum.

For Bergson, what is at stake in living in duration is, namely, free will and the creation of the “radically new.” Woolf ’s “philosophy” necessitates duration, also, as moments of be-ing—which are precisely artistic, creative—require the transcendence of the “false” time

73The Metaphysics of Flowers in THE WAVES

of that “other clock.” In a moment of being, one experiences a connection with the uni-verse, “the mind grows rings [and] identity becomes robust” (257). Woolf summarizes her aesthetics—or, “what [she] might call a philosophy”—in the much quoted passage from Moments of Being. She famously concludes that “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the mu-sic; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock” (72). Notably, Woolf calls this shock “intuition” (72), an important word, also, for Bergson. “Intuition” is a word which has been used in many, often contradictory ways. Th e term is “full of echoes,” as Woolf would say,2 and Bergson acknowledges this in Creative Mind. However, a congru-ency exists between Woolf ’s and Bergson’s conceptions of intuition. For both, the method of intuition allows us to reach the “thing-in-itself.”

In Creative Mind, the book most centered on the theme of intuition, Bergson argues for a radical re-visioning of metaphysics. He proposes a new metaphysics based upon the method of intuition, which is, according to Bergson, “a question, above all, of fi nding true duration” (34). One cannot practice intuition without placing one’s self into duration, into the fl ow of “real time,” in order to experience the movement of thought. As Bergson states, “[T]o think intuitively is to think in duration” (39). Just as what Bergson calls “real time” is important in an understanding of moments of being, intuition is also inherent to Woolf ’s “philosophy”: the experientiality of the “shock.”

Th e reason why philosophers such as Kant argue that we will never be able to reach the “thing-in-itself ” is that these philosophers spatialize time and thus are only able to perceive the “thing” by various positions outside of time and outside of the “thing.”3 Th e other issue Bergson raises with philosophers and metaphysicians is that matter, as it is for Kant, is given a priori. Th e “thing” is not considered in the context of change, of becom-ing, and the universe remains static. Bergson writes:

Kant had proved, so it was said, that our thought exerts itself upon a matter pre-viously scattered in Space and Time, and thus prepared especially for man: the ‘thing in itself ’ escapes us; to comprehend it, we would need an intuitive faculty which we do not possess. On the contrary, from my analysis the result was that at least a part of reality, our person, can be grasped in its natural purity. (30)

Th e place where we might begin the practice of intuition and therefore perceive the “thing-in-itself ” is the self, which can be defi ned through Woolf, Bergson, and (later) Deleuze as a dynamic and unifi ed multiplicity.

As a process philosopher, Bergson is not interested in dialectical synthesis but in non-linear becoming, in the dynamic diff erentiation that occurs through inner multiplicity, which is also unifi ed. Deleuze writes in Bergsonism: “Being, or Time, is a multiplicity. But it is precisely not ‘multiple’; it is One, in conformity with its type of multiplicity” (85). Following Bergson, Deleuze distinguishes the multiple, a quantitative grouping, from a virtual multiplicity, which is by nature qualitative. In Th ree Guineas, Woolf writes of the possibility for “unity” to “rub […] out divisions as if they were chalk marks only; to dis-cuss with you the capacity of the human spirit to overfl ow boundaries and make unity out of multiplicity” (143). Likewise, Bergson posits in Creative Evolution: “I am then […] a


unity that is multiple and a multiplicity that is one. […] Such is my inner life, and such also is life in general” (258). In keeping with these congruent arguments, if we are to reach the “thing-in-itself,” we must recognize the assemblage, the multiplicity, inherent to the “self ” and the “thing.” If life, the élan vital, is, as Bergson posits, a creative evolution, then we must consider the movements of this assemblage.

Th rough the method of intuition, we can move from an examination of our own minds outward. Bergson, in a clarifi cation which current (mis)readings of his work ig-nore—take, for instance, Jonah Lehrer’s cursory comments in Proust Was a Neuroscien-tist (2007)—states that intuition is not simply psychological, nor is it a self-involved, bourgeois navel-gazing, as Lehrer suggests. In his “Introduction to Metaphysics,” Bergson writes: “Strictly speaking, there might exist no other duration than our own, as there might be no other color in the world than orange, for example” (Creative Mind 221). Th is absurd suggestion is precisely how those who label intuition as “bourgeois medita-tion” (Lehrer 78) and, thus, as strictly psychological, would describe Bergson’s method. However, “the intuition of our duration, far from leaving us suspended in the void as pure analysis would do, puts us in contact with a whole continuity of durations which we should try to follow either downwardly or upwardly: in both cases we dilate ourselves indefi nitely by a more and more rigorous eff ort, in both cases transcend ourselves” (221). In this way, intuition is not only a scientifi c method (as Deleuze argues in Bergsonism) but also possesses ecological import because it enables us to connect with durations other than our own, both human and non-human, and so allows us not only to “transcend our-selves” but to move beyond the “human, all too human.” Th ese durations, by defi nition, also implicate creative evolution, the “thing” and the “self ” in the context of change; we experience a continual and originary wholeness dynamically through the connectivity of durational unity. Or, as Elizabeth Grosz defi nes it, intuition allows us to “discern the in-terconnections rather than the separations between things, to develop another perspective or interest in the division and production of the real” (Time Travels 136).

Kant’s “thing” does not exist because his conception of the “thing” is static and, as we have seen, change must be included in the equation—which produces not a quantita-tive, summary understanding of the thing but a qualitative, multiplicative experience of it. Th e “seven-sided fl ower” in Th e Waves, as intuitively experienced by Percival and the six voices of the novel, necessitates durée and, thus, change. Like a moment of being, “this one thing” (the “seven-sided fl ower”), Bernard affi rms, does not “endure.” We are left with impressions, glimpses, momentary intuitions—like the fi n, which rises to the surface then sinks again. As Woolf recognizes with the “seven-sided fl ower” passage and elsewhere in her fi ction, objects continually fl uctuate. In this passage from Th e Waves, we recognize again that multiplicity is not opposed to unity (and vise versa), that, through intuition, Bernard, Susan, Neville, Jinny, Louis, Rhoda, and Percival have experienced the intercon-nections of their “selves” and, in so doing, have composed (or, created) “a whole fl ower” (127). Th ey have not added together seven points of view, which Bergson characterizes as immobile (220), but they have collectively intuited all the possible, mobile connections between their “selves” and the world (here, the red carnation).4

Later in the same dinner “scene,” Neville comments on this “false speech,” which affi rms “‘I am this; I am that!’” (138). To say, simply, a “red carnation in that vase” is a reduction; likewise, to make affi rmative statements about the self is to falsify by fi xing


the movement of the élan vital.5 Nancy Bazin, in Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision, argues that Woolf ’s vision of “the complex ambiguous, contradictory nature of man was similar to the Cubist’s concept of the total reality of an object or set of objects. Like the Cubist painter, she wanted to increase the number of possible perspectives and thus, in that sense, make her characters more lifelike” (143).6 While intuition for Woolf and Bergson cannot be reduced to a quantitative sum of perspectives (as earlier clarifi ed), Rhoda’s aesthetics are notably cubist. When she looks “between […] shoulders,” she envi-sions something like a Cubist painting: “When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright—a column; now a fountain, falling” (139). With this vision, Rhoda comments on the many changing shapes; instead of seeing the other “characters,” she sees objects in fl ux. Rhoda later thinks: “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? Now that lightning has gashed the tree and the fl owering branch has fallen and Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing. Th ere is a square; there is an oblong” (163). However, though Rhoda sees the world geometrically, she intuits the continual refi guration of these shapes. Rhoda’s cubist vision allows her to intuit the “thing” in fl ux. Like the Cubist painters, Woolf rec-ognizes that the image of the multiplicity (a “red carnation,” for instance) opens one up to the actual multiplicity. Th us, the reader, like Rhoda, can intuit the “thing,” but this experience cannot depend on language as such and must happen off the page, as language always fi xes durée. One must read aff ectively: for rhythm, not for plot. In this way, the reader no longer “makes sense” based on static defi nitions, but senses the text.7

Bergson recognizes art (including literature) can often teach us something about in-tuition. He posits: “Art would suffi ce then to show us that an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible” (160). Part of the practice of intuition is an exercising and expansion of perception and memories, and artists model this practice. Artists “look at a thing […] for itself, and not for themselves. Th ey do not perceive simply with a view to action; they perceive in order to perceive,—for nothing, for the pleasure of doing so” (162). Certainly, Woolf de-institutionalizes art. Moments of being are art, and, furthermore, one becomes an artist through moments of being. So, it is possible, following Woolf ’s philosophy, that even the common person can practice an artist’s perception and, in turn, intuition.

Because of Woolf ’s connection between everyday life and art, it is not surprising that one of her experiential moments of being as a child involves a fl ower, which she perceived “for the pleasure of doing so,” as Bergson would say. In “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf writes: “I was looking at the fl ower bed by the front door; ‘Th at is the whole,’ I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the fl ower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the fl ower; and that was the real fl ower; part earth; part fl ower” (71). Here, Woolf identifi es the relationship between part and whole, which can also be understood in terms of a unifi ed multiplicity.8 Th e “ring,” like the globe or drop in Th e Waves, “encloses” without, paradoxically, “closing off ” because the “ring” indicates a moment of being, which we know to be fl ashes, “shocks” in a system of fl ux.9 In this autobiographical pas-sage, Woolf demonstrates that she has intuited her own duration and, following Bergson and Deleuze, has “affi rm[ed] and immediately […] recognize[d] the existence of other durations, above or below” her (Bergsonism 32-3), in this case, the duration of the fl ower.

In Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction, Stella McNichol comments on the fl ower passage from Moments of Being. She states: “Th is is a moment of transcendence, of a


mystical sense of something existing beyond the literal and tangible object one is looking at. Embedded in this vision is a realization of the meaning and importance of wholeness; that something is made whole often through the inclusion of something else which is not essentially of itself ” (125). For Bergson, this “transcendence” can be obtained through the method of intuition. But, as Bergson and Woolf would argue, to claim essentiality is to miss the point: where is the essential self or even the essential fl ower in Th e Waves? Are not matter and memory always already un-essentialized through assemblage? Like the “red carnation” at the dinner party, “things-in-themselves,” as defi ned by Kant, become a moot point. If we cannot think movement, cannot conceive of the “thing” as in fl ux, we, like Kant, will never be able to intuit the “thing.” Th e only “essential,” according to Bergson, is change.10 Th us, Bergson’s—and, as I have argued, Woolf ’s—new metaphysics can be defi ned “as experience itself; and duration will be revealed as it really is,—unceasing creation, the uninterrupted up-surge of novelty” (Creative Mind 17). Th rough durée, the Bergsonian and Woolfi an method of intuition allows us “to go beyond the human condi-tion,” which is the “meaning of philosophy” according to Deleuze (27) and, we might add, the meaning of art, of novels like Th e Waves.

Notes

1. See “Memory of the Present and False Recognition,” in which Bergson systematically shows how we create memories even in the moment we term “present” (Mind-Energy 157-60, 172).

2. See “Eulogy to Words,” 7 March 2008, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profi lepages/woolfv1.shtml>, BBC, London, 29 April 1937.

3. See “Phantasms of the Living,” a speech given to the Society for Psychical Research in 1913 and collected in Mind-Energy (pages 98-100, specifi cally).

4. Seven points of view would equate the quantitative multiple, while the intuited connection is precisely what Bergson and Deleuze understand through multiplicity.

5. In A Th ousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write: “Th e plane of consistency contains only haecceities, along intersecting lines. Forms and subjects are not of that world” (263). Notably, they link this point directly to Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway, who both walked through London. Walking, for Woolf as fl âneuse, is an act of openness to the world. Deleuze and Guattari criticize Mrs. Dalloway for claiming “I am this, I am that,” because “[t]aking a walk is a haecceity,” which “has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome” (263). So, there exists no room for subjects as such in this conception of the world.

6. Other critics, such as Jesse Matz, have argued for congruency between Impressionist aesthetics and Woolf ’s fi ction. In “Cultures of Impression,” Matz writes: “When Virginia Woolf repeats Manet’s ‘supreme in-diff erence’ by providing happiest to work up her impressions in subjective solitude, she also simulates Cezanne’s dedication to ‘the mixed and broken character of fully absorbed perception.’” Matz continues: “Nowhere is the dynamic chiasmus of attention and distraction more evidently productive than in Woolf ’s impressions, which always partake both of intense focus and subjective dissolution—both of full presence and absence of any fi xity on objects themselves” (Bad Modernisms 310).

7. Even literature can move beyond language if we seriously consider Bergson’s intuitive method. Bergson upholds aff ective reading as an “analogy” for “the intuition [he] recommend[s] to the philosopher” (102). Th is way of reading attends to movement—not meaning—to rhythm, to “the temporal relations between the various sen-tences of the paragraph and various part of each sentence, in following uninterruptedly the crescendo of thought and feeling to the point musically indicated as the culmination point that the art of diction consists” (102). Music, for Bergson, is duration, and, inherent to literature (as well as music) is rhythm. Woolf recognizes this musical-literary relation with Th e Waves, which she wrote “to a rhythm and not a plot” (Diary 316).

8. Th e “whole” can be understood in terms of the Deleuzian virtual, which Deleuze utilizes in Bergsonism to reveal how Bergson does not contradict himself by positing a unity of duration while at the same time arguing that durations are multiplicities (93-4; 112-3).


9. In other words, in this moment, the “whole” fl ower (as assemblage) has territorialized. Th is territorial-ization, following Deleuze, is a momentary stabilization of the system. Manuel DeLanda has expanded Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage in his book A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Th eory and Social Complexity (2006). DeLanda’s defi nitions of de/territorialization are useful to my examination of Th e Waves. He defi nes deterritorializing as “any process which either destabilizes spatial boundaries or increases internal heterogeneity” (New Philosophy 13). DeLanda writes that territorialization “plays a synthetic role, since it is in part through the more or less permanent articulations produced by this process that a whole emerges from its parts and maintains its identity once it has emerged” (14). Th is identity (while stabilized) is not fi xed, for alternate becomings are still possible, and further de/territorializations can occur. Once any component (or duration, function, intensity, etc.) of the assemblage changes through de/territorializations, new capacities will emerge. Th e plane of consistency comprises the virtual, which is not opposed to the real but to the actual. In any deterritorialization (enabled through a line of fl ight), the assemblage reconstitutes itself through a positive feedback loop. In this way, the virtual system is potential-ized and, then, reterritorialized as the actual (or possible).

10. “For intuition the essential is change: as for the thing, as intelligence understands it, it is a cutting which has been made out of the becoming and set up by our mind as a substitute for the whole” (Creative Mind 39).

Works Cited

Bazin, Nancy. Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973.Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover, 1907. 1998.—. Creative Mind. Trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Th e Philosophical Library, Inc. 1934. 1946.—. Mind-Energy. Trans. H. Wildon Carr. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1920.—. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Paul and W. Palmer. New York: Macmillan, 1896.—. Time and Free Will. Trans. F.L. Pogson. New York: Harper & Row, 1889. 1960.Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism.

New York: Zone Books, 1988.Gillies, Mary Ann. Henri Bergson and British Modernism. London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996.Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.Gruber, Ruth. Virginia Woolf: A Study. Leipzig: Verlag Von Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1935.Hague, Angela. Fiction, Intuition & Creativity. DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003.Kant, Immanuel. From Critique of Judgment. Th e Norton Anthology of Th eory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B.

Leitch, et al. New York: Norton, 2001. 504-35.Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. New York: Houghton Miffl in, 2007.McNichol, Stella. Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction. London: Routledge, 1990.Matz, Jesse. “Cultures of Impression.” Bad Modernisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 298-330.Pawlowski, Merry M. “‘Where Am I?’: Feminine Space and Time in Virginia Woolf ’s Th e Years.” Literary

Landscapes: From Modernism to Postcolonialism. Eds. Attie de Lange, Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn and Jakob Lothe. New York: Palgrave, 2008. 75-91.

Woolf, Virginia. A Eulogy to Words. 7 March 2008. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profi lep-ages/woolfv1.shtml>. BBC, London. 29 April 1937.

—. Moments of Being. New York: Harcourt, 1976. 1985.—. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume III. Eds. Anne Oliver Bell and Andrew McNeillie. New York: Har-

court, 1980.—. Th ree Guineas. New York: Harcourt, 1938.—. Th e Waves. New York: Harcourt, 1931.

CROWDING CLARISSA’S GARDEN

by Erin Kay Penner

Clarissa’s “plunge” into London on the fi rst page of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) off ers a rallying point for critics intent on establishing Woolf as a writer of the modern city, the subject of last year’s conference. “I love walking in London,” Clarissa says

in the opening pages; “Really it’s better than walking in the country” (MD 6). But Clar-issa’s opening “plunge,” of course, echoes an earlier “plunge” through the French windows “at Bourton into the open air” when she was eighteen (3). By allowing the image of that childhood garden to dominate the opening pages of her novel, Woolf shows readers the real contours of the walks that take place in Mrs. Dalloway. Th e choice of London walks over country ones is a red herring; for Clarissa, walking is simply inextricable from memo-ries of country life. Although Morris Beja off ered a fantastic sketch of “Th e London of Mrs. Dalloway” in the Spring 1977 Virginia Woolf Miscellany, London is not the only, or even the primary, terrain of the novel. Beneath the cityscape lies a prior, natural landscape that resonates throughout Mrs. Dalloway. As the curious phrase “plunged at Bourton into the open air” makes clear, Bourton, for Clarissa, is the outdoors, and it is the grounds of her childhood home, which Clarissa remembers so vividly, that underlie the motorcars and shops of Mrs. Dalloway’s London.

But here we should pause to consider Clarissa’s hesitation. She does, of course, even-tually sally forth into London, but Woolf does not make that movement explicit in the novel, as she does in the earlier “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923). Whereas in the short story we watch as Clarissa “stepped out into the street” (CSF 152), in the novel the memories of Bourton replace that action. And in those memories Woolf draws us back to a moment in which Clarissa paused on the edge of that natural space. As Deborah Guth observes in “‘What a Lark! What a Plunge!’: Fiction as Self-Evasion in Mrs. Dalloway,” “Woolf portrays Clarissa’s sense of plunging with such intensity that the reader, momen-tarily lost in the syntax of the phrase, almost overlooks the fact that immediately after this she is still standing at the window, looking and just looking” (25). Whereas Guth reads this as an example of Clarissa’s “incapacity to commit herself fully” (25), I would like to draw attention to the way that Clarissa’s hesitation links the step into nature with the step into her own drawing room in later sections of the book. For all her happiness about “London; this moment of June” (MD 4), the step into nature off ers as much a check as the step into society that has Clarissa “hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing room, an exquisite suspense” (30). Th ere is the same confrontation of society in the gardens as there is in the drawing room. Nature, as Woolf imagines it in Mrs. Dalloway and in the short stories she wrote just before and after the novel, is far from wild freedom. Instead, she uses the garden to check her readers’ inclinations to look to nature for escape.

It is in the vegetable garden at Bourton that Peter and Sally get together to “compare notes” about the dramas played out in the drawing room (73). And it is at the secluded fountain on the grounds that Peter asks Clarissa to meet him: “they stood with the foun-tain between them, the spout (it was broken) dribbling water incessantly. How sights fi x

79Crowding Clarissa’s Garden

themselves upon the mind! For example, the vivid green moss” (64). For Peter and for the other characters of the novel, the garden is a continuation of the social scene that takes place indoors, rather than an escape from it. One wonders whether Woolf wrote such scenes as a sly check to E. M. Forster’s enthusiasm for nature as a means of magic and es-cape. When Woolf, in that famous 1925 diary passage, says that she “invented [Clarissa’s] memories” to off set the “tinselly” aspects of Clarissa’s character (D3: 32), those memories came largely in the form of the Bourton garden and the conversations that occurred there. When Clarissa thinks of plunging into the outdoors at Bourton, her focus quickly shifts from the natural scene to Peter’s words. Her thoughts range between the French windows and the terrace, hunting up the place in which he spoke, fi nally abandoning the grounds for a vision of Peter himself. Th e interaction with nature is used largely to impress upon the reader and the characters alike the social world that crowds any garden scene.

Two of the most striking diff erences between “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” and the novel that followed are the increase in links between Clarissa Dalloway and the other Londoners walking the street and the blossoming of the Bourton memories that play such a major role in the novel. In the short story, the narrator makes a clear distinction between Clarissa and the others walking down the street, whose stories are alluded to only briefl y and darkly: “No doubt they were not all bound on errands of happiness. Th ere is much more to be said about us than that we walk the streets of Westminster.…Only for Mrs Dalloway the moment was complete” (CSF 152). It is, ironically enough, Clarissa’s happy childhood that seems to separate her from the others:

Only for Mrs Dalloway the moment was complete; for Mrs Dalloway June was fresh. A happy childhood…fl owers at evening, smoke rising…there is nothing to take the place of childhood. A leaf of mint brings it back: or a cup with a blue ring. Poor little wretches, she sighed, and pressed forward. (152)

Clarissa’s ability to draw on a happy childhood is precisely what cuts her off from the oth-ers in the street in the short story.

Woolf maintains the sharp distinction between Clarissa and the other characters through the fi nal moments of “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” never granting Clarissa the kind of sym-pathy visible in Mrs. Dalloway. Whereas, in the novel, the backfi ring of a car outside startles Clarissa and enables the narrator to shift attention to other startled bystanders, her reaction in the short story is quite diff erent: “Th ere was a violent explosion in the street outside. Th e shop-women cowered behind the counters. But Clarissa, sitting very upright, smiled at the other lady. ‘Miss Anstruther!’ she exclaimed,” prompted by the shock to remember the name of the other customer in the shop (159). Th e story thus ends with Clarissa still in full possession of herself and the narrative, an exemplar of the English unfl appability she so admires.

What I fi nd interesting is that the novel probes more deeply into Clarissa’s memories, revealing that not all garden experiences were happy ones for her. With the novel’s more nuanced picture of Clarissa’s childhood we see an increase in her sympathy for others, a change echoed by a great deal of narrative movement between her mind and those of the “poor wretches” Clarissa observes. Only by reworking the garden of privilege, so that it is not a barrier between characters, can the garden emerge as a means of deepening the reader’s access to the character, and her access to others.


Th ese plunges into the garden occur only in memory in Mrs. Dalloway, but in the short stories that followed the novel Woolf uses Clarissa’s garden as a complement to the drawing-room party, bringing the garden into focus in the present day. In sharp contrast to Clarissa’s opening plunge into memory, a moment of hesitation that obscures her plunge into London, the move outside is overdetermined in the story “A Summing Up” (1944):

Since it had grown hot and crowded indoors, since there could be no danger on a night like this of damp, since the Chinese lanterns seemed hung like red and green fruit in the depths of an enchanted forest, Mr Bertram Pritchard led Mrs Latham into the garden. (CSF 208)

Th e characters are somewhere between being pushed out of the crowded room and being lured by the fruits of the “enchanted forest.” Such magic-making is given a very diff erent cast in Mrs. Dalloway, when Mrs. Hilbery, “looking for the door,” stops to lecture Sally and Peter Walsh on the beauties of Clarissa’s garden:

did they know, she asked, that they were surrounded by an enchanted garden? Lights and trees and wonderful gleaming lakes and the sky. Just a few fairy lamps, Clarissa Dalloway had said, in the back garden! But she was a magician! It was a park. (MD 191)

Th e absurdity of Mrs. Hilbery is set up from the beginning, when she fails to fi nd the exit, and it only increases as she transforms Clarissa’s back garden into the park of a country estate. Mrs. Hilbery’s tribute is of another time, perhaps more suited to Clarissa’s child-hood country home than the Dalloways’ walled city garden. In failing to register the shift, Mrs. Hilbery displays her inability to adjust her eyes to the limits of the garden in the modern, bustling world in which Woolf and her readers now live. Th e magic attached to traditional English gardens is something Woolf confronts head-on; off ering magic in the voice of Mrs. Hilbery dispels it quite eff ectively.

Once in the garden in “A Summing Up,” Sasha Latham acknowledges that “the beau-ty, country born and bred as she was, thrilled her because of the contrast presumably; there the smell of hay in the air and behind her the rooms full of people” (CSF 209). So many of the characters in the short stories clustered around Mrs. Dalloway highlight their country childhood: Mrs. Vallance, of “Th e Ancestors” (1973), thinks wistfully of the gar-den of her Scottish home, “which now appeared to her the place where she had spent her whole childhood” (183); Mr. Serle, of “Together and Apart” (1944), softens visibly under the infl uence of the moonlit sky and the mention of his ancestral home in Canterbury. We might think here of the moment near the end of Mrs. Dalloway in which Clarissa, too, thinks reproachfully, “She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly ad-mirable. She had wanted success. Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton” (185). For a party of city-dwellers, the stories and the novel speak just as strongly to the country, which is for many of these fi gures the place of childhood, of ancestors, of the dead, and of their lost potential. It is a rather Edenic im-age, not because the garden was perfect, but because it is a reminder of their fall from it.

Unlike the other characters who think longingly of the country life, Clarissa is thwarted in her attempts to romanticize it:


Many a time had she gone, at Bourton when they were all talking, to look at the sky.…It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this country sky, this sky above Westminster. She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but how surprising!—in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it was—ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. (MD 185-6)

She, like Sasha Latham, and like so many of the characters in the short stories Woolf wrote about Clarissa’s party, claims the sky, the “country” sky, as her own, as her escape from city and society. And yet here when she goes to claim it she is forced to see London, to see something other than an escape from her current situation. Whereas looking at the moon helps to bring together Miss Anning and Mr. Serle in the short story “Together and Apart,” Clarissa is dismayed to fi nd that she shares this glance outside with someone else. Instead of seeing the moon, as she says, “between people’s shoulders at dinner,” she is forced to look straight at the people. And her surprise is amplifi ed when the sky is not as she had thought it would be. Th e sky refuses to hold for her that “something of her own” and instead confronts her with newness. Although critics, perhaps most meticulously Deborah Guth, have argued that Clarissa weaves Septimus Smith’s death into her own life’s narrative, nature here refuses to off er Clarissa more material for her story. Th e night-time sky is neither nostalgic nor country, and the old woman opposite prevents Clarissa from fi nding in the sky an escape from the social pressures of her party.

Although the natural world plays a surprising variety of roles in the stories of Clar-issa’s party, it is not until “A Summing Up” that Woolf confronts directly public expecta-tions of gardens as a space of rejuvenation and refl ection. Unlike the other Woolf stories, in which the calm spaces of the country are used to criticize the “human beings packed on top of each other in little boxes” in the city (CSF 182), Sasha here uses the country to, at least at fi rst, revel in the developments of civilization:

Where there were osier beds and coracles paddling through a swamp, there is this; and she thought of the dry thick well built house, stored with valuables, humming with people coming close to each other, going away from each other, exchanging their views, stimulating each other. (209)

But when she looks over the garden wall, seeing London “vast inattentive impersonal,” the gilding of civilization is lost. Unable to decide “which view is the true one,” that of civiliza-tion’s triumph or civilization’s aloofness, Sasha gleans something of an answer in the tree in the garden: “the soul—for she was conscious of a movement in her of some creature beating its way about her and trying to escape which momentarily she called the soul—is by nature unmated, a widow bird; a bird perched aloof on that tree” (210).

Sasha escapes through chains of metaphor, the soul to bird that, when startled by a shriek in the street, becomes “remote as a crow” (211). She shows a refusal to engage the dichotomies she has set up: nature or civilization, triumph or indiff erence. What is most signifi cant is not whether nature or civilization wins. We are all familiar with Woolf ’s rather complex relationship with “civilization” as it was discussed in Bloomsbury circles, par-


ticularly by Clive Bell,1 and with her ambiguous regard for Clarissa Dalloway, for whom, she confessed to Lytton Strachey, “some distaste…persisted” (D3: 32). By ducking the question Woolf ’s character alters the terms of the story that has unfolded. Stepping into the garden, she seems to note the contrast between city and country out of some sort of obligation; Sasha observes that she is awed by the beauty of the garden, but then edits that it “thrilled her because of the contrast presumably” (209). Th at “presumably” sets us up for the story of civilization she spins shortly thereafter, a clean thick house replacing the unformed swamps. Just as she spins a story about her companion (“she was thinking of him in the abstract as a person whose existence was good, creating him as he spoke in a guise that was diff erent from what he said, and was certainly the true Bertram Pritchard, even though one could not prove it” (208)), so, too, she begins to spin the story of civilization’s triumph.

In telling such a story Sasha shows herself susceptible to the metaphors of her time and of literary tradition; when the gilt fades she does her best “to remember what she had read at school about the Isle of Th orney and men in coracles, oysters, and wild duck and mists” (210). But in evading—and here we might think of Rebecca Walkowitz’s work on the deliberate evasiveness of Woolf ’s cosmopolitan style—the decision between the gilded and the jaded views, she fi nally uses her storytelling tendencies to liberate herself from the situation she has created. Upon reentering the house with Bertram she has freed the soul that is now a widow bird from the constraints of her garden box.

As we watch Sasha peek over the wall, rewarded for her curiosity by a burst imagina-tive bubble, we may well think of the Eden story; the sight of the impersonal city causes her to lose her faith in the story of civilization. Going out into the garden does not off er her a reprieve of company—Bertram is unfailing in his attentions—or of failed interper-sonal encounters. In a rather telling fi nal line, Bertram decides that, of the couple with whom they’ve been conversing, he likes the husband, but not the wife, who is “very clever, no doubt” (211). Sasha is not the only guest of the Dalloway party who might describe herself as sitting somewhat outside the party: “she was condemned to be herself and could only in this silent enthusiastic way, sitting outside in a garden, applaud the society of hu-manity from which she was excluded” (209). Despite situating herself on the periphery of society, Sasha shows herself, in her reading of civilization in the garden, to be very much a part of that society, particularly its schoolroom perpetuation of the narratives of civiliza-tion and progress. Th e garden is not a reprieve from the crush of humanity, but yet anoth-er facet of it. In this story we see the imaginative labor required to move beyond the most common literary tropes and philosophies of civilization that crowd the English garden.

Th e garden, I suggest, is just as much a social space as Clarissa Dalloway’s drawing-room, one in which men and women must situate themselves within or without the dominant English themes and images. But here we will return to Clarissa’s hesitation on the opening page of Mrs. Dalloway. One thing that the garden can do is off er an image to compete with the drawing-room party. By entering the garden Sasha can make use of the images of nature not to escape civilization—if this were a Forster book we might expect half the party guests to disappear into the trees—but to set up parallel images of civiliza-tion alongside one another (the drawing room, the English garden) and fi nd room for her presence through the multiplicity of the images. In setting nature against civilization Woolf acknowledges the old rivalries, but uses that tension to release her from choosing between them.


Th e garden and the countryside in Mrs. Dalloway and the short stories that Woolf wrote just before and after it are not places of consolation. Septimus rejects Holmes’s attempts to shunt him off to a country home where he will be silenced; Clarissa ignores Sally’s invitation to visit her in the country. In some ways, Woolf might join Peter Walsh in preferring men to caulifl owers (3, 4, and 193), at least inasmuch as she acknowledges the diffi culty of seeing nature as an exception to society, as a place of unbesmirched loveli-ness and rejuvenation. Nature has been papered over by poetic longing such that those civilized images must be confronted when one does step out into the garden. Woolf shows us nature where the modern Briton is most likely to fi nd it: not in the sprawling parks of the country estates but in the London back garden, that odd square of greenery between Clarissa’s party and the towers of Westminster.

Notes

1. See Brian W. Shaff er, “Civilization in Bloomsbury: Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway and Bell’s Th eory of Civiliza-tion,” Journal of Modern Literature 19.1 (Summer 1994): 73-87.

Works Cited

Beja, Morris. “Th e London of Mrs. Dalloway.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 7 (Spring 1977): 4.Guth, Deborah. “‘What a Lark! What a Plunge!’: Fiction as Self-Evasion in Mrs. Dalloway.” Modern Language

Review 84.1 (1989): 18-25. Shaff er, Brian W. “Civilization in Bloomsbury: Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway and Bell’s Th eory of Civilization.” Journal

of Modern Literature 19.1 (Summer 1994): 73-87. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press,

2006. Woolf, Virginia. Th e Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. Orlando: Harvest, 1989.———. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. San Diego: Harcourt, 1977-1984.———. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harvest, 1953.

THE FLESH OF CITIZENSHIP: RED FLOWERS GREW

by Rachel Zlatkin

I

He lay very high, on the back of the world. Th e earth thrilled beneath him. Red fl ow-ers grew through his fl esh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head. (Mrs. Dalloway 68)

The Regent’s Park represents an eff ort to naturalize a princely national order that in Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) resounds in the regular ringing of Big Ben. Originally conceived as a park closed to the common public with two rings of ornate homes

for the stately, pedestrians did not have access until 1835, and then for just two days a week. Th us, the original conception of the park rests on the exclusion of the common public by an encircled and celebrated state. Woolf ’s Flush learns “that there is no equality among dogs: there are high dogs and low dogs” over a summer in Th e Regent’s Park.1 Likewise, the characters of Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway walk their ordered daily routines with the clock tolling their hours: “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable” (4). Th e risk is a modern mechanized (or habitual) movement according to a centralized state that compartmentalizes time and space for its class-stratifi ed citizens. Of course, in Mrs. Dalloway the hour, the past, is revocable: it is remembered, revised, and relived for Septimus Smith and Mrs. Dalloway, most especially. Nevertheless, the characters submit to a kind of containment, startled out of it from time to time by the backfi ring automobile or the smoking plane. Inventions, nor-mally taken as a sign of progress and futurity, misfi re the past into the present. Th is apparent need to shock a citizen into an even temporary remembrance of the war and its eff ects fuels Woolf ’s critique of a post-war England. At the heart of this critique is Septimus Smith—a man who can no longer contain the uncontainable, and whose boundaries between self and object, body and mind, are anything but stable.

In Septimus Smith’s fi rst scene in Th e Regent’s Park, the leaves “beckoned” him; they’re “alive” (22). He feels “the leaves being connected by millions of fi bres with his own body” (22). He hears “the sparrows fl uttering, rising, and falling” (22). He sees that their “jagged fountains were part of the pattern,” that “[s]ounds made harmonies with premeditation” and that “the spaces between them were as signifi cant as the sounds” themselves (22). He feels his connectedness to nature quite tangibly—in “millions of fi bres”—an experience just as acute as Evans’ traumatic returns. Th ose fi bers provide Septimus a means to signifi cation that the rhetoric of a post-war England does not. Timo Maran, an eco-semiotician, notes that humans, both biological and cultural beings, stand in the unique position of translating between the two realms (463). Septimus Smith’s post war condition makes him hypersensi-tive to such a position, fully capable of hearing the signifi cance in “the spaces between” (MD 22). My argument requires that a distinction be made between Septimus Smith’s intermedi-ary position and his psychological condition, for I argue he is in a position of health.

Th is paper will explore the relationship between Septimus and his environment. D.W. Winnicott’s object relations theories provide the basis for my understanding of hu-

85THE FLESH OF CITIZENSHIP

man relations, and I rely on eco-critical thoughts to extend that concept of reciprocal exchange between human subjects to include the natural environment. In the second portion of the paper, I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s more specifi c conception of the fl esh as it pertains to Septimus Smith’s feeling of embedded-ness in Th e Regent’s Park. While his character makes an important argument against the treatment of returning soldiers that falls along class lines, his character also argues for a particularly personal experience of natural phenomena, one that provides a model for all subject-subject relations. Th ese two arguments, for the veteran and for the natural environment, are not exclusive in Mrs. Dalloway. Rather the two are inextricably bound in the character of Septimus Smith: a man who leaves his small town to pursue his poetic ideals in a London that places him in a bank, a man who returns from the fi rst machine war with an invisible wound, a man who fi nds a level of acceptance in the trees of Th e Regent’s Park that is unmatched by his human counterparts.

When Woolf places Septimus Smith in Th e Regent’s Park for a meeting with Evans, she creates a dialogic relation between the structured order of the park and the disrup-tive unruliness of Septimus Smith’s psyche. Th e national park’s very design argues for a controlled containment unheeded by Septimus’s condition. Further, Woolf makes the pointed contrast between the garden setting and an unruly experience of selfhood just as Peter Walsh romanticizes the scene between Septimus and Rezia in the park. In so doing she also calls into question what is meant by British post-war citizenship and challenges her readers to read against London’s clock.

On the one hand, she has political concerns. Th e novel’s repeated mention of the honor paid at the site of the unknown soldier, for example, underlines the inadequate help such unknowns as Septimus receive. While the tomb does honor the dead, it also veils the after-shocks still being felt in 1923 England not just by those returned, such as Septimus Smith, but by the Lady Boxboroughs and Mrs. Foxcrofts who lost their sons. Such issues of con-tainment permit Peter Walsh’s romanticization of the scene at Regent’s, as well as Clarissa Dalloway’s romanticization of Septimus Smith’s suicide. Th e tomb serves as just one form of containment, the identity of the dead “unknown” permanently obfuscated. Parallel to Septi-mus Smith’s individual abandonment and the unknown soldier’s monumentalized erasure is the larger English abandonment of the Armenian people after the war, despite the renewal of the genocide, a decision that makes ghostly reappearances throughout the novel and invades Mrs. Dalloway’s party alongside Septimus Smith’s suicide.

On the other hand, Woolf ’s ecological concerns as bound to Septimus Smith normal-ize his psychological crises. He experiences no boundary between self and other, present and past, because there is no boundary between his fl esh and the fl esh of the world. As eco-critic Louise Westling has observed, “Th ere is no break (French rupture) from the rest of the living community, as the very development of the modern individual from embryo to adult makes clear, especially in the earliest stages of the fetus. And synchronically, we breathe and move within it, transferring air and food, exchanging energies, atoms, mol-ecules” (35). Hence, the silencing of Septimus Smith’s voice is a cultural repression in which the other characters participate, for themselves as much as by the state. Peter Walsh unwittingly plays the living Evans to Septimus’s dead; Walsh’s knowledge of this fact is hardly necessary, but it serves as a reminder that in our turn we are all subject to our envi-ronment and might be better people if we participated in it more consciously. In the end,

86 VIRGINIA WOOL AND THE NATURAL WORLD

even Clarissa is glad for Septimus’s death, glad he was able to commit to a leap, because it helps her to feel her own leap into the London streets she loves and to feel the success of her party. She feels, at her party, the unifying spirit of a life and many lives artfully intertwined, even timed, but she is hardly aware of the misinformation and politics that take place there. In contrast to Mrs. Dalloway’s experience of oneness, Septimus Smith’s experience in Th e Regent’s Park argues for a dialectical relationship between humans and the natural environment.

Septimus Smith’s heightened physical sensitivity charges his perception of the world and energizes his interactions with it and on its behalf. Not long after he feels himself “connected by millions of fi bres” to the leaves, Evans appears “behind the railing” (25) and Rezia dutifully interrupts. Both the park railing and Rezia’s words of caution signify for Septimus a lack of communion, a separation, in fact, from Evans, that is instigated by the people around him. In response to these intrusions he retreats under a tree, “the traffi c humm[ing]” (25) on one side, the zoo animals “barking, howling” on the other (25). Th e barks and howls of the zoo animals serve as a reminder that nature is never fully caged. Lions and tigers would maul given the chance; their sounds communicate a warlike reality that London ignores alongside Septimus’s vision of Evans. Th e trees, however, repeatedly provide Septimus a haven, and Septimus responds in kind, with a desire to speak to the Prime Minister about not cutting them down. Likewise, Septimus will respond to his friend Evans on his next appearance.

II

What there is is a whole architecture, a whole complex of phenomena ‘in tiers,’ a whole series of ‘levels of being,’ which diff erentiated by the coiling up of the visible wherein it is redoubled and inscribed. Fact and essence can no longer be distinguished. (Merleau-Ponty 114)

Th e cultural ecologist David Abram posits that “Th e sensing body is not a programmed machine, but an active and open form, continually improvising its relation to things and to the world” (49). His description of the improvisational sensing body in relation to others counters the modernist view of body as machine or subject to habit and identifi es the un-derbelly of Mrs. Dalloway’s Big Ben. Woolf depicts this body when she describes the fi bers connecting Septimus’s body with the leaves of trees. In so doing, she identifi es the sensing body with the body of a young poet in search of creative exchange. In other words, Septi-mus Smith’s openness to sensation and exchange is not merely symptomatic of his apparent shell shock but an extension of his younger idealistic self who apparently identifi es the artist with the scapegoat, a fi gure “who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun… suff ering forever” (MD 25).

Woolf identifi es the sensing body, also, with the risk of psychic instability. Th ere is such a thing as too much sensation and too much sensitivity. Th e fi bres that once connect-ed Septimus and the world eventually radiate with the symptoms of Woolf ’s migraines. Th e fi rst expense is the fl esh, the very organ where touch and feeling are coexistent: “the fl esh was melted off the world. His body was macerated until only the nerve fi bres were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock” (68). Woolf imagines Septimus Smith’s body


from a snowy coverlet to a veil of nerve fi bres. Th ese fi bres radiate between the rock his body rests upon and the world crushing it. Septimus does nothing but feel the sounds of his environment, their vibrations and waves consuming him to a felt lack of distinction.

When contemplating the fl esh as a sensory organ and the consciousness it commu-nicates, it is diffi cult to ignore Merleau-Ponty’s work. When Merleau-Ponty notes that his hand “is felt from within” and is “also accessible from without, itself tangible” (133), he is, also, making an argument for a dual human consciousness, a consciousness capable of conceiving of the self both as object and subject of a relationship, and one capable of conceiving of others as both subjects and objects of that relationship as well. However, his sense of the fl esh can appear quite unstable: “I feel at the surface of my visible being that my volubility dies away, that I become fl esh, and that at the extremity of this inertia that was me there is something else, or rather an other who is not a thing” (61). His defi ni-tion of the fl esh as “the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body” (146) is a conception of an active force, driven by an inertia that continually moves outward toward touch and signifi cation, even as it remains thought-fully gazing from behind. Th is consciousness is one that must continually re-conceive its distinction between similitude and diff erence, permitting the reciprocity for which eco-criticism and object relations call. Woolf, also, plays with this distinction in Septimus Smith’s second scene with Evans.

Th e sounds surrounding Septimus simulate combat experience: “shocks of sound … rose in smooth columns,” the “red fl owers grew through his fl esh” (68). Th e veil of fi bers is shockingly penetrable, all too sensitive to vibration, movement, and physical sensation. True, for Septimus, there is no distinction between feeling, seeing, hearing, and meaning. However, his acute sensitivity to sound and vibration does not mean that the voices he hears are only fantastical. He hears “stiff leaves rustl[ing] by his head” (68) and “the voices of birds” (69). He is feelingly enmeshed in his world with no separation between him and it because he coils over it so thinly. Th is would be the danger of the outside of Merleau-Ponty’s description: Septimus Smith is this web of nerves; these nerves sense both realms without distinction. In a striking revision of soldier as Christ-like sacrifi ce, Septimus’s web of nerves are the fi bers feeling all the world.

Th e scene ends with Evans’s second appearance and a Woolfi an reversal, as Evans re-veals himself from behind a protective tree. In a telling revision of the past, Septimus calls out to Evans, “For God’s sake don’t come!” (70) Into this dangerous scene Peter Walsh walks, the crucially embodied signifi er. Peter Walsh embodies a new past, Evans’s life rather than his death, for “no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not changed” (70). His grey suit is clean. Septimus sees as sensitively as he hears. His environment provides him his friend still living. Against his expectation of Evans dead, Septimus receives a moving, touching, sounding person, and feels his sacrifi ce for his friend. Finally, he is able to save the man whose death he could not feel, to change the experience of the original trauma, to call out as before he could not, to play the redeemer to the one person who mattered.

Th e acceptance Septimus feels in Th e Regent’s Park provides a crucial setting for this recovery. Th e felt separation from Rezia, who no longer wears her wedding ring, and his doctor, who observes that his feelings are out of “proportion” (96), marks a space separate from the state and the national narrative surrounding shell shock. Th e belief that survivors suff ering such symptoms were cowards, a national problem to be contained in homes


provided for their “rest, rest, rest” (96), is not so diff erent from the marked containment of the unknown soldier, “rest in peace.” Th e trees in Th e Regent’s Park, an example of the contained uncontainable, guard the transitional space Septimus needs in order to revise his own history and allow for a signifi cant engagement with his past.

Peter Walsh is, of course, dead to the signifi cance of this embodiment; twice the narrator refers to him as “the dead man in the grey suit” (71). Walsh is enamored of this new England, even knowing his “susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing” (71): “Never had he seen London look so enchanting—the softness of the distances; the richness; the greenness; the civilisation, after India, he thought, strolling across the grass. […] …there was design, art, everywhere; a change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place” (71). Leaving the park, Walsh gives a battered old woman a coin and steps into his taxi. For Walsh, this woman is signifi cantly situated at the margins. She sings a song that “issued from so rude a mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root fi bres and tangled grasses, still the old bubbling burbling song, soaking through the knot-ted roots of infi nite ages, and skeletons and treasure, streamed away in rivulets over the pavement … fertilising, leaving a damp stain” (81). For Septimus, the voice that moves from the deep earth is the voice he hears in the park, a primeval voice that has seen mil-lions of Septimus Smiths and Leonard Basts “swallowed up” by the city they inhabit. It is the voice that resuscitates Septimus’s message, a message that he writes on slips of paper in the park or with Rezia, bound up, hidden at home—the same primordial truths that, in contrast, he cannot remember within the confi nes of Dr. Bradshaw’s offi ce: “Men must not cut down trees. Th ere is a God. …Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known” (24). And “For God’s sake don’t come!”

Peter Walsh, for all his ignorance of Septimus’s condition, and despite his assump-tions as to the Warren-Smith love aff air, furnishes Septimus with a moment, permits him, however briefl y, to see Evans in the fl esh and living, to feel the goodness he wanted to do and to do it, to enact his protective protestation, to become the steadfast tree. None of Walsh’s quizzical awe of London’s changes over 1918-1923 changes this fact. Th e next time Septimus calls on Evans, Evans does not come, as if Septimus has successfully proven to himself, consciously or unconsciously, that he is not the coward or the disproportionate his doctors believe him to be.

Th e signifi cance of Peter Walsh’s walk toward Septimus does not belong to him, nor does it belong to Septimus. Th e fi bers connecting Septimus to the leaves reach from a “hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root fi bres and tangled grasses … the old bubbling burbling song, soaking through the knotted roots of infi nite ages.” Peter and Septimus both participate in a communication born of their surroundings, move as the shape of the park guides their step. Th at supportive environment provides Septimus a means toward healing that enables his last moment with Rezia, the everyday banter of a married couple while she creates a new hat. Winnicott would surely note that this cre-ative environment consists of their shared laughter and play. Th is experience of laughing acceptance hearkens back to the environment Septimus fi rst discovered in Th e Regent’s Park: “…he saw Regent’s Park before him. Long streamers of sunlight fawned at his feet. Th e trees waved, brandished. We welcome, the world seemed to say; we accept; we create” (69). If damaged by the war, Septimus Smith has yet managed to (re)discover the poet he might have just as easily left in his small town before his move to London.


Why associate such a fi gure with Th e Regent’s Park, with the structured wild? Eco-criticism requires a sensitivity to “other voices that we have forgotten to hear, voices that arise in what we may have formerly assumed to be silences” (Merleau-Ponty 126). As Virginia Woolf reminds us through Septimus’s scenes in Regent’s Park, the land is not mute, and the wilderness is not contained. Th is is a view Woolf continued to explore, as evidenced in Between the Acts: the planes still fl y, without the curious skywriting; the cows, domesticated as they may be, step in and moo the ending of LaTrobe’s play when the last words are blown away. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf identifi es a silenced Septimus with a silenced wilderness; his speech and his writing are associated with “a lack of pro-portion,” but it is shell shock that alerts him to those voices nationalistic culture works to regulate. His war experience sensitizes him to the natural phenomena that pervade a political park; the incapacity of those around him to hear those voices, or their capacity to hear them only by the count of Big Ben, has consequences for Septimus, for what it means to be human, and for an expression of citizenship. In the words of David Abram:

Our bodies have found themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold tex-tures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth—our eyes have evolved in the subtle interactions with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. (22)

If the trees in Th e Regent’s Park protect Septimus, guard him in the midst of an over-whelming attack of feeling that permits those at the party not to feel, then Septimus is also Virginia Woolf ’s argument for a sensitivity to all animate life, to the meaning even in its “silence,” and for a more conscious citizenship based on such inclusion.

Notes

1. A special thanks to Elisa Sparks for reminding me of this passage.

Works Cited

Abram, David. Th e Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Th an-Human World. New York: Pantheon, 1996.

Gersdorf, Catrin, and Sylvia Mayer, eds. Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. New York: Rodopi, 2006

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Th e Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Maran, Timo. “Where do your borders lie? Refl ection on the Semiotical Ethics of Nature.” Gersdorf and Mayer 455-476.

Westling, Louise. “Literature, Environment, and the Question of the Posthuman.” Gersdorf and Mayer 25-47Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 1981.

THE BESIEGED GARDEN: NATURE IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MRS. DALLOWAY AND WILLA CATHER’S ONE OF OURS

by Jane Lilienfeld

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1931) and Willa Cather’s One of Ours critique the visual propaganda of World War 1 through metaphoric representations of nature. Although the writers were not personally acquainted, Virginia Woolf contextualized Cather’s work

in “American Fiction,” while Cather judged A Room of One’s Own (1929) to be an accurate account of the challenges faced by some women writers (Woodress 423). Additionally, the ar-gument of Cather’s essay “Th e Novel Demeuble,” is clearly indebted to Woolf’s insistence in “Modern Fiction”1 that novelists should only sparingly represent material reality (O’Brien 155). Further, each novelist had researched conditions at the French front, and each disapproved of the distortions on which visual and verbal government wartime propaganda depended.2

Willa Cather has long been branded with the infamous image of the plow that broke the plains encircled by the huge red ball of the setting sun from My Antonia (254).3 De-nounced as “scenic nationalis[m],” mocked as praise of American frontier expansionism (Cooperman, qtd. in Trout 4), Cather’s work is currently undergoing reappraisal. Some critics now champion Cather as an eco-feminist (Ryder “A Cry” 75-6). Most current crit-ics argue that Woolf did not reduce the land to the body of the female (Bagley, Zeiss), al-though Cather critics reluctantly acknowledge her reductive practices about “the feminine landscape” (Stout 82-3, O’Brien 409-11). However, both Cather and Woolf were fi erce preservationists of both rural and natural landscapes (Hussey “I’d,” Ryder, “A Cry” 77-9).

Twice as long as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. It earned gratitude from numerous war survivors and their families (Lewis 122-3, Harris 32-3), along with male denunciations such as Hemingway’s that the novel desecrated their depictions of the manly art of war (North 172-4, 178-9). One of Ours remains controversial. Some read its narrative voice as praise of American war-fervor, while others champion the novel’s under-mining of American militarism (Trout, Memorial 191). In fact, argues Steven Trout, Cather’s novel juxtaposes “clashing discourses,” narrated through several “inconsistent points of view,” (Memorial 7) in order to create “a many-faceted Modernist texture” (Memorial 146). Criti-cal discourse about Woolf ’s narrative methods is equally contentious.4 Not surprisingly, the cacophony of interwoven voices and competing, embedded interpreters within Mrs. Dalloway resembles the layered, often “confl icted” (Memorial 83) narrative voices of One of Ours.

Septimus Warren Smith is “in some ways” almost “a British version of Claude Wheel-er, [the protagonist of One of Ours]” claimed Josephine O’Brien Schaff er (143). Recent critics acknowledge that the homosexuality of each man was likely explored in their close conjunction with other men during battlefi eld conditions (Briggs 152, Cramer, Herring). Too, both men are alienated products of rural backgrounds, and both uncritically accept the wartime propaganda that motivates them to join the military (OOO 124-8, MD 93).

Septimus had been drawn by vague dreams of literary fame to London from Stroud in Glouscestershire (MD 91). At the confl uence of fi ve rivers, set amidst fl ourishing fi elds and farmlands, Stroud has prospered since Medieval times as a market town, suggesting that

91The Besieged Garden

Septimus’s family might at one time have labored both as farmers and skilled craftspeople (“Stroud”). Claude had grown up on a sprawling Nebraska farm, which he had seen as a vast monetary enterprise, producing not grain but dollar signs.5 Indeed, once war is declared, Claude’s father plans to profi teer by turning all their crops to wheat because its price is sure to rise (OOO 123). After his failed marriage, Claude transforms his father’s lush “timber claim” into what readers would now call a nature preserve, refashioning it into a well-wa-tered-hollow for birds, small mammals and himself (OOO 136, 157, Ryder, “A Cry” 77-8).

As Paul Fussell points out in Th e Great War and Modern Memory, British troops, even those who could not read,6 had been from their earliest years forced to hear pastoral im-agery intoned from hundreds of Anglican pulpits, a sonorous vegetation-laden-language from Th e King James Bible. Hundreds of poems by would-be and later-established poets, and letters home from countless British soldiers are testament to the fact that the lan-guage of what Fussell terms “British ruralism,” (233) abounds in such verbal war records. Th ese accurately depict the lush French countryside with its larks and nightingales, sud-den streams, poppies, roses, fl owering ground cover and hedgerows (Fussell 114-125, 130, 135-45, 153-4). Pastoral imagery had embedded itself in hundreds of years of British con-sciousness, so that the soldiers verbalized their experiences through their vision of an arca-dian Britain projected onto the similar French landscape.7 Th is is certainly what motivated Septimus, who “went to France to save [an] England, which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Poole in a green dress walking in a square” (MD 93).

Indeed, numerous American and British posters designed as war propaganda enunciated imagery of a “mother land” for which lives must be sacrifi ced. Critics have demonstrated Cather’s and Woolf’s visual acuity (Hankins, Humm) and sophisticated awareness of such verbal and visual war propaganda (Poole 83, Levenbach, 92-6). British recruiting posters like “A Bit of England,” “Your Country’s Call,” “Queen Mary’s Army: Th e Girl Behind the Man Behind the Gun,” even “ Women of Britain say ‘Go!’” all incorporate background details of country towns, rolling hills, winding country lanes, stucco and white country cottages surrounded by kitchen and fl ower gardens laden with fruit and fl owers, notably hollyhocks, box hedge, tulips and rich greenery (“Propaganda Posters: UK”). Similar patriotic nostalgia embedded in images of rural and farming imagery pervaded American visual propaganda. Cather echoed this imagery within Claude’s idealized perceptions of France (Trout, Memorial 45, 49, Nelson, Harris 35-44).8

Mrs. Dalloway subtly recalls this visual propaganda in its major characters’ memories, which are rooted in their deep love of the land. In Peter’s memory, Sally Seton rambles through “a walled-in” garden awash in roses (MD 81), and in his imagination, Th e Soli-tary Traveler ambles through “forest lanes,” into “woods” overgrown with “ferns” (MD 60). Imagining himself on his property in Norfolk, Richard sees that “a soft warm wind blew back the petals; confused the waters; ruffl ed the fl owering grasses. Haymakers [. . .] parted curtains of green blades; moved trembling globes of cow parsley [. . .]” (MD 122). Like her father, Elizabeth Dalloway is happiest on their Norfolk farm and is predictably associated by her suitors with very early Spring, as “a hyacinth sheathed in glossy green” (MD 133). Lady Bruton remembers her childhood adventures amidst “fi elds of clover” [. . .] “of dahlias, [. . .] hollyhocks, the pampas grass” in Devonshire (MD 121). Aunt Parry thinks back to her girl-hood during the Raj, when she was “carried by coolies” to seek “orchids” amidst the Indian hills (MD 194-5).9 Such memories are exactly the material played upon by propaganda.


Th is sweet nature of rural memory is betrayed in Mrs. Dalloway and One of Ours within disrupted gardens. Septimus experiences the beauty of a London park transformed into the Ely-sian fi elds, where the dead Evans wanders among “trees in the meadow of life beyond a river [. . .],” (MD 25). Peter’s proposal to the young Clarissa goes awry in a ruined garden, where a broken water-spout ticks like a time bomb (MD 68-9). Th e back garden where Septimus in war-time Italy seeks refuge with Rezia and her sister is mostly cement, with “fl owers” set in root-crushing “tubs” (MD 93). Th e most famous of the novel’s besmirched gardens, that of Septimus’s boss, Mr. Brewer, was presumably destroyed by aerial bombardment (War in the Air), which “ploughed a hole in the geranium beds” and “smashed a plaster cast of Ceres,” indicating the destruction of the Greek nature goddess and her cycles of renewal (MD 92). Th e holograph of what became Mrs. Dalloway juxtaposes these gardens with the “dark soil” of the French front, in which “no gardener turns with his trowel” (Wussow 106). Th us fl ower-beds become trenches, in which Septimus had “fl owered,” (MD 91-93), hollows that Richard Dalloway knows are lightly-covered graves into which thousands of nameless bodies had been “shovelled together” (MD 124-5).

Th at which Woolf metaphorically depicts, Cather enunciates. Just like Septimus, Claude goes to war to save a pastoral ideal (OOO 157). Earlier in his life, Claude’s passion for Joan of Arc (OOO 50, 128) encouraged him to project onto France the rural perfection lost to monetary America. For Claude, the American Expeditionary Forces’ march northeast from Arras to the Argonne Forest takes them, as he says to himself, “deeper and deeper into Flowery France” (OOO 252). Claude experiences the front as a defamiliarized Nebraska landscape, its cultivated fi elds awash in poppies, blooming clover and blue cornfl owers (OOO 252-3, see also Nelson). However, even Claude can-not deny that these fi elds are pitted with small cemeteries, fl eeing refuges and fl ooded trenches ensnarled in barbed wire, with burnt, gnarled trees suggesting the numerous dead (OOO 266-7).

Alternating with the savaged countryside, are several hidden gardens still blooming amidst ruined villages. Within each garden looms the war. In the midst of the Joubert family’s rebuilt arbor, (OOO 262) their adopted Belgian orphan is traumatized into a silence rent only by her terrifi ed nightly screams (OOO 264). Further on, the remnants of a town that had changed hands repeatedly between the French and German forces enclose a still-vibrant garden dense with roses, fl owering pear trees, yew trees and thick hedges (OOO 283-4). Yet even here death strikes, for a “few nights before” Claude’s arrival (OOO 282), a soldier had been drowned in close proximity to this garden in a stagnant pool gouged by bombardment (OOO 282).

Th e suggested fertility of the furrows of Boar’s Head trench—“almost a wallow”--where Claude’s depleted unit holds the line, close round Claude in what to him is his heroic death (OOO 334-5). Claude’s sacrifi cial charge up to the top of the trench to spare “his men” (334) re-minds one critic of suicide (Trout, Memorial 34, 55, 62). Claude’s mired body recalls his burrow-ing himself into the wetlands of the hidden “timber claim” (OOO 157, 334). Further, Claude’s muddy death suggests a connection to the years that Septimus spent entrenched at the front.

Dramatic irony shadows each novel’s dual depictions of nature, perfect in propa-ganda, savaged in battle. Woolf ’s and Cather’s novels transform the landscape of war into rigorous commentary on their protagonists’ experience.

Notes

1. In an essay that is barely laudatory of much American fi ction of the day (1925), Woolf faintly praises Cather’s work by comparing it not unfavorably with that of the British: “there are Americans who have all the accomplishments of culture without a trace of its excesses—witness Miss Willa Cather” (125). I would

93The Besieged Garden

like to thank Emily Kopley for pointing out this reference to me.2. Virginia Woolf depended on her familiarity with numerous sources, among them Roger Fry (Lilienfeld,

“Editing” 115-6) and Sigfried Sassoon (Showalter 192), with conditions on the French front. Willa Cather spent four years researching the war, familiarizing herself with the letters of her cousin G. P. Cather who had been killed in the war, veterans’ experience, news reports, visual depictions, and other extensive materials (Trout, Memorial 6, Ryder, “Green” 198).

3. “Th ere were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fi elds against the horizon, a great black fi gure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the fi eld. Th e sun was sinking just behind it. Magnifi ed across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. Th ere it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun” (Cather, My Antonia 245).

4. Who is telling the story? Is it an omniscient author or an implied author or disembodied voices? Is Woolf ’s narrative discourse polyphonic? Critics heatedly debate these and similar questions (Lilienfeld, Reading 186-9).

5. Claude mourns the once-lush orchards, now cut down because “it was less trouble” to “buy fruit in town” than to preserve the gnarled old trees (OOO 78).

6. Cather makes this point in the fi gure of Mahaily, the family’s live-in maid, who is illiterate and believes deeply in the most extreme of war-time anti-German propaganda (OOO 160). Th at Mahaily takes all photographs and pictorial propaganda as literal truth, seems less a commentary on her as on the distorting nature of pro-paganda. Mark Wollaegner’s recent book analyzes propaganda as intertwined within many diverse discourses during the Great War, while I limit my discussion here to American and British visual propaganda.

7. Th is paradise becomes what Fussell terms a “sordid pastoral” (166), increasingly deformed by the muni-tions of modern industrial warfare (Fussell 115).

8. Robert Nelson explores Willa Cather’s complex passion for France, something of which she may have em-bedded—as a way to interrogate her younger self, perhaps—in Claude’s innocent transfer of her patriotism from America to France. Edith Lewis records Cather’s and her return to France after World War 1 to make sure that One of Ours depicted the country accurately, without sentimentality (119-121).

9. Rezia, once imagined by her husband as a “fl owering tree,” (MD 161) under sedation moments after Sep-timus’s death, sees herself racing through rural cornfi elds (MD 163).

Works Cited

Bagley, Melissa. “Nature and the Nation in Mrs. Dalloway.Woolf Studies Annual 14 (2008): 35-52.Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. Orlando, Fl: Harcout, 2005.Cather, Willa. One of Ours. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006. Cited as OOO.—. My Antonia. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1954.—. “Th e Novel Demeuble.” Not Under Forty. New York: Knopf, 1970. 43-51.Cramer, Timonthy R. “Claude’s Case: A Study of Homosexual Temperament in Willa Cather’s One of Ours.”

South Dakota Review 31.3 (1993): 147-60.Fussell, Paul. Th e Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.Hankins, Leslie. “Virginia Woolf ’s ‘Th e Cinema’: Sneak Previews of the Holograph Pre-Texts through Post-

Publication Revisions.” Woolf Studies Annual 15 135-175.Harris, Richard C. “Over Th ere from Over Here: Willa Cather, the Authorial Reader, and One of Ours.” Vio-

lence, the Arts, and Willa Cather. Eds. Joseph R. Urgo and Merrill M. Skaggs.Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. 31-48.Herring, Scott. “Catherian Friendship; or How Not to Do the History of Homosexuality.” Modern Fiction

Studies 52.1 (Spring 2006): 66-91.Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema.

New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003.Hussey, Mark. “’I’d make it penal, leaving litter’: Rural Preservation in Between the Acts.” Twentieth Annual

Virginia Woolf Conference. Georgetown College. Georgetown, KY. 4 June 2010.Levenback, Karen. Virginia Woolf and the Great War. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999.Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living, A Personal Record. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1953.


Lilienfeld, Jane. Reading Alcoholisms: Th eorizing Character and Narrative in Selected Novels of Th omas Hardy, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.

—. “’Success in Circuit Lies’: Editing the War in Mrs. Dalloway.” Woolf Studies Annual 15 (2009): 113-134.Nelson, Robert J. Willa Cather and France: In Search of the Lost Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.O’Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: Th e Emerging Voice. New York: Fawcett/Columbine, 1987.Poole, Roger. “’We All Put Up with You, Virginia’: Irreceivable Wisdom About War.” Virginia Woolf and War:

Fiction, Reality, Myth. Ed. Mark Hussey. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991. 79-100.Propaganda Posters-UK. 2009. Firstworldwar.com/a multimedia history of world war one. 1 May 2010.

<http:fi rstworldwar.com/posters/uk/htm/Ryder, Mary. “’As Green as Th eir Money’: Th e Doughboy Naifs in One of Ours. History, Memory, and War:

Cather Studies 6. Ed. Steven Trout. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 92-128.—. “Willa Cather as Nature Writer: A Cry in the Wilderness.” Such News of the Land: U.S. Women Nature

Writers. Eds. Th omas S. Edwards and Elizabeth A. De Wolfe. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001. 75-84.

North, Michael. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.Schaefer, Josephine O’Brien. “Th e Great War and ‘Th is Late Age of the World’s Experience’.” Hussey, War.

134-150.Showalter, Elaine. Th e Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. New York: Penguin, 1980.Stroud, Gloucestershire. 30 Dec 2009. Wikipedia. 24 May 2010. <http://http.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroud,_

Gloucestershire/Stout, Janis P. “Touching the Note and Passing On: Violence in Willa Cather’s Pictures of the West.” Urgo and

Skaggs 82-99.Trout, Steven. Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.War in the Air: Bombing Raids on Britain. 14 Dec 2005. Spartacus Educational Schoolnet. Jan 2006. <http://

www.sparticus.schoolnet.co.ukFWWairwar.htm/Wollaeger, Mark. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900-1945. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2006.Woolf, Virginia. “American Fiction.” Th e Moment and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

Inc., 1948. 113-127.—. “Modern Fiction.” Th e Common Reader: First Series. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1953. 150-158. —. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1997. Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press, 1989.Wussow, Helen, ed. “Th e Hours,” Th e British Museum Manuscript of Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway. New York:

Pace University Press, 1996.Zeiss, McKenzie L. “Th e Pastoral Legacy of the Garden: (Anti)Pastoral Images and National Identity in Virginia

Woolf and Vita Sackville-west.” Woolf in the Real World: Selected Papers from the Th irteenth International Virginia Woolf Conference. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2005. 100-4.

VIRGINIA WOOLF: NATURAL OLYMPIAN:SWIMMING AND DIVING AS METAPHORS FOR WRITING

by Rebecca McNeer

The most memorable photographs, for which Virginia Woolf so hated posing, show the writer at rest—cerebral, contemplative, wistful, and—indoors. Th is person would not have been at home in the natural world, they seem to say; moreover,

writing is a quiet pursuit, in which, perhaps, great thoughts are recollected in tranquility. In fact, in her personal writing, where Woolf frequently uses images of active, physical pursuits to describe the arduous act of writing, the opposite is true.

Sometimes, Woolf likens writing to steeple chasing: “I’ve taken my fences, as I say, & got some good gallops for my trouble” (D2: 258) or to mining for gold. Referring to what became Th e Waves, Woolf notes: “I may have found my mine this time, I think. I may get all my gold out. . . . And my vein of gold lies so deep, in such bent channels” (D2: 292). Of the same novel she later writes, “I’ve got to work with my pick at my seam,” excavating, or even drilling, when she feels she has “at last, bored down into my oil well, & can’t scribble fast enough to bring it all to the surface” (D3: 12). Th e frequency with which Woolf shows that what she is attempting requires her to go below the surface is remarkable. Woolf should be pictured in helmets, hard hats, or goggles and wetsuits, the latter especially, for within her diaries, no images describing her writing recur more often or are more signifi cant to her creative process than those associated with water, particularly swimming and diving.

Th roughout her writing career, Virginia Woolf used her diaries as a bridge to her pub-lished works. She reread them often: “It composes,” she said. “Why? I think [it] shows one a stretch, when one’s grubbing in an inch” (D5: 227). She writes that she hoped the diaries

would resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one fl ings a mass of odds & ends without looking them through. I should come back, after a year or two, & fi nd that the collection had sorted itself & refi ned itself & co-alesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to refl ect the light of our life, & yet steady, tranquil [,] composed with the aloof-ness of a work of art. (D1: 266)

She says she would be “curious to fi nd how I went for things put in haphazard, & found the signifi cance to lie where I never saw it at the time” (D1: 266). Th e signifi cance of water imagery—of the brain’s wetness, of swimming and diving—may well be a pattern of something fl ung into this most personal writing that Woolf “never saw . . . at the time.”

Yet the heart, the foundation of these watery references, the underwater spring of creativity that hydrated Woolf was the time spent at Talland House, near the town of St. Ives, in Cornwall, where the Stephen family spent summers from 1882 to 1894. Lyndall Gordon believes that “Woolf ’s imagination was shaped fi rst by a natural scene” (16), that Cornwall “gave Virginia, as the Lakes Wordsworth, a sense of emotional reality in nature that no experience in later life could surpass” (12).


On March 22, 1921, Woolf asks of herself in her diary, “Why am I so incredibly & incurably romantic about Cornwall? One’s past, I suppose . . . . Th e sound of the sea at night . . . old waves that have been breaking precisely so these last thousand years” (D2: 103). In Moments of Being (1976), Woolf enumerates memories of St. Ives down to “the click of the garden gate, the ants swarming on the step,” what she calls “an incongruous miscellaneous catalogue” of her memories, and likens them to “little corks that mark a sunken net” (116).

In Reading Virginia Woolf, Julia Briggs calls attention to Woolf ’s assignment of cre-ative prominence to St. Ives in Moments of Being, describing what Woolf famously terms “the most important of all my memories” (MOB 64):

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fi lls and fi lls and fi lls—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St. Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the fl oor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive. (MOB 64-5)

Th e rhythm of the waves Woolf describes above became associated in her mind with the rhythm of life—“I sometimes think humanity is a vast wave, undulating: the same, I mean . . .” (D3: 22) —and with the rhythm of writing, which she defi nes in a letter to Ethel Smyth: “All writing is nothing but putting words on the backs of rhythm. If they fall off the rhythm one’s done” (L4: 303). Th at this rhythm was for Woolf synonymous with the sea is made clear in the following reference Woolf makes to her progress in writing Th e Waves (1931): “I begin to see what I had in mind; & want to begin cutting out masses of irrelevance, & clearing, sharpening & making the good phrases shine. One wave after another” (D3: 303). At some point in her diaries, Woolf refers to all of her major works in such sea/water-oriented terms. What Woolf terms “the poetry of existence” itself is, she confesses, “Often . . . connected with the sea & St Ives” (D2: 246).

In the creative process, the water that refi lls the bowl of her most important memory is linked to the condition of her brain. Rarely is water seen in a negative and, sadly, prophetic light, though a few references to drowning are in evidence. With To the Lighthouse (1927) nearing publication, she does write that she feels something “like a painful wave swelling about the heart—tossing me up” (D3: 110). To the Lighthouse is referred to as “that cursed book—that stone that plunges me deeper & deeper in the water” (D3: 226). Correcting proofs, always a tedious, grinding task for Woolf, she writes: “And so I pitched into my great lake of melancholy. Lord how deep it is! What a born melancholic I am! Th e only way I keep afl oat is by working” (D3: 235). At Rodmell in 1933, complaining after a visit by Elinor Castle Nef, Woolf grouses: “I come in here to write: cant [sic] even fi nish a sentence; & am pulled under . . .” (D4: 171). Still, through activity, through undisturbed writing, she is capable of recovery: “My melancholy has been broken, like a lake by oars” (D3: 236).

Th ese negative references are remarkably few. More often, when Woolf writes of wa-ter, she refers to her brain, its wetness or its dryness. When her writing is going well, she

97Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian

refers to her brain as a well, a cistern, a hidden spring, bubbling, boiling, freshly fl owing. Working on what would become Th e Years (1937), Woolf notes that she is “free to begin the last chapter; & by a merciful Providence, the well is full, ideas are rising, & if I can keep at it widely freely powerfully I shall have 2 months of complete immersion. Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order” (D4: 232). A day of solitude promises to replenish the cistern: “So when I wake early now I luxuriate most in a whole day alone; a day of easy natural poses, a little printing, slipping tranquilly off into the deep water of my own thoughts navigating the underworld; & then replenishing my cistern at night with Swift” (D3: 33). By her references, then, reading and travel, but, chiefl y, solitude for thinking could refi ll or restore what Woolf sometimes complained of as “my dry cistern of a head” (D5: 218).

While writing Th e Waves, Woolf writes in her diary with anticipation and certainty, “My brain will be fi lling” (D4: 56). Working on what became Mrs. Dalloway (1925), in a rough patch, Woolf remarks: “indeed I made up my mind one night to abandon the book—& then one touches the hidden spring” (D2: 272). Sometimes, her brain is too full, her work in the diary too intensive: “Really I’m writing too much here. Th e twelve months at this rate will overfl ow” (D2: 295). On the other hand, she can chastise herself for not having written at all: “What a disgraceful lapse! Nothing added to my disquisition, & life allowed to waste like a tap left running” (D1: 239). “Th e worst of it is,” she writes, “my brain fi lls too fast—overfl ows” (D4: 42).

In 1935, working on Th e Years, Woolf ’s brain is divided: “Half my brain dries com-pletely; but I’ve only to turn over, & there’s the other half, I think, ready, quite happily to write a little article. Oh if only anyone knew anything about the brain” (D4: 338). Clearly, Woolf spent time considering and commenting on the condition of her own.

At its best, its most creative, Woolf describes her brain as wet and teeming with ideas, but certain people, conversations, and experiences cause her to feel as if her brain is “Like a wrung dish cloth” (D2: 271), with all the water gone. After visits with Rose Macauley and Elizabeth Bowen, Woolf writes, “I have a dull heavy mop inside my brain . . . & am prey to every fl ea ant gnat” (D4: 347). Six days in London leave Woolf feeling that her brain is “rather dried up” (D5: 93). Th e aftermath of a visit to Ottoline Morrell causes Woolf to describe her mind as “damp blotting paper” (D3:238).

Assessing her novel Th e Waves, Woolf writes that she “tried to speak the truth, bom-bastic as the remark sounds, wrung it drop by drop from my brain” (D4: 43-4). Deprived of sleep through entertaining, Woolf writes, “one late night fl oors me”; she describes her brain the next day as “all sand” (D4: 257). Th en, too, her brain could be dried out by writ-ing non-fi ction, made “sandy,” as she writes, “with writing criticism” (D2: 246).

Th is dry condition was one Woolf felt keenly, noting that “when my brains dry up I feel nervous” (D4: 61), because the water, that bowl of her memory, needed refi lling. At those times, Woolf talked of healing her brain. Fretted by a visit from Leonard Woolf ’s nieces, she writes, “I am going to wrap my brain in green dock leaves for a few days: 5, if I can hold out; till the children . . . have gone. If I can—for I think a scene is forming” (D4: 338). Working on the essay “Fact and Fiction,” Woolf writes in her diary, “I get so knotted & jaded; never mind. I shall lie fl at a little in brain, for a few days; until I feel the well full” (D4: 226). She notes the metaphoric wetness or dryness of her brain as if taking her temperature: “Very slowly the well, so dry last week, seems to be re-fi lling” (D2: 70).


Revising Th e Years, Woolf notes, “Its [sic] true my brain is so tired of this job it aches after an hour or less. So I must dandle it, & gently immerse it” (D5: 31). “But I needn’t hurry,” she writes on another occasion of a similar plan for recovery; “the main thing is to let ideas blow, easily; & come softly pouring” (D4: 356). As she waits for her brain to heal in this fashion in 1937, she betrays anxiety: “Will another novel ever swim up?” (D5: 105) from the well, the cistern, the spring of her brain, and put her, as she terms it, back “into the fl ow” (D5:189) of her creative power?

Woolf herself seeks immersion in the fl uid, seamless part of life. Th ough they fretted her, guests could also allow her “to go adventuring on the streams of other peoples [sic] lives—speculating, adrift” (D3: 187). When she is not, in fact, a part of this stream, or writing of it, she corrects herself: “A scandal, a scandal, to let so much time slip, & I leaning on the Bridge, watching it go” (D3: 199). Yet in a letter to Elizabeth Robins, Woolf acknowledges the solitary life of the writer. “Writing,” she says, “is an unsocial occupation” (L6: 74). Woolf underscores the solitude required to write by confessing: “I cannot write if anyone is in the room” (D5: 338).

In the quiet, solitary silence of swimming and diving, in the fl uidity and treasure-seeking for words she describes as pearls, Woolf found the most perfect references for her writing. Both endeavors are solitary; one may not hear the voices from the shore, and they form a link between what Julia Briggs calls Woolf ’s “active silence of thought” (2) and the interiority of her novels. Even the strokes associated with swimming relate to the rhythms Woolf identifi ed as central to her writing and what Briggs calls “the rhythms of time” (5).

Evidently, in the literal sense, Woolf was an excellent swimmer. In 1909, on a return trip to Cornwall, Woolf writes to Violet Dickinson, “Yesterday, I hired a . . . bathing dress, and swam far out, until the seagulls played over my head, mistaking me for a drifting sea anemone” (L1: 412). Th is drifting is the state she wishes to recreate metaphorically in order to pursue her writing: “Please God,” she writes, “these . . . people dont [sic] come . . . I want to swim about in the dark green depths” (D3: 255). She writes of the “current of thought” into which she hopes to slip, “to submerge everything” as she lets ideas form before she puts them on paper (D3: 253), of not wishing “to break the current & fi nish” Th e Waves (D3: 301); on another occasion, she says that she will “take a plunge into some current” of thought (D5: 261). She will, she writes, leave the dry work of Roger Fry’s bi-ography and “slide down into the water” (D5: 154-155); she spends a July day at Rodmell in “Reading & walking & swimming into lucid depths” (D4: 170).

Interrupted by Karin Stephen, Woolf subsequently complains, “Th ere I was swim-ming in the highest ether known to me,” as she was working on Th e Waves, but Stephen succeeded in “blowing everything to smithereens” (D2: 314). As late as 1940, Woolf em-ploys what, from its high incidence, must be seen as her favorite metaphor for writing: “I shall swim into quiet water” (D5: 314).

A more extreme variety of solitude, of the quiet necessary for her writing, is to be found in diving. Writing To the Lighthouse is, as she records, “a plunge into deep waters” (D3: 112). So deeply is she immersed in writing the novel, she describes a case of artistic bends: “I live entirely in it, & come to the surface rather obscurely & am often unable to think what to say when we walk round the Square, which is bad I know. Perhaps it may be a good sign for the book though” (D3: 59). Visiting Vita Sackville-West at Knole in 1927, Woolf notes that she feels “a sense of links fi shed up into the light which are usually submerged” (D3: 125).

99Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian

Elsewhere Woolf writes of “the myriad impressions which I net every day” (D3: 6) and of “letting myself down into my mind” (D3: 219) as if she were a diver looking for treasure.

Indeed, this was often her aim. Writing of her life with Leonard, Woolf credits its “immense success” to the fact that “our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it” (D3: 30). Th e literary treasure—words, or what Woolf once called “premonitions of a book” (D3: 253)—is often likened to pearls, to the string of connected waves of memory: “Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves. For example, going to my dressmaker in Judd Street, or rather thinking of a dress I could get her to make, & imagining it made—that is the string, which as if dipped loosely into a wave of treasure brings up pearls sticking to it” (D3: 11).

Sometimes, as Woolf notes in 1915 with a touch of false bravado, diving is strenuous and not without danger: “My writing now delights me solely because I love writing & dont [sic], honestly, care a hang what anyone says. What seas of horror one dives through in order to pick up these pearls—however they are worth it” (D1: 120). In another, beau-tiful reference to pearls, Woolf writes to Ethel Smyth of her intention to

gently surge across the lawn (I move as if I carried a basket of eggs on my head). . .take my writing board on my knee; and let myself down, like a diver, very cautiously into the last sentence I wrote yesterday. Th en perhaps after 20 min-utes, or it may be more, I shall see a light in the depths of the sea, and stealthily approach—for one’s sentences are only an approximation, a net one fl ings over some pearl which may vanish; and if one brings it up it wont [sic] be anything like it was when I saw it, under the sea. Now these are the great excitements of life. (L4: 233).

For Woolf, the sea was, as she once described it, “the pulse of a heart” (D1: 4). References to water are most numerous during the 1920s, at the height of her great-

est creative period. In Volume Four of her diaries, covering the years 1931-1935, Woolf details trips to Italy, Ireland, Holland, Germany, and France, a much more free and so-ciable life made easier by the money Woolf had earned, a time punctuated by the death of friends. Conversely, from this point there is less about the brain, less about water, as she recognizes “a certain general slackening of letters & fame, owing to my writing nothing” (D4: 287), thus underscoring the link of water, the wet and fertile brain, and of swim-ming and diving, those active pursuits, to her creative power. Yet these references remain to the end, perhaps because, as Woolf writes, “one’s life is not confi ned to one’s body and what one says and does; one is living all the time in relation to certain background rods or conceptions” (MOB 73). Th e pattern, these “background rods or conceptions,” may be seen fi rmly established from the beginning in a 1908 letter to Clive Bell: “Th e sea is a miracle—more congenial to me than any human being” (L1: 326).

Th e sea—and the metaphors for writing Woolf ties to it so decisively--provides the steady stream, the fl owing connection, the link to life both backwards and forward in which Woolf dwelt, determined, as she wrote, “To make much shorter work of the day than one used. To feel each like a wave slapping up against one” (D3: 303). And so she did, as her personal writing confi rms, to the end.


Works Cited

Briggs, Julia. Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life. New York: Norton, 1984.Woolf, Virginia. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie. 5 vols. New

York: Harcourt. 1977-1984.—. Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vols.1 and 4. New York: Harcourt.

1975-1980.—. Moments of Being. Ed. Joanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt, 1976.

“THIS, I FANCY, MUST BE THE SEA”: THALASSIC AESTHETICS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S WRITING

by Patrizia A. Muscogiuri

“Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea.” (D3: 209)

Seascapes, sailing, diving and the sea itself are aspects of nature and of human be-ings’ relationship with it which frequently inspired Virginia Woolf ’s writing. In-deed, Woolf ’s engagement with the sea pervades most of her novels and surfaces

recurrently in her short stories, diaries and essays, letting emerge—when one looks care-fully at it—a persistent endeavor in bringing about a groundbreaking thalassic aesthet-ics permeated by fresh politics. By employing the adjective “thalassic” (from the Greek noun θαλασσα, i.e. “sea”) in connection with Woolf ’s marine aesthetics and sea-related metaphors, my purpose is to emphasize Woolf ’s informed handling of the sea as a radi-cal metaphor, in particular (though not exclusively) with reference to women as bearers of alternative politics.1 In other words, I argue that in Woolf ’s writing, images of the sea confi gure a dimension that is simultaneously aesthetic and philosophical, and should be reconsidered as pivotal metaphors at the heart of her politics.

In the context of Woolfi an studies, David Bradshaw has indicated Woolf ’s childhood experiences in St. Ives as the source of the profuse sea imagery in her writing (101-104) and has interpreted her metaphorical treatment of the element as essentially associated with “the silenced and marginalised position of women,” “with isolation and annihila-tion” and, “occasionally,” with “security and peace” (101)—a partly correct but limited reading of Woolf ’s more complex, ever evolving handling of thalassic metaphors. On the other hand, Gillian Beer has connected Woolf ’s “fascination with the sea” to evolutionary theory and the historicization of the notion of the sea as origin of life that resulted from it, a notion which had been promulgated for millennia by “most myth systems” (17). In this line of argument, Beer postulates that Woolf ’s fondness for the element “may be related to her search for a way out of sexual diff erence”—a problematic statement in relation to both Woolf and the import of her thalassic aesthetics—“or, equally, for a continuity with lost origins” (Beer 17). Th e fact that the sea “is constantly renewing itself ” yet “resists transformation” (17) is indicated by Beer as another element of that fascination, whereas the presence of sea metaphors in Woolf ’s texts is explained as mere receptiveness, à la Clarissa Dalloway, to images found solely in the writings of Victorian and/or later scien-tists (105-8).2 Set against this view, my argument is that, above and beyond the infl uence of her childhood memories, Woolf ’s life-long engagement with the sea fi nds its basis in the Western philosophical and literary tradition of thalassic metaphors—which Woolf exploits for her purposes and keenly rewrites—and has to do more with politics (includ-ing social and gender politics), aesthetics and language than science. If contemporaneous science did provide suggestions for Woolf (which is plausible notwithstanding her view of science as “the least like to my own ideas” [L4: 409]), these do not explain, however, the


distinctive, eclectic political implications emerging from, and simultaneously channelling, her continuous reworking of these deeply polysemic tropes.3

Indeed, throughout her writing, Woolf displays a shrewd understanding of the poli-tics that inform Western inscriptions of the sea. From classical antiquity to early modern-ism and beyond, the sea has been repeatedly treated metaphorically, both in writing and iconography, so as to confi gure and perpetuate a variety of dominant discourses, which range, for instance, from political conservatism and religious or moral conformism to misogyny, exacerbated nationalism, imperialism and racial discrimination (Muscogiuri, “Sign of the Breaker” 5-27). Th e association of the sea with evil and even the demoniac is a classical locus of antiquity. Indeed, the sea was often thought of as chaos undermining the fi xity, order and stability built up by rationalist thought, which, as a consequence, were usually identifi ed with the land (Muscogiuri, “Cinematographic seas” 204-5). Un-derstandably, however, the signifi cance of thalassic metaphors fl uctuates depending upon the episteme and the historical moment, so that discontinuities in what can be read un-equivocally as long-established phallogocentric constructions of the sea do occasionally emerge before the end of the eighteenth century, although it is only afterwards that alter-native treatments of the sea become less uncommon. In particular, radical renderings of thalassic metaphors are not infrequent in twentieth-century writings by women, which draw on the classical metaphorical association of the sea with the irrational, the senses and the body as well as the unknown, often reformulated by women as a forgotten, alternative dimension of being. Intriguingly, therefore, Woolf ’s idiosyncratic reconfi guration of the sea as a political strategy aligns her work with that of other modernist women, in particu-lar the poet H.D., whose writing has often been misinterpreted precisely as a result of the general neglect of her thalassic aesthetics.

Woolf ’s handling of the sea involves complex aesthetic, philosophical and political questions, which are elaborated so as to incorporate issues of identity, language and the body, a wealth of arguments which I cannot address fully here (though I will briefl y touch on some of them). I have therefore chosen to concentrate on just some aspects of Woolf ’s less obvious treatment of the sea as an aesthetic and, specifi cally, metafi ctional metaphor—with reference to conscious allusions, in thalassic terms, to her own notion of writing as opposed to conventional views of narrative and language. As I will show, Woolf embraced fl uidity and saturation in explicit opposition to the aesthetics of realism and, more subtly, masculinist modernism; she undertook to explore (sea) depths unknown to both the realist and the rationalist observer, whose outlook stops at the surface of the sea of life; and she also strived not only to “get the waves to be heard all through” (D3: 236) but also to inscribe in her texts what she called “the voice of the sea” (D3: 209). But what is, for Virginia Woolf, the voice of the sea? Th e answer to this question is connected to Woolf ’s notion of saturation and fl uidity, as well as to her conception of the sea depths.

When she began to visualize Th e Waves (1931)—her most experimental piece of writ-ing, which was going to be, fl uidly, “prose yet poetry; a novel and a play” (D3: 128)—Woolf submitted her still embryonic ideas on it to her sister and closest friends. Sig-nifi cantly, on 7 November 1928, she noted in her diary that, whereas “Nessa and Roger and Duncan and Ethel Sands admire[d]” (D3: 203) this project as the expression of her “uncompromising side,” “one reviewer days [sic] that I have come to a crisis in the matter of style: it is now so fl uent and fl uid that it runs through the mind like water. Th at disease

103“This, I fancy, must be the sea”

began in Th e Lighthouse” (D3: 203). Whoever it was, that reviewer had read Woolf ’s latest writings from the masculinist perspective of that mainstream modernism founded on the tenets of hardness and dryness—as advocated, for instance, by T.E. Hulme. Consider-ing Woolf ’s remarkably recurrent usage of sea metaphors throughout her writing, it is signifi cant that, of all her works, only the ones densely permeated at a structural level by the sea are identifi ed as “crisis” and, even more subtly, as “disease,” in line with that medi-calization of a woman’s writing which is typical of the then still-dominant understanding of women as intrinsically prone to disorder and hysteria and hence inferior to men both physically and mentally (Gilbert and Gubar 53 ff ). In other words, from the reviewer’s angle, the “dry hardness” (Hulme 127) of a linear, teleological (masculinist) writing would indicate soundness, whereas anything that by virtue of its diff erence deviates from that established norm would express a disorder. Indeed, I suggest that Woolf ’s keen reworking of sea metaphors (and, in particular, the thalassic structure of Th e Waves) brings about, rather, a dis-order: that is to say, the conscious unmaking—or, at least, a severe under-mining—of the (phallocratic) order of the logos. Taking this into account, then, it is not surprising that Woolf pondered only en passant the criticism of a “diseased” style that “runs through the mind like water”: “Shall I now check and consolidate, more in the Dal-loway and Jacob’s Room style?” (D3: 203). Th e idea of following in the more “solid” style of these two works, in which sea metaphors abound nonetheless, is immediately set aside. Assuredly, Woolf decides to pursue her creative agenda uncompromisingly.4 Th ree weeks later (28 November 1928), another entry in her diary records what may be read as her indirect response to the critique of a sick, unsound fl uidity—that is to say, her intention “to saturate” (D3: 209), as she puts it, her writing in Th e Waves, namely:

to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfl uity: to give the moment whole; what-ever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that dont [sic] belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: get-ting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. (D3: 209)

For Woolf, the conventions of realism dry up life, producing only “deadness” and “waste.” Set against this perspective, Woolf ’s notion of a saturated writing points to a poetic prose that aims at inscribing what is left out by both traditional fi ction and poetry; 5 “to saturate” the text means to infuse life into it by re-creating that essential element of existence that, for Woolf, is “the voice of the sea.”6 Conceived as integral to the moment, “the voice of the sea” is perceived by Woolf as something incompatible with rationalist realism and almost utterly erased by the patriarchal, logocentric order, where it is usually “obscured and con-cealed under the other sounds” (TTL 30). Th is is a “voice” that relates (to) the most elusive aspects of life and, most crucially, reclaims what is kept out of the phallogocentric discourse, in several senses, from those “nursery rhymes, street cries, half-fi nished sentences and sights” (TW 279) mentioned in Th e Waves—or, in other words, anything that eludes the logos and yet infuses the sphere of the irrational in each person—to the genuine “poetry” found in the sea of “Ordinary People” (an earlier, provisional title of Th e Years [1937]), in particular those left in the margins of both canonical writing and society, above all women, queer people, but also outcasts like Septimus Smith, for instance. Th e idea, suggested in Th e Waves, is that


the writer must “(while they talk) let down one’s net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and she said and make poetry” (W 217). Woolf ’s materialist understanding of creative language as emerging from a sea of human beings engaged in common conversation radically subverts traditionalist hierarchic notions of poetry and, more generally, literature as a higher form of language which is rather received than produced by the majority of people, along with the political and social implications of this view. In this sense, this “voice” originating in the depths of the sea of life has a dual connotation, as it is both innermost (i.e. relating to the “inner sea” of the individual mind, the latter being a classical metaphor which recurs frequently in Woolf ) and social. In To the Lighthouse (1927), for instance, Mrs. Ramsay (but fi nally also Lily) is the one who hears the voice of the sea distinctly, murmuring to her, at times soothing and at times ad-monishing her (TTL 30), whereas in Th e Waves it is a plurality of voices that is netted and brought to the surface (these are of course the inner voices of a multiple self, but they also work well as a metaphor for an eclectic group of people, so much so that, still today, they continue to be mistaken for formal “characters” by many critics, something which Woolf found “odd” [D4: 47]); and then conversation, proper interpersonal communication (as opposed to the monologues of Th e Waves), is fi gured in To the Lighthouse as marine life, as a lively sea creature moving in its underwater environment.7

Interestingly, in fact, Woolf seems to set a clear-cut antithesis between the surface and the depths of the sea, which I will now briefl y explore with a view to completing my argument on the voice of the sea. In To the Lighthouse, for instance, the contrast between surface and depths is illustrated in the diff erent approach to the sea that Mr. Ramsay and Lily have. Mr. Ramsay represents the Lucretian spectator, who imperturbably looks at the sea—and, implicitly, other people’s lives—with the detachment (and sterility, in his specifi c case) provided by his rationalism: “had he been able to contemplate [the sea] fi xedly might have led to something” (TTL 73), the text makes clear. As for Lily, more perceptively than Mr. Ramsay, in looking out to sea she is in fact looking for a “message” or a “vision” (207), in an endeavor to be receptive to the voice of the sea and/or any insight that it may bring about. Initially, she can fi nd no message or vision there as, similarly to Woolf ’s fi guration of the woman writer as a fi sherwoman “on the verge of a deep lake” (DM 152) in “Professions for Women,” Lily is also described as remaining cautiously “on the verge” (TTL 159), safely “moored to the shore” (158). In the course of time, however, she listens to the voice of the sea (219-220), intuits its “message,” and gradually aban-dons all restraints: by metaphorically immersing herself in marine waters “up to the lips” (295)—thus enacting Woolf ’s imperative, in “Th e Mark on the Wall,” “to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts” (CSF 79)—she gains a vital insight and, eventually, has her vision. Crucially, in fact, Lily’s immersion in the depths of the sea (of her own self and life) reveals an ocean of social interaction as the true sub-stance of the “individual,” what may be termed, in contrast to Kate Chopin’s “abysses of solitude” (18, 120), abysses of sociability, deep waters that transcend time (just like the literal sea) and space, as well as any traditional notion of “identity”: for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. Th e Ramsays’; the children’s; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washer-woman with her basket; a rook, a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of fl owers: some common feeling which held the whole together (TTL 177). Th e voice of the sea reconnects to this dimension, while


metaphoric sea diving reconciliates conscious and unconscious, past and present, self and other, human and animal, and plant and object, as the sea emerges as the metaphoric locus of that “common feeling which held the whole together” or, in other words—as Woolf herself phrased it in her diary, yet again in explicit connection with the sea—“the poetry of existence” (D2: 246).

Hence, the opposition between surface and depths of the sea has a specifi c import in Woolf, as she explicitly associates the characteristic bias towards categorization and discrimination that informs both rationalism and realism (those “hard separate facts” in the quote above) not only with the terra fi rma but also, as we have seen, with the surface of the water and the limited scope of a logocentric, land-based perspective (like Mr. Ram-say’s) that stops there. Th is critique is beautifully rendered by Woolf through her meta-phoric treatment of the sea in that neat metafi ctional story that is “An Unwritten Novel” (1920). In its critical rejection of rationalist realism and the related traditionalist notion of fi ction, “An Unwritten Novel” traces the ultimate defeat of the “omniscient” narrator’s attempt at external observation of surface “reality” and rationalistic deduction, which are thwarted by the emergence of the unexpected and, more specifi cally, the non-manifest and elusive aspects of existence that usually remain unwritten and unsaid. Revealingly, the story, which was regarded by Woolf as her “great discovery” (L4: 231), fi nds a climacteric denouement in the narrator’s fi nal visualization of this elusive, non-manifest actuality as a metaphoric sea:

Mysterious fi gures! Mother and son. Who are you? Why do you walk down the street? Where tonight will you sleep, and then, tomorrow? Oh, how it whirls and surges — fl oats me afresh! I start after them. […] Wherever I go, mysterious fi gures, I see you, turning the corner, mothers and sons […]. Th is, I fancy, must be the sea. Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the water murmurs and moves. […] it’s you, unknown fi gures, you I adore; […] you I draw to me — adorable world! (CSF 115, emphasis added)

Hence, this too is the “unknown” sea into which Woolf wishes to dive in her writ-ing, an ever-moving ocean of people, a fl esh-and-blood, interpersonal version of the tra-ditional metaphor of the sea of life. Indeed, this is not an abstract symbolic sea nor a reconfi guration of the impersonal and yet formidable oceanic crowds found in Cicero, Virgil, or, later on, Baudelaire, Poe and others, portents of revolution, but an “adorable world” made of “mysterious fi gures,” as real life is, to whom Woolf wishes to give voice. In this way, from being considered a periphery, as it frequently happens with many writers, in Woolf the sea becomes the substance of life itself and emerges as a source of not only (genuine) “poetry” (the “poetry of existence”) but also fresh politics, and the voice of the sea as voice of the other – both in the sense of the other “inside” and in the sense of those innumerable unknown others bodying forth the Woolfi an sea of life.

Th is is especially interesting when compared, for instance, with Joseph Conrad’s un-derstanding of the sea as a “still void” (148), characterised by a disappointing “indolent silence” (244)—which makes it ultimately “monotonous” and “barren” (184). On the contrary, in Woolf, the sea emerges as exuberant, active life, as it “moves” and “whirls and surges”; its “murmuring” signals that it may be conceived as the source of an alternative


language, a fresh creativity or, more generally, a vital fertility, as suggested by the presence of a mother and son at the heart of this Woolfi an image of the sea. Indeed, this specifi c fi guration of a communal sea of life as composed of “mothers and sons” stays with Woolf for a long time, so much so that, as it is known, it develops into the image of an explicitly maternal sea in the fi rst draft of Th e Waves. However, it is most signifi cant that the image of a maternal sea disappears in the fi nal version of Th e Waves, where a subtle diff erentiation is introduced with regard to motherhood, which, when read in connection with patriar-chy and women’s unawareness, is identifi ed rather with the seasonal life of the cropping land (through the voice of Susan). Th e result is that, rather than a specifi cally maternal sea (which in a way would have been a restrictive image), in Th e Waves Woolf confi gures the sea as a purely feminine element. Th at is the import of the fi rst interlude of Th e Waves, where the image of a woman immersed in the sea, “couched beneath the horizon” and raising “her lamp” (5) from the depths of the sea is revolutionary both in terms of philo-sophical and aesthetical implications: indeed, to Lucretius’s celebration of “the shores of light” of phallogocentrism opposing the dark seas of Mother Nature (Muscogiuri, “Sign of the Breaker” 110-111), Woolf substitutes a fresh, feminine light emerging from the sea, like a new beginning for the world, a fl esh-and-blood Aurora (or the Dawn), if not indeed Th alassa or Tiamat: the woman writer, whose voice recites/resites the voice of the sea.

Notes1. Th e adjective also gestures towards Th alassa, the primeval sea goddess (one of the pre-Olympian deities,

like Gaia, of Greek mythology), and, by following in its philological tracks, towards the earlier Babylonian sea goddess and creator of the universe Tiamat (or Tiawath/Th awath/Th alath, the latter form being nearly identical to θάλάττα, Attic variant of θάλασσα). Hence, through these associations signalling the signifi -cance of the feminine principle in ancient myths of creation, it is suggestive of the sea as metaphoric locus of an alternative, specifi cally female, creativity. It is my contention that the cultural and political weight of this understanding is crucial for Woolf and that it shapes her view of the sea as a site of resistance to, and subversion of, a number of dominant discourses.

2. Of Clarissa we are told that “her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors” (MD 86); but for as much as Woolf herself was an avid reader of both scientists, she cannot be confl ated with Clarissa. My position diverges from Beer’s substantially in the recognition of both a specifi c agenda in Woolf ’s handling of the sea and a much wider context of usage of these tropes, whose crucial political implications infuse Woolf ’s understanding of the sea and, hence, her informed reinvention of thalassic metaphors.

3. It is worth mentioning that both Huxley’s and Tyndall’s nautical metaphors have no scientifi c referent, on the contrary, they are in turn to be read in the context of the philosophical and literary tradition of thalassic metaphors.

4. It may not be a mere coincidence that in the fi nal pages of Orlando, published only a few weeks before that diary entry, we read: “All this, the trees, deer, and turf, she observed with the greatest satisfaction as if her mind had become a fl uid that fl owed round things and enclosed them completely” (283).

5. Th is is epitomized by the oxymoron of “a selected everything”: “Why admit any thing to literature that is not poetry – by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novel[ist]s—that they select nothing? Th e poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything in; yet to saturate. Th at is what I want to do in Th e Moths [Th e Waves]. It must include nonsense, fact, sordidity: but made transparent” (D3: 209-210; emphasis added).

6. Th e phrase brings to mind Kate Chopin’s famous inscription of it in Th e Awakening, where the sea, its “voice” and “touch” (18, 120), are associated with sensuality and self-discovery, considered as prerequisites for women’s emancipation in terms of both gender and creativity. Th e association of water with self-knowledge and “the passions” or “the body” (DM 152) can also be found in Woolf, for instance, in the description of the imagination diving in “a deep lake” (DM 152) in “Professions for Women,” in explicit


relation to writing. However, as far as “the voice of the sea” is concerned, Woolf ’s conception of it intro-duces diff erent issues from those alluded to by Chopin, as shown in the remainder of this essay.

7. “[W]hatever they said had also this quality, as if what they said was like the movement of a trout when, at the same time, one can see the ripple and the gravel, something to the right, something to the left; and the whole is held together” (TTL 165). Set against a logocentric notion of language as fi xed and words as absolute concepts, Woolf understands conversation as fl uid and alive, exceeding its surface meaning, at the same time both fi sh and water.

Works Cited

Beer, Gillian. Virginia Woolf: Th e Common Ground. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.Bradshaw, David. “Th e Purest Ecstasy: Virginia Woolf and the Sea.” Modernism on Sea. Ed. Lara Feigel and

Alexandra Harris. Amsterdam and London: Peter Lang, 2009. 100-115.Chopin, Kate. Th e Awakening and Selected Short Stories. Ed. Jim Manis. Pennsylvania State University. 2008.

Web. May 20, 2010. Conrad, Joseph. Th e Shadow-Line. Ed. Franco Marenco. 1917. Turin: Einaudi, 1993.Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. Th e Madwoman in Th e Attic. Th e Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-

Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979.Hulme, T.E. “Romanticism and Classicism.” Speculations. Ed. Herbert Read. 1924. London and New York:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.Muscogiuri, Patrizia A. “Cinematographic seas: metaphors of crossing and shipwreck on the big screen (1990-

2001).” Fictions of the Sea. Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture. Ed. Bernhard Klein. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. 203-220.

Muscogiuri, Patrizia A. “Th e Sign of the Breaker. Shipwreck, Sea and Language in (Post)Modernity.” PhD Th e-sis. University of Salford, 2006.

Woolf, Virginia. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. 5 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1977–84.

—. Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1975-1980.

—. “Th e Mark on the Wall.” Th e Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Th e Hogarth Press, 1985. 77-83.

—. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. London: Th e Hogarth Press, 1968.—. Orlando. A Biography. London: Th e Hogarth Press, 1928.—. “Professions for Women.” Th e Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: Th e Hogarth Press, 1942. 149-

154.—. To the Lighthouse. 1927. London: Th e Hogarth Press, 1932.—. “An Unwritten Novel.” Th e Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Th e Hogarth

Press, 1985. 106-115.—. Th e Waves. 1931. London: Th e Hogarth Press, 1933.

“WILD SWIMMING”

by Gill Lowe

Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke use water throughout their work as a metaphor for powerful emotional states. In “A Sketch of the Past,” (1985) Virginia uses an arresting simile, “I see myself as a fi sh in a stream; defl ected; held in place; but

cannot describe the stream” (MOB 92). She recognises her passivity. She is alive, aware, alert to experience but not actively swimming; held, static, in the current of what seems to be her mother’s invisible infl uence.1 Water is frequently troped as female. In Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Th rough Britain, Roger Deakin, high priest of wild swimming, de-scribes water’s “welcome embrace like all our mothers soothing and kissing us cool” (196). Th is paper will suggest that for Rupert Brooke, unable to cast off a puritanical, maternal inheritance, swimming became a necessary cleansing that was sometimes calming but, more often, a desired cold, sharp shock.

Both Rupert and Virginia were reliant on powerful mothers but had ambivalent feel-ings about their infl uence. Both were ambitious, both physically fragile, both frequently ill and treated by the same nerve specialist, Dr. Maurice Craig. Both were sexually ill-at-ease. Th e Edwardian period was perplexing and diffi cult for them.2 Virginia, uncom-fortable with a stifl ing nineteenth century heritage, actively embraced modernism as a clean start. Infl uenced by Swinburne, Baudelaire and Wilde, Rupert chose an aesthetic, decadent world-weary image on going up to Cambridge in 1906. Th is façade transformed during his short life; he assumed several elaborate acts, depending on who was watching.

Virginia seems to have appraised his habit, noting in her essay, “Th e Intellectual Imagination” (1919) that he “made friend after friend, and passed from one extreme to another of dress and diet” (E3 134). He next tried an abstemious, Fabian, “back-to-na-ture” role. Finally, traditional, reactionary values reclaimed him. In 1913 in a letter to his fi rst female love, Noel Olivier, he writes, “I’m the most conservative person in the world” (Song of Love 243). Th e truth was more extreme. By then, he had become stridently mi-sogynistic, anti-Suff ragist, homophobic, anti-pacifi st and anti-Semitic.

Virginia Stephen stayed with Rupert at the Old Vicarage between the 14th-19th Au-gust, 1911. According to her 1918 essay, “Rupert Brooke,” he was “consciously and defi -antly pagan. He was living at Grantchester; his feet were permanently bare; he distained tobacco and butcher’s meat; and he lived all day, and perhaps slept all night, in the open air.” His nature was, she writes, “self-conscious in the highest degree” (E2 279). William Pryor, in Virginia Woolf and the Raverats, quotes a 1925 letter to Virginia from Gwen Raverat where she observes, retrospectively, “All that about bathing and food and bodies was a pose” (176). Repeatedly, in his letters, Rupert asserts his chosen act, “I am becoming a wild rough elementalist. Walt Whitman is nothing to me” he wrote to his cousin, Erica Cotterill, in August 1908 (RB Letters 139). Again to Erica, from Devon in March 1909, “I am leading a healthy life. I rise early,” … “eat no meat, wear very little, do not part my hair, take frequent cold baths, work ten hours a day, and rush madly about the mountains in fl annels & rainstorms for hours. I am surprisingly cheerful about it- it is all part of my

109“Wild Swimming”

scheme of returning to nature” (RB Letters 159). Virginia recognized the necessity for him of this scheme, writing that, “Like most sensitive people, he had his methods of self-protection; his pretence now to be this and now to be that” (E2 279).

Always attuned to the inauthentic, she wrote, “You might judge him extreme, and from the pinnacle of superior age assure him that the return to Nature was as sophisticated as any other pose” (E2 279). “Th e Intellectual Imagination” (TLS 11th December,1919) was Woolf ’s review of Walter de la Mare’s lecture, “Rupert Brook and the Intellectual Imagination” which had been delivered in memoriam on March 27th 1919 at Rugby School. In this essay Woolf re-states that “Rupert Brooke was never for a second unconscious” (E3 135).

“Wild swimming” refers to the liberation of entering what might be seen as an out-lawed element; a secret “skinny-dipping.” No watchers are implied, or, if they are there, they are voyeurs. Wild swimming suggests abandon: euphoric, endorphin-inducing plung-ing and larking. For Jay Griffi ths, in Wild: an Elemental Journey, wildness is “rebellious, breaks the rules, subversive and quintessentially revelrous” (343). During Virginia’s stay with Rupert, they swam naked together, causing her more adventurous sister, Vanessa, to versify to Saxon Sydney-Turner, “I heard from Virginia. She bathed with her Brook [sic]/ And now they’re at Firle. For what next must we look?”(VB Letters 106).

Hermione Lee refers to a letter of the 25th August, 1911, to Clive Bell from Adrian Stephen who was looking forward to seeing “the Goat” that day, to “hear how her Rupert romance is going on. She told me that he said he did not want to marry for several years at any rate but did want to copulate occasionally and promiscuously. I am afraid that her bathe has not been taken quite seriously enough for her taste but perhaps she will now have gone a step further” (295). Her siblings’ presumptuous expectations would be dashed.

Christopher Hassall, uses a signifi cant line from W. B. Yeats as the epigraph to his bi-ography of Brooke, “Th ere is always a living face behind the mask.” Hassall draws attention to Rupert’s dual nature which he calls “both puritanical and romantic at once” (277). In a letter to Gwen Darwin (later Raverat), Rupert writes, “We go for both; we join up Puritan and Hedonist: we have (once more) only connected” (262). Rupert’s close friend, Frances Cornford, recognized that, “Deep-ingrained in him, and handed down to him I should imagine through generations of English ancestors, was the puritanical spirit. I remember how clearly it showed … nobody could miss it, whoever saw the scorn and sternness in his face when he spoke of things that he hated, things corrupt and unclean” (277-278). Hassall suggests that Mrs Brooke’s strength lay in her Puritanism but he implies that this might have been a problem for Rupert, “It was there hardly less in her son, where, in that divided nature, it could create a confl ict under stress and so might become a source of weakness” (144).

Jonathan Rutherford writes that, while he lived at Grantchester, Rupert manufac-tured “his own romantic identity as a naïf, child poet” (49-50). Th is was the perfect part to adopt to help control disturbing natural impulses and to evade adult responsibilities. I suggest that Rupert found the pastoral aesthetic appealing and useful as a means of man-aging the division in his nature. Faced with perplexing personal dilemmas, rustication became a reassuring escape. Styling himself as a “neo-pagan” was a calculated decision and, inevitably, he found it diffi cult to be casual about this role.

Rupert’s poetry is imbued with an elegiac longing for certainty and safety. Th e coun-tryside is portrayed as place of stability and continuity; a defence against change. Nature is conventionally represented as feminine: lovely, regenerative and comforting. Rutherford


adds a nationalist layer to this idea, “Th e depiction of England as a mother to her sons became a powerful motif in imperialist ideology” (52). Like other spiritually-doubtful Edwardians, Rupert sought to escape his urban existence by creating his own Arcadia, two miles outside Cambridge. In May 1908, in a letter to Jacques Raverat, Rupert portrays Cambridge as “speciously arrayed in a pretence of heat and light green buds” but it is actually corrupt. He goes on to choose a ghoulish Websterian simile; the city is “a swollen corpse, and we buzz on it like fl ies” (RB Letters 127).

For the Greeks, Arcadia was an innocent, pre-adolescent, asexual place. Rupert was obsessed by Peter Pan (RB Letters 25th March 1905, 19; 31st December 1905, 33; 10th January 1906, 38) and Keith Hale, in Friends and Apostles, writes that he saw it at least ten times (25). Perhaps this was because J. M. Barrie’s play “restructures the ideal world according to the parthenogenetic model of women as mothers but never as wives or lov-ers” (Cecil Degrotte Eby, cited by Hale in footnote, 25). Pastoral is stylised and highly aesthetic. It is an artefact. As it commonly associates the City with degeneracy, pastoral can be seen as a highly moral concept. Rupert rejected Christ, in favour of the ambiguous, pagan Pan. Rutherford suggests that, “Brooke is afraid, because Pan symbolises both what he most wants and what he most fears. Pan is a metaphor for his turn to nature in search of sexual potency and identity. But he is also the fi gure of unrepressed sexuality” (62).

Virginia is often credited with the invention of the term “neo-pagan” but she borrowed it from the Pre-Raphaelites and the social reformer, Edward Carpenter. His follower, J. H. Bad-ley, founded the co-educational, progressive Bedales School, advocating nudism, mixed bath-ing and camping to keep an innocent mind and healthy body. Several neo-pagans attended Bedales. Th e group was anti-intellectual, standing for freedom and spontaneity.3 Despite all this apparent liberty, the body was seen as androgynous and relationships were mostly platonic.

David Garnett describes the physically daring Olivier girls climbing fearlessly, mak-ing dens, skinning and eviscerating rabbits but, sometimes, “as unthinkingly cruel as sav-ages” (99). He writes about a camping trip in the summer of 1909 at Penshurst.4 Th ey were river swimming by the light of bicycle lamps. “[W]e took running dives into the unseen river. It was exciting- the moment of doubt before one struck the water, and then swimming rapidly out of the next diver’s way. Th e smell of new-mown hay, of the river and weeds, the curious polished smoothness, that fresh river-water leaves on the skin … all heart-aches were purged and healed and an immense happiness and gratitude to my friends fi lled me. Soon we were sitting round the blazing fi re, Noel’s eyes shining in wel-come for the new arrivals and the soft river-water trickling from her hair down her bare shoulders” (169-170). Rupert, one of these new arrivals, gradually fell in love with Noel but chose to cast her in his mind and in writing as a mythic Grecian goddess or elusive dryad. He became irrationally protective once their relationship was over; anxious that she would be kidnapped; revolted that another might possess and sully her.

Virginia may have misunderstood the essentially chaste qualities of most of the neo-pagans. On 18th April, 1911, planning a holiday in France with “My Neo Pagan [Ka] Cox” (L1 460), she writes a bold letter to Clive Bell, “I mean to throw myself into youth, sunshine, nature, primitive art. Cakes with sugar on the top, love, lust, paganism, general bawdiness, for a fortnight at least; and not write a line” (L1 462). Writing to Jacques Raverat in 1925, she retrospectively mocked her yearning to be liked by the group, “You made me smoke one of Sir George’s cigars—& I so much wanted you to admire me, &


thought I was a desolate old stick compared with the younger generation” (VW and the Raverats 139). Rupert swam with Gwen Raverat, Rose Macaulay,5 Ka Cox, and Phyllis Gardner amongst others. He appears evangelical in his wish to involve his friends in a shared therapeutic cleansing.

Th ere exists a notebook, a pencil manuscript, catalogued as RCB/M/6 in the Papers of Rupert Chawner Brooke in the King’s College archive, Cambridge. Inside is a draft of a talk called “From without,” written for the Carbonari Society and dated Michaelmas 1909. In it Rupert praises the revivifying and calming qualities of nature and aligns him-self with the rural community. He addresses his academic audience as, “you little people, you noisy, quick-witted, little, dark, shifty eyed, bitter-tongued, little men of the city. You think that peace is ignoble, dull and dulling, a thing of sloth. You laugh at us of the country, because we will stan[d] for hours together over a gate, watching our sheep. You confuse nimbleness of mind with depth of emotion” (RCB/M/6).

After a few more lines he writes, “We of the country abide, perdurable, slow of brain, with hearts that change from glory to glory, like a pool in evening.” In the next paragraph, he continues, “Eh, I am an alien here, & homesick & shy, reading my rough words with an archaic Arcadian burr, with all your clever bright eyes glittering round me, & your whirring brains—.” A few lines later he writes about day-time swimming, “Two or three days ago I wandered out for my customary dip in the river. It was in the afternoon, about the time you were all sitting in your great-coats over the fi re roasting chestnuts for your tea. I ran across a fi eld, through a wood, & stripped in a little clearing” (RCB/M/6). After a break in the text, he describes a swim on a night with “a great many stars but no moon.” “I stood naked at the edge of the black water in a perfect silence. I plunged. Th e water stunned me as it came upwards with its cold, life-giving embrace. Was it the splendid shock that made me think the river was quivering [?]” (RCB/M/6).

What is remarkable about this description is that Rupert is not swimming privately, but has an imaginary audience. He hears the water roaring in his ears as “a tumult of applause from all the world around.” To him, the trees are personifi ed as “incredulous”. Th ey sway “like a crowd at a football-match & the stars waving downwards like a million white fi nger ends” (RCB/M/6). Th is swimming is far from wild but, rather, a morally enlivening, stirring public event. Far from being a subversive activity this sort of swim-ming is a shock to the system. It is a cold, therapeutic purge, reminding the swimmer of his corporality. A few lines further on he seems to feel that nature is chastising him; the wind begins to blow and dark clouds form. He runs off “homeward through the wood,” “moodily feeling that somehow, somewhere, I had been a fool” (RCB/M/6).

Rupert was acutely aware of his physical charisma. He often comments on the eff ect he had on his audience. According to Timothy Rogers, Rupert once asked Gwen Raverat, “Will you please disarrange my hair; I’ve got to read poetry to some old ladies” (2). He writes in January 1912, to Ka Cox, “I’ve always enjoyed that healthy serene, Apollo-golden-haired, business” (RB Letters 341). Hassall writes that he traded on his boyish appearance “to charm the elderly and eminent” (277). Having met Henry James, Rupert told Frances Cornford, “Of course I did the fresh, boyish stunt, and it was a great success” (277). His friend Edward Marsh, cites Rupert’s statement in a letter written in his last year at school, “I am an actor and spectator as well, and I delight in contriving eff ective exits” (30). Paul Delany, and other biographers, mention a celebrated, but (because of its physi-


ological implausibility) perhaps apocryphal, anecdote. Th is was Rupert’s trick of diving into the river to resurface with an instant erection (132). Apparently, he was not merely aware of his audience but, also, prepared to give a standing ovation to his own performance.6

Nigel Jones writes that Rupert’s friends impertinently referred to Sherrill Schell’s iconic shirtless portrait as “Your favourite actress,” although Rupert himself thought it “‘rather silly’” (316). In Beginning Again Leonard Woolf recalls meeting Rupert for the fi rst time, and thinking, “‘that is exactly what Adonis must have looked like in the eyes of Aphrodite.’” Ac-cording to Leonard, Schell’s well-known portrait, “neither fl atters nor libels him. It is almost incredible but he really did look like that. Th e photograph, of course, does not show his colouring—the red-gold of his hair and the brilliant complexion.” He considered Rupert to be a “professional charmer” with a “very pronounced streak of hardness, even cruelty” (19).

Rupert’s severe mental breakdown in early 1912 followed the troubled aff air with Ka Cox which had probably led to a miscarriage. He had idealised Ka as a dependable moth-er-surrogate but, once he had slept with her, became obsessed with the idea that she was no longer pure, describing his feeling for her as, “like having black-beetles in the house” (RB Letters 337). Th e man, whose thesis was on Webster, became imbued with a Jacobean sensibility. His letters to Noel Olivier are increasingly fastidious, full of images of poison and dirt (Song of Love 65, 83, 118, 127, 230). Physical love and ageing are consistently seen as “fi lthy” and “disgusting.” Blaming Lytton Strachey for his break with Ka, he began to associate Bloomsbury with all that was to him “rotten”, “treacherous & wicked” (176), specifi cally female emancipation, Jewishness, homosexuality and pacifi sm. He longs to bathe

Rupert Brooke, 1913 NPG P101(b) by Sherrill Schell, glass positive, (305 mm x 254 mm)


to get clean, sane and healthy. He writes to Geoff rey Keynes, from Cologne, on 24th June 1912, “My soul is on its last legs. Have you any cure for syphilis of the soul?” … “still I stink; & still I peal [sic]. It may be there is a herb growing at the bottom of the river just above the pool at Grantchester, & that if I dive & fi nd it & bring it up—it will heal me” (389).

At the British Library I have been transcribing an unpublished memoir and letters between Rupert and the woodcut artist Phyllis Gardner. Th e manuscripts begin in 1911 and shed light on this unstable time in Rupert’s life. Th e most remarkable section, from November 1912, concerns wild swimming. Phyllis describes Rupert’s “wild irresistible drowning force” (BL 74742, 46). One evening, he off ers her sixpence to jump in to “the swirling and bubbling” waters of the mill weir near Byron’s Pool. She refuses.

Next Sunday, by moonlight, they begin to wade in the shallows of the Granta. She writes, “Th e wood was primeval and full of strange things that crawled unseen: and in the little stream through it were snags that looked like alligators” (BL 74742, 36-37). Th ey take off their clothes and wade into the water. She gets his boots wet and asks him, “Will you kill me?” He answers, “Perhaps.” Th ey see water rats, swim in the cold, black water and then get out. He tries to catch her, knocking her over. He off ers to dry her “with his hair: it was wild and tousled and standing on end like a mop, and I could see his keen eyes burning under the shadow of his brows” (BL 74742, 46). She lets down her long soft red hair and rubs it over his back. “I understood how an animal that loves you feels when it rubs you with its head, and I went on rubbing in a kind of ecstasy.” He asks her if she is afraid, then seizes her throat, pressing her Adam’s apple with both thumbs and asks, “Sup-posing I were to kill you?” He says she “couldn’t resist—much—.” She chokes, tries to stop him from “strangling” her and asks how long would it take? “Oh, two or three minutes,” he says. He spreads her “out fl at.” “And he looked at me, and felt me, and then said in an off hand kind of way, ‘you’ve rather a beautiful body’” (BL 74742, 40). It starts to rain heavily; they return to the Old Vicarage, Grantchester.

By 1913 Rupert wanted to break with Phyllis. Condescendingly calling her “Child,” he tells her that she is a puritan (BL 74741, No. 55); “made for love and marriage” (BL 74741, No. 65); not “strong enough to stand unconventional emotional life” (BL 74741, No. 50). He, however, is a restless “wanderer.” Phyllis writes that “he had been drawn into a vortex of would-be original people, who to satisfy their own base natures had made in-constancy a principle, and went as much as possible on the negative morality that he who breaks a rule is greater than he who makes it” (BL 74742, 69).

It was only later, in 1913, having escaped to an authentically wild paradise, that Rupert found contentment without sexual guilt with a Tahitian woman, Taata Mata. He writes in Letters from America that in the South Seas “the intellect soon lapses into quies-cence. Th e body becomes more active, the senses and perceptions more lordly and acute. It is a life of swimming and climbing and resting after exertion. Th e skin seems to grow more sensitive to light and air, and the feel of water and the earth and leaves. Hour after hour one may fl oat in the warm lagoons, conscious, in the whole body, of every shred and current of the multitudinous water” (87).

Th e outbreak of war released him from this atavistic idyll. Infl uenced by a political group, including Wellesleys, Asquiths and Winston Churchill, Rupert assumed a stirring new patriotic role which was exemplifi ed by the poetry he wrote at the start of the Great War. In the famous 1914 sonnet “Peace,” God has,


… caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move.And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,And all the little emptiness of love!

Th is revivifying image of swimmers vigorously and readily jumping into “cleanness,” as an escape from ordinary mundane existence, also suggests that it is an ethical imperative to enlist in the service of the nation. Th is paper has explored the ways in which, for Rupert Brooke, wild swimming became an essential cleansing, both literal and metaphorical; a splendidly shocking alert against stagnation, “a cold, life-giving embrace” (RCB/M/6).

Notes

1. In “Reminiscences,” Virginia’s mother is seen as a swimmer who is struggling to master the element of water. Virginia writes about Julia’s weakening eff orts, “she sank, like an exhausted swimmer, deeper and deeper in the water, and could only at moments descry some restful shore on the horizon to be gained in old age when all this toil was over” (MOB 11).

2. Virginia lost her father in 1904 and her brother, Th oby, in 1906; Dick Brooke died in 1907 and Rupert’s father in January 1910.

3. Th e “neo-pagan” contingent was fl uid but at various outdoor camps included: Godwin Baynes, Justin Brooke, Rupert Brooke, Ka Cox, Gwen Darwin (later Raverat), Frances Darwin (later Cornford), David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, Harold Hobson, Bill Hubback, Geoff rey Keynes, Bryn, Daphne, Margery and Noel Olivier, Hugh Popham, Sybil, Ethel and David Pye, Maitland Radford, Jacques Raverat, Gerald Shove, Eva Spielman and Dudley Ward.

4. Th e Penshurst group included Rupert Brooke, the Olivier girls, Godwin Baynes, Maitland Radford, Har-old Hobson, Dorothy Osmaston, Walter Layton and Dudley Ward.

5. Rupert was tutored by George Macaulay, Rose’s father, and seen as family friend. She was a keen swimmer and swam with him at Grantchester. At this time, Rose wrote Th e Secret River, John Murray, (1909); her protagonist, Michael, is said to be based on Rupert Brooke. Jane Emery writes, in Rose Macaulay: a Writer’s Life, “Rupert enjoyed mixed bathing for yet another sensation: the exciting tension between innocent childlike pleasure and suppressed adolescent titillation. For, simultaneously puritanical and sensual, he was persistently torn between love for a very young, beautiful, elusive dryad type and for an emotionally and sometimes sexually generous partner of either gender—whom he subsequently devalued” (109).

6. In her 1917 essay, “Th e New Crusade,” Virginia writes about the “peculiar irony of his canonisation” and implies that, later in Rupert’s life an adoring audience became undesirable, that the “romantic public took possession of his fame” leaving an “unmerited and undesired burden of adulation” (EII 203).

Works Cited

British Library manuscripts 74741, 74742. Phyllis Gardner/Rupert Brooke Papers. Letters and memoir of Phyl-lis Gardner relating to Rupert Brooke, poet (b. 1887, d. 1915); 1911-1918.

Papers of Rupert Chawner Brooke in the King’s College archive, Cambridge. RCB/M/6, “From without,” writ-ten for the Carbonari Society, dated Michaelmas 1909.

Brooke, Rupert. Letters from America, Travels in the USA and Canada. London: Modern Voices, Hesperus Press, 2007.Deakin, Roger. Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Th rough Britain. London: Vintage, 2000.Delany, Paul. Th e Neo-Pagans, Rupert Brook and the Ordeal of Youth. New York: Th e Free Press, 1987.


Emery, Jane. Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life. London: John Murray, 1991.Garnett, David. Th e Golden Echo. London: Chatto and Windus, 1953.Griffi ths, Jay. Wild: An Elemental Journey. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006.Hale, Keith. Ed. Friends and Apostles, Th e Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914. New

Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.Harris, Pippa. Song of Love, Th e Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier. London: Bloomsbury, 1991.Hassall, Christopher. Rupert Brooke, a Biography. London: Faber and Faber, 1964.Jones, Nigel. Rupert Brooke, Life, Death and Myth. London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999.Keynes, Geoff rey. Ed. Th e Letters of Rupert Brooke. London: Faber and Faber, 1968.Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996.Marler, Regina. Ed. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. London: Bloomsbury, 1993.Marsh, Edward. Ed. Th e Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, with a memoir by Edward Marsh, London: Papermac,

Macmillan, 1987.Pryor, William. Ed. Virginia Woolf and the Raverats, a Diff erent Sort of Friendship. Bath: Clear Books, 2003.Rogers, Timothy. Rupert Brooke, a Reappraisal and Selection. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.Rutherford, Jonathan. Forever England, Refl ections on Race, Empire, Masculinity and Empire. London: Lawrence

and Wishart, 1997.Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again, an Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918. London: Th e Hogarth Press, 1964.Woolf, Virginia. Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1 1888-1912. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann.

London: Chatto and Windus, 1975._____, “Th e New Crusade” and “Rupert Brooke.” Essays 2 1912-1918. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Th e

Hogarth Press, 1987._____, “Th e Intellectual Imagination.” Essays 3 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Th e Hogarth

Press, 1989._____, “Reminiscences” and “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. Ed. Hermione Lee. London: Pimlico, 2002.

THE WOOLF, THE HORSE AND THE FOX: RECURRENT MOTIFS IN JACOB’S ROOM AND ORLANDO

by Vara Neverow

References to the horse1 and the fox in Jacob’s Room (1922) and Orlando (1928) have been noted in passing but have neither been analyzed in depth nor in relation to one another. In my examination of these two motifs, I have become particularly

intrigued by what the conventions of the horse’s domestication and the fox’s ferality might signify and have also noticed that there are strong sexual overtones underlying some refer-ences to these two species. Let me begin, however, by tentatively aligning the horse and fox with another related and oft-discussed animal motif—the dog. With regard to dog references in Woolf ’s work, various scholars—including June Dunn, David Eberly, Emily Jensen, and Ruth Vanita—have explored canine sexual signifi cance, especially with regard to possible allusions to coded lesbian and male homosexual relationships. More recently, Jane Goldman, in “‘Ce chien est â moi’: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog,” an essay that will soon evolve into a book-length work, has tackled dog references even more rigor-ously and from multiple perspectives. In her argument, Goldman articulates the “troika slave-woman-dog,” a concept “rooted in the legacy of counter-enlightenment discourse that links slaves and dogs, as well as an equally entrenched patriarchal discourse that links women and dogs” (Goldman 59). Such compounding of hierarchical exploitation is simi-larly evident when Orlando, at the time still a man but now obsessed with the “glory” of “a man who had written a book and had it printed,” ticks off a list of former pleasures: “a dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards” (61). Th e glib inventory, which echoes the time-worn phrase “wine, women and song,” indicates Orlando’s prior preferred indulgences, a hierarchy that privileges the dog over the other items. Further, the generic woman in ques-tion would certainly be a prostitute and seems to have been less interesting to Orlando than an animal and just barely more important than the joys of gambling at cards.

Like dogs and women, horses and foxes are intrinsically categorized as “Other,” and ref-erences to them are embedded within discourses that justify abuse and persecution. Margin-alized humans (e.g., women, homosexuals, non-Caucasians, etc.) who fall into these catego-ries are demoted to the status of animals (a hierarchy determined by humans, not established by nature) and can then be identifi ed as inherently inferior, sub-human and thereby targeted for legitimized exploitation. In both works, Woolf alludes to the exploitation of horses and foxes by referencing the ways that humans use and abuse these animals.

Domesticated horses in the two works manifest in a variety of ways including both hunting and warfare. War horses, bred and trained for battle, are specifi cally mentioned in Orlando, while the use of horses (as well as dogs) in the Great War is subtly mentioned in Jacob’s Room. One such instance in Orlando occurs when, deeply depressed by Sasha’s be-trayal of him, Orlando takes to wandering in the family burial crypt. In a scene calculated by the faux biographer to echo Hamlet addressing the skull of Yorick, Orlando morbidly contemplates the bones of an ancestral hand and wonders as to the sexual identity of its original owner: “Had it urged the war horse,2 or plied the needle?” (53). Having become a

117The Woolf, the Horse, and the Fox

woman, Orlando rejoices that she is not “prancing down Whitehall on a war-horse” (119) and later, while she is wandering through London’s Victorian-era streets, she “c[omes] to great open squares with black shiny, tightly buttoned statues of fat men in the middle, and war horses prancing, and columns rising and fountains falling and pigeons fl utter-ing” (203), suggesting that the setting actually is Whitehall, which is intrinsically both a massive display of military history and a site of concentrated power to wage war. Lady Orlando seems here to have come upon the Horse Guards and may be passing a statue of Charles I on horseback as she walks in the direction of Trafalgar Square where the fi gure of Admiral Nelson stands erect atop a pillar.

In Jacob’s Room there are specifi c coded allusions to the impending First World War as related to horses. One particularly poignant instance in the novel is the passing men-tion of “Th e Twentieth Hussars” (89), the cavalry unit in which Cecil Woolf and Philip Woolf, Virginia Woolf ’s brothers-in-law, both served in the Great War. Cecil was killed in the Battle of Cambrai, and his brother Philip was wounded by the same shell (see Hussey 387; see also Levenback 19). Clara Durrant, hosting a gathering, introduces two of her guests to each other, and it is in their idle party chit-chat that the army unit is mentioned:

“You shall sit by my mother,” said Clara. “Everybody seems to come in here. ... Mr. Calthorp, let me introduce you to Miss Edwards.”“Are you going away for Christmas?” said Mr. Calthorp.“If my brother gets his leave,” said Miss Edwards.“What regiment is he in?” said Mr. Calthorp.“Th e Twentieth Hussars,” said Miss Edwards. (89)

Ironically, the word “war” itself actually never occurs in Jacob’s Room, but it is cleverly im-bedded in various ways, including the three middle letters of Miss Edwards’s proper name.

Th e historical impact of the Great War specifi cally on horses is documented in the per-manent exhibition of the International Museum of the Horse at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington. Th ere, a plaque entitled “Th e Horse in World War I[:] 1914-1918,”3 states:

It is estimated that some six million horses served [in the war] and substantial numbers of these were killed. By 1914, the British had only 20,000 horses and the United States was called upon to supply the allied forces with remounts. In the four years of the war, the United States exported nearly a million horses to Europe. Th is seriously depleted the number of horses in America. When the American Expeditionary Force entered the war, it took with it an additional 182,000 horses. Of these, 60,000 were killed and only a scant 200 were returned to the United States. In spite of the innovations of World War I, one reality re-mained the same; the horse was the innocent victim.In one year, British veterinary hospitals treated 120,000 horses for wounds or diseases. Like human combatants, horses required ambulances and fi eld veteri-nary hospitals to care for the sick and injured. Th e motorized horse van was fi rst used as an equine ambulance on the Western Front. (http://www.imh.org/legacy-of-the-horse/the-horse-in-world-war-i-1914-1918/)


A British website that addresses the history of World War I notes that “such was the use of hors-es on the Western Front, that over 8 million died on all sides fi ghting in the war. Two and a half million horses were treated in veterinary hospitals with about two million being suffi ciently cured that they could return to duty” (http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/horses_in_world_war_one.htm). Indeed, the tragedy of this vast slaughter of horses seems almost unimaginable.

Th e fox has been subjected to slaughter in a diff erent way. Th e fox is targeted victim of the fox-hunt,4 a venerated bloodsport. Th e fox itself has a complicated relationship with both the domesticated hunting horse and the accompanying hounds. Foxes, as wild animals, however, cannot generally be exploited in the same ways as horses (or, of course, dogs). Th us, one can view the fox in both Jacob’s Room and Orlando as a motif of freedom, an autonomous creature, defi antly unshackled, and not at all constrained by the “slave-woman-dog” troika of abuse noted above. I hope to establish that Woolf ’s references to the fox confi rm this claim.

Aligning and analyzing various patterns of horse and fox motifs in both Jacob’s Room and Orlando, it becomes evident that horses are generally (though not always) depicted as domestic animals, while foxes are consistently shown to be truly wild at heart—and danger-ous even when in captivity. Fascinated and bewitched by his treacherous Russian love inter-est, Sasha, Orlando describes his object of desire in ways exquisitely ambiguous with regard to identity and sexuality alike: “a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds” (28). Again referencing the fox, Sasha is compared to Orlando’s dangerous pet of yore—”a white Russian fox, . . . a creature soft as snow with teeth of steel, which bit [Orlando] savagely” (33). I should note that it is unclear in either Jacob’s Room or Orlando as to whether any given fox reference is linked to male or female biology5—a factor that makes Sasha’s own sexual indeterminacy even more pronounced and suggests that the fox is not merely a creature but a marker of ambiguous diff erence.

Like the ambiguous fox in both Jacob’s Room and Orlando, horses are not merely rep-resented as living animals. Th ey are imbued with the imaginary. Mrs. Jarvis in Jacob’s Room, melancholy and suff ering from extreme ennui, entertains fantasies of “phantom horsemen galloping” over the moors where she wanders (25). Similarly, the narrator observes that Jacob, while alone in Greece, indulges in delirious fl ights of imagination, evidencing “the wild horse in us” (149; see also discussion below). And as a young boy, Orlando, day-dreaming, imagines that the root of his favorite oak tree on which he reclines “was the back of a great horse that he was riding” (15)—an image which fairly obviously alludes to sexual arousal and, implicitly, to psychoanalytic interpretations of sexual fantasy.

Th e horse has other strong sexual resonances in both Jacob’s Room and Orlando. Jane de Gay, in Virginia Woolf ’s Novels and the Literary Past, briefl y discusses the horse motifs in Jacob’s Room in relation to classical traditions. As she notes, in Phaedrus, a work Jacob is explicitly reading, Socrates “likens the soul to a charioteer driving two horses, one virtuous the other wanton” (de Gay 82). De Gay, quoting a passage from the novel, also observes that Jacob “ha[s] been seen riding a horse which becomes part of him: ‘as if your own body ran into the horse’s body and it was your own forelegs grown with his that sprang’” (de Gay 82). And reinforcing my own argument, de Gay, when she interprets this passage as evidence that “Jacob wrestles with the temptations of the fl esh in his relationships with women,” strongly suggests that there is an undercurrent of sexuality in the horse motif (de Gay 82).

Jacob’s imaginary fusion with his horse in a fox-hunt also links him to the ancient Centaurs of Greek myth, notorious for their lustful, unruly ways, including profl igate


indulgence in drunkenness and rape, characteristics that manifest themselves in milder forms in Jacob’s own behavior. When, as noted above, the narrator describes Jacob on his jaunt through Greece, observing that “Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us” (149), she also implicitly invokes the passions aroused during Jacob’s earlier fox-hunting experience when he fuses with his steed:

To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have — positively—a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang—there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often. (149)

Jacob can be considered something of a metaphorical stallion himself considering that, by the end of the novel, he has apparently fathered at least two children, one with Florinda and the other with Sandra Wentworth Williams. And, perhaps not surprisingly, he ultimately lets all his lovers “go hang”—perhaps taking after his father, who had also “run a little wild” (13).

De Gay links the horse motif, as have many other scholars, to Clara Durrant’s panic attack which occurs when she is in Hyde Park near the statue of Achilles honoring the Duke of Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. As de Gay states, Clara sees “a riderless horse running past which, according to the Phaedrus, implies uncontrolled desire and spiritual chaos—an image encapsulating the onset of war and presaging Jacob’s death,” and, as de Gay subsequently observes, the poignant becomes risible when another character, Julia Eliot, no-tices that the runaway horse is being pursued by a “little man . . . pounding behind with his breeches dirty” (de Gay 82). Yet, the horse’s mad dash does not lead to its freedom—rather, the elegant animal remains saddled despite having unseated the rider and soon will experi-ence the humiliated rider’s mortifying weight again. Further, the rider may well punish the horse for its daring dash toward autonomy. Th e disobedient horse is enslaved and ultimately devoid of options. Given the devastating massacre of horses in World War I and Britain’s voracious demand for new animals, one speculates that this horse, too, may die at the front.

Th e horse in Jacob’s Room is also associated subtly elsewhere with transgressive and secretive sexuality. Laura Doyle points to the conventions of evasive sexual categorization in the novel, not-ing that Jacob’s and Clara Durrant’s gossipy acquaintances assiduously avoid outright reference to Richard Bonamy’s homosexuality, instead calling him “a dark horse” (Doyle 549; see JR 163).

Linking the horse to the fox most directly are the specifi c references to fox-hunting in Jacob’s family. In the novel, Jacob’s father, Seabrook Flanders, prior to his marriage: “had bro-ken horses, ridden to hounds, farmed a few fi elds, and run a little wild” (13), as noted above regarding sexual adventures. On the maternal side, Lady Rocksbier, Betty Flanders’s relative, “had been a great rider to hounds” (104) and Jacob himself “rode to hounds — after a fashion, for he hadn’t a penny” (163), all in pursuit of the wily fox. And Jacob’s fl eeting transaction with the prostitute Laurette includes a brief conversation regarding how, once upon a time, this woman (now a sex worker) had the status and wherewithal to have ridden to the hounds but, by implication, can certainly no longer be invited to dinner by the horsy set (see 105 for a description of them). Th is passing reference is reminiscent of both Jane Goldman’s “dog-slave-woman” troika and Orlando’s reference to “a dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards.”

Th e specifi c word “fox” occurs four times in Jacob’s Room (aside, that is, from two references to Charles James Fox, the eighteenth century Whig statesman [89; 151]). Th ere


are three references to the creature itself (22, 140) and one hyphenated mention of “fox-hunting gentlemen” (140). Th ere are also two references to wild foxgloves (52, 56), which grow on the moors and dangle their downward-facing bell-shaped fl owers, attracting bees (56). Th ese plants not only share the suggestive name of the fox itself but perhaps may lim-inally also remind the reader of the implicitly sexualized signifi cance of gloves, an argument delineated in Kathryn Simpson’s “Th e Paradox of the Gift: Gift-Giving as a Disruptive Force in Mrs. Dalloway.” Th e fi rst mention of actual foxes6 occurs early in Jacob’s Room:

An old cottage woman living alone, high up, had told him of a purple butterfl y which came every summer to her garden. Th e fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she told him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always see two badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like two boys fi ghting, she said. (22)

I have argued elsewhere that the wrestling badgers are homosexually coded (see Neverow, “Transgressive”), the episode being echoed later in the novel when Richard Bonamy and Jacob get into a kerfuffl e while another elderly woman, Mrs. Papworth, the charwoman, eavesdrops from the scullery, wondering, in regard to “Women,” “what Sanders and her gentleman did in that line” (106). Th e passage is aligned with the playful puppy dog motif in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) of Septimus and Evans wrestling (see Jensen 173). It seems that the reference to the fox cubs falls into the same category. In both Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway, the recurrent motif of intimate, playful behavior representing emotional and sexual bonding alludes to traumatic experiences in the Great War (whether symbolically between foxes or badgers or in terms of plot development between young men). In Jacob’s Room, these encounters foreshadow the hor-rors to come while in Mrs. Dalloway, the references allude to those who have already made the so-called ultimate sacrifi ce (or have witnessed these deaths in Septimus’s case).

Th e fox cubs play on the moors, in the habitat where the foxgloves grow. In a research paper entitled “Sexual Deviants on the Moor: Transgressive Love in Emily Brontë’s Wuther-ing Heights and Virginia Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room,” Michelle Gould, a graduate student at South-ern Connecticut State University, has argued convincingly that the moors themselves are the site of sexual liberation, the only place where Mrs. Jarvis and Mrs. Flanders can at last be freed from heterosexual constraints, allowing them to discover and express their desires.

To pursue their nocturnal adventure, Mrs. Jarvis and Mrs. Flanders must pass through an actual gate into the wild. Encouraged by her friend, Betty agrees to go for a late evening walk, and the narrator notes suggestively that “it was years since [Betty] had opened the orchard gate and gone out on Dods Hill after dinner” (138; see Neverow, “Return”). Earlier in the novel, when the narrator describes Betty Flanders’s thought process and her concomitant behavior as she rejects Mr. Floyd’s marriage off er, the gate is also mentioned: “How could I think of marriage!” [Betty] said to herself bitterly, as she fastened the gate with a piece of wire” (18). But now, years later, Mrs. Flanders and her friend are crossing a restrictive boundary and, one may argue, are entering a zone that is not controlled or restricted by patriarchy (see, for example, Showalter).

In their transgressive nighttime wanderings, the two women, as they stealthily enjoy forbidden erotic pleasure, are aligned with the fox (or foxes?)7 (see also Neverow, “Re-turn”), for the fox itself appears only on the moors, in its natural habitat, a space beyond social constraints—and beyond gates. In the passage describing the two women together on


the moors at midnight, the narrator twice directly references the activities of the fox, thereby bracketing a specifi c mention of churchgoing “fox-hunting gentlemen” (133), while describ-ing the natural world in the present tense. It is unclear whether just one or two foxes share the moonlight with the two women. In the fi rst reference, “a fox steals out from behind the gorse bushes,” and in the second, “A fox pads stealthily” (133), but it could be the same fox.

Th ere may also be a subtle frisson of foxy irony regarding Betty’s house-cat Topaz, so named for his orange-red fur and directly associated with Mr. Floyd, her rejected suitor: “Poor Topaz,” [Betty] said (for Mr. Floyd’s kitten was now a very old cat, a little mangy behind the ears, and one of these days would have to be killed) . . . and she smiled, thinking how she had had him gelded, and how she did not like red hair in men. Smiling, she went into the kitchen” (18). Betty smugly anticipates euthanizing Topaz and implicitly associates castrating the cat with rejecting Mr. Floyd’s marriage off er. Intriguingly, the color of Topaz’s marmalade fur is also very similar to that of a red fox’s pelt. Th us, while Topaz, a neutered feline, is a household pet subjugated to Betty’s will, Betty and Mrs. Jarvis are able to go a bit wild and achieve, however briefl y, the autonomy of the fox at liberty on the moors.

In regard to fox references, there may be a suggestive hint in Woolf ’s verb choice. Th e narrator notes that the fox pads about the moors. “To pad,” of course, means “to walk with or as if with padded feet” (like the pads on a fox’s paws) but is also associated with a colloquial phrase from the late eighteenth century—“making a fox-paw”—which Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English suggests is probably “a deliberate perversion of ‘faux pas’” (“fox [or fox’s] paw”; see also Farmer and Henley, “foxed”). Th e word “pad,” as John S. Farmer and William Ernest Henley note, has mul-tiple meanings, one being slang for a robbery committed on foot—while another variant is a reference to a bed, or “pad.” In this instance, the reference to the fox’s padded paw may also be a deliberate and layered pun since the “fox paw” means, and with regard to women specifi cally, “carelessly allowing oneself to be seduced” (423), and the “pad” suggests trans-gressions appropriate to wandering on foot on the moors in the moonlight.

Th e narrator’s bracketed reference to “fox-hunting gentlemen” (133) is the only explicit mention of the fox as a target. Th ere are, however, other instances in Jacob’s Room associat-ing horses with the bloodsport without actually identifying the elusive object of desire, the desperate fox that fl ees the riders, the horses and the pack of hounds. In Mrs. Dalloway, Sep-timus Smith’s escalating madness transforms him from a domesticated dog playing with his canine companion to an isolated and victimized wild fox literally being hounded to death. Septimus envisions himself as a creature relentlessly pursued: “Human nature, in short, was on him—the repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils. Holmes was on him” (90). Dr. Holmes, one of Septimus’s medical consultants, literally pursues Septimus to his death as hounds do in the chase (146). Th is motif of the hunted animal vividly depicts the persecu-tions and suff ering of those who are viewed as sexually transgressive.

As in Jacob’s Room, the fox in Orlando is associated primarily with the moor. In an inventory of Orlando’s family wealth, the narrator ticks off : “the heath[,]…the forest, the pheasant and the deer, the fox, the badger and the butterfl y” [15]). In Jacob’s Room, the same triad of fox, badger and butterfl y are mentioned in the sexually charged description of wrestling animals noted above. And, while there are no references to deer in this section of Jacob’s Room, the narrator’s description of Mrs. Jarvis resonates strongly with the pheas-ant mentioned in Orlando: “Short, dark, with kindling eyes, a pheasant’s feather in her hat,


Mrs. Jarvis was just the sort of woman to lose her faith upon the moors” (25). Elsewhere in Orlando the fox is again linked to the pheasant when, now a woman, Orlando, back in England, “hear[ing] a fox bark in the woods, and the clutter of a pheasant trailing through the branches” (130), is inspired to begin to work again on her poem, Th e Oak Tree.

Th e horse motif in Orlando has specifi cally been linked to sexual ambivalence. Sherron K. Knopp in her 1988 article, “‘If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?’: Sapphism and the Subversive-ness of Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando,” notes that, after Orlando’s transformation into a woman:

Orlando fl ees to the moor, breaks an ankle, and resolves to die as ‘nature’s bride,’ until she is discovered by a man on horseback: “Madam,” the man cried, leaping to the ground, “you’re hurt!” “I’m dead, Sir!” she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged. Th e morning after as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. It was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire. (31 [Orlando 183])

When Shelmerdine on horseback rescues Orlando after she has broken her ankle, Orlando immediately jilts her fantasy of a union with nature for a conventional marriage that will allow her sexual freedom without negative social consequences, an arrangement obviously similar to that of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. Th e horse here is depicted as domesticated and reliable, associated with social expectations and accepted sexual stan-dards rather than with acts of defi ance or transgression.

In contrast, when Mrs. Jarvis and Betty Flanders meander together stealthy and un-bridled, it is only outside the garden gate on the moor where the foxes wander freely that they each discover something satisfying—Mrs. Jarvis, no longer discontented, suddenly fi nds it “diffi cult to think of herself to-night,” and Betty Flanders, leaning down to pick up a pebble, seemingly discovers something that makes Mrs. Jarvis think that “Sometimes people do fi nd things” (139). What do the two women really fi nd? It’s up to the reader to determine. Evidently, Mrs. Jarvis and Betty Flanders are able, at least briefl y, to enjoy intimacy and repose outside the limits of society in a zone where only rarely does noise disrupt the peace of the moors or the hunt disturb the fox:

Still, as Mrs. Jarvis said, stepping out on to the moors, “How quiet it is!” Quiet at mid-day, except when the hunt scatters across it; quiet in the afternoon, save for the drifting sheep; at night the moor is perfectly quiet. A garnet brooch has dropped into its grass. A fox pads stealthily. A leaf turns on its edge. Mrs. Jarvis, who is fi fty years of age, reposes in the camp in the hazy moonlight. (140)

To conclude, the horse, for the most part, seems to represent conventionality and domes-ticity, although there are moments of rebellion, intense desire or fantasy associated with the equine. In contrast, the fox’s stealth and wiliness points toward possibilities that can hardly be articulated.

Notes

1. Regarding specifi c references to horses in Woolf ’s work, see also Clarke and Marcus.


2. Th e term “war horse” is not hyphenated here (53) in the edition used; it is, however, hyphenated in the phrase subsequently quoted (119).

3. Th e subtitle of this plaque is “Th eirs Was not to Reason Why,” a wry echo of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s word-ing in his jingoistic Crimean War poem “Th e Charge of the Light Brigade.” Th e phrase suggests that, while soldiers can at least desert (however dishonorably), the horses have no options for resistance whatsoever.

4. Fox-hunting, still practiced in the United States, was purportedly banned in 2002 in Scotland and 2004 in England and Wales. One might think that foxes would actually be protected by such legislation; however, since they continue to be regarded as pests, the provision only prohibits the hounds from chasing the foxes to death and does not ban shooting the fox once the hounds have fl ushed the prey out. In the nineteenth century, as many as 100,000 foxes were killed per year in hunts (Impact on the Countryside.). Prior to the 2004 ban, 21,000 to 25,000 foxes were killed in registered hunts, approximately fi ve percent of the fox population (Foxhunting). According to another source, more foxes are now killed in the Scotland hunts than were previously because they have a lower chance of survival and are shot to death in larger numbers (Ironic Consequence Of Scottish Fox Hunt Ban).

5. Using Mark Hussey’s invaluable CD-ROM to search Woolf ’s work for fox references, I found only one mention of a “vixen,” a specifi cally female fox. Th e reference occurs at the very end of the published version of Between the Acts in the rather violent union of Giles and Isa (148) and, in the same passage, as Mark Hussey pointed out at the 2010 Woolf conference, Giles is specifi cally referenced as the male animal of the species—the “dog fox” (148). As one website points out with regard to diff erentiation, “there is very little sexual dimorphism in Red foxes (i.e.[,] the males and females look very similar)” (Red Fox).

6. It is highly probable that, aside from the white Russian fox in Orlando, the ordinary foxes Woolf mentions are the red variety (see Red Fox).

7. Deborah Garrard has suggested that there may be parallels between Woolf ’s fox motifs and David Gar-nett’s curious illustrated Lady into Fox (1922). Th at the fox motif may be associated with lesbian desire is reinforced by D. H. Lawrence’s “Th e Fox,” which was published on 11 April 1923 and thus could not have infl uenced Woolf ’s work since Jacob’s Room was published on 22 October 1922.

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19th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Elizabeth F. Evans and Sarah Cornish. Clemson University Digital Press, 2010. 154–160.

—. “Th e Return of the Great Goddess: Immortal Virginity, Sexual Autonomy and Lesbian Possibility in Jacob’s Room.” Woolf Studies Annual 10 (2004): 203-32.

Partridge, Eric. “Fox (or fox’s) paw.” Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: Colloquialisms and Catch-phrases, Solecisms and Catachreses, Nicknames and Vulgarisms. Ed. Paul Beale. 8th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1984.

Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes). <http://www.wildlifeonline.me.uk/red_fox.html#length>. 10 Aug. 2010. Web.Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 179-205.Simpson, Kathryn. “Th e Paradox of the Gift: Gift-Giving as a Disruptive Force in Mrs. Dalloway.” Woolf Studies

Annual 11 (2005): 53-75.Vanita, Ruth. “‘Love Unspeakable’: Th e Uses of Allusion in Flush.” Virginia Woolf. Th emes and Variations. Ed.

Vara Neverow-Turk and Mark Hussey. New York: Pace University Press, 1993. 248-57.Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Annotated with an Introduction by Melba Cuddy-Keane. Gen. Ed. Mark

Hussey. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005.—. Jacob’s Room. Annotated with an Introduction by Vara Neverow. Gen. Ed. Mark Hussey. Orlando: Harcourt,

2008.—. Mrs. Dalloway. Annotated with an Introduction by Bonnie Kime Scott. Gen. Ed. Mark Hussey. Orlando:

Harcourt, 2008.—. Orlando. Annotated with an Introduction by Maria Di Battista. Gen Ed. Mark Hussey. Orlando: Harcourt,

2006.

THE DOGS THAT THEREFORE WOOLF FOLLOWS: SOME CANINE SOURCES FOR A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

IN NATURE AND ART

by Jane Goldman

The saturnine dog in Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I is an antecedent to the dog-woman narrator in A Room of One’s Own (1929), I have argued (Goldman 2007). Situating a dog at the scene of scholarship and creativity, both works test the

boundaries between human and animal. I argue that Woolf ’s signifying dog follows Dür-er’s dog and also follows other accounts of Dürer’s dog. Following here means both fol-lowing chronologically—coming after—but also following the example of—the fi gure or pattern of—that is following suffi ciently enough to recognize Dürer’s dog as an allegorical antecedent but also departing from it, refi guring, or resignifying it. (Goldman 2010). Furthermore, Woolf ’s dog-woman narrator, suspended between human and animal, an-ticipates Jacques Derrida, naked before the pitiless gaze of his domestic cat, and asking: “Who am I, therefore? Who is it that I am (following)?”—punning on the French “je suis”—I am and I follow (Derrida). Is the human something that is the animal or some-thing that follows or even supercedes the animal?

Derrida identifi es an “abyssal rupture [which] doesn’t describe two edges” (emphasis added) between Human and Animal. He claims: “beyond the edge of the so-called hu-man, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than ‘Th e Animal’ or ‘Animal Life’ there is already […] a multiplicity of organizations of relations between liv-ing and dead […] among realms that are more and more diffi cult to dissociate by means of the fi gures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death” (Derrida 30). For Derrida, anyone who claims the distinct edge between Human and Animal,

claiming thus to designate every living thing that is held not to be human (man as rational animal […] who says “I” and takes himself to be the subject of a statement that he proff ers on the subject of the said animal, etc.) […] he utters an asinanity [bêtise]. He avows without avowing it, he declares just as a disease is declared by means of a symptom, he off ers up for diagnosis the statement “I am uttering an asinanity.” And this “I am uttering an asinanity” should confi rm not only the animality that he is disavowing but his complicit, continued, and organized involvement in a veritable war of the species. (Derrida 31)

Woolf ’s dog-woman, on the contrary, does not eff ace the limit between Man and Ani-mal, nor does she ignore the abyssal rupture identifi ed by Derrida, but she contributes to “multiplying its fi gures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply” (Derrida 29). Woolf ’s dog-woman may resemble Derrida’s “animal fi gures”—“without doubt something other than fi gures or characters in a fable”—more, as he says of his essay “White Mythology,” “the meta-morphoses of the fi gural […] follow[ing] the movement of tropes and of rhetoric, the


explanation of concept by means of metaphor, by prowling around animal language,” and “welcomed” or poised, as he says of “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” “on the threshold of sexual diff erence” (Derrida 36).

I would like to explore some readings of the dog and other creatures in Dürer’s en-graving—including some readings that were available to Woolf. Dürer’s engraving has “vexed to nightmare” generations of critics, writers and artists. As a recent journal editor, inviting “new looks” on Dürer, put it: the Melencolia I “simply will not go away” (Lears 129). According to the great iconographer Erwin Panofsky, it was

the fi rst representation of the ‘Artist’s Melancholy,’ and for centuries it has in-spired writers and artists to meditate on its jumble of meanings-embodied in the clutter of ordinary and esoteric objects; the cadaverous dog, drowsing putto, and banner-bearing bat; the mysterious play of light and darkness; and, above all, the bulky, brooding angel whose sex remains unclear. (Lears 1)

Walter Benjamin helps us to understand the metanarrative status of the print (Benjamin 152; Goldman, “Desmond” 181-182). But Panofsky’s foundational modern reading of Dürer, whose exposition of Melencolia I remains the most paraphrased in scholarship (see Doorly), helps us to do what every viewer of the print is obliged to do: put the images into words and to recognize the provenance of these images. He describes the dog as “a half-starved shivering hound” (Panofsky 156), and both the dog and the bat as “not merely emblems but, even more, living creatures, one squeaking with evident ill-will, the other shrivelled up with general misery” (Panofsky 162). I would like to dispute these assertions about the “living creatures”—not least that the bat Panofsky sees is a bat at all.

If Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own is indeed an intertext with Dürer’s Melencolia, I suggest that it is further infl ected by reference to readings—or verbal accounts—of that engraving by two Victorians, the critic John Ruskin and the poet James Th omson (B.V.), whose works were in Woolf ’s library and also cited in her writings. Ruskin understands the main design of Melencolia I to represent human labor: “Th e labour indicated is in the daily work of men. Not the inspired or gifted labour of the few (it is labour connected with the sciences, not with the arts), shown in its four chief functions: thoughtful, faith-ful, calculating and executing” (Ruskin 244). But if human labor is the subject, no human is actually represented in the engraving. Ruskin understands the winged androgynous looking “spirit” to be a feminine fi gure or representation of human labor, but not itself a human subject (as does Panofsky). How could she be human? “She has eagles’ wings, and is crowned with fair leafage of spring” (Ruskin 245). Th e androgyny of the fi gure has sometimes been noted by critics, but usually in acknowledging that the inhuman and winged feminine form is the allegory of the (always and already) masculine artistic subjec-tivity. A recent observer even ignores her eagles’ wings in making this assumption: “What ails this fl ummoxed technician, this hermaphroditic lump surrounded by the detritus of a defunct cult?” Trevor Winkfi eld asks. “Trapped as he is in female attire and crowned by a hedge, he looks the personifi cation of Worry, not Melancholia. In fact the bat-held banner bearing that title could well be just another red herring, one among the many that plague this particular rebus” (Lears 5). I will return to the “the bat-held banner” later, but it is worth noting Winkfi eld’s articulation of the comedic aspect of Dürer’s melancholic

127The Dog that Therefore Woolf Follows

whose wings are indeed so negligible as to render her more like an overweight man in drag than like Ruskin’s eagle-winged vehicular “spirit”—but perhaps that’s Dürer’s point about melancholia as the failure of creative transcendence.

Meanwhile, in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf describes an eagle-winged chimaerical feminine fi gure laboring in the margins between history and poetry: “a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet” (AROO 66). Th is “monster” represents the combined failure of either discipline to represent real, historically situated women and also has something in its gene pool of Horace’s famous chimaera in the opening lines of the Ars Poetica. Elsewhere in A Room of One’s Own the evasive narrator, in the temporary persona of the fi ctional Mary Beton, discusses the fi ctional Mary Carmichael’s fi rst novel, Life’s Adventure, in which she reads the scandalous sentences that give evidence

that women, like men, have other interests besides the perennial interests of domesticity. “Chloe liked Olivia. Th ey shared a laboratory together. . . .” I read on and discovered that these two young women were engaged in mincing liver, which is, it seems, a cure for pernicious anaemia; although one of them was mar-ried and had—I think I am right in stating—two small children. Now all that, of course, has had to be left out, and thus the splendid portrait of the fi ctitious woman is much too simple and much too monotonous. (AROO 125)

Are the laboring Chloe and Olivia, mincing liver in their laboratory rather than chop-ping suet in the kitchen, a feminist or even Sapphic satire on Dürer’s (or Ruskin’s Dürer’s) winged Melancholia and her putto sidekick? Th e scene begs many questions, not least regarding the provenance of the liver. Is it from a human or an animal? Are they students of anatomy? Woolf ’s narrator speaks of material half-elided at this point in Life’s Adven-ture. And what precisely of her own fi rst drafts Woolf herself decided “had to be left out” from this point in A Room of One’s Own is now available to her readers in the published manuscript version edited by S.P. Rosenbaum. In the corresponding MS pages following the Chloe liked Olivia refrain are numerous inscriptions and allusions to Quennell’s off en-sive sentence and numerous repetitions of its deeply off ensive term, “limitations” (Woolf, Women and Fiction: passim; Goldman 2009: 442-451). Th e subjectivity of Woolf ’s narra-tor I have argued is suspended (“‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. […] (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please--it is not a matter of any importance)”) (AROO 7); and her status on the margins between animal and human is everywhere inscribed in distinctly canid fi gurations. But given the gender politics of the iconographic legacy that Dürer has left us for inscribing the subjectivity of the scholar-artist in studio, perhaps it is not so surprising that Woolf ’s attempt to represent the woman scholar-artist in studio borders on the canine.

Alice A. Kuzniar, ignoring the inhuman wings and the gender politics of artistic subjectivity, nevertheless discusses Dürer’s Melencolia as a human and presses the “resem-blances” between this woman and her hound (17, 18). Finding animal muteness para-doxically to render the human Melencolia mute, Kuzniar goes on to ask: “could it be that among all the imponderables on which she broods is that of the radical alterity of animal being, despite its embodiment in the mundane hound at her feet or despite its physi-cal immediacy as it presses up against her body?” (Kuzniar 18). Despite mirroring one


another, Melencolia and her hound remain in Kuzniar’s reading stranded on either side of the human-animal divide. Reaching this conclusion Kuzniar is herself mute on the inhuman attribute of Melencolia’s wings. But the proximity of a dog to an angel may be Dürer’s very topos; and we might compare Andrea del Verrochio’s painting Tobias and the Angel (c. 1470-80) in which the human protagonist, Tobias, is accompanied by the Archangel Raphael and by his pet dog.1 If the third walking beside the dog and the angel is human here, then the third sitting beside the dog and the angel in Melencolia I is another unearthly winged being, the putto. Given the unearthly and divine qualities associated with wingedness, can it really be that “mortality” is indeed what the winged Melencolia “shares most with the animal” (Kuzniar 19)? In order to reach this view, then, canine crit-ics must employ their fi ngers to elide those wings (however ineff ectual or residual they may seem). Kuzniar is obliged to turn to Franz Kafka’s fi ction to consider what it would “mean to coalesce human and animal into the same being” (Kuzniar 20), yet Dürer’s etching may yield quite diff erent readings of the human-animal divide if we consider the precise morphology of his fi gures.

If the winged fi gure of melancholy and the companion putto are obviously con-structed fi gurative emblems, Dürer’s dog and bat, Panofsky reminds us, are of a diff erent order: “not merely emblems but, even more, living creatures” (Panofsky 156). But what if the dog is the only image to be both emblem and living creature? Is that winged crepus-cular creature sporting the title of its own engraving in any sense a realistic depiction of a recognizable species of bat? Clearly, with Ferdinand de Saussure and Rene Magritte we can all recognize “Ceci n’est pas une roussette,” but the focus of critical debate is the mor-phology of Dürer’s emblems. Whereas the dog’s breed has been confi rmed by many critics to be wolf-hound, the bat fails to match the description of any bat found in Nature (or indeed on the Internet!). Winkfi eld is right to ask: “And do bats really have tails? And why are those wings so robust?” (qtd in Lears 5). Th e answer to his fi rst question is “No they do not—or at least not tails like that one!” (Th e long-tailed bat appears to be misnamed and the mouse-tailed bat has a long skinny tail . . . like a mouse’s). Th e answer to the second is perhaps, “Presumably because they have to hold up the sign saying ‘Melencolia I’!” Is the “I” here, as some scholars suspect, not a numeral but a letter, and the word for the fi rst-person?

If the bat is not a bat, then what is it? According to Th omson’s Th e City of Dreadful Night, it is a chimaera. Th omson seems to be the fi rst to notice that the morphology of Dürer’s bat emblem is not that of a bat but a “batlike” chimaerical creature, a “snaky imp, dog-headed” (Th omson XXI ll. 40, 39). And if this is so, then the “keen wolf-hound sleep-ing undistraught” (XXI l.21) is now the solitary example of Panofsky’s “living creature” em-blem. Th omson’s poem also seems correct in identifying the imp as cynocephalous—dog-headed. Acknowledging this complicates our reading of the dog itself. Is the dog-headed, snake-tailed and winged creature somehow representative of the slumbering dog in another state—its Benjaminian necromantic slumber? Unlike “Th e grave and solid infant perched beside, / With open winglets that might bear a dove” (Th omson XXI ll.23-24), or the house-wifely fi gure of melancholia with her “impotent” and “folded” eagle wings (XXI ll.27, 26), the “snaky imp, dog-headed” ascends eff ortlessly on its melancholia emblazoned wings.

Yet where are these fi gures I am attempting to describe? Somewhere in the margins between Dürer’s image and Th omson’s poem. Th e published poem, furthermore, elides


another verbal rendering of Dürer’s image by Th omson which we might bring into play. Th omson’s biographer, Henry Stephens Salt, records this earlier draft, as it was written in a letter to William Rossetti (January 30, 1874) enquiring about the status of the dog in Dürer’s print. Salt reproduces it as “an instance of how Th omson could jest grimly on the humorous side of very serious subjects”:

Wishing to bring this great fi gure into a poem, and rapidly enumerating the ac-cessories which help to identify it, I fi nd myself bothered by the animal prone at her feet. Ruskin in one place terms this a wolf, and in another a sleeping wolf-hound. […] For myself, I have been used to consider it probably a sheep, and as dead, not sleeping; in fact, a creature awaiting dissection, and suggesting anatomy as among the pursuits of the labouring and studious Titaness. Can you, who are an art-adept, resolve the question, and tranquilise my agi-tated mind? My animal stanza runs thus:-

Words cannot picture her; […] Th e instruments of carpentry and science Scattered about her feet in strange alliance With the poor creature for dissection brought.

Must I, as Ruskin dictates, change this last into,

With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught—(a villainous make shift)? (Salt 78)

Aborted from the published version, this verbal depiction of the dog—or sheep—as dead and awaiting dissection reduces the animal to the reifi ed object of human instrumental science, and gives a blackly humorous explanation for its fl ying dog-headed chimaerical counterpart. In death it is transfi gured and ascends from the “pit” toward heaven. Given the powerful atheism communicated by Th omson’s City of Dreadful Night, a radically unstable, fragmentary pre-modernist text, in which one of its many dislocated speakers asserts, “Th ere is no God; no Fiend with names divine” (Th omson XIV l.40), we might understand the transfi gured and ascendant dog as an instance of adynaton, the classical rhetorical device employed to suggest impossibility, which often makes use of animal fi gures. For example, Matthew 19:24: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”; or the expression “Pigs might fl y!” Is Th omson’s rendition of Dürer’s engraving therefore suggesting that the dog has a much better chance than anyone else—in the picture or looking at it—of getting to heaven or reaching creative enlightenment? “Dogs might fl y?”

We know that Woolf was avidly reading Th omson’s works in January 1905 when she was also composing her “‘lecture’ for the Working women” of Morely College London.2 Th e experience prefi gures her lectures to women students at Cambridge University twenty-three years later, on “Women & Fiction,” out of which she drafted A Room of One’s Own. At the close of her manifesto she pointedly repeats the canine adynaton employed by Sir Arthur


Quiller-Couch to describe the impossibility of writing poetry in poverty as evidenced by the poets of the previous hundred years, including both Ruskin and James Th omson:

Browning was well to do […] and if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write Saul or Th e Ring and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. Th ere remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a mad-house, and James Th omson by the laudanum he took to drug disappoint-ment. Th ese are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault of our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years a dog’s chance. (AROO 161-162)

Woolf actually quotes Quiller-Couch’s “dog’s chance” adynaton again in the next para-graph, and then adapts it for feminism by demonstrating the historical record of women’s poverty, concluding “Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. Th at is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own” (AROO 163).

Dürer’s dog is a realistic enough rendition of Nature to be identifi ed as a Wolfhound; but is it denatured by Woolf ’s verbal engagement with Th omson’s poetic reinfl ection of it (and his speculation on its status as Nature Mort)? Th is complex of verbal and visual sources suggests Woolf ’s chimaeric signifying dog and dog-woman to be self-conscious artistic constructs, modernist-feminist satiric allegories, not realist attempts to represent Nature’s real creatures. But, A Room of One’s Own is also informed by another work known to Woolf, which documents a living canine woman. Th e “giant cucumber” (AROO 92), Woolf ’s lampoon of Margaret Cavendish (Duchess of Newcastle), overshadows intriguing subterranean allusions to Cavendish, including her graphic account, in Sociable Letters (1664), of “a Woman […] like a Shagg-dog […] a Doglike Creature”:

To tell you what Pastimes this City hath, they be several Sights and Shews, which are to be seen for Mony, for even Pastime is Bought; for at several times of the Year come hither Dancers on the Ropes, Tumblers, Juglers, Private Stage-Players, Mountebanks, Monsters, and several Beasts, as Dromedaries, Camels, Lions, Acting Baboons, and Apes, and many the like, which would be as Tedious to me to Relate as to See, for I would not take the pains to See them, unless some Few; amongst the rest there was a Woman brought to me, who was like a Shagg-dog, not in Shape, but Hair, as Grown all over her Body, which Sight stay’d in my Memory, not for the Pleasantness, but Strangeness, as she troubled my Mind a Long time, but at last my Mind kick’d her Figure out, bidding it to be gone, as a Dog-like Creature; and though I am of so Dull and Lazy a Nature, as seldom to take the Pains to See Unusual Objects, yet here coming an Italian Mountebank, who had with him several persons to Dance, and Act upon the open Stage, […]. (Letter 195; Cavendish 205-206)

If Woolf ’s signifying dog counts Dürer’s saturnine Wolfhound in her paternal forebears, her mother-line includes the Duchess’s shaggy dog-woman! Cavendish’s letter records her


impressions of a Flemish fairground curiosity, one of a number of “unusual objects” who are reifi ed performers and actors (human and animal) whose “Sights and Shews” may be bought: a hairy woman the troubling memory of whose strange alterity is transformed by Cavendish into a fi gure: “as she troubled my Mind a Long time, but at last my Mind kick’d her Figure out, bidding it to be gone, as a Dog-like Creature” (206). Notice how Cavendish’s mind transforms the recognizably human and living woman into the Dog-Like Creature, and in emphasizing these mental workings she forces a Cartesian rupture between mind and body, self and other, attempting to draw the line, the distinct edge between Human and Animal, and therefore she:

utters an asinanity [bêtise]. [She] avows without avowing it, [she] declares just as a disease is declared by means of a symptom, [she] off ers up for diagnosis the statement ‘I am uttering an asinanity.’ And this ‘I am uttering an asinanity’ should confi rm not only the animality that [she] is disavowing but [her] com-plicit, continued, and organized involvement in a veritable war of the species. (Derrida 31)

Yet in the context of Cavendish’s long syntactically proliferating sentences the crea-tures pile up, human and animal, in such a pell-mell that the asinanity of the speaking “I” is all too apparent. Cavendish’s self-conscious account of her fi gure-making is surely an open acknowledgement too of her asinanity—or caninicity. Ejected from Cavendish’s mind but forever inhabiting her text, her Dog-Like Creature may well be stalking Shake-speare’s sister too, along with Dürer’s doubled fl ying and melancholic dog, and Th omson’s dead dog, through the shifting terrain of A Room of One’s Own, “multiplying its fi gures” at the very—edgeless—site of “the common life, which is the real life, and not […] the little separate lives we live as individuals” (AROO 171). Woof! Woof!

Notes

1. I thank Karina Williamson and John Llewelyn for drawing my attention to this story and image. According to the catalogue of the National Gallery, London, which acquired it in 1867 (NG781, Room 57), “Tobias, a fi gure from the Old Testament Apocrypha, was the son of Tobit. Tobit was blinded by some sparrows’ drop-pings which fell into his eyes. He sent his son on a journey to receive some money which was owed to him. Accompanying Tobias were his guardian, the archangel Raphael, whom he thought was a mortal, and his dog. Tobias bathed in the river Tigris, where a giant fi sh leapt from the water. Raphael told him to catch it and when they returned home Tobias used the gall of the fi sh as a cure for his father’s blindness.” Th e dog is considered the work of the young Leonardo da Vinci who was apprenticed to Verrocchio.

2. It was on the subject of “Prose […] which does not commit me to anything. It amuses me rather to write, as I can say what I like, without fear of criticism, and the subject interests me—but Heaven knows if it will interest them” (PA 223).

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Th e Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 2003. Cavendish, Margaret. Sociable Letters. Ed. James Fitzmaurice. New York and London: Garland, 1997.Derrida, Jacques. Th e Animal Th at Th erefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.Doorly, Patrick. “Durer’s Melencolia I: Plato’s abandoned search for the beautiful.” Art Bulletin 86 (2004): 255-276.Goldman, Jane. “‘Ce chien est à moi’: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog.” Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007): 49-86.


—. “Desmond MacCarthy, Life and Letters (1928-35), and Bloomsbury Modernism.” Th e Oxford Critical and Cultural history of Modernist Magazines, Vol. 1: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955. Ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Th acker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 428-51.

—. “‘When dogs will become men’: Melancholia, Canine Allegories and Th eriocephalous Figures in Woolf ’s Urban Contact Zones.” Woolf and the City: Selected Papers of the Nineteenth Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Elizabeth F. Evans and Sarah E. Cornish. Clemson, South Carolina: Clemson University Digital Press, 2010. 180-88.

Kuzniar, Alice A. Melancholia’s Dog: Refl ections on Our Animal Kinship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.Lears, Jackson, et al. “Dürer’s Melencolia I: New Looks.” Raritan 25.3 (2006): 129-153.Panofsky, Erwin. Albrecht Dürer, Vol. 1. 3rd Ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948.Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. Vol. 5. London: Smith, Elder, 1860.Salt, Henry Stephens. Th e Life of James Th omson (B.V.). Revised Edition. London: Watts & Co., 1914.Th omson, James. Th e City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems. London: Reeves and Turner, 1880.Woolf, Virginia. A Passionate Apprentice: Th e Early Journals. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. London: Hogarth, 1990.—. A Room of One’s Own, London: Hogarth, 1929.—. Women and Fiction: Th e Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own. Ed. S.P. Rosenbaum. Oxford: Black-

well, 1992.

“THE BIRD IS THE WORD”: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND W. H. HUDSON, VISIONARY ORNITHOLOGIST 1

Diane F. Gillespie

My title “Th e Bird is the Word” dates me. It refers to a song from the 1960s that morphed into a surf-rock song, taken up more recently by the Family Guy and Big Bird on Sesame Street. What does it have to do with Virginia Woolf? It

came to mind when I was free-associating about nature and words. Next I recalled Woolf ’s famous comment in “A Sketch of the Past” (1939). It ends, “we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself ” (M0B: 72). If “the bird is the word” 2 and, more seriously, “we are the words,” then, the bird and we are one with each other and also with an authen-tic mode of expression.

Relevant scholarship examines Woolf ’s many bird images with their classical and me-dieval precedents and suggestions of continuity, community, or social commentary (e.g. Blyth, Ames, Leslie, Walker). As others note too, Woolf supported bird protection acts, but disliked the dogmatism and sentimentality of some proponents.3 Her graphic essay “Th e Plumage Bill” (1920) is a feminist response to those who blamed women’s feathered hats exclusively for the torture and extinction of whole species of birds (Abbot).4 More philosophical studies of Woolf and nature focus on language (e.g. Waller, Walker, Sultz-bach, Westling). Among all these insightful readings, however, are only brief references to British naturalist and ornithologist W. H. Hudson (1841–1922) (e.g. Blyth, Abbot, Walker). I want to use two of his books especially to create cultural contexts for Woolf ’s writing. When she reviewed Hudson’s memoir Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life in 1918, she linked his interest in birds with his fl ights of words. In her later fi ction, she re-envisioned Hudson’s attempt in his bird-fi lled 1904 novel Green Mansions to express oneness with nature.

PART I: “I WISH I HAD SEEN HIM.”—V. WOOLF (L2: 549)

In spite of diff erences in sex and socialization, age and reputation, Hudson and Woolf were surprisingly kindred spirits. Both had distinctive childhood experiences of non-ur-ban places that reverberate throughout their writing. Hudson’s early life in Argentina remained as vivid to him as summers in Cornwall were to Virginia Woolf. Both lost their mothers at a young age and married spouses who helped satisfy a need for nurturing and support.5 Both were educated and enthusiastic common readers. Without university degrees or positions, however, both defi ned themselves as outsiders—Hudson among aca-demic scientists in an adopted country and Woolf among academic, mostly male, biogra-phers and critics.6 Neither was conventionally religious, although both achieved a form of spirituality through sensory immersion in the living, natural world.

Both Hudson and Woolf were also observant walkers.7 Hudson’s path almost crossed Virginia Stephen’s in Cornwall in 1905. She had returned for a nostalgic summer vacation. In November of the same year, Hudson arrived. His study of the Cornish people, plants,


and especially birds resulted, in 1908, in his book, Th e Land’s End. Again in Cornwall ten years later, Hudson, elderly and in poor health, wrote the memoir Woolf reviewed.

Both also inherited nineteenth-century traditions of human domination that includ-ed collecting and classifying dead specimens (c.f. Alt, “Virginia,” 65). A good example is an 1885 painting by John Everett Millais. I would call it “Dead Birds,” but its real titles are Th e Ruling Passion, and later, Th e Ornithologist (Tomalin 129) [Figure 1]. As a boy in Argentina, Hudson hunted birds for the family table, and then made a meager living get-ting exotic bird skins for scien-tifi c collectors. Naturalistic in-terests also ran in the Stephen family and Virginia, with her siblings, hunted, chloroformed, and collected moths and butter-fl ies (PA 145).8 Yet both Hud-son and Woolf, who went on to observe a wide variety of living creatures in their natural envi-ronments, became advocates for those too often deemed inferior and powerless. When Hudson met scientifi c bird collectors in England, like “hummingbird Gould” shown invalided in the painting, their pride in their dusty collections of dead feathers disgusted him (Tomalin 109–10, 141–2). Although he ably described people, Hudson determined to defend the lives of beleaguered creatures of the natural world, especially birds. Woolf privileged wom-en’s neglected lives and thwarted aspirations (Alt,“Virginia” 65). Contemporary readers

therefore consider both Hudson and Woolf precur-sors of current environmental movements, ecological in the case of Hudson (Tomalin 25), ecofeminist in the case of Woolf (e.g. Waller 153–4, Walker 144).

Neither Virginia nor Leonard Woolf ever met Hudson. Leonard, who knew people who admired and described him, pictured Hudson as “a gentle, melancholy, charming, bird-like man” (Essays 76). Th e Woolfs’ books included a painting by Bryan Hook of Hudson feeding gulls (Birds in London) and a formal photograph of him used as a frontispiece in Far Away and Long Ago [Figure 2]. Although Virginia was to have been introduced to the man in person by Dorothy Brett who “adored” Hudson, this encounter never occurred. In 1922, the year he died, Virginia voiced her regrets: “I wish I had seen him,” she wrote (L2: 549).

Fig 1: John Everett Millais. Th e Ruling Passion, or Th e Ornithologist (1885).

Fig. 2: W. H. Hudson. Opie Ltd. Redruth. Frontispiece for Far Away and Long Ago (1918).

135“The Bird is the Word”

Clearly, however, the Woolfs read Hudson. Eight of his volumes remain today among their books: the 1918 memoir Virginia reviewed; 153 Letters from W. H. Hudson (1923) ed-ited by Edward Garnett and reviewed by Leonard; Hudson’s book on the Woolfs’ beloved south downs, Nature in Downland (1900);9 a 1923 edition of his essays, Idle Days in Patagonia (1893); 1924 editions of both Birds in London (1898) and Adventures Among Birds (1913); plus 1926 and 1927 editions of Hudson’s best-known novel, Green Mansions (1904).

PART II: “THAT MYSTERIOUS SPIRIT […] IN ALL NATURE, BUT IN BIRDS PARTICULARLY”—V. WOOLF (E2: 301)

Virginia Woolf wrote about Hudson’s memoir Far Away and Long Ago when she didn’t feel like taking on projects “at command of a telegram” from the Times Literary Supplement (D1: 197). “For a wonder,” she recorded in her diary, “the book, Hudson, was worth reading” (D1: 197).10 In her review, Woolf reveals her fascination with his creative process. Hudson describes the “marvelous experience,” of feeling simultaneously ill with a howling Cornwall storm outside, and “thousands of miles away” in Argentina, “happy again with that ancient long-lost and now recovered happiness!” (Far 4). His vivid experi-ence made Woolf recall her own sense that “between or behind the dense and involved confusion” of “grown-up life,” were “chinks of pure daylight.” Her own “lantern-like il-lumination” may last only seconds, but Hudson, she says, writes “as if he held his lantern steadily upon this simple, unmistakable truth” (E2: 298). Although Hudson’s memoir has both “literary and artistic merit,” Woolf decides that it should be read as “the whole and complete person whom we meet rarely enough in life or in literature” (E2: 298).11

In her review Woolf wants to keep quoting from Hudson’s engaging descriptions of living people (E2: 299–300).12 She notes, however, that his own temptation was to write “’about birds and little else’” (E2: 301). He resists but, she adds, “like all writers of strong individuality, a colour gets into his pages apart from the actual words, and even when they are not mentioned we seem to see the bird fl ying, settling, feeding, soaring through every page of the book” (E2: 301). Hudson doesn’t just record facts for specialists, Woolf says; he perceives a relationship between birds and the “mysterious spirit” he fi nds “in all nature, but in birds particularly” (E2: 301).13

In his memoir, Hudson describes his envy of a bird he calls the great creasted scream-er. It rises high in the sky, then fl oats “in vast circles for hours, pouring out those jubilant cries . . . which sounded to us . . . like clarion notes” (Far 191). Hudson admits his own longing to fl y, yet not by being deprived of his “will or soul” by “a balloon or airship.” He is content with a rare “kind of dream called levitation, when one rises and fl oats above the earth without eff ort” (Far 191). Woolf doesn’t mention this dream in her review but, much later in “Th e Moment: Summer’s Night” (c. 1938), she too imagines that “we . . . take wing, with the owl, over the earth and survey the quietude of what sleeps.” Th e experience is creative and unifying, unclassifi able and humbling: “Could we not fl y too,” she asks, “with broad wings and with softness; and be all one wing; all embracing . . . , and these . . . pryings over hedge into hidden compartments of diff erent colours be all swept into one colour by the brush of the wing; and so visit . . . peaks; and there lie exposed . . . to the cold light of the moon rising, . . . eminent over us?” (CE 2: 294–5).14 For Vir-ginia Woolf, Hudson’s memoir reveals a consciousness not only subject to what she calls,


elsewhere in the same year (1918), “moments of vision,”15 but also an enviable ability to sustain and capture them in colorful and rhythmic fl ights of words.16

Woolf ’s recreations of childhood experiences in Cornwall are less spiritually bird-fi lled than Hudson’s of Argentina. Yet, in To the Lighthouse (1927), she weaves an early memory of “rooks cawing” as “part of the waves breaking” in Cornwall (MOB 66) into her re-imagining of her mother. Perhaps Hudson’s fi fth chapter, “Expulsion of the Rooks,” in the Woolfs’ 1924 edition of Birds in London may have been an additional impetus. Mrs. Ramsay humanizes an old pair of rooks she calls “Joseph and Mary.” She is amused by them, but also admires their beauty in fl ight as they cut the air “into exquisite scimitar shapes” in ways that defy description (TTL 80). Protective of this intense life, Mrs. Ram-say chides her son Jasper, who thinks birds do “not feel,” for wanting to kill them, “for she did not understand the fun of shooting birds” (TTL 81).

Hudson’s book on Cornwall, Th e Land’s End (1908) (see n. ix below), includes a lengthy and graphic denunciation of this wide-spread “fun” of shooting sea and land birds as well as maiming them with snares and stones. Th e biblical names of Mrs. Ram-say’s rooks, although mock-heroic, allude to a long religious history of spiritually potent, winged creatures, one Hudson invokes to denounce the hypocrisy of followers of Method-ist preacher John Wesley. Cornish clergy who, like Wesley, should love “all creatures,” still won’t denounce the killing and torture of birds for fear of alienating parishioners who give dolls to little girls but bird traps (or “gins”) to little boys (Lands 196–7).

Mrs. Ramsay’s Joseph and Mary also refl ect her own complex relationship with Mr. Ramsay, their gendered roles as well as their mutual dependencies and irritations. In Birds in London, Hudson describes the rook’s complex domesticity in a way that makes their appearance appropriate in Woolf ’s mature and often amused portrait of family tensions. Th e rook, Hudson says, “in a domestic state” has a “capacity for strong attachments,” but also for “versatility and playfulness, and that tricky spirit . . . which so curiously resembles, or simulates, the sense of humour in ourselves” (53).17

PART III: “A TENDER SPIRITUAL MUSIC—A LANGUAGE WITHOUT WORDS” —W. H. HUDSON (GREEN MANSIONS)

Virginia Woolf never wrote about a Hudson novel, but her comments suggest fa-miliarity and appreciation.18 In 1919, the year following her review, she recorded in her diary one criterion for a good writer: Hardy, Conrad, and Hudson all have “interesting mind[s]” (D1: 238). Publicly, in “Modern Novels” (1919), Woolf expresses her “uncon-ditional gratitude” for Hardy, Conrad, and, to a “lesser degree for the Mr Hudson of Th e Purple Land, Green Mansions, and Far Away and Long Ago” (E3: 31).19 Although she thought parts of his books “very bad,” she continued to think others “very good” (L2: 549). Passages of his memoir, for instance, she said in 1923, “will undoubtedly go to posterity entire” (E3: 356). 20

When Leonard Woolf reviewed Hudson’s letters in 1923, Virginia learned about an earlier “scratch” from him (D2: 282).22 Hudson had found the ending of Th e Voyage Out (1915) “brutal,” and criticized Woolf ’s setting—“somewhere in S[outh]. America.” For all the relationship her characters had to their environment, he wrote, “the scene might just as well have been in some hotel on the south coast of England” (153 Letters 130–1; rpt.


Majumdar 61–2). Hudson’s “scratch” drew little blood. Woolf continued to group him with “great Edwardian fi gures” like Conrad and James (E4: 341). We might even read fi c-tional experiments like “Time Passes” in To the Lighthouse and the interludes in Th e Waves (1931) partly as responses to Hudson’s challenge to embed characters more eff ectively in their natural environments.

Several scholars discuss what they call Woolf ’s “conversation[s]” (Walker 144–5; Sultzbach 71, 75), or her “dialogue[s]” with nature (Waller 137). Hudson’s 1904 novel, Green Mansions, mentioned by Woolf in 1919, was an earlier attempt at such intimacy. Using a fi rst-person narrator who is frustrated by his inadequate language skills, Hudson anticipates, but cannot fulfi ll, Woolfs’ need to transform conventional uses of language and forms of narration.23 Illustrators of Hudson’s novel have been equally bound by tra-ditional visual languages and forms. Since the fi rst illustrated English edition (1926) re-mains in the Woolf ’s library, I want to juxtapose one of Keith Henderson’s dramatic, black-and-white interpretations of specifi c passages with a less representational, more sug-gestive frontispiece done in color in 1944 by E. McKnight Kauff er. Th e Woolfs knew and worked with Kauff er but, although his Green Mansions illustrations suggest some of her own experiments with verbal renditions of nature, Virginia would not have seen them.24 Th e diff erences between these visual languages help to underscore some of the verbal diffi -culties Hudson himself faced in describing his bird-girl Rima and her intimacy with nature.

Hudson’s narrator, Abel, is a political refugee in the jungles of Guayana. He settles among natives who do not hunt in a certain area for fear of a being they call “the daughter of the Didi” (Green 1927 53). To Abel, however, this part of the forest is a “wild paradise” (Green 1927 32). Th ere he contemplates na-ture’s organic architecture (its green mansions) and loses himself in a harmony of sights and sounds. Abel begins to hear “a low strain of exquisite bird-melody, wonderfully pure and ex-pressive, unlike any musi-cal sound I had ever heard before” (Green 1927 37). He repeatedly tries to de-scribe this voice’s ranges and moods, and concludes that it is the natural language of “an intelligent unhuman being” (Green 1927 45; my em-phasis). Th e source, however, is human—a small, bird-like, “girl form” he comes to know as Rima (Green 1927 65). Henderson’s dramatic, black-and-white illustration, “Scarcely Daring to Breathe,” dwarfs Abel and unites Rima (lower right-hand corner) with the thick, surrounding foliage and the small bird fl ying to her hand [Figure 3 Green 1926 71–2]. According to the text, Rima eats wild “berries and gums” and wears garments wo-

Fig. 3: Keith Henderson. Scarcely Daring to Breathe. Illustration for W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions (1926). Courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections, Washington State University.


ven of spider webs (Green 1927 105), clothing Henderson does not try to suggest. She also fl its with birds among tree-tops, as in “I Caught Sight of Her as She Ran Along,” where Henderson depicts her white legs, barely visible to Abel atop a high branch (Green 1926 121–22).25 Under Rima’s protection as well are representatives of the darker side of nature, like the snake she, with a “torrent of . . . sounds in that unknown tongue,” prevents Abel from stoning (Green 1927 77).26

Abel has less trouble describing Rima’s bird-like language than he has with her ethe-real appearance. Limited by “words we all use to paint commoner, coarser things,” he can-

not capture “all the exquisite details, all the delicate lights, and shades, and swift changes of colour and expression” that comprise Rima (Green 1927 79). McKnight Kauff er’s more impressionistic visual language suggests some of the mercurial, luminous quality of her per-son along with her oneness with all natural creatures [Figure 4]. When Abel begs his lis-tener to subordinate “the picture as I have to paint it in words” to “the feeling its original inspired in me” (Green 1927 80), Hudson thus privileges—over external appearances and facts—Abel’s “trembling with delight” (Green 1927 80). Yet the narrative form con-tinues to limit him to only what Abel can summarize for his auditor.

Also, although Rima is increasingly Abel’s intermediary with nature, we have no access to her perceptions. Th rough Abel, we know she wants him to have a more authen-tic, even spiritual level of conversation both with her and with the natural world. She tries to teach him her bird-like language, but, although admiring, he cannot learn it. Her “sweet, wasted symbols . . . would always be

inarticulate sounds,” he says, “aff ecting me like a tender spiritual music—a language with-out words, suggesting more than words to the soul” (Green 1927 112–13).

Th e unsentimental naturalist in Hudson does balance Rima’s spiritual union with nature against the more down-to-earth qualities of her everyday life with her disreputable old guardian, but Abel is even more thoroughly earth-bound (Frederick 53, Garnett viii). When hostile natives, avid to kill the birds and animals Rima protects, burn her alive in a tree, Abel fi rst is overcome by grief.27 Th en, sinking into “moral insanity” (Garnett viii), he incites a rival tribe to wreak bloody vengeance on Rima’s killers. Fleeing, like a guilt-ridden Cain, Abel carries her spirit and her ashes with him on a despairing and arduous journey back to civilization. As part of his eff ort to salvage and live a life “of nature and of the spirit” (Green 1927 4), Abel relates the story that is this novel.

Fig. 4: McKnight Kauff er. Frontispiece for W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions (1944). Permission of the Estate of E. McKnight Kauff er.


Although in Green Mansions Hudson refl ects patriarchal identifi cations of women with nature and birds, he also validates what his society subordinates. He creates a parable of the mutually destructive failure of human beings to live in harmony with the natural world, and of the need to transcend everyday language conventions to describe or commune with it. Green Mansions thus anticipates and provides a cultural background for Woolf ’s eco-feminism and for what L. Elizabeth Waller calls her “ecology of language” (138). More successfully than Hudson, Woolf pushes herself against the boundaries of language and un-derstanding and against traditional oppositions and hierarchies like human and natural. As she playfully suggests in “Craftsmanship,” useful words should give way to suggestive ones, freely living, combining, propagating, and changing in our minds (DM 204–6).

Conversations with nature in fi ction are more likely to occur when a living language endows a living natural environment with seemingly independent expression—like what Abel fi rst calls the natural language of “an intelligent unhuman being” (Green 1927 45). Th e long, italicized, poetic passages that comprise the nine interludes of Th e Waves, for instance, do include a variety of bird images. More generally, and like the best of Hudson’s writing, Woolf ’s descriptive passages, whether she recreates what is repulsive or what is beautiful in nature, resound with rhythmic bird words—“fl ying, settling, feeding, soar-ing” (E2: 301), colorful, and harmonious. Woolf ’s characters need no bird-like Rima to mediate with all that is ruthless or exalting in nature. Nor do we, as readers, feel domi-nated by a single, identifi able, human perspective like Abel’s. As readers we participate in the life cycles of Woolf ’s six characters as they unfold, one with inspiring and relentless natural cycles. We are the birds; we are the words; we are the thing itself.

Notes

1. I wish to thank Simon Rendall and the Estate of E. McKnight Kauff er for permission to reproduce the frontispiece of the 1944 edition of Hudson’s Green Mansions as well as Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections at Washington State University (hereafter MASC/WSU) for the Henderson image. I have made a sincere eff ort to locate copyright holders and apologize for any information I may have missed.

2. I limit “bird” here to the winged and feathered creature, and ignore traditional applications to maidens or girls as well as contemporary American slang usages, like “bird” as a rude sound of disapproval.

3. Woolf had some sympathy for Eleanor Ormerod’s defi nition of sparrows as garden pests (Alt, “Pests”; Scott).

4. A quotation from Hudson appears in Woolf ’s essay, but she objects, not to his words, but to the use “Way-farer” [H. W. Massingham] makes of them. See Abbot and, for background on “Murderous Millinery,” see Haynes.

5. Hudson married, in part, for “something of the security of the mother and child relationship” (Tomalin 115), and Virginia’s “need for care” also partially defi ned her marriage to Leonard (Lee 314).

6. Although, in addition to her self-education, Woolf took formal courses at the King’s College Ladies De-partment, London, she and her sister “were not matriculated students, regularly following a course of study leading to a . . . University degree” (Jones and Snaith 6). Hudson was educated by tutors and his own reading (Tomalin 56–8).

7. When Hudson relocated from Argentina in 1874 at age 33, he traveled and walked all over England, always recording and often publishing his observations (Tomalin 103). Woolf, as her diaries indicate, walked, in London and the country, both for her health and for pleasure.

8. Leslie Stephen owned fi eld guides that Virginia inherited; he observed, classifi ed, and also drew fl ora and fauna, including birds, in the margins of other books, some still in the Woolfs’ library (MASC/WSU). Among his children, Th oby especially developed a passion for bird-identifi cation and, like his father, drew them in his books (Lee 115).

9. Leonard, in his 1923 review of the edition of Hudson’s letters to Edward Garnett, says he recently had


re-read Th e Land’s End (no longer in the Woolf ’s library in MASC/WSU). Leonard contrasts the “charm” of this and other early books to the bitterness of the later letters (Essays 79).

10. Woolf must have been moved, for example, by Hudson’s memories of pet dogs, fragile health, and a beloved mother lost too early in life. A child is as dependent on its mother, he writes, “as any fl edgling in the nest on its parent” (Far 39). Woolf notes in her review how Hudson’s mother worried about him until she realized that he “was not staring at vacancy, but observing ‘an insect perhaps, but oftener a bird’” (E2: 301).

11. McNeillie suggests that we “compare ‘A Sketch of the Past’” (E2: 302 n. 3). As Woolf said about Hudson, she can write about her own “fi rst impressions” (MOB 66) only by recreating “the person to whom things happened” (MOB 65). Also like Hudson she says, “At times I can go back to St Ives . . . and can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there” (MOB 67).

12. In “A Sketch of the Past” we also get glimpses of “characters” Woolf remembers from childhood, seen “exactly” as she saw them then (MOB 73–5).

13. Hudson called his view “animism” by which he means, in part, “the sense and apprehension of an intelligence like our own but more powerful in all visible things” (Far 224–5).

14. Woolf also never went up in an airplane, but was more curious about mechanical fl ight than Hudson. See “Flying Over London” (CE 4: 167–77). In her fi ction, not just birds, but also airplanes take on a variety of meanings (Beer).

15. “Moments of Vision” is the title of Woolf ’s review of Logan Pearsall Smith’s Trivia (1918): He “enclose[s] certain moments which break off from the mass, in which without bidding things come together in a combination of inexplicable signifi cance” and are, “to the thinker at least, . . . almost menacing with meaning” (E2: 250–51).

16. Both Hudson and the Woolfs enjoyed memoirs. Hudson identifi ed with Serge Aksakoff ’s history of his childhood (Far 226) and with early chapters of Leigh Hunt’s memoir (Far 315). Both Aksakov’s A Russian Schoolboy (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1924) and Hunt’s Autobiography (London: Milford; Oxford UniversityPress, 1928) are still among the Woolfs’ books ( MASC/WSU), the former signed by Leonard.

17. Th e young Hudson was strongly infl uenced by Gilbert White. Virginia Woolf pasted her “AVS” bookplate in a 1901 edition of his Th e Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (MASC/WSU) which she reviewed in 1939 (CE3: 122–16). White also stresses the domesticity of rooks (322).

18. Beginning in 1885, Hudson wrote fi ve pieces of longer fi ction (Th e Purple Land, A Crystal Age, Fan, Green Mansions, Ralph Herne) and a number of short stories in a collection called El Ombu, and, published together, “Dead Man’s Plack” and “An Old Th orn.”

19. See also “Modern Fiction” (E4: 158). In “Th e Modern Essay” (1922, 1925), Woolf groups Hudson with those who have “strayed into essay writing accidentally” (E4: 222) and who have “some fi erce attachment to an idea” (E4: 224). Leonard follows her in grouping Hudson with Conrad as “artists in words” who had “gone to or come from the wild and exotic parts of the world” and “found in them and in ‘Nature’ the only congenial subjects” (Essays 73).

20. Hudson himself “was not given to praising his own work,” some of which he wrote because he badly needed money (Miller 87–8).

21. When in 1927 Woolf recommends Hudson, along with Richard Jeff ries, to Julian Bell as one model for an aspiring writer, she says he is “very careful” to select only observations that contribute to the whole (L3: 432).

22. Garnett says his own eff usive praise of Th e Voyage Out had prodded Hudson into “rapier thrusts at my ribs” (“Introduction” 8; c.f. Majumdar 61).

23. In such writing, narrative may lose traditional oppositions, centralities, and hierarchies; backgrounds may become foregrounds and plots may become “organic progression[s]” (Waller 140–1, 153–4).

24. Henderson (1883–1982), a Scottish artist/designer, trained at the Slade. His work included designs for books, posters, and the RAF. For the conference presentation, I used four of his images and three by McKnight Kauff er (1890–1954), an American artist/designer who settled in London in 1914, became a friend of Roger Fry’s, and designed the 1928 wolf ’s-head logo a well as several distinctive dust jackets for the Hogarth Press. He is often remembered for his London Underground and Transport posters (Willis 376, 383).

25. Even more literal, later attempts include a 1959 Mel Ferrer fi lm. Critics panned its star, Audrey Hepburn, as too old (29 at the time) and too tall to play Rima.

26. Abel is crazed but not killed by the snake’s bite. D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake” was “infl uenced by Hudson” (Tomalin 189) who describes his own changing attitude towards snakes (Far 205–23).

27. Ironically, Rima’s death is as brutal as Hudson thought Rachel Vinrace’s. Th ere is no evidence that Woolf read Green Mansions (1904) before publishing Th e Voyage Out (1915). Still, just as Abel cannot learn Rima’s bird-like


language and thus “cannot communicate with her on the level at which she ‘speaks’” (Miller 154), so Terrence Hewett cannot enter into the musical “language” of Rachel’s expressive piano playing. Both men lose young women who seem too immersed in an aesthetic level of being to survive the realities of an adult, patriarchal world.

Works Cited

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Alt, Christina. “Pests and Pesticides: Exploring the Boundaries of Woolf ’s Environmentalism.” Woolfi an Boundaries: Selected Papers from the Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anna Burrells, Steve Ellis, Deborah Parsons, and Kathryn Simpson. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2007. 93–99.

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Ames, Christoper. “Woolf ’s Swallows.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 31 (Fall 1988), 4.Beer, Gillian. “Th e Island and the Aeroplane: Th e Case of Virginia Woolf.” Virginia Woolf. Ed. Rachel Bowlby

London: Longman, 1992. 132–61.Blyth, Ian. “Woolf, Rooks, and Rural England.” Woolfi an Boundaries: Selected Papers from the Sixteenth Annual

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Press, 1968.Haynes, Alan. “Murderous Millinary.” History Today 33 (July 1983) 26–30.Hudson, W. H. Birds in London. London: Dent, 1924. —. Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life. New York: London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1918.—. Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest. Illus. Keith Henderson. London: Duckworth, 1926. —. Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest. New Readers Library. London: Duckworth, 1927.—. Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest. Illus. E. McKnight Kauff er. Foreword John Galsworthy.

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Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. 61–62.Miller, David. W. H. Hudson and the Elusive Paradise. London: Macmillan, 1990.Tomalin, Ruth. W. H. Hudson: A Biography. London: Faber and Faber, 1982.Scott, Bonnie Kime. “Virginia Woolf, Ecofeminism, and Breaking Boundaries in Nature.” Woolfi an Boundaries: Se-

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EVOLUTION, HISTORY, AND FLUSH; OR, THE ORIGIN OF SPANIELS

by Jeanne Dubino

Flush is the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, recounting his fourteen-year life from his ancestry to his death. Flush is a dog memoir, about a dog’s life, with a dog’s point of view and, in some editions, with dog photos (Smith 352; see also

Humm). So often is Flush read as a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning—more specifi -cally, of the years leading up to her life with Robert Browning, their escape to Italy, and the fi rst part of their lives together there—that it is easy to forget, as the narrator proclaims in the fi rst sentence, that Flush is the “subject of this memoir” (3).1 And, today, Flush—or more specifi cally, the origins of his “family,” the spaniel—will be the subject of my paper.

Quentin Bell wrote that Flush was “not so much a book by a dog lover as a book by someone who would love to be a dog” (175). I am not going to look at the way Woolf imagines herself as a dog as such. Critics would agree that Flush is an anthropomorphized character, but the extent to which the novel/biography is about “canine consciousness” (Ittner) itself—or the “dogginess of the dog” (Goldman, “Ce Chien” 100)—is under de-bate by critics such as Jutta Ittner and Dan Wylie. Rather than explore the extent to which Woolf enters into Giorgio Agamben’s Open, or the cerebral space inhabited by nonhu-man animals and accessible to humans,2 I want to explore the way she constructs, broadly, canine context. As Anna Snaith notes, Woolf ’s interest in writing Flush had “all to do with context” (615). Other critics have examined an array of these contexts and signifi cations; to cite just a few, Susan Squier looks at the woman writer’s journey from imprisonment to freedom; Pamela Caughie, the interplay of highbrow art and mass culture; Snaith herself, eugenics, race, and fascism; David Eberly, the emotionally fraught world of Woolf ’s own human, domestic relationships; Jacqui Griffi ths, childhood and the oedipal triangle; and Wendy Faris, animals as vehicles for Bloomsbury’s expressions of the suppressed emotion-al life. All of these valuable studies consider human contexts, whether Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s or Woolf ’s own. My presentation, focusing on the very beginning of Flush, will concentrate on canine context. More specifi cally, it will examine Woolf ’s use of Dar-winian discourse in constructing a history of the origin of the spaniel.

Flush is a history of a dog’s life—but in Woolf ’s writing “nothing is simply one thing” (TTL 277). It is important to consider, briefl y, Woolf ’s historiography. All her life, Woolf was interested in the lives of the silenced, the subordinated, the excluded, the underdog.3 Even Flush, she wrote, “deserved a biography” (L5: 167). For Woolf, history was not sin-gle-stranded; it was ever “thick description” (Geertz), dense, hybrid, and interrelational. Woolf ’s inclusion of the social, economic, literary, and more, make her histories dynamic and rich. Because canine history is so closely intertwined with human history—the evolu-tion of their companionship can be traced back to more than 50,000 years ago (Th urston 1)—Woolf ’s canine biography is inclusive of the human milieu as well. Intertwined in what Melba Cuddy-Keane calls Woolf ’s “multiple versionings of history” (60) are “mul-tiple articulations” (Cuddy-Keane 62)—literally, multiple voices telling multiple stories. In Flush, we have a dog’s perspective often informed and controlled by his emotions


and senses,4 above all, smell; Alison Booth calls this “focalization” “narrative olfaction” (“Scent” 3). Th e voice of Flush’s object of aff ection, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, emerges, from time to time, through her quoted letters. Behind Flush’s view is that of an “anony-mous, omniscient third-person narrator whose consciousness freely moves in and out of the spaniel’s, at times empathically merging, at other times creating a distance” (Ittner).

Woolf ’s multiple reasons for writing Flush—as a way to make money, as a parody of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, as a way of critiquing nineteenth-century political and social culture (Snaith 613-14), as a distraction from writing Th e Waves, as a continua-tion, as David Eberly suggests, of Orlando, as a means, as Gillian Beer proposes, to expose “the fi ctionality of our imagined Victorian England” (103), as a way to exercise her “pow-ers of representation[,] reality[,] accuracy” (D4: 40), and as, perhaps, an off ering to her own spaniel Pinka, on whom Flush is modeled—all further the multi-tonal resonance of her project. Interwoven in its dense texture of serious and humorous layers are the vari-ous threads that constitute a canine history, the origin of the spaniel, and I will now turn to those. Starting with Darwinism and the story of creation, I next move to the stories of another evolution, the possible etymologies of the word spaniel. Tied in with these etymologies are the histories of empires and dynasties. After I trace these histories I end with a discussion of the spaniel’s roots in Great Britain. By the nineteenth century, Woolf suggests through her narrative of the life of Flush, evolution, at least in terms of British class structure, seems to have stopped altogether.

DARWINISM AND THE STORY OF CREATION

Historical accounts have traditionally served to provide legitimacy and “to secure the pedigrees of existing rules” (Lowenthal 235), and so the narrator of Flush, not to be outdone, pushes beyond the “greatest antiquity” to the very beginning of time, to “the ferment of creation,” in her quest to secure the origins of the spaniel: “It is universally admitted that the family from which the subject of this memoir claims descent is one of the greatest antiquity” (3). To read Flush’s parodic fi rst line, though, in the context of more contemporary books on breeds, such as Joyce C. Judah’s An Ancient History of Dogs: Spaniels through the Ages: Th e Historical Roots of All Dogs, is to see how Woolf knew her breed books; Judah, writing three quarters of a century later, also starts at a point in the very distant past, 55 million years ago (3). While Darwinian language and concepts appear through Woolf ’s novel/biography, they are most prominent in its fi rst twelve pages. Woolf playfully speeds5 over Darwin’s concept of slow time, of his “slow and gradual modifi cation” (Darwin 317), to describe the evolution of the world—“Ages passed; vegetation appeared”—to the fi rst appearance of animals, or here, rabbits. A key component of evolution is the idea that all life is a result of a random process, a concept that the narrator, in the spirit of Voltaire, dismisses: “where there is vegeta-tion the law of Nature has decreed that there shall be rabbits; where there are rabbits, Providence has ordained there shall be dogs. Th ere is nothing in this that calls for ques-tion, or comment” (3). Th is “metaphysico-theologico-cosmoloonigolog[ical]” (Voltaire 520) passage, of course, echoes Candide’s parody of Gottfried Leibniz’s argument from design, or the notion that everything exists for a specifi c reason; compare Pangloss’s instruction to his pupil Candide: “It is clear . . . that things cannot be otherwise than

145Evolution, History, and FLUSH

they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end. Observe: noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles . . .” (Voltaire 521). On the other hand, the balance among the varying elements in Woolf ’s passage—vegetation, prey (rabbits), and predator (dogs)—is a law of Nature, and so the spirit of evolution, it would seem, trumps the implied creationism (“that things cannot be otherwise than they are”). From the emergence of vegetation, rabbits, and dogs from this “ferment of creation” we move quickly to further individuation into multiple family trees: the royal Plantagenets, Tudors, and Stuarts; the middle-class Howards, Caven-dishes, and Russells; and the working-class Smiths, Joneses, and Tomkins (5). Alongside this human individuation into classes and families, “minor branches” of the “Spaniel family” break off “from their parent stem,” and “at least seven famous . . . families—the Clumber, the Sussex, the Norfolk, the Black Field, the Cocker, the Irish Water and the English Water”—come into existence (5). Th e profusion of families, both human and spaniel,6 recalls Darwin’s famous “Tree of Life” diagram (Darwin 160-61), and fore-shadows the domestic, and class-defi ned, world that will emerge in the following pages.

ETYMOLOGIES

In its parody of a breed book, itself a genre of Th e Origin of Species, the narrator posits the origin of the name spaniel. Following her snapshot history of the creation of the world, she off ers a hopping etymology, bouncing from one theory to the next. Does the word spaniel come from “span,” the Carthaginian word for rabbit? Upon arriving in Spain, Carthaginian soldiers “shouted with one accord ‘Span! Span!’—for rabbits darted from every scrub, from every bush. Th e land was alive with rabbits. . . . and the dogs, which were almost instantly perceived in full pursuit of the rabbits, were called Spaniels or rabbit dogs” (3-4). But no, our narrator notes, “there is another school of thought”: “Hispania derives from the Basque word españa, signifying an edge or boundary. If that is so,” we can imagine her sighing, “rabbits, bushes, dogs, soldiers—the whole of that romantic and pleasant picture, must be dismissed from the mind; and we must simply suppose that the Spaniel is called a spaniel because Spain is called España” (4). Indeed, it would be easy, like the narrator, to dismiss these theories out of hand, except that Woolf did do her homework; as she told David Garnett, in response to his favorable review, “I’m not so inaccurate as you think. No. I am rather proud of my facts” (L5: 231). Fanciful as these speculations appear to be, they are two of several legitimate hypotheses still extant. Th e ancient Greek geographer Strabo reports that the Carthaginians, or Punic/Phoenicians, found Spain abounding with rabbits (Strabo 125-29),7 and, accord-ing to one etymology with which Woolf may have been familiar, their word for rabbit was “tsepan.”8 Españia is the Basque word for edge, and among its other meanings are “extremity” and “shoulder”; Españia may mean the “Land of the Shoulder” because it formed the western boundary of ancient Europe.9 Bypassing the most recent derivation of the word spaniel, the Old French word espaigneul, which meant Spanish (“Spaniel”), Woolf prefers to make her history come alive by alighting on the more remote, and the more suppositious, conjectures.


IMPERIAL AND DYNASTIC HISTORIES

As far as the spaniel’s pre-historic and etymological origins, Woolf takes us, as far as scholarship allowed, to point zero, but she bypasses one of the other possible origins, namely, the Far East (Lytton 14). Judith Neville Lytton’s compendium on spaniels, the 359-page Toy Dogs and Th eir Ancestors, published in 1911 by Duckworth, Woolf ’s half-brother, had been in print for two decades by the time Woolf wrote Flush. Surely she would have known about it, or, at the very least, would have been familiar with this putative ancestry of the spaniel. Instead, her account tells us that the spaniel sprung from the same soil as its vegetation and rabbits. Woolf ’s reason may be, as Jane Goldman has suggested, that she is acknowledging Vita’s Spanish ancestry (Cambridge 76). Or, Woolf ’s account of this etymology, based on the Carthaginian presence in Spain (Hammond 577), may be an occasion for her to include the allusion to the Carthaginian Empire, one of the longest-lived and largest states in the ancient Mediterranean. At its peak, under the rule of Dido,10 Carthage came to be called the “shining city,” ruling 300 other cities around the western Mediterranean and leading the Phoenician (or Punic) world, including Spain. Founded in 814 BCE, Carthage lasted till 146 BCE, when it was utterly and memorably destroyed by the Romans in the Th ird Punic War (Langer et al. 103-04, 116-17). Flush also includes references to three fallen dynasties, “the Royal Houses of Bourbon, Haps-burg and Hohenzollern, . . . now in exile, deposed from authority, judged unworthy of respect” (8). Th e House of Bourbon, overruling, primarily, France and Spain from the mid sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, lasted nearly 250 years; Hapsburg, most famously the Austrian and Spanish Empires, from the mid thirteenth to the early twenti-eth centuries, or nearly 700 years; and Hohenzollern, over Prussia, Germany, and Roma-nia, from the eleventh to the early nineteenth centuries, or nearly 800 years (Langer et al. 395, 459, 490, 465; Hearnshaw 7-8). Along with this vanished empire and these nearly extinct Royal Houses, Woolf refers to two regional areas whose political highpoints are a part of the past and who are now under the power of their neighboring nations. Th e no-tion that Spain may be based on a Basque word is a point of pride among Basque nationals (“Spain”); the Basque area, crossing the French and Spanish borders, marked its period of greatest autonomy at the end of the eighteenth century (Payne, Chapter Th ree). Woolf also cites the great Welsh king Howel Dda (or Hywel Dda), who codifi ed Welsh law in 930 in his famous Book of Laws (Davies 87-89, 94); the rule of Welsh princes ended in 1282 with the Edwardian conquest (Davies 161).

To the rise and fall of empires, dynasties, and political entities, Woolf connects the evolution of the spaniel, whose own family prevails through the centuries. In comparison to the royalty of the Houses of Bourbon, Hapsburg and Hohenzollen, the breed of the Spaniel triumphs. Moreover, “when the Plantagenets and the Tudors and the Stuarts were following other people’s ploughs through other people’s mud,” the spaniel “was taking his ease in palaces” (5). Howel Dda’s Book of Laws stands out, now, because it is the fi rst de-tailed classifi cation of dogs in the world—and, in Flush, because of Howel Dda’s assertion that “’[t]he Spaniel of the King is a pound in value,’” thus making it “plain that the spaniel was already a dog of value and reputation” (5).11 Woolf is certainly parodying classism and its reverence for nobility with/and all its trappings, its “coronets and quarterings [noble descent going back to fi ve generations]” (8).


Woolf ’s emphasis on the demise of these powers, however, serves also to illustrate several Darwinian concepts, including the survival of the fi ttest, with fi t being defi ned as, primarily, the remarkable ability to adapt. In my paper last year I described in some detail how successfully Flush adapts to each of his environments (Dubino). Even before we see how Flush’s story unfolds we are reminded, in these early pages, that the story of the dog—and in Flush, of the spaniel—is a story of “brilliant evolutionary success almost without parallel in the animal world” (Budiansky 5). While empires such as the Carthag-inian are ultimately doomed to extinction, whose only remains are putative linguistic fos-sils embedded in language (or in shards uncovered by archeologists), its living beings—in Flush, its people and its dogs—survive, and often, as Woolf shows us, through migration, another key component of Th e Origin of Species. Th e spaniel, after all, may have been brought to Wales “by the Spanish clan of Ebhor or Ivor” (4-5) long before before Howel Dda wrote his Book of Laws. Once again, Woolf is not being fanciful here; small groups of westward-migrating Celts did move to the British Isles in the last centuries of prehis-tory (Davies 22-23), and they brought their language and their culture—including their animals, and possibly the spaniel—with them.

THE SPANIEL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Whatever its origins, by the age of Elizabeth the spaniel became the quintessentially English dog. In Flush, without any fanfare or debate, and slid into the middle of a para-graph (5), the spaniel’s Spanish identity has been erased and it has become anglicized, its family history integrated into the course of English history (5) with its tripartite divi-sions of royalty, gentry, and yeomen. By the sixteenth century the narrator, quoting Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, refers to the “aristocracy of dogs” with “‘greyhounds, Spaniels and Hounds’” corresponding to “the Lords . . . Gentlemen, and . . . Yeomen of dogs’” (6). By the seventeenth century the spaniel—at least one of its families—would have been moved from gentry to royalty simply by being given the name of the King Charles Spaniel (Wyett). If dogs could assume a new class identity simply “by being given the name of the highest ranking Briton” (Wyett), the reverse, as we see in the reference to the Arcadia, was even truer, especially for the middle class, who could rise up the social hierarchy by keeping company with dogs associated with the gentry and nobility. As cultural canine theorists such as Mary Elizabeth Th urston, Harriet Ritvo, and James Serpell have noted, dogs serve, especially in England, long renowned as a nation of dog-lovers, as a symbol of a nation’s values, attitudes, and character. While, in an endnote, Flush’s narrator calls into question the dog’s “relation to the spirit of the age, whether it is possible to call one dog Elizabethan, another Augustan, another Victorian” (176), the novel itself shows a close correlation between the life and times of the dog. As it defi nes English national character, the spirit of the ages in Flush does not change from one century to the next. Th e two eras featured most prominently in Flush, the Elizabethan and the Victorian, are both marked by classism. Sidney’s canine divisions persist into Flush’s world; his only recourse to a class-defi ned society is fl ight to an idealized country like nineteenth-century Italy where it appears that “there [are] no ranks at all,” where it seems as if all dogs are “mongrels, . . . dogs merely—grey dogs, yellow dogs, brindled dogs, spotted dogs . . . [and not] a single spaniel, collie, retriever or mastiff among them” (112).


NINETEENTH-CENTURY LONDON: NO EVOLUTION

When Flush returns to London for a short visit he encounters the result of what can happen to a society that does not evolve. Th e class structure is still in place. Every charac-ter Flush sees upon his arrival is defi ned by his or her class position, from “a lady bounti-fully appareled in fl owing robes of purple plush” to a page at the service of a “majestic deerhound” to a “fl unkey in livery dropp[ing] a letter in a box” (137-38). Th e presence of a policeman, with his “bull’s-eye” [lantern] swinging menacingly from side to side, hints at the coercion needed to maintain this oppressive, class-bound order. Th e city is under a funereal “pall” (137) and is, moreover, paying a physical price for allowing the poverty that results from this class divide: it has just recovered from an epidemic of cholera (138). It is hardly a wonder that Mrs. Carlyle’s dog Nero may have tried to commit suicide by leaping from a top-story window (175-76). Flush himself feels under a great deal of strain, and is happy only once he fi nds “himself on the deck of the Channel steamer crossing to France” (142). In nineteenth-century England Flush and his comrade Nero have only two options: death or escape. Unlike poor Nero who has to stick it out in London, with the archetypal Victorians the Carlyles, till the end of his life, when he is fi nally run over by a butcher’s cart (176), Flush migrates to survive. If evolution leads to extinction, it also leads to new life forms, and failure to evolve at all leads to certain stagnation and, in the realm of human and canine aff airs, misery.

Flush may have been a joke, as Woolf repeatedly told her friends in letters, but it was also a serious undertaking to which she applied herself with her usual care, assiduousness, and inventiveness. In her history of the spaniel she off ers a serious and whimsical account of its origins in relation to the dawn of time; to her medium, language; to the rise and fall of several empires and dynasties; and to its anglicization. Intertwined in her multiple stories is a strenuous critique of classism, overlaid with a parody of breeding and the genre of the breed book, and informed by a deep appreciation and knowledge of Darwinism. As the study of non-human animals becomes a more prominent part of the humanities, I believe that future work on this underestimated book will reveal Woolf ’s complex under-standing of the relationships between the human and canine species, and her facility in making these relationships come alive through literature.

Notes

1. All references are from Flush unless otherwise noted.2. Or, to cite a translation of Agamben’s own words, the space “in which human openness in a world and

animal openness toward its disinhibitor seem for a moment to meet” (62).3. See Cuddy-Keane 61; Snaith 618-20, 631-32; Caughie 162; and Booth, Greatness 178.4. See Beer 102.5. “I visualise this book now as a curiously uneven time sequence—a series of great balloons, linked by

straight narrow passages of narrative” (D4: 142).6. Th e word “family” is repeated eight times in the fi rst twelve pages of Flush, and 129 times throughout Th e

Origin of Species.7. See also David and DeMello 37.8. See “Spain.”9. See “Spain”; and Taylor, who speculates that España may derive “from the Basque españa, which means a

‘lip,’ ‘border,’ or ‘edge’ of anything” (263).


10. Th e indirect reference to Dido, renowned for her loyalty to Aeneas (Th e Aeneid), may introduce one of the themes of Flush, or dogged devotion. I am indebted to Jane Goldman for highlighting one possible mean-ing for this allusion.

11. See McHugh 65.

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Beer, Gillian. Virginia Woolf: Th e Common Ground. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. Vol. 1. London: Hogarth, 1972. Booth, Allison. Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. —. “Th e Scent of a Narrative: Rank Discourse in “Flush” and “Written on the Body.” Narrative 8.1 (2000). 3-22.

JSTOR. Web. 1 June 2010.Budiansky, Stephen. Th e Truth about Dogs: Th e Ancestry, Social Conventions, Mental Habits and Moral Fibre of

Canis Familiaris. London: Phoenix, 2002. Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana, IL:

University of Illinois Press, 1991. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. “Virginia Woolf and the Varieties of Historicist Experience.” Virginia Woolf and the Essay.

Ed. Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. 59-77. Darwin, Charles. Th e Origin of Species. 1859. Intro. and edited by John W. Burrow. London: Penguin, 1985. David, Susan E. and Margo DeMello. Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood

Creature. New York: Lantern Books, 2003. Davies, John. A History of Wales. London: Penguin, 1993. Dubino, Jeanne. “Dogs, Women and Adaptation: Virginia Woolf ’s Flush.” Woolf and the City: Th e Nineteenth

Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. 5 June 2009. Lecture. Eberly, David. “Housebroken: Th e Domesticated Relations in Flush.” Virginia Woolf: Texts and Contexts. Ed.

Beth Rigel Daugherty and Eileen Barrett. New York: Pace University Press, 1996. 21-25. Faris, Wendy. “Bloomsbury’s Beasts: Th e Presence of Animals in the Texts and Lives of Bloomsbury.” From Deca-

dent to Modernist: And Other Essays. Spec. issue of Yearbook of English Studies 37.1 (2007): 107+. Academic OneFile. Web. 24 May 2010.

Bloomsbury’s Beasts: Th e Presence of Animals in the Texts and Lives of Bloomsbury.” From Decadent to Modernist: And Other Essays. Spec. issue of Yearbook of English Studies 37.1 (2007): 107+. Academic OneFile. Web. 24 May 2010.

Geertz, Cliff ord. Th e Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Goldman, Jane. Th e Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Bloomsbury’s Beasts: Th e Presence of Animals in the Texts and Lives of Bloomsbury.” From Decadent to Modern-

ist: And Other Essays. Spec. issue of Yearbook of English Studies 37.1 (2007): 107+. Academic OneFile. Web. 24 May 2010. “Ce Chien Est à Moi: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog.” Woolfi an Boundaries: Se-lected Papers from the Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anna Burrells, Steve El-lis, Deborah Parsons, and Kathryn Simpson. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2007. 100-07.

Griffi ths, Jacqui. “Indeterminate Children and Dogs in Flush and Th e Sound and the Fury. Children in Literature. Spec. issue of Th e Yearbook of English Studies 32 (2002): 163-76. JSTOR. Web. 30 May 2010.

Hammond, Nicholas G. L. A History of Greece to 322 B.C. 1959. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Hearnshaw, F[ossey] J. C., ed. Macmillan’s Historical Atlas of Modern Europe. London: Macmillan, 1920. Humm, Maggie. “Flush, or ‘Who Was the Woman in the Photograph?’” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 74 (2008): 13-14. Ittner, Jutta. “Part Spaniel, Part Canine Puzzle: Anthropomorphism in Woolf ’s Flush and Auster’s Timbuktu.” Mosaic:

A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature 39.4 (2006): 181+. Academic OneFile. Web. 31 May 2010.Judah, Joyce C. An Ancient History of Dogs: Spaniels through the Ages. Supply, NC: Lulu Publishing, 2007. Langer, William L., John W. Eadie, Deno J. Geanakoplos, J. H. Hexter, and Richard Pipes. Western Civilization

I: Prehistory to the Peace of Utrecht. 1968. 2nd ed. New York, Harper, 1975. Lowenthal, David. Th e Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Lytton, Judith Neville. Toy Dogs and Th eir Ancestors: Including the Management of Toy Spaniels, Pekingese, Japanese

and Pomeranians. London: Duckworth, 1911. MacInnes, Ian. “Mastiff s and Spaniels: Gender and Nation in the English Dog.” Textual Practice 17.1 (2003): 21-40. McHugh, Susan. Dog. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. Animal Series.Payne, Stanley G. Basque Nationalism. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1975. Basque series.


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Gowdy’s Th e White Bone.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 9.2 (2002): 115-31.

“LAPPIN AND LAPINOVA”: A WOOLF IN HARE’S CLOTHING?

by Kathryn Simpson

Animals are central to Woolf ’s life and writing–from the marmosets and the many dogs that she and Leonard kept as pets, to the plethora of animal names she uses as terms of endearment (dolphin for Vanessa and mongoose for Leonard, for example)

as well as the animal names she uses not quite so kindly (most notoriously, “civet cat” to refer to her friend and rival, Katherine Mansfi eld).1 In Woolf ’s fi ction literal animals take on a fantastical and metaphorical life, signifying far more than the simple animality of their real-life selves, and imaginary creatures similarly test boundaries of diff erent kinds. Woolf ’s fi ctional menagerie has been variously considered as a means of challenging social norms and as revealing repressed desires and creating a space for unruly behavior.2 Her fi ctional animals also operate as vehicles for raising contentious and complex political issues.3

Here I will explore “Lappin and Lapinova,” a story published in 1939 but fi rst writ-ten “20 years ago or more” (D5: 188) at Asheham (and so before 1919). Th is was one of the few stories Woolf published explicitly to make money4 but, as we know, Woolf ’s writing is “never simply one thing.” Th e story recounts the fi rst few years of Rosalind’s marriage to Ernest Th orburn, a relationship vitally sustained through their fantasy of themselves as Queen Lapinova (a hare) and King Lappin (a rabbit). With its fairy tale qualities and tantalising ambiguities, the story off ers many possibilities for interpretation and I’ll examine three aspects in detail. Th ese are the colors white and gold, the rabbit/ hare fantasy world and the sand caster gift. Keeping in mind the two historical moments of probable composition and publication, I’ll consider how these off er scope for interpret-ing this story in relation to Woolf ’s experience as a writer, her perception of her work in relation to the literary market and her political perspective, especially in relation to war.

Comparing an undated typescript (held in the Berg Collection) with the version of the story published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1939, there are only very slight variations. One that seems signifi cant for the war-time context of its original composition and the near war-time context of its publication is Rosalind’s introduction of the adjective “white” to describe her fantasy hare self. In the typescript Rosalind simply echoes Ernest’s description of the hare he’d chased:

“‘A white hare,’ he added. ‘A white hare!’ Rosalind exclaimed …”

In the published version, however, Rosalind responds with her own intervention into Ernest’s description:

“‘A woman hare,’ he added. ‘A white hare!’ Rosalind exclaimed.”

In both versions, Rosalind goes on to elaborate her description: “‘Rather a small hare; silver grey; with big bright eyes?’” (CSF 263). Th e silver grey color possibly over-rides the “white” that she initially insisted on, but it simultaneously draws attention to this initial color.


As Jane Goldman has persuasively argued, “Woolf ’s deployment of color may […] off er the basis of a coded articulation of historical intervention” (1998, 8) and the various signifi -cances of white at the earlier point of composition may come into play. It signifi es “purity” in the women’s suff rage color scheme of purple, green and white (as Goldman discusses) as well as cowardice or shame in the White Feather Campaign, which was used to pressure able-bodied men to enlist in the period before the 1916 Military Service Act legalized conscription into the armed forces. Th ere was a conscience clause as part of this Act but, as each case was tried on an individual basis, there was considerable anxiety about whether the eligible men in Woolf ’s intimate circle would be conscripted. Both political deployments of this color would have been readily apparent to Woolf in the late 1910s and both, in diff erent ways, equate white with militancy and so imply women’s dangerous collusion with the forces driving war.

White, of course, is also central to Victorian ideals of femininity and Rosalind’s seemingly Ruskin-inspired binary schema of the separate spheres that she and Ernest will occupy, with an outline of their diff erent “characters,” is suggestive of that powerful Victorian conception of the perfect wife–the angel in the house. As Ruskin explains, “a true wifely subjection” can be achieved where the wife’s qualities complement the manly attributes of her husband:

Th e man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle, – her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision. […] Her great function is Praise. […] Th is is the true nature of home–it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division. (Ruskin 117-8)

Although in her “real” life Rosalind does seem to be a compliant wife, her fantasy life signifi cantly modifi es Ruskin’s terms:

And before they went to bed that night it was all settled. He was King Lappin; she was Queen Lapinova. Th ey were the very opposite of each other; he was bold and determined; she wary and undependable. He ruled over the busy world of rabbits; her world was a more desolate, mysterious place, which she ranged mostly by moon-light. All the same, their territories touched; they were King and Queen. (CSF 263).

Th is fantasy sexual economy that Rosalind commits herself to is patriarchal–as her name, Lapinova, with its Slavic patronymic suffi x, “ova”, indicates–and this suggests her com-plicity in a patriarchal social structure. However, in the fantasy Rosalind creates she is actively creative and adventurous. Further, her version of their marriage makes the couple feel “in league together against the rest of the world” (CSF 263; emphasis added) and, as Georgia Johnston has pointed out, Rosalind’s fantasy and her active sexuality puts them at odds with the sexual dynamic conventionally associated with patriarchal marriage.

Th at Rosalind’s identity would ultimately be dangerously subsumed into that of Er-nest and his family is indicated through the use of the colors white and gold, where white is dissolved or dispersed by gold. Rosalind marks her separation from Ernest’s prolifi cally “breeding” family by wearing her white wedding dress to the Th orburn’s golden-wedding

153“Lappin and Lapinova”

anniversary party (where “Everything was gold”). Her intense discomfort and feeling of isolation is signalled by her gaze which “seemed insoluble as an icicle” (CSF 264). How-ever, the heat of the party and feeling oppressed by the numbers of (signifi cantly named) Th orburns leads to her sensation of disintegration: “She was being melted; dispersed; dissolved into nothingness” (CSF 265). Even “the raw white fog” of Lapinova’s “natural” realm is turned into a “golden mesh” in the lamp light and as an orphan she feels like “a mere drop among all those Th or(thaw)burns” (CSF 264). Th is thawing and potential burning seem to be powerful threats, eroding Rosalind’s sense of autonomy and evoking the punishment of rebellious women–hares being associated with witches in folklore.

Her anniversary gift of an “eighteenth-century relic,” a sand caster, also signals her diff er-ence from the Th orburns (CSF 264). As Marcel Mauss explains, the giving of gifts is part of complex social practices, governed by norms and obligations, and Rosalind’s giving of this gift indicates her acquiescence in these social norms. It is a sign of her “good breeding” that she knows how to behave in polite society in adhering to the rituals of gift-giving. In many ways, as she says, the sand caster is “a senseless present”—outmoded and not utilitarian—but it is these qualities that actually mark it as a true gift and separate it from the monetary economy. Th e diff erence of Rosalind’s gift becomes apparent in comparison to the other lavish gifts that strew every available surface: these are all “gold-marked, authentic” and so readily translatable into, in fact synonymous with, cash (CSF 264). Her gift is fundamentally at odds with the acquisitive-ness of the Th orburns, whose large family is also conceptualized in economic terms: in addition to Ernest, the “fruitful” Th orburn union had “produced nine other sons and daughters into the bargain, many themselves married and also fruitful” (CSF 264; emphasis added).

But as Rosalind participates in this obligatory gift-giving, she has a moment of stark and shocking clarity as she recalls the note her mother-in-law gave her expressing the wish that Er-nest would make her happy. She feels panic as she refl ects on the fact that she’s not happy with Ernest and that he, like all his family and ancestors in the family portraits that surround her, has a nose that doesn’t twitch at all. But she also realizes that her mother-in-law’s note, in “the stubby black handwriting,” is not just a reminder of the legally binding marital contract that Rosalind has signed, but a contract of another kind, fi xing her in her place in this family as Ernest’s wife. It assumes her acceptance of the Th orburn idea of “happiness”–based on acquisition, increase and profi t in terms of gold and the breeding of children–and her role in its continuation.

Her only recourse from the increasingly horrifying realization is to escape into fantasy: hearing the “magic word” “rabbits” results in “a mysterious catastrophe” for the Th orburns in Rosalind’s imaginary revision of the party: “Th e golden table became a moor with the gorse in full bloom; the din of voices turned to one peal of lark’s laughter ringing down from the sky” (CSF 265). Rosalind’s surreal perception of the Th orburn family reveals her feelings of fear and distaste about them, their greed and acquisitiveness determining their transfor-mation of Mr Th orburn into a poacher, Mrs Th orburn into “the squire” and Ernest’s sister, Celia, into a ferret. As they raise a toast and “return[ing] thanks” for the abundance of their family and gifts, Rosalind as Lapinova foresees the fall in the Th orburn fortunes, and views the scene through an altered vision–not of affl uence and success, but of “the decayed family mansion” and their investment in the values of “a world that had ceased to exist” (CSF 265).

However, in the interplay of real and fantasy worlds at this point, Mr Th orburn’s role as “poacher” sheds a diff erent light on Rosalind’s anniversary gift. Although the sand caster does not have the same illicit connotation as Mr Th orburn’s collection of eighteenth-cen-


tury dressing-table objects (kept secret from his wife), Rosalind’s identifi cation of him as a “poacher” raises concerns that she too has collaborated in his “stealing off ” with goods that will be taken out of circulation, kept privately and consumed greedily: she feels she has played into the poacher’s hands. Like the “pheasants and partridges” her fantasy poacher drops “stealthily” into his cooking pot, Rosalind realizes that she too may be appropriated, her freedom curtailed and her creative gifts stolen and consumed (CSF 265).5

At this crucial point in the story Ernest’s on-going co-creation of their fantasy ensures Rosalind’s sense of safety as Lapinova. But this animal imagery is double-edged and all refer-ences to rabbits and hares are violent and destructive–they are animals to be shot, sold, eaten and used. Rabbits are commodities, comestibles and in both their fantasy and real worlds Er-nest is a metaphorical hunter.6 Rosalind’s “re-writing” of Ernest as King Lappin seeks to over-ride (or over-write) the Victorian associations of his name and his family heritage: “He did not look like Ernest either. Th e name suggested the Albert Memorial, mahogany sideboards, steel engravings of the Prince Consort with his family–her mother-in-law’s dining room in Porchester Terrace in short” (CSF 261). However, his breeding and cultural belonging win through in the end. Ernest’s refusal to continue the co-creation of their fantasy life causes Rosalind’s world to shrink to the prosaic and everyday (the simply domestic) and, without his co-operation, she loses her fantasy self. Simultaneously, Ernest becomes Rosalind’s hunter–his key in the door sounds like a gun shot and he seems to relish Rosalind’s distress at losing Lapinova, cruelly concluding she was “‘Caught in a trap […] killed’” (CSF 268). Th e life-sustaining force of Rosalind’s imaginary life is cut off by Ernest’s refusal to collude: as a result she experiences a metaphorical death, becoming “stiff and cold” with eyes, like those of the stuff ed hare she sees in the Natural History Museum, “glazed, like glass eyes” (CSF 267). Th is is a testimony, perhaps, to Woolf ’s own awareness of the (literally) vital necessity of imagina-tion to sustain existence, but also of the necessity of collaboration and co-creation.

Th e sand caster gift and the emphasis on imagination and narrative all suggest an inter-pretation of this story in the light of Woolf ’s writing and publication. Th e sand caster’s out-moded function in fi xing words may also allude to the Hogarth Press’s outmoded publica-tion practices of fi xing words in print.7 Th ere’s much more that could be said about this, but it’s the later context of the story’s production and publication that I want to focus on here.

In the 1930s context when the proliferation of propaganda became increasingly powerful in forming and promoting fi xed perceptions and beliefs, Rosalind’s gift of a device that “fi xes” words takes on a diff erent signifi cance. Th e rise of fascism in Europe led to dramatic changes in the social, political and economic context in which Woolf worked. Holding fast to her pacifi st principles, Woolf felt an increasing sense of isolation from friends and family, and also feared a loss of audience which she attributed in part to the increasing intrusion of market forces and political agendas into literary writing (as her essays, “Why Art Today Follows Politics” (1936) and “Reviewing” (1939) attest). As Th ree Guineas demonstrates, for Woolf the forces of fascism, capitalism and patriarchy form a powerful and deadly nexus driving Europe towards war. Her sense of being “the hare, a long way ahead of the hounds my critics,” following the publication of Th e Waves (D4: 45), is echoed as she anticipates the response to Th ree Guineas, describing herself as an “outsider” at which “[t]he pack may howl, but it shall never catch me” (D5: 41). In the diary entry in which she mentions “rehashing ‘Lappin and Lapinova,’” she also tellingly refl ects on her sense of her “public reputation at [that] moment” in terms of being “secondrate, & likely […] to be discarded altogether,” “decapitated” by negative criticism. Th is latter feeling

155“Lappin and Lapinova”

is not unlike Rosamund’s sense of imminent death, “feeling hands tightening at the back of her neck” (D5:188; CSF 268).

In some ways, this story could be read as a companion piece to Th ree Guineas–a com-plicating counterpart to the strident polemic of Woolf ’s extended essay. Whereas in Th ree Guineas the guineas operate as monetary gifts (“free gifts given freely”), and the extensive letters operate to sustain dialogue and a multiplicity of voices in an eff ort to counter the movement towards war, the sand caster gift perhaps sheds a more problematic light on Woolf ’s position as a pacifi st and woman writer. Like Rosalind’s gift, Woolf perceives her own artistic gift to be complex–at once at odds with the acquisitiveness dictating the operation of the commercial literary marketplace and also with the proliferation of the mechanical reproduction of words so closely associated with propaganda. However, Ro-salind’s dilemma is similar to that of Woolf: Rosalind is the pacifi st white hare caught in a trap–an unwilling member of the very English Th orburn family and at odds with, but ultimately in danger of being subsumed by, their acquisitive and belligerent values.8 Th ese values are encapsulated in ostentation of the golden-wedding anniversary party, with its discussion of the diff erent ways of obliterating the “enemy” (the rabbits). Th at this golden celebration of the Th orburn family is associated with capitalism’s insatiable acquisitiveness that must be resisted if the destruction of war is to be avoided is made apparent through the operation of color: the white icicle is dissolved by the Th orburn gold, destroyed by their greed for money and power. Th at this gold is also associated with war is suggested by “the great Chrysthanthemums that curled their red and gold petals into large tight balls” and which obscure Rosalind at the dinner table. As Elisa Sparks has pointed out, Woolf ’s diary for December 1920 records her experience of seeing women in the Strand crying out “Remember the glorious dead” as they handed out Chrysanthemums (D2: 79).

Whilst Woolf ’s essays of the period privilege women’s creativity as a force to counter war and to promote peace,9 I wonder whether this story in some ways suggests something otherwise. Woolf increasingly felt herself to be a lone pacifi cist voice, but she may also have a sense that, like Rosalind, she was not a white hare but “silver grey,” with her invest-ment in the imaginary, the creative and the fi ctional leading only to unwitting complicity with capitalism and war. Rosalind’s gift may suggest Woolf ’s fears that her creativity and writing had been superseded, like the sand caster, by more powerful, mechanically repro-duced voices and words.10 Th e story may suggest Woolf ’s fears that her creativity, her writ-ing and her stance outside the war machine may not free her from complicity, nor prevent her from being killed–whether metaphorically as a writer whose work is no longer read and responded to, or literally if Hitler’s invasion of Britain were to succeed.

Notes

1. Indeed, Hermione Lee describes the “messy, uncontrolled and sexual” menagerie of names which “by a literary parthenogenesis” would breed “yet more beasts” (111).

2. As Richard Espley argues (92). 3. As Jane Goldman reveals in her discussion of “Woolf’s signifying dog” (2007, 100). 4. Woolf’s submission of this story to Harper’s Bazaar was, according to her diary, simply to do with economic neces-

sity (D5, 189).5. Rosalind’s revulsion towards Mr Th orburn’s appropriation of the sand caster may hint at Woolf’s own concerns

about their catering to a niche market in which their hand-printed books would also have value largely as col-lectibles (as Lawrence Rainey has suggested of such modernist productions, 43).

6. Perhaps the fox terrier that crosses the newly-weds’ path as they leave the church at the beginning of the story is


an omen of what is to come. 7. As she and Leonard began to set up the Hogarth Press in 1916, producing their fi rst hand-printed book, Two

Stories, in 1917 Woolf was well aware that their production methods were outmoded but also that the Press itself was not a business in the usual sense, motivated as it was, not by the drive to make profi t, but to publish work that was experimental and diffi cult to publish elsewhere, to support new and unknown writers, and to create a public space for political views and a greater freedom of speech. From the outset the Press was perceived not as part of a capitalist system but as operating in a diff erent economic sphere, privileging the process of production and the creative and intellectual work itself rather than seeing value only as the maximising of profi ts in the production of commodities. Rather than seeing her writing as a commodity for ready consumption by her reader as consumer, Woolf imagined an ideal reader as accomplice and co-conspirator in the creative process.

8. Although Rosalind fears replicating her in-laws’ lives, it is signifi cant that it is on the anniversary of her in-laws’ anniversary party that Rosalind’s fears about Ernest’s loss of commitment to their fantasy life are realized. As Lapi-nova’s vision of the Th orburn mansion in ruins indicates, the worship of gold and greed leads only to destruction and decay. But this greed also enslaves men as well as women: making women such as Mrs Th orburn into bullies and Celia into a spy.

9. As is clear in Th ree Guineas and “Th oughts on Peace in an Air Raid” Woolf is keen to privilege women’s creativity because, as she states in Room, it is in the gift of women to renew and revitalize literary and cultural traditions and, her writing of the mid-late 1930s suggests, to bring about and sustain peace.

10. She was perhaps aware, as Sonita Sarker argues, of her participation in a “negotiated nostalgia” (39)

Works Cited

Espley, Richard. “Woolf and the Others at the Zoo.” In Woolfi an Boundaries: Selected Papers from the Sixteenth Annual In-ternational Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed Anna Burrells, et a. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2007.

Goldman, Jane. Th e Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Goldman, Jane. “’Ce chien est moi:’ Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog.” In Woolfi an Boundaries: Selected Papers from the Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed Anna Burrels, et a. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2007. 100-107.

Johnston, Georgia. “Natural Iteration.” Paper presented at Virginia Woolf and the Natural World (20th Annual Confer-ence on Virginia Woolf), Georgetown College, June 2010.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996.Mauss, Marcel. (1950) Th e Gift: Th e Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W.D. Halls. New York and

London: W.W.Norton, 1990.Rainey, Lawrence. “Th e Cultural Economy of Modernism.” In Th e Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed Michael

Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 33-69.Ruskin, John. (1865): “Lecture II. –Lilies. Of Queens’ Gardens.” Sesame and Lilies and the Political Economy of Art. Lon-

don and Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press.Sarker, Sonita. “Th ree Guineas. Th e In-corporated Intellectual, and Nostalgia for the Human.” Virginia Woolf and the Age

of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Caughie. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000. 37-66.Sparks, Elisa K. “Woolf and Nature: New Visual and Verbal Contexts.” Paper presented at Virginia Woolf and the Natural

World (20th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf), Georgetown College, June 2010. Woolf, Virginia. “Lappin and Lapinova.” Virginia Woolf: Th e Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick, London: Triad

Grafton Books, 1991. 261-8. _____. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 2. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: Penguin, 1981._____. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: Penguin, 1982._____ . Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 5. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: Penguin, 1984._____. Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt, Brace,

Jovanovich. 1975-80._____. “Reviewing.” Th e Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected Essays Volume 2. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. London: Penguin,

1993. 152-63._____. A Room of One’s Own. London: Grafton, 1989._____. “Th oughts on Peace in an Air Raid.” Th e Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected Essays Volume 2. Ed. Rachel

Bowlby. London: Penguin, 1993. 168-72. _____. Th ree Guineas. 1938. London: Th e Hogarth Press, 1991._____. “Why Art Today Follows Politics.” Th e Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected Essays Volume 2. Ed. Rachel

Bowlby. London: Penguin, 1993. 133-136.

“A CERTAIN HOLD ON HADDOCK AND SAUSAGE”: DINING WELL IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S LIFE AND WORK

by Alice Lowe

Food is an essential part of the human experience of the natural world, and for Vir-ginia Woolf, as for most of us, it has many meanings. Much has been written and discussed about Woolf ’s eating disorders, her fear and loathing of food and refusal

to eat properly (or at all) when she was ill. But just as she displayed a lively and outgoing character when she was well compared to the depression and anxiety that accompanied her sporadic illness, so too, she had a vivid appreciation for food, in both her personal enjoyment and appreciation of it and her use of it in her novels and essays, letters and diaries. From gathering mushrooms and baking bread to the boeuf en daube dinner in To the Lighthouse, this paper will explore Woolf ’s positive experience with food and eating.

Both emotionally-rooted childhood traumas and biologically-based mental illness are asserted as major factors in Virginia Woolf ’s life, either or both contributing to her eating problems. Louise DeSalvo attributed Woolf ’s eating disorders to the former, citing maternal neglect and paternal bullying as well as molestation by her step-brother Gerald Duckworth, conjecturing that as it occurred on a ledge where dishes of food were placed, “Th e very sight of a plate of food must have made her sick, recalling her feelings of disgust and shame” (104-5).

Her nephew and fi rst biographer, Clive Bell, claimed mental illness, using the terms “madness” and “insanity” for what is now thought to be bipolar disorder. Hermione Lee took a balanced approach, calling Woolf “a sane woman who had an illness” (171), with genetic, biological and environmental factors all contributing. She expressed concern about diagnostic labels: “To choose a language for Virginia Woolf ’s illness is . . . to rewrite and represent, perhaps to misrepresent it” (172). Allie Glenny called her work on Woolf ’s eating distress “the vindication of Virginia Woolf as a woman not only of genius but also of eminent sanity . . . [in spite of ] pathologizing labels intended to silence her or at the least to devalue her viewpoint” (vi).

Lee and others have questioned the eff ects of her illness versus her treatment by an authoritarian medical profession. Stephen Trombley wrote of Woolf as a “victim of male medicine,” whose doctors heightened her aversion by plying her with food. He studied the doctors’ backgrounds and biases, diagnoses and treatments and noted that Dr. Savage, for example, blamed insanity in young women on education (126). Virginia’s purportedly “mad” belief that she was the victim of a conspiracy made sense under the circumstances of her treatment, and he attributes her refusal to eat and violent reactions to her caretakers as a response to her threatened freedom.

Leonard Woolf believed and trusted the doctors, even though he was aware that they didn’t really know what was wrong or how to treat it. He adhered to their prescriptions of plenty of food and milk, rest and inactivity. Overfeeding was thought to be a kind of seda-tion and thus essential to the “rest cure.” While he observed early on that “Virginia had a great love of ordinary things, of eating” (56), he perhaps didn’t see that his and the doc-tors’ insistence on her overeating might be part of the problem rather than the solution.


He believed, as many still do, that his diligent monitoring of her health and well-being enabled her to work, even perhaps kept her alive.

My argument is not with the diagnoses or the theories behind them as much as with an implied constancy of these conditions, the suggestion that they permeated her life and work to a greater extent than I believe they did. I assert that Virginia Woolf liked food. Leonard acknowledged this, as did Clive Bell, who pointed out that when she was well, “there was fun . . . there was much eating, drinking and jollity” (94). And so I off er the following as food for thought.

In 1907 she wrote to Nelly Cecil, “Why is there nothing written about food—only so much thought? I think a new school might arise, with new adjectives and new epithets, and a strange beautiful sensation, all new to print” (L1: 278). She makes a similar observation in A Room of One’s Own: “It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for some-thing very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten.” She goes on to describe, in sensuous and sumptuous phrasing, the lunch at the men’s college (11).

She appreciated and recognized the importance of food not just for sustenance, but for its vital social connotations. Her keen observations of human behavior and nuance in-clude many scenes at the dinner table. She wrote about food deliberately and thoughtfully, attentive to what she wanted to convey. E. M. Forster observed that “It is always helpful, when reading her, to look out for the passages which describe eating. Th ey are invariably good . . . [and] a sharp reminder that here is a woman who is alert sensuously” (236). Of the scene in To the Lighthouse, he says that “Such a dinner cannot be built on a statement beneath a dish-cover which the novelist is too indiff erent or incompetent to remove. Real food is necessary, and this, in fi ction as in her home, she knew how to provide. She put it in because she tasted it” (236-7).

Th is is in stark contrast to claims that displays of fondness for food in her fi ction were compensation for her rejection of food in real life (Trombley). Analyzing food images in Woolf ’s novels, Harriett Blodgett posits that too much attention is given to Woolf ’s life at the expense of her artistry. “Yet because it is no longer usual to scrutinize Woolf in formalist terms, particularized recognition of her food imagery dwells on its autobiographical ties, sometimes misleadingly so” (45). She refutes arguments that the novels refl ect the attitudes of an anorectic woman, that, as one example, Mrs. Ramsey’s not being seen eating is indica-tive of both Woolf ’s and Mrs. Ramsey’s anorexia. First, Mr. Ramsey isn’t seen eating either, and secondly, Mrs. Ramsey’s cosseting of the men is typical of Victorian women. Similarly, her refusal to take one of the pears from the table arrangement, also cited as evidence, merely shows her aesthetic appreciation of it and her awareness of her role as host.

Most of her novels contain signifi cant food or eating scenes with vivid descriptions, in-cluding Neville’s “delicious mouthfuls of roast duck, fi tley piled with vegetables,” the butter oozing through Bernard’s crumpet, and Susan plunging her hands into the bread dough in Th e Waves. In Orlando, “How good to eat” is used in lieu of the word “beautiful.” Jacob’s Room is a cornucopia of food references, the most of any of her novels; they run the gamut of the human experience, from plenty and privilege to hunger and hardship. Th e gentility of Clarissa Dalloway’s party is contrasted with the satire of Doris Kilman’s gluttony for both food and Elizabeth Dalloway. Boeuf en daube, the pivotal dinner in To the Lighthouse, is a stew—a blend of ingredients, and Woolf uses communal meals and parties to bring people together.

159“A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage”

Food imagery and dining scenes fl esh out characters, settings and moods, showing both contrasts and commonalities, pleasure and pain. Consummate artist that she was, of course she also used her own experiences, as any good writer will do, to convey an authenticity to her characters’ experiences. She was able to recall the negative reactions to food that Septimus displays, and like William Bankes in To the Lighthouse and Kitty in Th e Years, she was critical of English food. She wasn’t a glutton, but she’d observed them. Much has been made of her disdain for gluttony and bad table manners, her primary targets being her close friend Ethel Smyth and Leonard’s colleague, Kingsley Martin. She shrewdly remarks that “You can tell people they are murderers; you can not tell them that they eat like hogs. Th at is wisdom” (L5: 226). She had dined at the tables of renowned hosts, and she shared the sensual enjoyment of good meals as so many of her characters did. Yet she was careful to add these passages and descriptions only when they served her purpose, whether metaphorically or to paint a vivid scene.

Food images in her work have been used as supporting evidence of opposing view-points, so one might say that the “proof of the pudding” lies in her life. Food is prominent in her diaries and letters, with fascinating trajectories over the years. Letters to friends include an appreciation of food as pleasurable and associated with well-being. She describes meals as one for whom they keenly matter: not just “had lunch,” but “lunched off cold chicken and tongue;” not just “we dined,” but “we dined off cold pheasant.” From Spain, she writes to Lytton Strachey of “the beauties of nature and the antiquities of man, upon which I would discourse if you would listen, but to tell the truth it is the food one thinks of more than anything abroad” (L2: 5). To Roger Fry, she describes the colors and sights and “a delicious lunch off rice and bacon and olive oil and onions and fi gs and sugar mixed” (L3: 29).

In spite of regular household help, she always had an interest in preparing as well as eating food. At Little Talland House in Firle, before she had a cook, she reports to Clive Bell: “Meals take 10 minutes to prepare, if one is sagacious enough to begin one’s potatoes after breakfast. Owing to this foresight, I had a potatoe so cooked that its skin rose in crackling bubbles, on the surface, and it was soft to the heart” (L1: 453). She took cooking classes in 1914 and describes to Janet Case the “ladies of great culture and refi nement . . . come to improve their knowledge of dinner party soup. I distinguish myself by cooking my wedding ring into a suet pudding! It’s really great fun” (L2: 55). At Asheham in the summer of 1917, diary entries express her joy in the daily activity of foraging for mushrooms and picking ripe blackberries to augment their table and compensate for wartime shortages.

During the fi rst World War, Virginia and Vanessa became increasingly self-reliant. Th ey learned from their own cooks, experimented making meals, and exchanged recipes (Light 137). Sweets took on heightened importance during the war, especially chocolate, for which she “beats the town” in London (Dl: 126). Mary Hutchinson is frequently and warmly men-tioned for producing “chocolates, cakes & sweets in abundance” (D1: 197). It was a great treat in Brighton in 1918 when they found plenty of chocolate; she says, “Can’t one see the curtain lifting very slightly, and some promise of a world of food & so on beyond?” (D1: 189).

When she and Leonard settled in at Monks House in 1919, food becomes part of the reassuring routine of daily life, enhanced by their garden. She talks of picking strawberries and cutting asparagus, harvesting apples, potatoes and walnuts in season. Baking is a satis-fying activity. Her cooks were aware of her bread-making skill, and Woolf herself showed Louie Mayer how to make it as good as her own. Her cooks’ culinary skills were important.


She sent both Mabel and Nellie to cooking classes, where both became profi cient at French cooking (Light 236). She wrote about food increasingly and with undisguised appreciation. “Nelly is preparing a nice roast chicken & ices for dinner, which I shall enjoy” (D3: 90); “I have just eaten a pear warm from the sun with the juice running out of it” (D3: 251).

Dining with friends was more about the people and the conversations than the food, but menus fi nd their way into numerous letters and diary entries. During World War I: “We sat at a low table covered with a bandanna, & eat out of dishes each holding a diff er-ent bean or lettuce: delicious food for a change. We drank wine, & fi nished with soft white cheese, eaten with sugar” (D1: 17); and shortly after the war at the Savoy Grill Room: “It is long since eating a meal was such a serious business to me. Fish & meat & melon & ices have come to their own again” (D1: 290). Food with Vita Sackville-West is charged with playfulness and eroticism: “[We] dined off sandwiches & strawberries in the highest glee” (D3: 306); “[We] ate cold salmon & raspberries & cream & little variegated chocolates given by Lady Sackville” (D4: 87). While visiting Nan Hudson and Ethel Sands she writes to Vita: “Oh the heavenly food! I said to myself I shall grow so fat Vita won’t like me. Still I ate and ate” (L3: 407). Of that same visit, she tells T.S. Eliot that “For the cooking alone I would sell my soul twice over” (L3: 413). Mary Hutchinson entertains in great style, and Virginia describes a dinner that included “an enormous earthenware dish . . . garnished with every vegetable, in January—peas, greens, mushrooms, potatoes; and in the middle the tenderest cutlets, all brewed in a sweet stinging aphrodisiac sauce” (L3: 164).

Two important things happened in 1929-1930—a new stove came, and Nelly left (after some false alarms, coming and going). Of the former she says: “But what interests me is of course my oil stove. I go over the dishes I shall cook—the rich stews, the sauces. Th e adven-turous strange dishes with dashes of wine in them” (D3: 257). And without a live-in cook: “I make bread. I cook mushrooms. I wander in & out of the kitchen” (D3: 311). “I am more & more attracted by looseness, freedom, & eating one’s dinner off a table anywhere, having cooked it previously” (D3: 316). She tells Vita: “I have only one passion in life—cooking. I can cook anything. I am free for ever of cooks. I cooked veal cutlets today. I assure you it is better than writing these more than idiotic books” (L4: 93). She values “solitary evenings; & cook-ing dinner” (D4: 184); “Words words & now roast beef & apple tart. An evening alone” (D5: 183). “Our way of life here—cooking messes, cutting fresh asparagus from the earth seems to me almost divine” (L4: 335); “I light my oven, and put in my chicken brew; and a divine blood red soup, made of beetroot, onions, carrots and I think a dash of some spirit” (L4: 407). Recovering from a bout of fl u, she writes “I’m beginning to plan a walk; and to plan what my next sentence will be, and to think with rapture of roast mutton” (L4: 268).

She loved French food. Traveling with Vita, she describes the food in four of fi ve letters to Leonard, including “the vastest most delicious meal I have ever eaten. It is the usual small French inn, with farmers lunching; we began with pate of duck, went on to trout, gnocchi, stuff ed chicken and spinach made with cream and then sour cream and a delicious cake and then pears” (L3: 534). On another trip, there was “a fi rst rate dinner . . . thought out and presided over by a graceful young chef . . . he concocted a sauce out of cream, French beans, mustard, salt & wine . . . another red brown casserole was brought, & the sauce poured over. I had mushrooms in cream. And I observed the way a good waiter serves a dish with infi nite care & respect, as if handling something precious” (D4: 317). At a hotel in France: “Dinner of character; fried eggs, ham and rice. Choc[olate]

161“A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage”

cream with biscuits fl oating. Aubergines with chopped bacon and gravy; also stuff ed with cheese dressing” (D5: 89).

She couldn’t get enough goose liver pate abroad or at home and expressed her pleasure in imaginative detail. Of a gift from Vita, she writes: “I’ve eaten the whole pie practically myself! What immortal geese must have gone to make it! It was fresh as a dockleaf, pink as mushrooms, pure as fi rst love” (L6: 194). Gifts of food were frequent and acknowledged with mouth-watering words of thanks. Vita’s mushrooms “must have grown in a water meadow and been breathed on by cows” (L5: 204). “Did I tell you my notion of heaven? All mushrooms” (L5: 328). During World War II, Octavia Wilberforce sent them hard-to-get dairy products: “Your cow must be a miracle. It has produced the best cream and the best milk that [we] have ever eaten” (L6: 454).

Shortages and rationing were part of the wartime challenges and horrors taking their toll. But her accounts of cooking and eating at Monks House demonstrate a heightened appreciation of the relative simplicity of their life, where “the world rises out of dark squalor into this divine natural peace” (D5: 243). Cooking helps to combat depression (D5: 215), and she tells Ethel Smyth that “Th e delight of being without a maid in the house is such that I don’t mind an hour’s cooking—indeed it is a sedative” (L6: 434). “So happy cooking dinner, reading, playing bowls” (D5: 231). Making butter with Louie is “a moment of great household triumph” (D5: 340), and becomes a source of pride. She writes Ethel: “Did I tell you I can now make lovely, rich, savoury vegetable soup? Tonight we shall have macaroni au gratin…with cream” (L6: 467). She closes an update to Mary Hutchinson: “What else? Oh I read a great many books, and cook vegetable soup for dinner” (L6: 472).

Her last entry in 1940 reads, “How one enjoys food now. I make up imaginary meals” (D5: 347). In January 1941 after viewing the devastation in London, she’s “ravished & demolished. So to Buszards where, for almost the fi rst time, I decided to eat gluttonously. Turkey & pancakes. How rich, how solid” (D5: 353). And then in March, just two weeks before her death: “And now with some pleasure I fi nd that it’s seven; and must cook din-ner, Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down” (D5: 358).

With her keen powers of observation, Woolf used the language of food vividly and playfully to describe the world around her. Friends and family, acquaintances and strangers, are likened to “one of the hams in Flint’s shop” (D5: 23), “a perfectly stuff ed cold fowl” (D5: 120), “mute as a trout [with] the swift composure of a fi sh” (D1: 197). Compare Morgan Forster, “a pale cold chicken” (D4: 169), to Desmond McCarthy, “the most cooked & satu-rated of us all . . . basted richly over a slow fi re” (D3: 234). She herself is “light as a trout with sheer irresponsible relief” (L4: 357), like “a biscuit in the middle of rats” (L5: 211).

Reading and writing assume colorful images: books that go stale “like a cheese that’s been cut in & left. Th e fi rst slice is always the best” (D5: 257) or are likened to “a sickly slab of plum cake iced with pink fl y blown sugar” (D4: 186); ideas are like omelettes and “words like hard boiled eggs” (L6: 286). Meritorious prose, she says, is “such gruel & water . . . not a food for the mature” (L5: 88). She compares writing Between the Acts to Th e Year, noting “more milk skimmed off . A richer pat” (D5: 340). She writes to Hugh Walpole that his book is even better than peach-fed Virginian ham (D5: 141-42).

Virginia Woolf ’s priorities, her loves, were writing and reading, her friends and fam-ily, and her daily life, which included her walks, nature and food. She writes about what


she eats as a way of expressing contentment. Food was comfort, a quiet pleasure, like a warm fi re or a brisk walk. She mentions when food is bad as well as when it’s good, but not that it’s noxious or that she has no taste for it, but rather as one who expects and hopes for better. And she recognizes the potential for the picturesque and the humorous as well as the layered meanings in her use of food imagery to describe people, to demonstrate character and to set a stage. I don’t think this would be possible without an underlying appreciation and enjoyment.

Her work refl ects this, perhaps most notably in A Room of One’s Own, when she compares the meals at the men’s and women’s colleges. Of the former, Mary Gordon remarks that “Her joy in sensual satisfaction is magnifi cently expressed . . . it is one of the immortal meals in lit-erature” (ix). Woolf refl ects on the two meals and observes that “Th e human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well (18).

Works Cited

Bell, Clive. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.Blodgett, Harriet. “Food for Th ought in Virginia Woolf ’s Novels.” Women’s Studies Annual. Vol.3:1997. 45-60. DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: Th e Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. Boston: Beacon

Press, 1989.Forster, E.M. in Recollections of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Joan Russell Noble. 1972. Middlesex, England: Penguin

Books, 1975. 226-242.Glenny, Allie. Ravenous Identity: Eating and Eating distress in the Life and Work of Virginia Woolf. New York: St.

Martin’s Press, 1999.Gordon, Mary. Foreword. A Room of One’s Own. Virginia Woolf. 1929. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1989.Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. 1996. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.Light, Alison. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants. New York: Bloomsbury Press. 2008.Moran, Patricia. Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfi eld and Virginia Woolf. Charlottesville: Uni-

versity Press of Virginia, 1996. Trombley, Stephen. All that Summer She was Mad. New York: Continuum, 1982.Woolf, Leonard. Growing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.Woolf, Virginia. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanov-

ich, 1977-84.___. Jacob’s Room. 1922. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1978.___. Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1975-1980.___. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. New York: Harvest Book, 2005.___. Orlando. 1928. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1973.___. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1989.___. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Orlando: Harvest Book, 2005.___. Th e Waves. 1931. New York: Harvest Book, 2006.

MOMENTS OF AGING: REVISING MOTHER NATURE IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MRS. DALLOWAY

by Katherine Sedon

I WAS IN A QUEER MOOD, THINKING MYSELF VERY OLD: BUT NOW I AM A WOMAN AGAIN—AS I ALWAYS AM WHEN I WRITE. (D3: 231)

Scholars have documented and discussed well Virginia Woolf ’s use of mirrors and glass as devices that key readers into what she calls moments of being. Critics from Harold Bloom to Hermione Lee have explicated her life and writing, thoroughly

commenting on issues of identity, perception, and time, among others. In similar mea-sure, feminist critics from Kathleen Woodward to Anne M. Wyatt-Brown have initiated a new conversation on Woolf that includes issues of aging in the context of Woolf ’s life and work. Just as feminist scholars continue to cultivate insights on aging, so too should critics discuss the devices used by Woolf to explore, analyze, and comment on the phenomenon of aging. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf revises the Mother Nature archetype to better fi t her perceptions and experiences of aging. In doing so, she employs nature imagery as vantages into particular moments of being that portend the social retrogressions and psychological devaluations of aging women—instances we might call moments of aging.

Diverse cultures throughout prehistory and recorded history have incorporated a feminine understanding of nature and earth into their mythologies, spiritual practices, and arts. Although there are a few exceptions, dominating discourses construct the Moth-er Nature archetype as a young woman. For example, Tellus or Terra Mater in Roman mythology, whose name literally translates to “Mother Earth,” is painted in a fl oor mosaic inside a Roman villa in Sentinum. A youthful Tellus reclines with her off spring, the four seasons, while Aion (the god of time) stands centered inside of a golden ribbon streaming the signs of the zodiac. Th ough that’s only one example, the archetype of nature as femi-nine pervades and crosses cultural, geographic, and chronological boundaries.

Carl Jung defi nes an archetype as “psychic contents that have not yet been submitted to conscious elaboration” (4). Th e conscious elaboration of an archetype develops into that archetype’s historical formula. As Mother Nature has been associated with the earth, harvests, growth, and fertility, those psychic contents have transformed into a highly de-fi ned concept rigidly connected to the idea of youth. Virginia Woolf turns this concept on its head by revising the archetype, eff ectively creating a well-wrought urn to hold the experiences of aging women. She explores the phenomenon of aging by comparing and contrasting her female characters to the features of nature: sky, animal and plant life, wind, and water. Her study yields a new Mother Nature, an aging one, who is barely recognizable to the historical formula of Mother Nature as a young woman. More spe-cifi cally, Woolf ’s revised Mother Nature appears in the Battered Woman, Clarissa’s aunt Helena Parry, and Clarissa Dalloway herself.

As Peter Walsh strolls through the park and considers his own age of fi fty-three, the Battered Woman interrupts him with singing:


A frail, quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, begin-ning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human mean-ing into--ee um fah so foo swee too eem oo--the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring sprouting from the earth; which issued . . . from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches . . . and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze. (MD 81)

Th e Battered Woman’s ageless, sexless, weak, and shrill voice coupled with her apparent homelessness imply that she lacks some subjectivity as a result of her loss of social status. Although she is physically visible to Peter Walsh, she is socially invisible and barren of leaves. Without the protection of her leaves, she is at the mercy of the eternal breeze, that unrelenting force of time and subsequent aging. Eff ectively, her voice is revoked of all human meaning.

In Aging and its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions, Kathleen Woodward describes the devaluation of subjectivity in aging women. “Th e sexual allure of a woman, still taken to be one of a woman’s most important ‘economic’ possessions, is understood to diminish much more rapidly with age than does that of a man” (16). Aging women lose value—be it social, political, or economic—until one might assume it is altogether depleted. Rather than provide her readers with a youthful and feminine form of nature that is fertile with the potential for life, Woolf creates the Battered Woman in the images of a barren tree and rusty pump—nearly lifeless and certainly less valuable objects.

Additionally, Woolf describes the Battered Woman with images of fl owers and birds but with an ulterior version of Mother Nature: “Once she had walked in May. . . . But the passage of ages had blurred the clarity of that ancient May day; the bright petalled fl owers were hoar and silver frosted . . . with the bird-like freshness of the very aged she still twittered ‘give me your hand and let press it gently’” (MD 82). Th e Battered Woman’s memory fades as she ages, and her fl ower petals become icy with the passing of time, in-dicating senility and a loss of sexual allure. Furthermore, she has the “bird-like freshness of the very aged”—a juxtaposition of the freshness and vitality of youth with the staleness of the very aged.

Th e Battered Woman’s implied senility is further evidenced in how Peter Walsh re-acts to her request that he hold her hand. He gives her a shilling before entering the taxi, avoiding any touch. Th e Battered Woman’s dependency on strangers is a microcosmic example of the power of the patriarchy’s purse and the powerlessness of an aging woman, who is simultaneously trapped within and discarded by the system. Leena Schroder and Merry Pawlowski cite Woolf ’s intention to expose the pecuniary consequences of aging as a woman. Schroder identifi es the Battered Woman as a “radical and disruptive spirit” who threatens Britain’s image of imperialism yet also confi rms the power of the Empire (239). Pawlowski adds that the “very presence of [the Battered Woman] is also the confi rma-tion of British power, a fact that was not lost on Woolf” (vii). We see this when her shrill intonation and solicitation for spare change stand out amongst the rhythmic hustle and bustle of shopping Londoners.

Aside from the Battered Woman, Woolf provides us with one of her oldest female characters: Aunt Helena Parry, age eighty years, one of the few female characters to age

165Moments of Aging

past fi fty. Woolf consistently describes Helena in relation to fl owers—particularly or-chids—and provides her readers with glimpses into Helena’s memories. “[I]t was orchids she saw, and mountain passes and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the ‘sixties over solitary peaks; or descending to uproot orchids (startling blossoms, never held before) which she painted in water-color; an indomitable Englishwoman” (MD 178). Helena recalls her life’s journey as uprooting orchids. Th e process of aging and journeying through life parallels the violent action of pulling fl owers from the ground: a premature end of life. Rather than presenting Helena as a fl ower growing her roots deeper and deeper into the soil, Woolf writes her as an uprooted orchid.

Many age theorists and scholars of age studies have already noted that females experi-ence a loss of life and subjectivity because age is, in large part, socially constructed despite its bodily implications. To quote Woodward, “Meanings are attached to the fi gures of age and aging based on a society’s evaluation of aging” (x). A woman’s subjectivity is ham-pered by the process of aging not because of physical change or deterioration but because of the social norms affi xed to age like the false attribution of senility. Margaret Gullette exposes this false attribution of senility to old age, saying of early twentieth-century Brit-ish culture, “Th e losses attributable to aging had become systemic—tied not merely to the sexual system but to cerebration as well” (23). In other words, during Woolf ’s lifetime, sexual activity was believed to be inherently tied to creative energy (read: imagination and intellect).

Peter Walsh falsely attributes senility to Helena, who he initially believes to be dead until he sees her very much alive at the party. Peter thinks, “He has heard of [Aunt Hel-ena], from Clarissa, losing the sight of one eye. It seemed so fi tting—one of nature’s masterpieces—that old Miss Parry should turn to glass. She would die like some bird in a frost gripping her perch” (162). Th e loss of sight pivots on the cultural metaphor of sight as thought. If seeing is thinking, Peter believes that Helena, in her old age, lacks intellec-tual abilities, despite her research and publications on orchids and how Charles Darwin admired her. Helena is a bird, frozen to death on its perch, without any marker of youth.

Th e Battered Woman and Aunt Helena exemplify Woolf ’s revised Mother Nature. However, the reader attains a stronger sense of Woolf ’s feelings on aging through Clarissa’s moments of being. By using the images of her revised Mother Nature, Woolf gives her audience the opportunity to live inside a moment of aging. Clarissa feels young, yet “at the same time unspeakably aged” (8). Th ere is an ambiguity surrounding Clarissa’s experi-ences of simultaneous youth and old age, emblematizing the anxiety one might have near the cusp of midlife and beyond. Th roughout the course of her day, in preparing for her party, Woolf lets us inside Clarissa’s thoughts as she grapples with her fear of aging.

As Clarissa prepares for her party, Woolf constructs a moment of being that plunges into the anxieties of aging:

[Clarissa] had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fi x in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fi fty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the mo-ment, transfi xed it, there—the moment of this June morning on which was the


pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself. (37)

Clarissa’s anxieties over aging culminate in a spasm that fi xes her identity within the mo-ment of aging. Th e placement of glass within the scene—along with particular language such as variations of fi xity, fl uctuation, and plunging—keys readers into Clarissa’s mo-ment of being as she considers her age. Yet, she envisions her awareness of aging as icy claws that fi x in her. Th e ice and claws reveal a particular kind of moment of being—a moment that hinges upon Woolf ’s revised Mother Nature, a moment of aging. No longer a historically-formulated archetype of youth and fertility, Woolf references Mother Nature in images of ice to develop Clarissa’s experiences of aging.

One of the most prominent experiences for aging women is invisibility, and the Bat-tered Woman, Aunt Helena, and Clarissa all experience it. Clarissa refl ects on her own invisible identity as she walks down Bond Street after purchasing fl owers:

But often now this body she wore . . . , this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, un-seen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway. (11)

Already married and no longer bearing children, Clarissa’s identity as an aging woman rests on being Mrs. Richard Dalloway. Clarissa is no longer visible to others—and even, to an extent, to herself. As the body ages and hides a former youth, the phenomenon of aging also hides the aging woman’s subjectivity as herself, instead transforming her into the identity seemed most suitable by society-at-large.

Because of the nature of aging as a biological phenomenon and social construction, an aging woman’s identity is bound up with her age. Woolf often explores the concept of identity within her moments of being, but her moments of aging provide readers and crit-ics with specifi c vantages into the identities of aging women. For example, Clarissa pauses at a window and plunges into a moment of aging:

A single fi gure . . . against the stare of this matter-of-fact June morning; soft with the glow of rose petals for some, she knew, and felt it, as she paused by the open staircase windows which let in blinds fl apping, dogs barking, let in, she thought, feeling herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless, the grinding, the blowing, fl owering of the day, out of doors, out of the window, out of her body and brain which now failed. (30)

Clarissa reacts to aging by feeling shrivelled and breastless—bankrupt of her bodily cur-rency. She laments the inescapability of aging. “Age had brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves”

167Moments of Aging

(174). Aging touches and visibly alters the body in a way that one cannot control just as one cannot control the waves of an ocean. Often used by Woolf, waves represent fl uctua-tion, always changing position, growing and breaking, those forces that carry us out into the sea of old age. Th e danger of a mermaid and the image of a setting sun depict the consequences of aging: eventual death.

Both aging and death intermingle in Clarissa’s life, which Woolf illustrates through repeated allusions to William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages” (4.2). Th e fi rst allusion appears when Clarissa muses on Lady Bruton’s luncheon invitation to Richard, the second when she reacts to news of Septimus Smith’s suicide, and the third when she watches the old woman in the window at the end of the evening. “‘Fear no more,’ said Clarissa. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun; for the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her made the moment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar and shivers: so she rocked: so she shivered” (30). Th is shock is a disruption that Woolf connects to images of a plant on a river-bed. Helplessly rooted to the river-bed, the plant has no option but to rock and shiver. From this imagery, Woolf immediately transitions into Clarissa’s fear of aging as she sees it in Lady Bruton’s face, a woman of at least fi fty. Woolf writes, “Th e dwindling of life; how year by year [Lady Bruton’s] share was sliced” (30). From this stream of consciousness, Clarissa’s shock becomes ambiguous—blurred between her jealousy over the invitation and her feelings of helplessness—but clearly bound up within her fear of aging.

Just after hearing news of the suicide of Septimus Smith, Clarissa refl ects as she looks through a window. She thinks, “It will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it was—ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. Th e wind must have risen” (186). In the setting sun, in the end of life and living, Clarissa fi nds a lack of color in her life history, a history that happened too quickly and broadly. In order to have the audience fully understand this in Clarissa, Woolf uses the sky and the Battered Woman as variants of her revised Mother Nature, such that the audience is able to recognize a modifi ed theme of Mrs. Dalloway: death is natural, death is inevitable, the wind will rise.

At the end of the evening, Big Ben strikes its count as Clarissa watches the old woman in the window across the way. And she thinks,

Th e young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. Th ere! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun. (186)

Fear no more the heat of the sun as the light will go out in death into darkness. Clarissa tells herself not to fear aging because death will end it. Just as the light goes out in the old woman’s window, Clarissa’s setting sun will fade into night.

Clearly, Clarissa does not pity Smith. Instead, she almost envies him for ending his own life. Aside from stating the obvious in regard to pity, Woolf provides a deeper intro-spection: while Smith very literally threw his life away, Clarissa and everyone else went


on living; “they would grow old” (184). Clarissa perceives death as an embrace. “Death was defi ance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. Th ere was an embrace in death” (184). Death embraces aloneness.

Woolf elaborates on her allusions to Shakespeare in a moment of aging. During this instance, Clarissa sees the waves collect and fall in the sea of old age. Woolf blurs the boundary between the aging woman and an aging nature:

So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, Th at is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. (40)

No longer fearing, the heart wades out into the sea of old age that grieves one’s losses over and over again. Th at is all. One only escapes aging in death, in wading farther into the water.

Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own criticizes how little the world knows about the lives of older women, but she provides many accounts of their experiences in Mrs. Dalloway. In taking up the topic of aging, Woolf revises the Mother Nature archetype and historical formula to include her experiences and perceptions of aging and death. She references feminine nature in particular moments of being to explore aging, creating moments of aging. For Woolf, aging was a grave concern. Her diary entry from October 2, 1932 reads, “I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence, my optimism” (D4: 125). Despite the sardonic humor of her diary, there is perhaps some truth in Woolf ’s statement. One could understand her suicide as a rejection of aging.

Works Cited

Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. “Creativity, Aging, Gender: a Study of Th eir Intersections, 1910-1935.” Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity. Ed. Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen. Charlottes-ville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. 19-48.

Jung, Carl. Four Archetypes. Cornwall: TJ International Ltd, 2001.Pawlowski, Merry M. “Introduction.” Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Kent: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2003.

i-xii.Schroder, Leena. “Mrs. Dalloway and the Female Vagrant.” Essays in Criticism 45 (1995): 324-46.Woodward, Kathleen. Aging and its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,

1991.—. “Introduction.” Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Indianapolis: Indiana

University Press, 1999. ix-xxix.Woolf, Virginia. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 3. Ed. Anne O. Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1979. —. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4. Ed. Anne O. Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1982.—. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 1981.

HOMELESS IN NATURE: SOLITARY TRAMPINGS AND SHARED ERRANTRY IN CORNWALL, 1905

by Barbara Lonnquist

Woolf’s understanding of her position within the whole of natural existence was often expressed within the context of being a walker upon the earth, of being, as she describes in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), part of the “swing, tramp, and trudge” of

human existence (4). Her travels between the city and the country as well as her voyages out-side of her native England reinforced within her a view of human experience as a simultane-ous inclusion in—and alienation from—the strangeness of the natural universe. One locus in particular, Cornwall, served as a privileged site of Woolf ’s psychic and aesthetic mining of the natural world. Cornwall was for Woolf the place of an imagined stability associated with childhood and the acute discovery of a radical abandonment. As Woolf herself identifi ed in “A Sketch of the Past” (written in 1940, only months before her own death), her earli-est memories reached back—through her mother—to Talland House in St. Ives, Cornwall (MOB 64-65), which Leslie Stephen had leased in 1881, and where the Stephens spent their summer holidays from 1882, the year Virginia was born, until 1894, the summer before the death of her mother, Julia Stephen, in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen.

Cornwall was not simply a “framing device” for Woolf ’s art; rather its place in Woolf ’s writing anticipates Lawrence Buell’s description of an environmental text as one in which “the non-human environment becomes a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history” (qtd. in McKusick 200). To put it another way, the visit to Cornwall in 1905 was for Woolf the genesis of a realization that would come to full expres-sion twenty years later in To the Lighthouse (1927), namely that seemingly stable constructions such as family, home and solid land are somewhat fl imsy illusions of stability. Walks along the towering Cornish cliff s, with their history of often unregarded devastation, inspired in Virginia what might be called a “geological view” of human history—not unlike that of an Arnold or Hardy, except that in Woolf ’s case the “long view” was infl ected not so much with Victorian doubt as with a chastened perception of a self decentered in the vast reaches of natural history.

In August of 1905, a year after the death of Leslie Stephen and eleven years since the fam-ily had last summered in St. Ives, Virginia and her siblings, her sister Vanessa and her brothers Th oby and Adrian, returned to Carbis Bay in Cornwall for a holiday that was in many respects as much a pilgrimage as it was a vacation. In the wake of their father’s death in 1904, the four Stephen children had moved from the family home in Hyde Park Gate in Kensington to a rented house at 46 Gordon Square in the less fashionable (and not yet Bohemian) Bloomsbury district of London. Virginia, who was barely twenty-three at this time of liberation from the restrictions of a Victorian familial and social life in Hyde Park, no doubt experienced both the exhilaration of a new-found freedom and at the same time a radical disorientation, a sense of being unmoored as she embarked on this new life and her own fl edgling apprenticeship as a writer.

Th e stay in Carbis Bay near St. Ives from August to October of 1905 would off er her a similarly exhilarating and destabilizing experience as the now-orphaned siblings confronted the phantoms of their past (some comforting, such as the Cornish folks who


retained vivid and fond memories of the Stephen family, especially of Julia Stephen) and at the same time the discovery of their own ghostliness not only in the unprotected state of relative homelessness but also in relation to the immense span of human and non-human history embedded in the Cornish landscape, where the desolation and spectacle of natural devastation contrasted sharply with the relative security of the world circumscribed by the electric lighting that was newly theirs in Gordon Square.

If the 1905 journey to Cornwall was, as Julia Briggs has characterized it, a form of “Word-sworthian revisiting” (162), Woolf ’s encounter with nature was less than romantic; her “tramp-ings” (Woolf uses “tramped” and “tramping” throughout the 1905 journal account of the visit) brought her into contact with nature’s radical otherness. Her descriptions suggest not only solitude but an existential loneliness that permeated even their communal walks and initiated for Virginia a haunting sense of abandonment, of being orphaned in the midst of a landscape that was not only stunningly beautiful and personally signifi cant but at the same time an aloof, even indiff erent, nature. And although in moments such as a regatta in St. Ives, when listen-ing to the voices from the beach on a sunny afternoon, she registers the impression of fi nding herself held “safe in a Nurses [sic] hand again” (PA 291), the feeling cannot hold.

Th e text that perhaps most informs my reading in this paper of Woolf ’s 1905 Corn-wall encounter with the strangeness and destabilizing sense of nature’s transience (echoed most poignantly in the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse [1927]) is Marilynne Robinson’s American novel Housekeeping (1980), a narrative in which parental abandon-ment—literal orphanhood—serves as a trope for our natural, human condition and leads the protagonist Ruth under the “care” of her aunt Sylvie (herself a “transient”) to an acute perception of the fl uidity underneath the seeming solidity of human constructions, which she calls mere “apparitions.” Accepting the existential homelessness signaled in nature, Ruth (unlike her sister Lucy) ultimately embraces with Sylvie a shared itinerancy—or in Edouard Glissant’s formulation, the shared “errantry” that makes its home in exile (Glis-sant 14-16). “Loneliness,” young Ruth declares, after her initiation into nature’s deep, “is an absolute discovery” (157). Th e interplay in Robinson’s novel between the dark and watery world outside where Sylvie and Ruth wander and the solid world of lighted houses (real and conceptual) sought by Lucy recalls Woolf ’s counterpointing of solid and fl uid in both To the Lighthouse and (although Robinson may not have known these) the Cornwall journal and Woolf ’s subsequent essay “A Walk by Night,” published later in 1905, based on the Stephen children’s dramatic tramp home in the dark at the end of their stay.1

From the start the journal explores the contrast between the familiar world of substantial-ity and a foreign and disorienting sense of ghostliness. After the excitement of setting off on the Great Western train, hoping to fi nd in Cornwall “our past preserved as though through all this time it had been guarded and treasured for us to come back to one day . . . to recover something tangible of their [summers’] substance” (PA 281, emphasis added), the foursome disembarks at dusk and heads straight to Talland House, where they stealthily grope in the dark to catch a glimpse “through a chink in the escalonia hedge” of an irretrievable past:

Th ere was the house, with its two lighted windows; there on the terrace were the stone urns, against the bank of tall fl owers; all, so far as we could see was as though we had but left it in the morning. But yet, as we knew well, we could go no further; if we advanced the spell was broken. Th e lights were not our lights; the voices were

171Homeless in Nature

the voices of strangers. [ ] We hung there like ghosts in the shade of the hedge, & at the sound of footsteps we turned away. (PA 282, emphasis added)

One sees here images now familiar to us from To the Lighthouse: the lighted windows, the stone urn and the aromatic escalonia hedge that functions as a kind of Proustian madeleine. Th e recognition upon arrival at the place of pilgrimage that memory cannot be resubstantiated any more than the grown children can reenter the sheltering space of the nursery is suggested by Woolf ’s ironic reversal of the present and the vanished in ren-dering the living, embodied Stephen survivors as apparitions suspended in time—“hung there like ghosts” (282). Th is inaugural image of ghostliness presages the “deconstruction of the solid world” (Lee 221) that prevails throughout the Cornwall diary, fi gured most prominently in the juxtapositions—or “puzzling margins,” to borrow Marilynne Robin-son’s phrase from Housekeeping (4)—which Woolf observes between the fl uidity of the sea and the utter solidity of the land, a contrast sharpened by the ruggedness of the Cornish coast with its towering cliff s that speak to Woolf of “enormous geological forces and vast reaches of time” (Westling 856). As Virginia continues to tramp this “trackless country” throughout the summer in sun and rain (which she once refers to as the “shock of an uncivilised storm” (PA 286, emphasis added), she notes the sudden unexpected secret[s] of pilgrimage that surprise the “solitary walker & linger in the memory”—“little visions” which she realizes no one else will see “for months, or even years” (PA 294). Th e interplay of solid and fl uid throughout the Cornish diary echoes descriptions from a previous sum-mer of the downs near Salisbury as “long curved waves of the sea … as though the land here, all molten once, & rolling in vast billows had solidifi ed while the waves were still swollen & on the point of breaking” (PA 192; qtd. in Westling 858).

Only at Land’s End, a goal where the imagination expects to be “infallibly im-pressed,” was she disappointed to fi nd the sight made “hideous” by encroaching tourism: “the cliff s, & the romantic line of the coast are the property nowadays of a hundred eyes; every ten minutes or so a lumbering brake or a dusty motor car deposits its load of sight seers” (PA 294). Th e land all around, however, is “still lonely & very beautiful” (PA 294). In the darkened evenings of the approaching autumn, the distinction between land and sea would gradually “dissolve” into an “ambiguous space” just as human outlines them-selves would blur and disappear into the vaporous landscape (E1: 82).

If as Jonathan Bate has suggested in Th e Song of the Earth, “art is the place of exile where we grieve for our lost home on earth” (73), Cornwall in 1905 became the site of Woolf ’s embrace of a simultaneous sense of homelessness and belonging on earth that would inform her writing over a lifetime, and, more immediately, one rather remarkable tramp recorded in her Cornwall diary would be transformed before the year’s end into an essay, “A Walk by Night,” published in Th e Guardian in December 1905. With “summer on the wane” and the holiday nearing its conclusion, Woolf describes in the Cornwall dia-ry a walk home begun at dusk but extended into night by their taking a “long look at Gur-nard’s Head” promontory beyond which “fl ashed the fi tful glare of the St Just Lighthouse” (PA 297). During the seven mile return in the darkness of misty Cornish night, although they try to keep to the road, it turns into a white mist, making its hard surface a surprise to their feet. As Adrian stalks ahead of them, “he was blurred and without outline” so that they “had to call out after him to make sure we had not lost him” (PA 297). Th e sudden


appearance of a farmer with a lantern returns them for a moment to “the cheerful land of substance” before returning into the darkness and the “fi elds that swam in dusky vapours” (PA 298). As they climb a hill they witness a village whose lighted windows were “scarcely able to irradiate a yard of the blackness that pressed on them” (PA 298).

Th e version published in Th e Guardian (and reprinted in Volume One of Th e Essays of Virginia Woolf) is faithful to the incident, but she transforms some of the imagery to emphasize the wateriness of the dark and their immersion in its depths. For example, the “vast trackless country” in the diary will become the “trackless ocean of the night” in the published version (E1: 81). Th e view as the party begins its return is described as “still solid in the twilight” as the “great cliff s front the night and the Atlantic waves,” but soon the surface of the road beneath them “swam like mist, and our feet struck somewhat tenta-tively as though they questioned the ground,” and a fi gure who appears momentarily will soon be “engulfed as though the dark waters of the night had closed over it and the voice sounded like one reaching across great depths as if by the waters of the night” (E1: 80). In this version, their own individuality is also dissolved: their voices sound strange to each other, and the fi gures walking beside one “seem to merge in the night” (E1: 81). As, by degrees, resistance to the darkness subsides, “the body moving forward seems something separate from the mind” (E1: 81). Th e farmer with the lantern confers a momentary feel-ing of solidity, but his voice “bidding us goodnight” becomes a “fi rm hand” pulling their submerged bodies “to the shores of the world, but in two strides the immense fl ood of darkness and silence was over us again” (E1: 81). Th e lights of the cottages “hung fl oating without anchorage” in the valley below were “like the lights of ships passing at sea” (E1: 81). At the vision of a village below, the narrator comments, “How puny were the rays of the lamp against the immeasurable waves of darkness surging around them! A ship at sea is a lonely thing, but far lonelier it seemed was this little village anchored to the desolate earth and exposed every night alone to the unfathomed waters of darkness” (E1: 82). In this version, the adapting consciousness gradually fi nds peace and beauty as it grows “ac-customed to the strange element”; the eye fi nds relief “without grating on any harsh out-line of reality” (E1: 82)—a possible revision of Matthew Arnold’s melancholic resistance to dissolution in “Dover Beach.” “Th e earth,” Woolf continues, “with its infi nity of detail is dissolved into ambiguous space” (E1: 82). Here the people of the night are not like their apparitions in the day. Both versions end with the image of the Stephen children as birds returned to a narrowed space after the immensity of the dark.

One can see here how Woolf anticipates the imagery of To the Lighthouse with its counterpointing of land and water in relation to the appearance of solidity registered by the house (symbolizing marriage, domesticity, culture) in its stand against the chaos and fl ux of nature. Take for example the dining table scene when the candles are lighted and the individuals are “composed . . . into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a refl ection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily” (97, emphasis added). Th is momentary stay against the chaos (produced by the immense eff orts of the sheltering goddess Mrs. Ramsay) does not last as we learn in the “Time Passes” section of the novel, which reveals how the winds and vapors have invaded the house, along with the thistles growing in the larder and swallows nesting in the drawing room. Even Mrs. McNabb, the

173Homeless in Nature

servant who comes to prepare the house for the Ramsays’ return, resembles a “tropical fi sh oaring its way through sun-lanced waters” (133).

In the fi nal entry in the 1905 Cornwall diary, written on the eve of their departure, Woolf thinks, with an admission of melancholy at the thought of her return to civiliza-tion, “Th e lights of London will be around me at this time of evening tomorrow, as the lighthouse gleams now” (PA 299). Later in London, where she will write the Guardian essay, she notes, “A dozen lights can do much to solidify the world” (E1: 81). Woolf would return to this diary twenty years later, in August of 1925, to mine it for her new novel, whose mature aesthetic vision eschewed the false separations between nature and culture, human and non-human. Like Lily’s painting in the novel, which was interrupted—and enriched, one feels—by the passage of time, the dynamic and poignant vision of Woolf ’s novel is indebted to the discovery of the young apprentice—and solitary tramper—whose encounters with nature in Cornwall plunged her more deeply into the dialogue between the human and natural worlds that surrounded her.

Notes:

1. I am indebted to George B. Handley’s understanding of Housekeeping as an ecological text and also to Th omas Gardner’s discussion “Enlarging Loneliness: Marilynne Robinson’s Reading of Emily Dickinson.” I would add that Sylvie is also a Wordsworthian emblem reminiscent of the river Wye in “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey:” “O sylvan Wye! Th ou wanderer through the wood. . .” (l. 57).

Works Cited:

Bates, Jonathan. Th e Song of the Earth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. New York: Harcourt, 2005. Gardner, Th omas. “Enlarging Loneliness: Marilynne Robinson’s Reading of Emily Dickinson.” Th e Emily Dick-

inson Journal 10 (2001): 9-33.Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Handley, George B. “Th e Metaphysics of Ecology in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Modern Fiction Stud-

ies 55.3 (2009): 496-521.Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Knopf, 1997. McKusick, James C. “Ecology.” Romanticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Nicholas Roe. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2005. 199-218. Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Noonday Press, 1998.Westling, Louise. “Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World.” New Literary History 30 (1999): 855-75. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York and

London: Harcourt, 1976. —. A Passionate Apprentice: Th e Early Journals, 1897-1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: Harcourt, 1990. —. To the Lighthouse. 1927. New York: Harcourt, 1981.—. “A Walk by Night.” Th e Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume One. Ed. Andrew McNeille. New York: Harcourt,

Brace, 1986. 80-2.Wordsworth, William. “Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye dur-

ing a Tour, July 13, 1798.” Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. Eds. Michael O’Neill and Charles Mahoney. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 105-110.

“WALK[ING] OVER THE BRIDGE IN A WILLOW PATTERN PLATE”:VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE EXOTIC LANDSCAPES

By Xiaoqin Cao

In a review of “Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures,” a classic Chinese short story collection by Pu Songlin of the Qing Dynasty, Virginia Woolf concludes her discussion by saying that “[s]o queer and topsy-turvy is the atmosphere of these little

stories that one feels, when one has read a number of them, much as if one had been try-ing to walk over the bridge in a willow pattern plate” (E2 8). Indeed, by reading Chinese literature, Woolf was able to imagine the exotic land no matter how strange it proved to be. Th e very imagery Woolf employed in such an analogy is the classic Chinese landscape, the willow pattern. As a most popular domestic artifact in the English society, the willow pattern plate, with its vivid visual refl ections of Chinese landscapes and the exquisite por-celain, has become an important cultural symbol of the East in westerners’ imaginations. By likening her reading experience to walking over the bridge in a willow pattern plate, Woolf was in fact materializing her perception of otherness when encountered with new literature and cultures.

Woolf ’s reading of Chinese literature and mention of Chinese artifact were no ac-cident. Woolf developed an early interest in foreign literature and culture while read-ing in her father’s grand library. Her later travels in many European cities expanded her knowledge and understanding of foreign cultures. For those countries where she never had a chance to traverse herself, she learned about them either by talking to family and friends who had returned from abroad or through extensive readings. Th ese experiences and knowledge are inevitably refl ected in her works. Th ough most of her novels are set in Britain, we can fi nd foreign affi liations in the major characters in one way or another. Ex-otic landscapes thus become a necessary but subtle element in Woolf ’s novels. Landscape writing on South America, Italy, India, Russia and even China can be found in many of Woolf ’s writings, in which she chooses diff erent imageries from the natural world and sometimes uses them as cultural symbols. Th is paper aims to explore Woolf ’s writing on exotic landscapes in her novels, esp. in Th e Voyage Out (1915), Orlando (1928), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927). I argue that by writing about exotic land-scapes, Woolf was also negotiating between “self ” and “other” and criticizing imperialism and colonialism.

Th e study of landscape in literature is not a recent invention. As early as 1977, Chris-topher L. Salter and William J. Lloyd made a survey of landscape writing in literature. Based on the “human imprints” on the landscapes, Salter and Lloyd generalize them into landscape of agriculture, landscape of livelihood, landscape signature of commercial ac-tivity, transportation, and so on. Martin Mitchell tried to examine the socioeconomic imprint upon the land. Roger Ebbatson and Ann Donahue made an even more focused study on nation, landscape and literature from 1840-1920. Th ey noted that landscape representation acted as “a site for the articulation of class relations, a means of forming national identity or a conduit for the exercise of colonial power” (2). Th ey further stated

175“Walk[ing] over the bridge in a willow pattern plate”

that “landscape representation in both art and literature […] acts as a ‘carrier’ of cultural authority through the operation of a complex set of visual or verbal conventions” (3). With this conviction, Ebbatson and Donahue explored the “ideological aspects of land-scape representation” (3) and tried to “reveal the gender, race and class implications that haunt the political unconscious” (3) of their chosen texts. My study of exotic landscape representation in literature concerns such ideological aspects of landscape representation with a focus on issues of orientalism, colonialism and imperialism.

Landscape writing is a necessary part in any form of creative writing because it is within certain landscapes that characters interact with each other. Th e landscape is always there; it gains meaning only when it is seen. Its meaning would depend on the subject who sees it. Like the interpretation of literary texts, the interpretation of exotic landscapes varies from person to person according to their social background and personal experi-ence. Th e word “exotic” immediately implies a center of perception, a point of departure for the viewing, that is, the dichotomy of “self ” and “other,” in which “self ” refers to the speaker’s native country, “other” refers to any country outside of his or her own national boundary. It is thus assumed that most people within a country share, to a certain degree, their interpretation of the “other,” the “exotic.”

For the interpretation of exotic landscapes, let us go back for a moment to the wil-low pattern plate mentioned earlier. Th ough the willow pattern plate has become a cul-tural symbol of the East, the artifact itself is problematic. Th e willow pattern plate was originally introduced into England from China by trade. Later, with the popularity of tea fashion in the English society and subsequently an increased demand for more willow pattern plates (the time required for replacing a broken willow pattern plate could be about three years), the English people began to produce their own willow pattern plates. It was also during this process that the willow pattern plate assumed its current form. A typical willow pattern plate design includes “a weeping willow, pagodas, a crooked fence, tree bearing fruit, three or four fi gures on a bridge, a boat and a pair of love birds forever kissing” (Kearns). It is generally believed, however, that the bridge in it was not on the original Chinese plate, and was only added later to the design by the British porcelain makers. Moreover, the fascinating willow legend attached to it was actually “invented by British manufacturers only around two hundred years ago as a clever promotional tool for the marketing of Chinoise tableware” (Kearns). Th us what seems to be a typical Chinese artifact, when imported into England, changed enormously through the ongoing recon-struction of the original object by the English people. Th is example restates what Edward Said terms as Westerners’ “orientalization” of the Orient.

Th e story of the willow pattern plate, however, only illustrates how the image of the East was constructed through the unconscious communal eff orts of Westerners. Th ese images, again through various textual representations, were later fi xed into stereotypes and became the media through which most Westerners imagine the East. Such orientalization, though powerful, may still raise doubts by keen social observers and writers, as Virginia Woolf self-refl exively wrote about when describing the exotic landscapes.

Th e description of the exotic landscape can be found in many of Woolf ’s novels. Given the wide-encompassing reference of the word “exotic” and for convenience of dis-cussion, I have divided Woolf ’s exotic landscape writing into two major categories, the Occidental other and the Orientalized other, with the former referring to European and


American “other,” the latter referring to the third world countries, with the exception of Russia. For the inclusion of Russia in the Orientalized other, I will have a fuller explana-tion later. For the limited time and space here, I will only discuss Woolf ’s representation of the exotic landscapes in the Orientalized other countries. I argue that these exotic land-scape representations inform Woolf ’s treatment of the “other” in three levels: 1) reproduc-ing western views of the Orientalized other; 2) balancing between “Self ” and “Other,” introducing another point of view; 3) aestheticizing and incorporating the “Other” as enriching and enlightening.

I use the term “Orientalized” other for my paper because I want to convey that all the countries under my discussion were “Orientalized” in some way, at least in Woolf ’s works. Despite geographical diff erences, all the countries under my treatment are either perceived like the Orient by Westerners, or assumed to have oriental characteristics because of colo-nialization. Russia is another country perceived to be the Orient. In Woolf ’s writings, she constantly placed Russia together with the East. In Th e Voyage Out, Helen remarks that, “the future of the race is in the hands of Susan and Arthur; no–that’s dreadful. Of farm labourers; no–not of the English at all, but of Russians and Chinese” (VO 205). In Jacob’s Room (1922), Woolf writes, “[s]uch is the fabric through which the light must shine, if shine it can–the light of all these languages, Chinese and Russian, Persian and Arabic” (JR 40). Th e same narration appeared so much so that Nick Kupensky argues, “the Rus-sians are positioned as the objects of an imperial gaze in which they are Orientalized to the extent that they inhabit the same foreign space as the Arabs, Chinese, and Persians” (4). So in Orlando, we fi nd Woolf reproducing Western views of Orientalized Russia. For Orlando, Sasha was “from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfi nished from doubt as to how best to end them” (O 29). Here Or-lando relates Sasha to the exotic landscape in Russia and then tries to sum her up despite her “Muscovitish Temperament.” He was attracted, fascinated by the otherness of Sasha. For Orlando, Russia was a barbaric country where “there were frozen rivers and wild horses and men […] who gashed each other’s throats open. […] a landscape of pine and snow, habits of lust and slaughter” (31). What Orlando sees in Sasha is exactly what Said generalizes as Westerners’ view on the Orient: exotic, mysterious, recondite and implicit.

In Th e Voyage Out, the exotic landscape of South America was given much detailed description on the travellers’ arrival: “the little boat was now approaching a white crescent of sand. Behind this was a deep green valley, with distinct hills on either side. On the slope of the right-hand hill white houses with brown roofs were settled, like nesting seabirds, and at intervals cypresses striped the hill with black bars. Mountains whose sides were fl ushed with red, but whose crowns were bald, rose as a pinnacle, half-concealing another pinnacle behind it. Th e hour being still early, the whole view was exquisitely light and airy; the blues and greens of sky and tree were intense but not sultry” (VO 86). Th e objectiv-ity of the landscape, when viewed by Mr. Pepper, immediately gained meaning with his knowledge of the brutal colonial history. He imagined how three hundred years ago the Elizabethan barques reached this virgin land and fought with the Spanish galleons who fi -nally “fell in heaps” (87). All these pointed to the expansion of the British Empire through violence. Here Woolf wrote about how the image of the native was spread from mouth to mouth by the travelers; “they declared that the natives were strangely beautiful, very big in stature, dark, passionate, and quick to seize the knife” (88). One of the main locales of


the story, Willoughby Vinrace’s villa, was built “on the slope of the mountain,” (88) which was enabled exactly by the colonial power’s freedom and autonomy in the colonized land. His villa thus became a symbol of colonial power’s imprint on the exotic landscape.

In both of the above instances, the landscapes in the orientalized countries were viewed, imagined, judged and even inhabited by the imperial subjects. In the same novel Orlando, however, a diff erent way of landscape representation occurred, and together with it, a seemingly reversed power structure. When Orlando left Constantinople in the com-pany of a gipsy when he became a woman, a large part of landscape description followed regarding “the high ground outside Broussa” (O 88).

Th ere were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of the streams. […] Th en, look-ing down, the red hyacinth, the purple iris wrought her to cry out in ecstasy at the goodness, the beauty of nature; raising her eyes again, she beheld the eagle roaring, and imagined its raptures and made them her own. Returning home, she saluted each star, each peak, and each watch-fi re as if they signalled to her alone; and at last, when she fl ung herself upon her mat in the gipsies’ tent, she could not help bursting out again, How good to eat! How good to eat! (89-90)

But it is exactly on the ejaculation of “How good to eat!” that Orlando and the gypsies diff er. Unlike Orlando, who was intoxicated by the beauty of nature, the gypsies regard the love of nature as a disease, something abnormal. To show the cruelty of nature, the old gypsy man showed her “the fi ngers of his left hand, withered by the frost” and “his right foot, crushed where a rock had fallen” (90). Th is incident makes Orlando think about whether nature is “beautiful or cruel” (91). In this section, Orlando is placed within a group of gypsies and has to confront their otherness on a daily basis. On the other hand, nevertheless, the gypsies are also confronted with Orlando’s strange Englishness. Unlike the previous section when Orlando sees the Russian princess’ otherness, in this section Orlando’s otherness is being viewed by the gypsies. Orlando’s pride as an Englishman is ridiculed and even sympathized upon. For the gypsies, England was a “barbarous land where people live in houses because they are too feeble and diseased to stand the open air” (89). When Orlando discloses with pride about the 365 bedrooms of her English home and her ancestors’ greatness, the gypsies comforted her by saying that “[t]hey would none of them think the worse of her for that” (92). While in the previous part the people in the Orientalized other countries are silenced, their voice and points of view are introduced in this part and form a contrast to the English values. Th ough Urmila Seshagiri rightly argues that “the novel [Orlando]’s playful satires and chronological games do not destabilize the myth of an originary, unifi ed, and all-powerful white England,” (142) Woolf ’s introduc-tion of gypsy’s points of view does point to her conscious consideration of non-English values. After all, her 1906 journal of Constantinople already showed such consciousness: “you also realised that life was not lived after the European pattern, that it was not even a debased copy of Paris or Berlin or London” (PA 348). I argue that by intentionally plac-ing these two value systems together, especially by transferring Orlando’s Englishness into otherness in the gypsies’ eyes, Woolf was subverting the self-assumed positional superior-ity of the imperial powers.


It is based on this consideration of the “other” points of view that Woolf made her aesthetization of the other. As an English woman growing up in the Victorian age, Woolf herself experienced the otherness her gender brought to her in various aspects of social life, as she vigorously pointed out in many of her essays. Th is experience more or less infl uenced her idea of the “other.” She criticizes any kind of cultural hegemony and the dominance of a single perspective. Th us we can always fi nd the presence of the other perspectives in her writings. Sometimes she aestheticizes the other perspective as rejuve-nating and enriching. A good example is her frequent use of “Chinese eyes” in her novels. Th e landscape is generally understood as the combination of natural scenery and human inventions like architecture, means of transportation, etc. Within this panorama, human fi gures, though a necessary part, always lose their individuality and are zoomed out from as with a digital camera to form a collective part of a single symbol. What the viewer sees from them, at best, is their costume and appearance. What they wear and look like, to the viewer, are nothing but symbols of their culture. It is in this sense that I will discuss Woolf ’s frequent use of “Chinese eyes” as part of her exotic landscape writing. In Mrs. Dalloway, Elizabeth Dalloway was described as “dark; had Chinese eyes in a pale face; an Oriental mystery” (MD 137). In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe had “little Chinese eyes” (TTL 21). Elizabeth, as the younger generation of the Dalloways in the novel, symbolizes life, hope and future in the novel. Lily Briscoe’s creative energy is believed to be connected to her Chinese eyes. What both characters indicate is a fresh point of view, something un-conventional, which when integrated into the English self, may bring cultural and artistic regeneration. Patricia Laurence remarks that, “Lily’s Chinese eyes suggest not the Empire’s foraging glance toward the distant lands of China and India for trade and gain, but the new aesthetic voyaging in the East during the modernist period. […] Lily’s embodiment of Chinese eyes–Woolf ’s brilliant cultural, political, and aesthetic stroke–suggests then not only the incorporation of the Chinese aesthetic into the English artist, but also Eu-ropean modernism’s and now, our own questioning of our cultural and aesthetic place or ‘universality’” (10). Urmila Seshagiri also notes that “[t]hrough Lily’s ‘little Chinese eyes,’ the longstanding imperilist binaries (colonizer/colonized, white/not-white, civi-lized/primitive) symbolized by tea, china, and the other material evidence of British rule will lose their authority in the postwar world” (154). So in both Elizabeth Dalloway and Lily Briscoe, Woolf uses “Chinese eyes” to suggest a new mode of perception which may subvert the Eurocentric discourse.

Edward Said said, “I do not believe that authors are mechanically determined by ideology, class, or economic history, but authors are, I also believe, very much in the his-tory of their societies, shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience in diff erent measure” (xxiv). Th e three levels of exotic landscape writing in Woolf ’s novels, I argue, well illustrate such interaction between writers and the history of their societies. In the fi rst level, Woolf ’s reproduction of the Western views of the Orientalized other shows how her writing was infl uenced by the western society of her time. In the other two levels of exotic landscape writing, we see Woolf consciously consider and assume the other points of view. By so doing, Woolf seems to prophesy a process of change in the perception of Self and Other, the Occidental and the Oriental. Woolf was able to criticize the empire from within, fi rstly because of her personal experience as a gendered other; she felt herself both an insider (being a British citizen) and an outsider (being a woman).


Moreover, her marrying Leonard Woolf may have signifi cantly strengthened her antipathy to colonialism and imperialism, since Leonard Woolf was an ex-colonial administrator who “returned to England after seven years of civil service in Ceylon and became a vocal socialist and opponent of the empire” (Seshagiri 149). Th e Bloomsbury Group also con-tributed to her positive consideration of other literatures and cultures, being themselves the forerunners in promoting exotic art and culture in the metropolitan London. So just like her suggestions for writers to have androgynous vision instead of sexist vision, Woolf also seems to consent on cultural hybridity rather than cultural hegemony in her discus-sion of the “other.” Th us, by writing about exotic landscapes, Woolf virtually built a bridge to walk over “in the willow pattern plate.”

Works Cited

Ebbatson, Roger, and Ann Donahue. An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840-1920. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005.

Kearns, Diana. “Th e Willow Pattern.” World Collectors Net (WCN) Magazine Issue 32. <http://www.worldcol-lectorsnet.com/magazine/issue32/iss32p5.html>. Accessed 14 May 2010.

Kupensky, Nicholas. “Translating Th e ‘obliquity of the Muscovitish temperament’: Virginia Woolf from a Rus-sian Point of View.” Paper presented to Th e Seventeenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Oxford, Ohio, June 7-10, 2007.

Laurence, Patricia. Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003

Mitchell, Martin. “Landscapes and Literature: A Look at the Early Twentieth Century Rural South.” Journal of Geography 97-4&5 (1998): 204-12.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1993.Salter, Christopher L., and William J. Lloyd. “Landscape in Literature.” Resource Paper for College Geography, No.

76-3. Washington, D. C.: Th e Association of American Geographers, 1977.Seshagiri, Urmila. Race and the Modernist Imagination. New York: Cornell University Press, 2010.Woolf, Virginia. Th e Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1912-1918. Ed. Andrew AcNellie. London: Hogarth, 1987.___. Jacob’s Room. London:Triad Grafton Book, 1976.___. Mrs. Dalloway. London: CRW Publishing Limited, 2003.___. A Passionate Apprentice: Th e Early Journals, 1897-1909. Ed. Michael A. Leaska. London: Hogarth, 1990.___. Orlando. London: Triad Grafton Book, 1977.___. To the Lighthouse. London: Triad Panther Book, 1977.___. Th e Voyage Out. London: Triad Grafton Book, 1978.

MINING WITH THE HEAD: VIRGINIA WOOLF, HENRY DAVID THOREAU, AND EXPLORING THE SELF THROUGH NATURE

by Diana Royer

Woolf’s 1917 essay “Th oreau” conveys admiration for Th oreau’s philosophy and way of life at Walden Pond. Rather than join Transcendentalists in “some cooperative community,” Th oreau chose to live “in solitude with nature” (134), with which

he had “an affi nity” (138). His drive to simplify his life in the woods became “a method of intensifi cation, a way of setting free the delicate and complicated machinery of the soul” (135), which led him to discover that most unsimple thing, one’s self. Analyzing Th oreau’s technique in select passages of Walden and making connections to Woolf ’s technique in fi ctional passages on nature demonstrates how each author uses nature philosophically to explore the self.

Part of the exploration and discovery for both Th oreau and Woolf is the capacity to see ordinary things in a truly new manner, a capacity Woolf much admired in Henry James. In a slightly negative 1908 review of Vernon Lee’s Th e Sentimental Traveler, Woolf states that if “you will open your mind to receive all impressions and force your imagina-tion to track down the most fugitive of suggestions, something charming and valuable, be-cause original, will be recorded. Th is is perhaps the course that any sensitive mind adopts naturally, though it does not always go on to trace it out upon paper” (“Th e Sentimental” 158). “But what art is needed to give such perishable matter an enduring form!” she ex-claims (“Th e Sentimental” 158); Lee does not have this art, but Woolf credits James with it. In a similar way, “When we read Walden,” she writes in her essay “Th oreau,” “we have a sense of beholding life through a very powerful magnifying glass. To walk, to eat, to cut up logs [. . .] all these occupations when scraped clean and felt afresh prove wonderfully large and bright. Th e common things are so strange, the visual sensations so astonishing” that, after experiencing them alone in nature, one could not imagine living life “with the herd” and following social habits (135). Woolf admired that Th oreau enacted his philosophy of life with little care for what society thought. Similarly, Kitty Lasswade in Th e Years (1937) and Susan in Th e Waves (1931) have fresh encounters with nature that form or reinforce their sense of self as distinct from a social being, as we shall see shortly.

Woolf observes, “Th oreau himself was an extremely complex human being, and he certainly did not achieve simplicity by living for two years in a hut and cooking his own dinner. His achievement was rather to lay bare what was within him—to let life take its own way unfettered by artifi cial constraints” (“Th oreau” 135). As Th oreau put it in the chapter of Walden titled “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach” (1766). Fully experiencing dawn and the morning are his primary means for doing this, and thus springboards for his philosophy. “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say in-nocence, with Nature herself,” he declares (1765), and ruminates on how in the morning “for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night” (1765). Th is awakening should be “accompanied by the undulations of celestial

181Mining with the Head

music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance fi lling the air” (1765). In such a setting,

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the eff ort to throw off sleep. [. . .] Th e millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for eff ective intellectual exer-tion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. [. . .] We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infi nite expectation of the dawn. (1765)

Here Th oreau is calling for heightened awareness and thinking throughout one’s life, contin-ually viewing things freshly and actively. He rejects clocks, factory labor and mechanical aids and embraces the movement of the sun, intellectual exertion and reawakening to Nature.

A passage that expresses Th oreau’s Transcendentalist philosophy quite eff ectively is the one that closes “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”:

Time is but the stream I go a-fi shing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fi sh in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the fi rst letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. Th e intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine. (1770)

In this passage Th oreau demonstrates how intuition allows you to penetrate nature—in this case, the fl owing stream—to escape time and place, to transcend the real and sense the ideal (those pebbly stars). Burrowing with his intellect, mining with his head, Th oreau explores nature to gain knowledge of himself and humanity.

To return to Woolf ’s essay on Th oreau, she fi nds all of his books to be “packed with subtle, confl icting, and very fruitful discoveries” and uses the quite apt metaphor of an In-dian marking his path through a forest by turning down twigs (“Th oreau” 136). Th oreau too leaves “signs for those who come after, should they care to see which way he went,” but following is not easy for the reader: “We can never lull our attention asleep in reading Th oreau by the certainty that we have now grasped his theme and can trust our guide to be consistent. We must always be ready to try something fresh; we must always be prepared for the shock of facing one of those thoughts in the original which we have known all our lives in reproductions” (“Th oreau” 136). Of course, this describes how one must be an at-tentive reader of Woolf ’s work as well, be prepared for her original expression of thoughts.

Sometimes, what Woolf ’s characters discover when becoming introspective over nature


is that it can make one feel insignifi cant and connected with humanity in a necessarily unsatisfactory way. In To Th e Lighthouse (1927), when Nancy wishes to retreat to her attic after lunch “to escape the horror of family life” (112), Minta draws her into joining others on a beach excursion. On the beach, she and Andrew separate from Minta and Paul, and then from each other. Nancy crouches down over a tidal pool, looking closely at minnows and imaginatively transforming this microcosm of sea life into the macrocosm of the entire ocean, over which she has God-like powers to withhold sunlight or let it shine. But once her eyes wander to the sea’s horizon, she becomes “hypnotized, and the two senses of that vastness [of the ocean] and this tininess [of the tidal pool] [. . .] fl owering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness. So listening to the waves, crouching over the pool, she brooded” (TTL 115). Shortly after when Minta is crying over having lost her grandmother’s brooch, Nancy feels “she wasn’t crying only for that. She was crying for something else. We might all sit down and cry, she felt. But she did not know what for” (TTL 117). In Th e Singing of the Real World: Th e Philosophy of Virginia Woolf ’s Fiction, Mark Hussey uses the tidal pool scene to make certain correlations between Woolf ’s view of the human situation and Pascal’s: “all human beings [are] reduced to nothingness when set against infi nity” (102). “To understand the human situation, says Pascal, is to despair” (102). Th e diff erence between the two is that for Pascal, “to escape from this despair we must pass to knowledge of God” (102). Th is doesn’t happen in Woolf, and so Nancy broods, feels “we might all sit down and cry.”

A happier outcome occurs when Kitty Lasswade of Th e Years revels in leaving London after her party and arriving the next morning at her country estate, which is surrounded by the green of nature. As she views it, she hears a bee buzz, the river murmur, pigeons crooning; she closely observes a butterfl y on a leaf. She thinks of the other party guests sleeping back in London, is pleased to be here alone, and goes out for a walk on the grounds. She moves from the tailored lawn and fl owerbeds, pauses on the river’s bridge to watch and listen to it. Leav-ing the more cultivated portion of the grounds and entering the woods, she observes spring fl owers, moss, the thinning trees as she climbs higher. “All passes, all changes, she thought [. . .]. Nothing of this belonged to her; her son would inherit; his wife would walk here after her” (TY 277). Yet this is not a disturbing thought to Kitty; rather, she feels joined with nature in the most elemental and universal way. As she arrives at the top of the hill and looks at the coun-tryside spreading out around her, “Her body seemed to shrink; her eyes to widen” (TY 277). “Uncultivated, uninhabited, existing by itself, for itself, without towns or houses it looked from this height. [. . .] A deep murmur sang in her ears—the land itself, singing to itself, a chorus, alone. She lay there listening, She was happy, completely. Time had ceased” (TY 278). Th is scene connects nicely to the aforementioned closing passage of “Where I Lived, And What I Lived For” in Th oreau’s and Kitty’s having stepped outside time and the material, social world to be absorbed in and by nature, learning from it, gaining happiness from it.

Susan in Th e Waves is also very connected with nature. In her soliloquy when she is almost twenty years old, she goes outside in early morning and observes,

At this hour, this still early hour, I think I am the fi eld, I am the barn, I am the trees; mine are the fl ocks of birds, and this young hare who leaps, at the last mo-ment when I step almost on him. Mine is the heron that stretches its vast wings

183Mining with the Head

lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes one foot before another munching; and the wild, swooping swallow; and the faint red in the sky, and the green when the red fades; the silence and the bell; the call of the man fetching cart-horses from the fi elds—all are mine. (TW 65-66)

She feels that she can’t be “divided, or kept apart” from this environment (TW 66); she re-fl ects on how she hated being sent to school in Switzerland, hated the “fi r trees and moun-tains” of that landscape and embraces her father’s farm rather literally: “Let me now fl ing myself on this fl at ground under a pale sky where the clouds pace slowly” (TW 66). Rather like Th oreau, Susan refl ects on her solitude: “I cannot be tossed about, or fl oat gently, or mix with other people” (TW 66); instead, she embodies nature: “I think sometimes [. . .] I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn” (TW 66). She sees herself as a natural inhabitant of this land: “I return, like a cat or fox returning, whose fur is grey with rime, whose pads are hardened by the coarse earth” (TW 67).

In midlife, Susan, appropriately married to a farmer, refl ects, “In this hot afternoon [. . .] here in this garden, here in this fi eld where I walk with my son, I have reached the summit of my desires” (TW 128). Yet she sometimes feels “sick of natural happiness, and fruit growing” (TE 129). “But for the most part,” she concludes,” I walk content with my sons. I cut the dead petals from hollyhocks. Rather squat, grey before my time, but with clear eyes, pear-shaped eyes, I pace my fi elds” (TW 130). Woolf had written in her essay “Th oreau,” “At times he seems to reach beyond our human powers in what he perceives upon the horizon of humanity” (138). I fi nd that Th e Waves, with its six distinct voices representing diff erent human experiences and its beautiful interlude passages about the sun on the sea, shows Woolf ’s heightened perception of humanity.

Th e fi nal lines of Walden are, “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. Th ere is more day to dawn. Th e sun is but a morning star” (Th oreau 1889). Woolf observes, “However much Th oreau had been able to do, he would still have seen possibilities be-yond; he would always have remained in one sense, unsatisfi ed. Th at is one of the reasons why he is able to be the companion of a younger generation” (“Th oreau” 138). I believe a similar sense of unsatisfaction drove Woolf to continue her explorations as well, using her head to mine nature and have her characters explore their selves through it. Like Th oreau, this makes her an equally suitable companion for a younger generation of readers.

Works Cited

Hussey, Mark. Th e Singing of the Real World: Th e Philosophy of Virginia Woolf ’s Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986.

Th oreau, Henry David. Walden. Th e Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1. 4th ed. Ed. Nina Baym, et al. New York: Norton, 1994. 1719-1889.

Woolf, Virginia. “Th e Sentimental Traveler.” Th e Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Yovanovich, 1986. 157-59.

—. “Th oreau.” Th e Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Yova-novich, 1987. 132-40.

—. Th e Waves. London: Grafton Books, 1987.—. Th e Years. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965.—. To Th e Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955.

VIRGINIA WOOLF AS MOUNTAINEER

By Catherine W. Hollis

“THE REAL PROBLEM IS TO CLIMB TO THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN. WHY, IF THAT IS NOT [IT], HAVE WE THE DESIRE? WHO GAVE IT US?” (Virginia Woolf, “The Symbol”)

In order to explain what I mean by calling Virginia Woolf a mountaineer, I’d like to start by reading from an essay called “A Tent of Her Own,” originally published in 1982 in the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin:

Virginia Woolf ’s recommendations for a woman’s intellectual and creative sur-vival in the modern world (a room and money of one’s own) are too modest for me; there must also be an internal frame backpack with ski-slot/wand pockets, loops for ice hammer and axe, as well as leather accessory patches for crampons and carabiners. […] I have been to Outward Bound and I have visions—so you must believe me when I say I have seen Virginia Woolf snowshoeing in Maine, face climbing El Capitan. Yes, Bloomsbury Ginny on cross-country skis, telemarking the Haute Route […], Virginia, rampant with backpack and tent, leav[ing] the protection of Leonard’s killing kindness and launch[ing] her career with the clear-headed anger of “Th ree Guineas” rather than ending it in desper-ate fear, a woman alone, a suicide. (A Tent 6)

In other words, the author—my mother—has a rescue fantasy about Virginia Woolf and proposes that had Woolf taken up mountaineering, as her father—Leslie Stephen—had done, she would have lived a longer, happier, and healthier life. Th is is the psychobio-graphical germ of my own work on Leslie Stephen as Mountaineer, fresh off the presses from Cecil Woolf this month. While I won’t be talking very much about Leslie Stephen’s mountaineering today, if you are interested in the scope and variety of his Alpine climbs, I’d direct you to the appendix of my monograph, which contains a “Climbing Resumé” listing all the mountains, including fi rst ascents, that Stephen climbed in the 25 trips he made to the Alps over a lifetime (LS 57—60). Th is project of mine has grown to en-compass both biographical scholarship and empirical practice, as though by climbing in Leslie Stephen’s footsteps in the Alps, I am also thinking back through my mother’s fl ight into the wilderness—and her desire to take Virginia Woolf with her. Today, I’d like to try and convince you that my mother’s vision of Virginia Woolf as a mountaineer is not as unlikely a scenario as it might fi rst appear. I will do this primarily through a reading of Woolf ’s late short story “Th e Symbol” (1941) which, through its attention to the problem of accurately describing a mountain, represents a return to Stephen’s Alpine legacy.1

On the face of it, the Bloomsbury Group was spectacularly uninterested in the ath-letic fraternity of British Alpinism. While Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant worshipped the Apollonian beauty of George Mallory, their younger Cambridge friend who would attempt to climb Mt. Everest three times before perishing on the mountain in 1924,

185Virginia Woolf as Mountaineer

Strachey found the culture of mountaineering “simply absurd” and regretted the eff ect of Alpinism on Mallory’s looks (Lunn 67, Holroyd 213). Oxford historian and mountain-eer Arnold Lunn describes being invited to lunch with Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and eagerly questioning them about their father’s Alpine achievements only to be met with ironic bemusement: “my uncritical reverence for Leslie Stephen” meant, he says, that “lunch was not a great success” (Lunn 67). Nonetheless, there’s an echo of George Mal-lory in Mrs. Dalloway, when Peter Walsh muses that the future of civilization rests in the hands of the idealistic scholar-athletes who get “books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas” (50), and perhaps also in Percival, that golden young man in Th e Waves whose death in India ripples back through the friends who survive him. On some level, Woolf was already picking up on the culture of mountaineering that she became more attuned to in the fi nal decade of her life.2

Herbert Marder observes that two familiar metaphors for death pervade Woolf ’s writ-ing, drowning and falling, and notes Woolf ’s increasing interest in mountains throughout the 1930s; he argues that altitude represents death in Woolf because it symbolizes a sever-ance of human connection, as in Woolf ’s essay “Flying Over London” (Marder 139). We can see this association in a diary entry from 1937 when Woolf considers writing a “dream story about the top of a mountain. Now why? About lying in the snow; about rings of colour; silence…& the solitude” (D5: 95). Woolf appears to have begun to brood on the idea of death on a mountain during a Sussex heat wave in 1930, when her own sun-stroke coincided with the news that an acquaintance, Victor O’Connor, an Eton schoolmaster and tutor to the Nicolson children, had died with his fi ancée Mary Irving in a climbing accident in the Alps. In her diary, Woolf dwells on the distance between herself in the heat-stricken countryside and the frozen lovers on the mountain: “there are the two bod-ies for ever. I suppose some ice drips, or shifts: the light is blue, green; or wholly black; nothing stirs around them. Frozen, near together, in their tweeds and hobnail boots there they lie” (D3: 314). Woolf ’s “I suppose” indicates the imaginative eff ort necessary to envision a glacier, something she has never seen for herself, and which here takes on the post-impressionist coloration of her early short stories. But this is hardly a solitary death: these lovers lie “near together,” married to the mountain and each other in “their hobnail boots.” Indeed, I would argue that Woolf ’s imaginative fl ight to the mountain glacier is predicated on relationship, not severance, and that her increasing attraction in the 1930s to what she calls “my mountain top—that persistent vision” represents movement towards a new understanding of her father.

Two years after O’Connor and Irving’s climbing accident, in 1932, the centenary of Leslie Stephen’s birth, Woolf wrote an essay about her father for Th e Times that was later published in Th e Captain’s Death Bed. Th e essay opens by gesturing towards the biographi-cal gulf between Stephen’s mountaineering achievements and his family: “By the time his children were growing up the great days of my father’s life were over. His feats on the river and on the mountains had been won before they were born” leaving only the “relics” of an alpenstock and a silver cup behind (69). It’s only now, Woolf tells us, that she recognizes that link between poetry and athleticism in her father’s character: “the act of walking or climbing seemed to inspire him to recite whichever it was that came uppermost or suited his mood” (70). It’s a crucial insight, and one that she’d previously captured through Mr. Ramsay’s pacing and recitation of Tennyson. By 1933, when Vanessa and Quentin


Bell fl ew in an airplane from London to Geneva, Woolf ’s interest in the Alps was further piqued, and she writes to Quentin in his Swiss sanatorium:

She says our ancestral mountains [the Alps] rather appeal to her—she begins to feel what father felt—noble, solitary, severe. I must come and see them. Do tell me what you think of them. I daresay they change in the dawn and sunset: and one gets to think them more beautiful than any other earth scape. (L5: 244)

Th at mountains change their appearance at dawn and at sunset, and further that moun-tains appear diff erently to the climber at the summit and the watcher in the valley is the cornerstone of Leslie Stephen’s mountain philosophy, as contained in his essay “Sunset on Mont Blanc,” which we can assume Woolf read—out of curiosity, if nothing else—after noting in her 1932 essay on Stephen that “Sunset” was “in his opinion the best thing he ever wrote” (70). Woolf ’s comment to Quentin mirrors Leslie Stephen’s Alpine empiricism; which is to say that time and again in Th e Playground of Europe (1871, 1894) he encourages his readers to “come and see” the Alps for themselves, his invitation to readers being to put down the book and take to the hills. Th is emphasis on “seeing for oneself” in Stephen is at least in part an expression of the insuffi ciency of language to capture the changing appear-ance of the “the dawn and sunset” on the mountain, or, as he says at the end “Sunset on Mont Blanc”: “the easiest way of obtaining the impression is to follow in my steps” (268).

When Virginia Woolf turned to the composition of her story, “Th e Symbol,” in the winter of 1941, her father’s footsteps led her towards her own vision of those “ancestral mountains.” As one of the last pieces of fi ction she worked on (the typescript is dated 1 March 1941), “Th e Symbol” is clearly freighted with mortality, yet it is also an attempt, however “inconclusive” (an early title was “Inconclusions”), to confront directly her father’s Alpine heritage. Th e woman in the story is a British tourist in a Swiss village, writing a letter to her sister in Birmingham from the balcony of her hotel, who while observing a mountain through her binoculars, struggles to fi nish the sentence fragment, “the mountain is a symbol…” (282). Ultimately, she witnesses a rope team’s plunge into a crevasse high on the mountain, but her sentence remains unfi nished. A network of fact undergirds this story: the Alpine village in question is modeled on Zermatt, and the mountain itself on the Matterhorn (a mountain Leslie Stephen never actually climbed); further, the proprietor of the narrator’s hotel is “Herr Melchior,” a direct reference, as Lyndall Gordon fi rst noted, to Leslie Stephen’s lifelong friend and mountain guide, Melchior Anderegg (Dick 305). Th e narrator’s comment on the history of the mountain (“in the forties of the last century two men, in the sixties four men had perished; the fi rst party when the rope broke; the second when night fell and froze them to death” [282—3]) evokes the most infamous mountain-eering accident in Victorian times, when on 14 July 1865, a British team led by Edward Whymper successfully climbed the Matterhorn for the fi rst time, only to face tragic loss on the descent when a rope broke and four climbers perished.3 Woolf ’s narrator (or doppel-ganger?), a woman puzzling about the signifi cance of a mountain, reveals a familiarity with the Victorian culture of mountaineering that Leslie Stephen was a part of.

Evoking the Victorian fascination with mountains as spectacle, “Th e Symbol” focuses its lens on the question of perspective: how one’s impression of the mountain changes de-pending on whether one looks at it through “glasses” or the naked eye, from the valley below


or from the peak above.4 Th roughout the story, impressions of the mountain’s appearance proliferate: “somehow the talk […] is always about the mountain. Either, how clear it is today, it might be across the street; or, how far away it looks; it might be a cloud” (284). In fact, “Th e Symbol” opens with an apparently close-up view of the mountain summit:

Th ere was a little dent on the top of the mountain like a crater on the moon. It was fi lled with snow, iridescent like a pigeon’s breast, or dead white. Th ere was a scurry of dry particles now and again, covering nothing. […] the snow was iri-descent one moment; and blood red; and pure white, according to the day. (282)

Th is view of the summit is possible for the main character through the visual technology of binoculars: “she could see the topmost height through her glasses. She focused the lens, as if to see what the symbol was” (282). Although the technology helps bridge the visual distance between the observer below and the mountain above, it does not help her com-plete her thought. Th e sentence fragment in the woman’s letter, “the mountain is a sym-bol…,” suggests the spatial and conceptual distance between the observer and observed, the woman and the mountain. Leslie Stephen wrote about a similar dynamic in “Th e Re-grets of a Mountaineer”: he speaks of the frustration of being confi ned to the valley fl oor in terms of desire, perception, and distance: “I wander at the foot of the gigantic Alps, and look up longingly to the summits, which are so apparently near, and yet know that they are divided from me by an impassible gulf ” (PE 305). In Woolf ’s story, the repetition of ellipsis represents the impassible gulf between the woman and the mountain as well as her desire to bridge it, which she attempts to do through her “glasses” and through fi gura-tive language (the summit is like a crater on the moon, the snow iridescent like a pigeon’s breast). But it will take more than “focusing her lens” to help bring the letter writer into relationship with the mountain.

Leslie Stephen had his suspicions about the use of fi gurative language in the descrip-tion of mountains, when writers attempt “to convert [mountains] into allegories about man’s highest destinations and aspirations” (PE 308); he was more challenged by the epistemological problem of mountains, by the attempt to see the mountain in itself as it really is. He took pains to point out the endemic of misperceptions and inaccuracies that Alpine tourists, like Woolf ’s character, were subject to in the observations they made of the mountain from its base: “Nothing is more common than for tourists to mistake some huge pinnacle of rock, as big as a church tower, for a traveler” (PE 316). Partly the problem is that, as Stephen tells it, a “bare statement of fi gures”—Mont Blanc is 15, 782 feet high—gives little for a mind to seize upon: “the bare tens and thousands must be clothed with some concrete images” (PE 315). Th e solution, for Stephen, relies on train-ing the eye, “the disproportion ceases to an eye that has learnt really to measure distance” (PE 316). And the eye is only trained to “measure the mountain” through the activity of climbing it: “no one can decipher the natural writing on the face of a snow-slope or a precipice who has not wandered amongst their recesses” (PE 319).

Observing the mountain through her glasses, immobile on her balcony deck, Woolf ’s narrator grows increasingly frustrated by the mountain’s propensity to change shape, “I could shriek sometimes […] always to see that mountain” (283). Her attempt to say what the mountain is a symbol of is thwarted by its ability to constantly change its appearance.


How can she get a fi x on something at once so overwhelmingly solid in fact and annoy-ingly fl uid in appearance? Th e mountain needs to be measured against a human context, as when the woman nods to a group of mountaineers in the street, “making ready to start” (282). One of the climbers is a tangential connection (his Aunt was “mistress of her daughter’s school” [282]) evoking Woolf ’s acquaintance with the tutor Victor O’Connor. As the climbers make their way up the mountain, the woman narrates their progress to her sister: “as I write these words, I can see the young men quite plainly on the slope of the mountain. Th ey are roped together. One I think I told you was at the same school with Margaret.” Th e letter-writer’s assumption that she “can see the young men quite plainly on the slopes of the mountain” is an example of one of those perceptual inaccuracies that so distressed Leslie Stephen, who describes a similar scenario with these words: “I lately watched through a telescope the small black dots, which were really men, creeping up the high fl anks of Mont Blanc” (PE 305). But the appearance of the climbers as small black dots in Stephen’s essay actually mimics the penultimate ellipsis in Woolf ’s story: “ ‘Th ey are now crossing a crevasse…’ Th e pen fell from her hand, and the drop of ink straggled in a zig zag line down the page. Th e young men had disappeared” (284). Representing “the disaster visually” (Briggs 187), the ellipses mimicks the crevasse, a gulf that the climbers fail to cross. Woolf the writer is cannier than her narrator concerning her usage of the ap-pearance of the “black dots” on the page and on the mountain.

To observe a death through “glasses,” the immeasurably far brought unspeakably close, is to be confronted by the horror of one’s own immobility and impotence in the face of mortality. Julia Briggs’ brief reading of this story emphasizes its thematic con-nections between writing, desire, and death: Briggs observes how the inexpressible vi-sion of the climbers’ death in a crevasse is represented materially both by an ellipsis in Woolf ’s text and a blot of ink in the woman’s letter home (187). Briggs also notices that the letter writer associates the mountain with a parental death, and with an “almost un-speakable” desire for freedom from that parent (a mother with cancer in the story): “the mountain just now reminded me how when I was alone, I would fi x my eyes upon her death, as a symbol. […] I thought, when I reach that point – I have never told anyone; for it seemed so heartless; I shall be at the top” (283). Th e character’s mixed and guilty feeling is evident in the dashes and semi-colons stuttering the expression of this forbid-den wish, while the unspeakable desire for freedom is fi gured as attaining a mountain summit. In Briggs’ argument, this is primarily a story about the unspeakability of death (as paralleled through the woman’s struggle to say exactly what the mountain is a sym-bol of ), with the manifest image of the climbers’ fall masking the latent content about a parental death. To extend this line of thought, I’d suggest that the character’s association of the mountain-top with parental death, and the guilty desire for freedom on the part of a writer-daughter, points to the more fraught emotional content of Woolf ’s return to her father’s Alpine legacy.5 We can read the mother in the story as a transposition for Leslie Stephen, who also died from cancer and of whom Woolf famously said “his life would have entirely ended mine” (D3: 208). If this sounds morbid, we should recall that Woolf herself was in a deepening depression when she wrote this story; and as Octavia Wilberforce, the psychiatrist who spoke with Woolf in her last months, noted in a letter dated March 28, 1941, after she’d received news of Woolf ’s suicide, “She was desperate and scared…and, my belief is, haunted by her father” (Marder 360). I think


it’s fair to say that “Th e Symbol” is both emotionally and intellectually haunted by the presence of Leslie Stephen.

But “Th e Symbol” also marks a return to Leslie Stephen’s intellectual and athletic legacy, and in this, it suggests a more productive inheritance. If “Th e Symbol” pres-ents the mountain as an unsolvable problem, a crevasse that cannot be crossed, it also contains the germ of a solution to that perceptual knot. Although much of the text structures the conceptual problem as the struggle to say what the mountain is a symbol of, one of its cancelled lines presents the challenge diff erently: “the real problem is to climb to the top of the mountain. Why, if that is not it, have we the desire? Who gave it us?” (306). Climbing the mountain, actually physically ascending it, is a solution to the problem of saying what the mountain is drawn straight from the pages of Th e Playground of Europe. Th e problem in this story is that while the mountain is constantly changing its appearance, the letter writer is static, unmoving, leading to her frustration: “I could shriek sometimes […] always to see that mountain.” By contrast, the moun-taineer is a mobile observer, not a passive one, and gathers impressions of the mountain from its base, its fl anks, and its summit: the climber’s range of perception allows for a more accurate measurement of the mountain than the tourist down below can hope to obtain. Woolf actually develops this solution herself in another late short story, “Th e Searchlight.” In that story, a character uses a telescope to bridge the distance between his current position and what he desires: when he sees, through his glass, a woman kiss-ing a man, he drops the binoculars and rushes to her house, eventually marrying her. Here, physical activity trumps visual passivity. I would propose then that the solution to the problem of “Th e Symbol” involves the journey of climbing the mountain, step by step, converting the mountain into units of bodily eff ort understandable to the hu-man mind. Achieving the summit after such a climb would feel very diff erent than merely observing the summit through the artifi ce of binoculars, which in “Th e Symbol” can only be associated with the ultimate stasis of death, “I think if I could get there, I should be happy to die” (306).

I would therefore wager that since we only have “Th e Symbol” in draft form, it is not only inconclusive, but also incomplete. And so I want to leave you with my own ver-sion of a rescue fantasy in the form of a hap-pier ending to this story. What happens next is this: after seeing the rope team’s plunge into the crevasse, the letter writer rushes into the street to join the search party, rent-ing boots and crampons, and hiring a guide knowledgeable in mountain craft to keep her safe in her climb. As she climbs, she begins to learn what the mountain is in relation to her own body, to those units of “muscular

Th e Matterhorn seen from Zermatt, August 2007 (photo by author)


exertion” that Leslie Stephen recommended as the pathway towards knowledge of the mountain (PE 317). When she reaches the summit, she discovers what Stephen knew: that, as he says, “to lie on the summit of a new and fi rst-rate pass is a pleasure, which, in the nature of things, can be but rarely enjoyed” (PE 186). Not death at all, but life itself. We can only speculate that had Virginia Woolf taken up mountain climbing, she would have found in the activity what her father did: mental and physical vitality, friendship, and pleasure.

Notes

1. Here I follow Ann Banfi eld in positing that the “theory of knowledge” Woolf develops in her own writing, particularly her interest in the relationship between “matter and mind,” at least partially emerges from her exposure to the British empirical philosophy espoused by her father and developed by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore (1, 38).

2. One of Virginia Stephen’s suitors, Hilton Young—who unsuccessfully proposed to her in 1909—was the brother of mountaineer Geoff rey Winthrop Young, a climbing mentor to Mallory and friend to John Maynard Keynes (Hall 139).

3. Th e narrator’s description of the “graves in the churchyard” (282) of fallen climbers suggests the English Church in Zermatt, where the body of Rev. Charles Hudson lies interred under the altar (Hudson was one of the men who died in the 1865 Matterhorn accident, and had been a frequent climbing partner of Stephen’s).

4. Ann C. Colley’s forthcoming book examines the intersection of technology and theatricality in the Victo-rian attraction to mountains as spectacle.

5. In the holograph cancellations, the speaker specifi cally “regrets” a “wasted youth” caretaking the ill parent and contextualizes it against her present desire “to master the height” and confront her own mortality. Th e “peak” represents “something,” the narrator says, that “remained almost unspeakable even to herself ” (305).

Works Cited

Banfi eld, Ann. Th e Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Briggs, Julia. Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.Colley, Ann C. Victorians in the Mountains. London: Ashgate, 2010.Hall, Sarah M. Before Leonard: Th e Early Suitors of Virginia Woolf. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2006.Hollis, Catherine W. Leslie Stephen as Mountaineer. London: Cecil Woolf Publishers, 2010. Hollis, Val Ward. “A Tent of One’s Own.” Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin (Summer 1982): 6 – 7.Holroyd, Michael. Lytton Strachey: Th e New Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.Lunn, Arnold. A Century of Mountaineering 1857 – 1957. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1957.Marder, Herbert. Th e Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf ’s Last Years. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,

2000.Stephen, Leslie. Th e Playground of Europe, 2nd ed. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894.Woolf, Virginia. Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 Vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,

1979 – 1984.—. Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 Vols. New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1975 – 1980. —. “Leslie Stephen.” Th e Captain’s Death Bed. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1950. —. Mrs. Dalloway (1925). New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1953.—. Th e Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

“IT WAS AN UNCERTAIN SPRING”: READING THE WEATHER IN THE YEARS

by Verita Sriratana

INTRODUCTION: THE WEATHER AND VIRGINIA WOOLF

The abounding weather descriptions which distinguish Th e Years from Virginia Woolf ’s other works were, according to Grace Radin, added spontaneously as a fi nal touch: “the passages describing the weather and setting the scene that begin each chapter and

that separate scenes within chapters were not added to the novel until the fi nal months before publication” (xxii). Th e reason why the weather was inserted at the book’s fi nal stage, I propose, might be that Woolf resorted to the weather as an alternative solution to what she perceived as the novel’s main problem: extremely abrupt and incoherent transition between scenes. She articulated what she thought was problematic in her work on Monday 16 March 1936: “I think the change of scene is whats so exhausting: the catching people plumb in the middle: then jerking off . Every beginning seems lifeless— & them I have to retype” (D5: 17).

Descriptions of seasonal cycle can produce paradoxical eff ects. On the one hand, it portrays an ever-changing world and helps us imagine time in terms of space: streets, pathways, and backyard gardens covered with snow in winter and fi lled with dry leaves in autumn. On the other hand, however, the idea of a constant cycle situates the ever-changing world in a fi xed temporal pattern. Winter is believed, as a fact, to be followed by spring and summer by autumn. Th is paradoxical union, of course, does not run smoothly and might be the reason Woolf perceived the book as a “complete failure” (D5: 17), the kind of failure which, she complained in a letter to Elizabeth Bowen on Sunday 23 Febru-ary 1936, might better be “dropped into the waste paper basket” (L6: 16). Woolf ’s sense of failure might be an inevitable result of the weather’s “uncertainty” or, in other words, its Janus-faced ambivalence. Th e weather’s insertion in Th e Years is paradoxical from the start, and so is the impact it produces.

“AGAINST ONE’S FORECAST”1: THE ELUSIVE WEATHER

Th e fi rst director of the Meteorological Offi ce was the then Admiral Robert Fitzroy (1805-1865), who in his early career had been the captain of HMS Beagle as well as the second governor of New Zealand. After his retirement in 1851, he was appointed as head of the Meteorological Statist to the Board of Trade, established in 1854. Fitzroy was fully aware of the impact of mass media and the signifi cant ways in which mass observation could contribute to the accuracy of weather prediction. Telegraphs and publications were then used to spread information accumulated from the offi ce’s “forecasting.” He famously coined the term “forecast” (88) in his 1863 Th e Weather Book, which was written as a manual for amateur weather observers. It is in this book that Fitzroy’s intention to “de-mocratize” the weather can be seen: “Th e means actually requisite to enable any person of fair abilities and average education to become practically ‘weather-wise; are much more


readily attainable than has been often supposed” (B). Despite the many attempts to chart and contain the weather in an exact pattern, it is true that we can never be certain about the climactic condition in the next instant or in the future. Fitzroy himself was also aware of the weather’s elusive nature. “Meteorology,” he wrote, “never can be an exact science, like Astronomy, because its elements are incessantly changing, in nature as well as quantity ; but it does not therefore require a merely superfi cial degree of attention” (vii-viii). It is this very ambivalence in the weather that Th e Years demonstrates.

Th e weather’s transformative power and impact on place can be seen in the novel’s Oxford section of 1880. It has been raining when young Kitty Malone, cousin of the Par-giters, makes her way to Miss Craddock’s home among the “cheap red villas” (61) for her history lessons. Afterwards, she goes to tea with Mr. Robson, a blue-collar academic from Yorkshire, and his family. She has been looking at a landscape painting of the Yorkshire moor and feels that the artwork itself brings out Mr. Robson’s regional identity: “In look-ing at the picture he had increased his accent” (68). Th e following excerpt depicts the trail she takes back home to the Lodge where her father, an Oxford Don, sits working on the history of the college. Th e rain has stopped earlier:

As she stood still for a second at a crossing she too seemed to be tossed aloft out of her usual surroundings. She forgot where she was… She could almost see the moors brighten and darken as the clouds pass over them. But then in two strides the unfamiliar street became the street she had always known…and next moment she was out in the famous crooked street with all the domes and steeples. (71)

In the same way that the oil painting has ignited both Mr. Robson and Kitty’s imagina-tion of Yorkshire, the weather has physically contributed to the metamorphosis of Oxford’s scenery. Th e sight of a glistening pavement and fl owers on it leads Kitty to conjure up her abstract version of Yorkshire and its moor in the middle of stern concrete domes and spires, “her usual surroundings.” Although her vision of Yorkshire appears only in a short while, it has a haunting eff ect. Woolf ’s “rainbow” is suddenly juxtaposed with the “granite” as Kitty turns the corner and fi nds herself in a familiar street. Th e changing weather as well as the switch from vision to reality gives her the status of an outsider possessing a mind which has just travelled to a place “other” than this mundane university town:

Th e usual undergraduate in cap and gown with books under his arm looked silly. And the portentous old men with their exaggerated features, looked like gar-goyles, carved, mediaeval, unreal. Th ey were all like people dressed up and acting parts, she thought. Now she stood at her own door and waited for Hiscock, the butler, to take his feet off the fender and waddle upstairs. Why can’t you talk like a human being? She thought, as he took her umbrella and mumbled his usual remark about the weather. (72)

Th e weather as technology of place2 encourages her to defamiliarize herself from her com-fort zone and question social norms and traditions, such as Oxford’s gown-wearing ritual and rigid hierarchy system. According to Homi K. Bhabha, the moment when one, like

193“It was an Uncertain Spring”

Kitty, becomes the “other” within oneself or feels unhomely3 in a place that is supposed to be one’s own home is called “the moment of discursive transparency” (155). He explains that the moment when one is able to see into the “discursive transparency” is “the mo-ment when, ‘under the false appearance of the present’, the semantic seems to prevail over the syntactic, the signifi ed over the signifi er” (155). Th e countryside of Yorkshire is, for Kitty, an “other” place where the Robsons would, she imagines, speak and live diff erently from what they are compelled to do at present. By positioning herself as the unhomely “outsider” within the body or parameter of an insider, the daughter of an Oxford profes-sor, Kitty comes to challenge the “signifi er” or the façade and fi xity of places and power discourses. She realizes that had Hiscock, the butler, been placed or stationed somewhere else, his ways of speaking and behaving would have been diff erent. It is social class systems that divide them. It is social norms that make his weather remarks sound most unnatural to her ears. Th e ambivalent weather, therefore, unbolts a new possibility of seeing and understanding society as a physical and as a discursive construct.

“I CAN WADE GRIEF”4: THE REVOLUTIONARY WEATHER

Th e weather is portrayed in the novel as having the power to unite people in an imag-ined community. At the same time, its ambivalence can also shatter the illusion of that very sense of community. For the subaltern or the socially marginalized people, in par-ticular, the weather is there to emphasize their seclusion from mainstream society. In other words, it highlights a social paradigm which builds itself upon class, status, gender, and racial segregation. An example can be seen when Crosby, after moving out from Abercorn Terrace, comes to pick up Martin’s laundry. After dismissing her by lying that he has had a previous engagement, Martin watches her walk away from his window: “She stood for a moment, like a frightened little animal, peering round her before she ventured to brave the dangers of the street. At last, off she trotted. He saw the snow falling on her black bon-net as she disappeared. He turned away” (212). On the surface, it can be said that Crosby has fi nally been liberated from class and domestic constraints. It seems that she is now able to live a life of her own. However, the weather description in the extract reveals the opposite. Crosby, depicted as a “little animal,” feels ever more frightened and alienated. Her black bonnet juxtaposes with the whiteness which surrounds her. Th is extreme color contrast emphasizes that she is forever the unwanted “other” whose presence agitates even the most intimate people in her life like Martin.

In the 1918 section, fi ve years after her eviction from Abercorn Terrace and her meeting with Martin, Crosby reappears as a frail old woman: “She looked so small and hunched that it seemed doubtful if she could make her way across the wide open space, shrouded in white mist” (287). Her new “liberated” life proves to be repeating the same old story of servitude. Louisa Burt, the landlady, has ordered her to clean the bath of a count, who is one of her fellow lodgers. Here, the opaque “veil of mist” (287) has allowed Crosby an opportunity to express her frustrations:

It was not actually raining, but the great open space was full of mist; and there was nobody near, so that she could talk aloud. ‘Dirty brute,’ she muttered again. She had got into the habit of talking


aloud. Th ere was nobody in sight; the end of the path was lost in mist. It was very silent... Her face twitched as she walked, as if her muscles had got into the habit of protesting, involuntarily, against the spires and obstacles that tormented her (…) ‘Th e dirty brute,’ she muttered again. She had had some words that morn-ing with Mrs Burt about the Count’s bath. He spat in it, and Mrs Burt had told her to clean it. ‘Count indeed—he’s no more Count than you are,’ she continued. She was talking to Mrs Burt now. ‘I’m quite willing to oblige you,’ she went on. (287-88)

Th e weather condition of this particular November day provides an alternative space for Crosby, the oppressed and marginalized, to “talk aloud” and make comments which chal-lenge the dominant discourses of power: classism and patriarchy. In broad daylight, with crowd swarming around, Crosby would not have the chance nor the courage to condemn Mrs. Burt and the Count. She would not have dreamed to undermine their authority: “Count indeed—he’s no more Count than you are.” To analyze this chosen passage in terms of Bourdieu’s formula of habitus and fi eld: “[(habitus) (capital)] + fi eld = practice” (Distinction 101), the haze creates an “alternative fi eld” which exposes the “challengeabil-ity” of a particular class and gender habitus. To illustrate, a “social fi eld” can be visualized in terms of an arena where social games are played or practised according to a habitus or a set of rules. Class habitus, a product of social hierarchy which privileges those on the upper ladder, propels Crosby to accept Mrs. Burt’s command to clean the Count’s dirty bathtub. When combined with gender habitus, a product of a convention which privileges men over women, class habitus also propels her to serve Martin even when she is supposed to be “liberated” from the confi nes of servitude. One’s habitus is shaped by “doxa” which, according to Bourdieu in Th e Logic of Practice, means “the fundamental presuppositions of the fi eld” (68) or what one is made to think as “natural.” A classist doxa is refl ected, for example, in the idea that the rich and the elite are better human be-ings than the poor and the working class. A sexist or patriarchal doxa, on the other hand, is refl ected in the idea that men are better human beings than women. Crosby’s “initia-tion” into the fi eld of servitude, her adoption of habitus and of classist and sexist doxa, are aided by her “rites of passage” and “examinations.” She has the illusion of being given the privilege to be “chosen” as a part of the Pargiter family when, in truth, it is not so. Martin fi nds no diffi culty in discarding her like he disposes of his old childhood trinkets. Crosby’s actions and attitudes towards Martin refl ect the notion that it is “natural” for her to serve and obey. Here, however, everything “natural” is dismantled in the “misty” November air. In Crosby’s “alternative fi eld,” created and made possible by the weather condition, questions which have long been suppressed are fi nally articulated: What gives Mrs. Burt authority over her? Why does the man dare call himself a Count when he is not? Th e weather, to conclude, opens up Crosby’s possibility to imagine and articulate her “heterodoxa.” Despite the fact that Crosby is still “orthodoxic” in that she upholds the doxa: “Even out here, in the mist, where she was free to say what she liked, she adopted a conciliatory tone, because she knew that they wanted to be rid of her” (288), her attempt to attack and simultaneously defend the doxa of classism and patriarchy shatters its truth claims. Th e weather, therefore, empowers her to think beyond her usual familiar habitus.

195“It was an Uncertain Spring”

Notes

1. “Anyhow, nothing is more fascinating than a live person; always changing, resisting & yielding against one’s forecast;” (D1: 85).

2. My idea of “technology of place” was inspired by Michel Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self and Irvin C. Schick’s concept of the technology of place in his book Th e Erotic Margin, in which he states that technology of place is “the discursive instruments and strategies by means of which space is constituted as place” (9). I propose that we come to understand place through an amalgamation of (including clashes and negotiations between) “concrete place” which we perceive through our sensory reception and “abstract place” which we imagine from shards of personal and collective memories, narratives, and representations. Th is paradoxical union parallels Woolf ’s visionary concept of the “granite” and “rainbow” in her essay “Th e New Biography,” fi rst published in the New York Herald Tribune on 30 October 1927:

And if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and refl ect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it. (149)

For more explanation on the concepts of “technology” and “technology of place,” see my essay “‘Unleash-ing the Underdog’: Technology of Place in Virginia Woolf ’s Flush”.

3. As Sigmund Freud points out in his essay “Th e Uncanny,” concepts of the “unhomely” and the “uncanny” are interconnected through their shared German semantic word unheilmlich. Equivalent terms in English are “uncanny” and “eerie” (124). Th e Uncanny is a term used when something seems familiar and strange at the same time: “the uncanny [the ‘unhomely’] is what was once familiar [‘homely’, ‘homey’]. Th e nega-tive prefi x un- is the indicator of repression” (151). Th e paradox and ambivalence in the notion of the Uncanny, therefore, mirrors Bhabha’s concept of colonial ambivalence.

4. “I can wade grief,/ Whole pools of it, --/ I ‘m used to that” (Emily Dickinson. “Th e Test.” Poems [Series 2]).

Works Cited

Bell, Anne Olivier. Ed. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 1, 1915-19. Intro. Quentin Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.

—. Ed. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 5, 1936-41. Assist. Andrew McNeillie. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.Bhabha, Homi K. Th e Location of Culture. London; New York: Routledge, 2006.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984. —. Th e Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Dickinson, Emily. “Th e Test.” Poems [Series 2]. Full Text. Web. Accessed 16/03/2010. 17.51 <http://www.full-

books.com/Poems--Series-2-1.html>Fitzroy, Robert. Th e Weather Book: A Manual of Practical Meteorology. 2nd Ed. London: Longman, 1863. Freud, Sigmund. “Th e Uncanny.” (121-162). Th e Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. Intro. Hugh Haughton.

New York: Penguin Books, 2003.Nicolson, Nigel. Ed. Leave the Letters till We’re Dead: Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf Vol. VI (1936-1941). Assist.

Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press, 1980.Radin, Grace. Virginia Woolf ’s Th e Years: Th e Evolution of a Novel. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981.Schick, Irvin C. Th e Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse. London; New York: Verso, 1999.Sriratana, Verita. “‘Unleashing the Underdog’: Technology of Place in Virginia Woolf ’s Flush.” Forum: Univer-

sity of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts. Issue 8 Technologies (Spring 2009). Web. <http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/archive/08/sriratana.pdf>

Woolf, Virginia. “Th e New Biography.” Granite and Rainbow: Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1958: 149-161.—. Th e Years. Ed. Hermione Lee. Notes. Sue Asbee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

TRANSFORMING NATURE: ORLANDO AS ELEGY

by Elise Swinford

Despite the clearly satirical tone of Orlando: A Biography, there is also, just as pres-ent, a melancholia that permeates Orlando’s search for “Life, a lover!” (244). As Suzanne Raitt has observed, Woolf intended Orlando (1928) in part as a

“light-hearted comedy” (30), yet, in Woolf ’s characteristic style, the instances of lightness are contrasted with deeply melancholic moments. Considering the dark side of Woolf ’s light-hearted comedy, I propose viewing the novel as an unconventional elegy.

Orlando’s mutable sex and ambiguous gender performance add to the parodic nature of the form of the novel but also suggest the parodic nature of gender itself. Woolf resists the notion of fi xed representability by creating a character who, by no eff ort of his own and with no apparent cause, transforms and metamorphoses. It is through the trope of metamorphosis that the satirical biography of Orlando also becomes a study in mourning, unlimited by gender, time, nature, or representability.

Woolf ’s examination of the connections between writing, gender, and nature leads us to reexamine traditional notions of grieving as well as traditional notions of gender, thus illuminating the indelible relationship between grief and gender. I see this relationship functioning on two levels: fi rst, one might immediately think of the gendered roles as-signed to mourners, especially prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as the necessarily gendered experiencing of loss just after the First World War. Secondly, I consider melancholia and gender on a more fundamental level through Judith Butler’s theory of melancholic gender, in which both melancholia and primary gender formation are matters of identifying with internalized love objects: gender identifi cation necessitates the sex of the original prohibited object of desire to be internalized as a prohibition (Butler 63). While Butler cites the Freudian models of mourning and melancholia, I believe that Orlando’s subversion of traditional notions of gender also allows us to push back against the traditional Freudian model in which grieving “successfully” is to grieve with fi nality and reconciliation. I suggest an alternative framework of “resistant mourning,” to borrow Patricia Rae’s term, in order to allow us to view Orlando as a work of mourning without requiring reconciliation, which Woolf herself resists in the very form of the book and her intentionally unresolved ending.1

In his study of the elegy, Peter Sacks identifi es the conventions of the genre as:

pastoral contextualization, the myth of the vegetation deity (particularly the sexual myths, and their relation to the sexuality of the mourner),…the reiterated ques-tions, the outbreak of vengeful anger or cursing, the procession of mourners, the movement from grief to consolation, and the traditional images of resurrtion. (2)

Th ough one could fi nd many of these elements in Orlando, it is Sacks’ identifi cation of the vegetation deity in the elegy that is particularly illuminating to the gendered meta-morphosis of Orlando.

197TRANSFORMING NATURE

Early in the novel, we are given an image of Orlando as a young boy attempting to compose a poem: “He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked…at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more” (16-17). Th ough he writes furiously in his notebook of “Vice” and “Mis-ery,” he is unable to proceed once nature enters his imagination. Th is passage is doubly signifi cant for the reading of Orlando as an elegy. Woolf ’s purposeful use of the laurel bush in the context of an attempt at poetry is an allusion to the myth of Apollo and Daphne in which Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s impassioned pursuits. Realizing the metamorphosis, Apollo mourns the loss of Daphne in her female, human form by making the laurel an emblem, representing, among other virtues, poethood. Or-lando’s own metamorphosis in physical form is closely tied to discourses of nature and, just as Daphne does in her altered form, Orlando remains, in essence, the same. Further, that Orlando “could write no more” when he sees the laurel bush indicates that Orlando is halted in his poetic venture because he has not yet properly ascended to the role of Poet. In order to join the ranks of the great poets throughout history, the Poet must fi rst fi gura-tively replace his predecessor by mourning him through the writing of an elegy.

Sacks views the elegy as well as the story of Daphne and Apollo within the framework of the Freudian model of mourning. Th e elegy is a work, he says, both in the sense of a text, and in Freud’s concept of “the work of mourning” (Sacks 1). Within this model, the laurel tree as a signifi cation of Daphne becomes a substitute for Apollo’s lost love object. Sacks explains that “[o]nly when Apollo turns to the projected founding of a sign, the laurel wreath, does he appear to accept his loss” (4). Apollo’s turning from Daphne to a sign of her indicates, then, that Apollo is working through the loss as a part of a success-ful mourning process. By any account, Orlando would be an unconventional elegy. Th ere is no named lost love object. For that matter, the identity of the elegist him or herself is debatable. However, if Orlando is a part of the canon of works of mourning written by many modernist writers during the interwar period, Sacks’ conventions of elegy serve to shed light on what is being mourned and how Orlando’s (and Orlando’s) resistance to resolution and representation become indicative of a modernist melancholia.

At the moment of Daphne’s metamorphosis, Apollo exclaims, “Let the laurel / Guard and watch over the oak, and as my head / Is always youthful, let the laurel always / Be green and shining!” (Ovid 1.1.544-66). Th roughout Orlando’s centuries of life, it is “Th e Oak Tree”—both the poem and its physical representation on Orlando’s estate—that represents Orlando’s struggle with fi guration, both through words and through his own changing physical manifestation. In light of Apollo’s elegiac declaration of the laurel watching over the oak, we see in Orlando a reversal of this convention—the laurel, the sign of traditional poethood, is subordinated to the oak tree, both the document Orlando carries in his bosom and the tree that provides him refuge.

It is the oak tree in both of its manifestations that provides the 30-year old Orlando safe haven after his betrayal by Nick Greene, the representative patriarchal literary ge-nius. After reading Greene’s biting satire of him, Orlando performs a sort of purifi cation through fi re, during which he “burnt in a great confl agration fi fty-seven poetical works, only retaining ‘Th e Oak Tree’” (O 96). Th is process strips Orlando of what he calls “a vast mountain of illusion” (97). Th e idea of illusion returns throughout the text: literature


is illusive (and elusive) to Orlando at this point in his life (Orlando calls all literature a “farce”), just as gender will come to be an illusion for Orlando later; Orlando is after all, “precisely as he had been” after he changes sexes (138).

Orlando’s failed foray into literature—his attempt at representability through lan-guage—causes him to be thrown into a melancholia from which he does not recover until his sexual transformation. After the dramatic burning of the volumes of poetry, Orlando fl ings himself under his favorite oak tree and wishes never to speak to anyone again. In his desire to “never speak” again, Orlando turns from “Th e Oak Tree” as language (the poem) to the literal oak tree. Just as Apollo mourns by turning from Daphne to the signifi cation of Daphne in the laurel wreath, so too does Orlando begin a process of mourning by turn-ing from the lost object—literature—to its signifi cation in the oak tree.

In this initial turn toward melancholia, Orlando knows what has been lost—his po-etic aspirations—but, to borrow Freud’s words, not what he has lost in the dissolution of his ability to write. After Nick Greene’s devastating satire coupled with the loss of Sasha, his Russian princess lover, Orlando sinks into a melancholia that lasts for centuries. Th ough these specifi c events can be used as markers in Orlando’s work of mourning, Woolf describes him from the beginning as having dark inclinations. Even during his pas-sionate aff air with Sasha as a young nobleman in James’ court, Orlando inexplicably falls into deep bouts of depression and comments that “nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy” (45). Th is vacillation between happiness and mel-ancholy, between satire and elegy, returns repeatedly throughout the novel. Upon seeing a production of Othello, Orlando thinks to himself that “[r]uin and death . . . cover all. Th e life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us” (57). Th ough there is no tone of satire in Orlando’s dark thought, Woolf ’s jokes here serve again to blur the line between satire and elegy: death, of course, will not cover Orlando, neither does he follow a typical path to the grave; in fact, his life as a man ends not in the grave but in a Turkish palace.

Woolf ’s pairing of gender and literature as illusions suggests two things: fi rst, just as the illusive nature of Orlando’s gender is not an obstacle but instead another vehicle through which he gains varied life experiences, literature as illusion does not necessarily carry with it the negative implications of a lie or deception—literature is deceiving to the point that all language is a deception, a necessary but often hindering tool of self defi ni-tion. Th e second thing that Woolf ’s positioning of gender and literature as illusions sug-gests is the indelible connection between literature, gender, and loss.

Considering this connection from the Lacanian perspective—that one’s psychosexual development is dependent on one’s entrance into language, which necessarily implies a loss—it is particularly signifi cant that at the moment of Orlando’s transformation, he ar-rives into the world as a woman in a way suggestive of a child entering subjecthood. After a pseudo-gestational period of seven days in a dark, warm room, Orlando wakes with a blast of trumpets, announcing “Th e Truth!” (137). Th ough Orlando is, in essence, the same, she re-enters the world with a reawakened subjectivity. As we are unable to remem-ber our own existence prior to our entrance into subjecthood, Orlando’s memory “went back through all the events of her past life,” yet “[s]ome haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a lit-tle dimmed” (138). Orlando’s process of self-recognition consists of the moment in which she “looked himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of


discomposure, and went, presumably, to his bath” (138). In this version of the Lacanian mirror stage, Orlando identifi es her own image as herself, and then re-enters the world.

Th e important diff erence here is that Orlando’s recognition of herself in her refl ec-tion as I, as a coherent subject, is not fraught, as in the Lacanian mirror stage, but is notably without any discomposure. Th ough the trumpets announce “Th e Truth!”, this an-nouncement is not a shocking, anxiety-inducing shift away from primary narcissism but a brief acknowledgement of a shift in embodiment. Th ough this shift represents an elegiac “beginning again,” it is without the angst of moving away from the disordered self. If anything, then, Orlando’s self-perception is most fraught before he is reborn as a woman. Th e “truth,” then, that Woolf seems to suggest does not lie in biological sex but in how gender is treated discursively. Orlando is the same; her meaning has changed due only to the cultural baggage attached to gender. Th e ease with which Orlando transforms also points to a process of mourning that, unlike Daphne’s transformation, is not destructive. To begin again, Orlando does not distance himself from his original state but internalizes it and moves forward.

Signifi cantly, this moment and the proceeding days Orlando spends with the Turkish gypsies are marked by silence. When Orlando speaks again, it is with an awkwardness, a sense that words are inadequate. As she sits around the campfi re with the Turkish nomads and views a beautiful sunset over the hills, Orlando exclaims, “‘How good to eat!’ (Th e gypsies have no word for ‘beautiful.’ Th is is the nearest.) All the young men and women burst out laughing uproariously. Th e sky good to eat, indeed!” (142). Th ough the gypsies recognize this outburst as the foreign “disease” of a love of nature, it also points to the dif-fi culty of representing experience through language. It is after this, Orlando’s (re)entrance into language, that she again feels compelled to compose in her manuscript, “Th e Oak Tree.”

Th e natural world and notions of natural sex, both constructed discursively, become open to interpretation. Woolf ’s use of nature as an inspiration—seen in Orlando’s love of the country and her life-long work of “Th e Oak Tree”—also brings to mind the law of “nature” as social restriction that sexologists had popularized in discourses of “unnatural” sexuality by the time Woolf wrote the novel.

As Orlando’s search leads her to the literary and social circles of eighteenth-century London, she entertains the next incarnation of the torchbearers of “Glawr”: Pope, Ad-dison, and Swift, quoting Joseph Addison’s “Trial of the Petticoat” for a testament to his character: “I consider woman as a beautiful, romantic animal, that may be adorned with furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks…. All this I shall indulge them in, but as for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither can, nor will allow it” (qtd. in Orlando 210). Already we are given the description of woman as an animal, her adorn-ments given freely by nature. Given Sacks’ almost exclusively masculine-oriented explana-tion of the (male) vegetation god mourner mourning the (female) metamorphosed lost love object, it is worth considering that Orlando possesses both positions in Sacks’ frame-work for this elegiac convention. Orlando is both the “beautiful, romantic animal” of the metamorphosed, mourned female love object as well as the male, immortal, vegetation god mourner. In this way, Orlando is already a “perversion” of natural law.

If the biographer would have quoted Addison a paragraph earlier in Th e Tatler, we would have seen more directly the confl ict that the forces of “nature” present to Orlando during her early life as a woman. Addison comments:


I would not be understood that…I am an enemy to the proper ornaments of the fair sex. On the contrary as the hand of nature has poured on them such a pro-fusion of charms and graces…; so I would have them bestow upon themselves all the additional beauties that art can supply them with, provided it does not interfere with, disguise, or pervert those of nature. (Tatler 116, 1709)

In Addison’s estimation, specifi c female attire has the ability to “pervert” or disguise the nature of women. Th ough Addison’s scope of what is natural for women is quite limited, Orlando still becomes a “perversion” of the multiple discourses of nature. She dresses in drag to enter the London nightlife, thereby “perverting” the natural beauty of the “fair sex” as well as the “natural” law of heteronormative gendering. When Orlando dresses in “her neat black silk knickerbockers of an ordinary nobleman” on her way to London, the biographer com-ments, “Vain trifl es as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offi ces than merely to keep us warm. Th ey change our view of the world and the world’s view of us” (187). Whoever the unspecifi ed “they” are, Orlando’s clothes—and, I would argue, her entire mas-culine gender performance during these outings—signal a metamorphosis from Orlando’s previous self as a country gentleman that is not limited to outward appearance or biology. Woolf refuses to answer the question of constructed versus essentialist self because this is not the main issue of Orlando’s metamorphosis. Orlando is not limited by gender, at least not gender alone, but by her (in)ability to fi t within the limits of representability.

Th e question of course persists: how can a work of high camp, of “fantasy and joki-ness” (Lee 517) be placed among the highly elegiac works created during the interwar years? Her other works written around this time—To Th e Lighthouse (1927) and Th e Waves (1931)—take on the subject of death with no comforting satire or joking. Speaking of Or-lando’s relatively utopian ending, Hermoine Lee adds that Orlando “doesn’t die. Orlando is the only of her books with no deaths, turning away from the elegiac mood” of the afore-mentioned works (520). It is, though, what is left out, what is unrepresented, that points to loss. One such moment occurs soon after the female Orlando’s famous revelation of, “‘You’re a woman, Shel!’” she cried. ‘You’re a man, Orlando!’ he cried….‘I am a woman,’ she thought, ‘A real woman, at last’” (253). At the moment of ultimate gender ambiguity, Woolf cannot fi nd or backs away from the words that would represent true gender sub-version. Th e narrator instead “almost dispenses with language” and “leaves a great blank” during Orlando and Shel’s passionate conversation (254). In addition to the modernist dilemma of an inability to express something beyond articulation, we have the bittersweet notion that Orlando’s space is “fi lled to repletion” (253), yet the space representing it to the reader is void. Despite or perhaps because of the nature of the satirical biography, the biographer postpones resolution, both in what happens here in the blank space and in the fi nal words of the novel. Woolf presents a sense of looking forward without forgetting the past. Orlando’s elegiac work of mourning—here I mean work as in a text and in a con-certed eff ort—does not end in destruction or in abandoning the lost love object. Instead, it ends in a revelatory acknowledgement of Orlando as constantly transitioning, as seen in Shel’s exclamation of “You’re a man!” followed by Orlando’s realization that she is a real woman. Th e biographer’s comment that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language is poignant here: Orlando’s entrance into womanhood is ultimately achieved through language (at the moment of this exclamation), not biology.


Notes

1. See Patricia Rae’s introduction to Modernism and Mourning.

Works Cited

Addison, Joseph. “Th e Trial of the Petticoat.” Th e Tatler. No. 116. Th e Tatler and the Guardian: Complete in One Volume. Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo & Col., 1880. 242.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” Collected Papers, Vol. IV. Trans. Joan Riviere. New York: Basic

Books, 1959. Lacan, Jacques. Th e Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.

New York: Norton, 1977. Lee, Hermoine. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1996. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955. Rae, Patricia. “Introduction: Modernist Mourning.” Modernism and Mourning. Lewisburg: Bucknell University

Press, 2007. Raitt, Suzanne. Vita and Virginia: Th e Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1993.Sacks, Peter. “Interpreting the Genre: Th e Elegy and the Work of Mourning.” Th e English Elegy: Studies in the

Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1985. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. 1928. Orlando: Harcourt, 1956.

“NATURE, WHO HAS PLAYED SO MANY QUEER TRICKS UPON US”:DIGGING GRANITE AND CHASING RAINBOWS WITH VIRGINIA WOOLF

by Derek Ryan

Perhaps her most famous metaphors taken from the natural world, Virginia Woolf ’s fi guration of “granite and rainbow” (“Th e New Biography” 100) appears to capture both halves of a “neatly split up” question concerning the aims of biography (“Th e

New Biography” 95). Her 1927 essay “Th e New Biography” assimilates granite with the “hard facts” of reality: it is “truth in its hardest, most obdurate form; it is truth as truth is to be found in the British Museum” (95). In contrast, the rainbow is assimilated with the “artful or highly coloured” (95) and “consists in personality” (96). Granite and rainbow are, as Kathryn Miles summarizes in an earlier edition of conference proceedings, the constituent elements of “a theory of biography that seeks to reconcile the binaries of truth and fi ction” (212). Miles argues that we fi nd potential for this reconciliation in viewing Orlando (1928) as the “fi ctional praxis to underscore [Woolf ’s] theory” (213), and posits that it is through Orlando’s unnamed narrator that we potentially fi nd a biographer ca-pable of bringing these binaries together (217). Where Miles uses “Th e New Biography” to illustrate the success of Orlando, however, Mitchell Leaska has used Woolf ’s essay to ex-plain the “failure” of Th e Pargiters (xviii). In his 1978 introduction to Woolf ’s abandoned project, Leaska maps the theory of granite and rainbow onto Woolf ’s initial intention to have essay segments interspersed with fi ction and argues that she “gradually realised that all the factual matter which would constitute the essay portions was weighty substance that somehow collided with the artistic design she originally planned,” therefore meaning that “the truth of fact and the truth of fi ction could not meet in felicitous alliance” (xiv). Confi ning Woolf ’s term to an oppositional framework, Leaska uses it to argue that Th e Pargiters failed because Woolf felt “the pressure of granite against rainbow” (vii).

Specifi c readings of Orlando and Th e Pargiters are not my primary concern here, but as examples of the ways in which “Th e New Biography” has been utilized by some of Woolf ’s critics, they are important for two main reasons. Firstly, both Miles’ and Leaska’s appro-priation of Woolf ’s “granite and rainbow” fi guration illustrates that it can be extended and applied to her other writings; secondly, although using it to diff erent ends, they both em-ploy Woolf ’s fi guration without ever challenging the stability of the terms “granite” and “rainbow” themselves. Th at is, this natural metaphor may be more or less amalgamated but remains, from the start, as two distinct elements working within a binary framework. Rather than understanding it as a fi xed and stable metaphor, I would like to argue that the complexity and usefulness of this dual term has not been fully realized. Th is paper attempts to extend Woolf ’s theory not by simply applying its dual premise but by analyzing Woolf ’s use of the terms “granite” and “rainbow,” both coupled and uncoupled, elsewhere in her writings. Digging granite and chasing rainbows will also lead me to consider the signifi cance of these terms in relation to the natural sciences of geology and physics.

From the second paragraph of “Th e New Biography,” Woolf is already blurring the dis-tinctions between granite and rainbow. We learn that “granite-like solidity” has “an almost

203“Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us”

mystic power. Like radium, it seems able to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light” (95), and the “rainbow-like intangibility” of “that inner life of thought and emo-tion” in fact “meanders darkly and obscurely through the hidden channels of the soul” (95). Th e inversion of properties of dark and light appears to confuse the opposing granite and rainbow; the bland and dark shades of granite become mystic and fi lled with light, and the luminous colors of the rainbow become darkened and obscure. Furthermore, when Woolf concludes that we cannot yet “name the biographer whose art is subtle and bold enough to present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow” (100), a self-refl exive writing is again displayed; even in this very sentence she undermines the expected parallel by pairing “dream” with “granite,” “reality” with “rainbow.” It is perhaps telling that the only other occurrence of Woolf deploying granite and rainbow in the same sentence also complicates the expected parallel, when in Orlando we are told: “Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite” (46). In one sense, granite’s parallel with diamonds is no surprise—being hard, obdurate rocks—and, to a lesser extent, the symmetry of rainbow and clay works in the sense of clay’s transformative, varied form. But, delighting in “the muddle and mystery” (O 46), Woolf is playing with the overlapping possibilities for these “queer” couples whereby an argument could just as convincingly be made for the rainbow/diamonds symmetry (mysticism, beauty, rarity), and the clay/granite symmetry (as naturally occur-ring materials). Already we become vigilant to Pamela Caughie’s warning in Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism that where Woolf is concerned, “we cannot count on any one element meaning the same thing from one text to another” (101). Caughie, who has herself criticized Leaska’s use of the “granite and rainbow” term as a “given distinction” (96), argues that the most important sentence in “Th e New Biography” may be that “[t]hey have no fi xed scheme of the universe, no standard of courage or morality to which they insist that [w]e shall con-form” (98; Caughie 100). As Woolf writes in her essay “Craftsmanship”:

It is only a question of fi nding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human be-ings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. (89)

We cannot conceive of a marriage of words as we do a conventional marriage between two people. Rather, there are many “swift marriages” (“Craftsmanship” 91) because words have a profound “need of change” (“Craftsmanship” 90). Free to mate with many other words, Woolf ’s granites and rainbows often appear uncoupled in her writings, and some-times within the same text. Turning my attention to Woolf ’s posthumously published “A Sketch of the Past,” I would like to argue that the various ways in which Woolf ’s polyga-mous granites and rainbows “hang together” (“Craftsmanship” 90) with diff erent words in diff erent contexts demonstrates that we fi nd solidity and intangibility, truth and fi ction, are always already intermingled each time Woolf writes the word “granite” or “rainbow.”

In her “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf remembers childhood days in the granite county of Cornwall, recalling “old men and women” who “danced round Knills Monumen—a granite steeple in a clearing” (MOB 136). She describes everywhere seeing “walls [that] were


thick blocks of granite built to stand the sea storms” and supposes that the “town was then much as it must have been in the sixteenth century, unknown, unvisited, a scramble of granite houses” (MOB 133). Importantly then, the endurance of granite does not solidify the town’s meaning, instead adding to the sense of the “unknown, unvisited,” to a somewhat mysterious existence. It is granite that evades a stable entry into linear time: “Th e eighteenth century had left no mark upon St Ives…It might have been built yesterday; or in the time of the Conqueror.” Th e Church, “like the houses,” was “built of granite” and therefore “ageless” (MOB 133). Indeed, it is a simultaneous endurance and intangibility of Cornish granite that also appears to be captured by D. H. Lawrence, when in “Th e Nightmare” chapter of Kan-garoo he describes Cornwall’s “huge granite boulders bulging out of the earth like presences” as “the mystery of the powerful, pre–human earth, showing its might” (225).

In a letter from 1921, Woolf had already described Cornish granite hills as “half transparent,” elusive entities provoking the imagination and memories, reminding her of childhood (L2: 462). In “A Sketch of the Past” she elaborates on the mystery of these hills, “scattered with blocks of granite; some said of them to be old tombs and altars; in some, holes were driven, as if for gate posts” (MOB 138). Th e children found great ad-venture in them, and Woolf alludes to the legend of the Logan Rock—an 80-ton rocking stone, fi nely balanced at the top of a cliff (so fi nely balanced that in April 1824 it had been tipped over by a disgraced Lieutenant Goldsmith before the locals demanded it be replaced!). Woolf expresses the childhood wonderment it evoked: “Th e Loggan [sic] rock was on top of Tren Crom; we would set it rocking; and be told that perhaps the hollow in the rough lichened surface was for the victim’s blood” (MOB 138). Far from these hills always and already signifying their obdurate actuality, it was only her father’s “severe love of truth” that attempted to reduce an already mysterious granite: He “disbelieved it; he said, in his opinion, this was no genuine Loggan rock, but the natural disposition of ordinary rocks” (MOB 138). It is precisely this notion of “natural disposition,” of a fi xed and certain reality, that Woolf challenges by sharing her memory of this childhood event. Th e massive and yet tentative existence of this granite rock is recalled and re-appropriated in the fi ght against phallogocentrism, and foregrounded are the pervading doubts about fact and fi ction, about “whether I mean anything real, whether I make up or tell the truth” (MOB 138). For Woolf these granite rocks are “at once real and imaginary” (“Th e New Biography” 97); they do not signify one totalizing meaning. As she notes plainly in a let-ter to Katherine Arnold-Forster in June 1923: “I don’t like symbolical granite” (L3: 49)!

As it turns out, the stability of Woolf ’s granite is always already challenged by modern advances in natural science. We don’t need to dig too deep into our geological world to discover that whilst granite may be a hard, durable, and dense material, studies since the Enlightenment have led to a less than straightforward understanding of it. Th e epigraph of Wallace Pitcher’s book Th e Nature and Origin of Granite cites acclaimed geologist Joseph Beete Jukes speaking in 1863: “Granite is not a rock which was simple in its origin but might be produced in more ways than one” (vii). Th ere is even less excuse for us to fall into stable understandings of granite today, as Pitcher informs us of a resurgence of interest in the twentieth century “stimulated by the thesis that granites image their source rocks in the inaccessible deep crust, and that their diversity is the result of varying global tectonic context” (v). With its truth both diverse and context-dependent, it is somewhat appropriate that granite should be formed from magma and contain potential metamorphic properties.


Due to its complexity, Pitcher highlights the intense diffi culties in attempting to classify granites: “It could well be argued that any attempt to categorize the granite fam-ily on a natural basis is doomed to failure given the virtually infi nite number of diff erent types which might be generated” (19). Whilst conceding that “a proper order is obviously required for description and comparison,” he stresses that “the resulting arrangements are wholly static, often artifi cial, and lead nowhere along the path of understanding” (19-20). Th is sounds remarkably close to poststructuralist readings of Woolf which argue, as Pa-mela Caughie puts it, that categorizations “are not necessarily discrete…Rather, they are constructed to solve certain problems” (20). Like Caughie then, Pitcher emphasizes what he calls “process based, dynamic classifi cation” (20).

Just as the solidity of granite is challenged by Woolf ’s writings and by science, so is the notion of an intangible rainbow as somehow detached and evasive of our material world. Th is too is illuminated in “A Sketch of the Past” when, recalling the “bright co-lours” and “many distinct sounds” of childhood (MOB 91), Woolf emphasizes an embod-ied “movement and change,” a complicated and fl owing “actual” (MOB 92) that creates an equally evasive sense of self, “the little creature”:

One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing, get-ting large, getting small, passing at diff erent rates of speed past the little crea-ture…driven on as she was by the growth of her legs and arms, driven without her being able to stop it, or to change it, driven as a plant is driven up out of the earth, up until the stalk grows, the leaf grows, birds swell. Th at is what is inde-scribable, that is what makes all images too static. (MOB 91)

Following this, Woolf then appears to assimilate rainbows straightforwardly with the imagination; describing her fi rst memory of her mother, she recalls how “she told me to think of all the lovely things I could imagine. Rainbows and bells…” (MOB 93). But rather than the intangibility of her memory and imagination being an escape from reality, “these minute separate details” are very much a part of the material life of the young Vir-ginia Stephen (MOB 93). For example, as Woolf remembers the elusiveness of her moth-er’s personality, Julia Stephen becomes not so much a “particular person” as “generalised; dispersed; omnipresent… the creator of that crowded merry world” (MOB 94). Woolf was “living so completely in her [mother’s] atmosphere that one never got far enough away from her to see her as a person…She was the whole thing; Talland House was full of her; Hyde Part Gate was full of her…She was keeping what I call in my shorthand the panoply of life—that which we all lived in common—in being” (MOB 94). Crucially however, Woolf is eager to avoid the notion of her mother as a totalising symbolical fi gure by adding, “It is true that I enclosed that world in another made by my own temperament; it is true that from the beginning I had many adventures outside that world; and often went far from it; and kept much back from it” (MOB 96).

Exploring the complexity of the granite/rainbow dynamic in “A Sketch of the Past” illustrates “the world tinged with all the colours of the rainbow” (MOB 55). It is as when Woolf describes the total eclipse of 1927 in “Th e Sun and the Fish,” where we see this fi ll-ing in of the world by the re-emerging sunlight that “was sprinkled rainbow-like in a hoop of colour,” that “steadily and surely” became a “great paint brush [that] washed in woods,


dark on the valley, and massed the hills blue above them”: “Th e world became more and more solid” (191). Another comparison could be drawn here with Lawrence, where this relationship between rainbow and solidity is evident at the end of Th e Rainbow: “a faint, vast rainbow” appears and is described as “great architecture of light and colour” that “stood on the earth” (493). In “Th e Sun and the Fish,” the earth soon becomes the familiar and populous place of “farm-houses,” “villages,” and “railway lines,” as the rainbow-like sprinkles of light “modeled and moulded” the “whole fabric of civilisation,” before Woolf tells us of the true revelation: “But still the memory endured that the earth we stand on is made of colour; colour can be blown out” (191). It is both the earth as rainbow, and the earth as “ephemeral as a rainbow” (TTL 20).

Th e unweaving of the rainbow itself as intangible and opposed to the hard facts of our material reality has, of course, also been emphasized by centuries of scientifi c discovery, most famously by Descartes and by Newton. On the one hand rainbows are multiplicities of color and type: everyone is familiar with the reds and yellows, greens and blues, but there are also variations such as refl ected and refracted rainbows, the supernumerary rain-bow, and the “double rainbow” that Virginia and Leonard Woolf themselves witnessed on their terrace in September 1930—a spectacle that Woolf notes as interrupting her letter writing to Ethel Smyth (L4: 217). Moreover, Richard Dawkins reminds us that the mul-tiplicitous nature of rainbows is not solely due to their colors or types: “why do you see a complete rainbow? Because there are lots of diff erent raindrops. A band of thousands of raindrops is giving you green light (and simultaneously giving blue light to anybody who might be placed above you, and simultaneously giving red light to somebody else below you.)” (46). Ad infi nitum, so that there is never only one rainbow that we all see; Virginia and Leonard were not in fact seeing the same “double rainbow.” Arguing against Keats’s famous disappointment in “Lamia” that Newton had reduced rainbows to fully under-stood “common things,” Dawkins emphasizes that science has multiplied the rainbow’s beauty and mystery: “there are as many rainbows as there are eyes looking at the storm…strictly speaking, even your two eyes are seeing two diff erent rainbows” (47). Th ere is then a kind of solid intangibility, a granite-like illusion. As Dawkins states: “Th e illusion of the rainbow itself remains rock steady” (47).

Where does this leave us regarding how we as critics may think about and use Woolf ’s “granite and rainbow” term? If Woolf ’s multiple granites and rainbows evade fi xed and distinct meanings, can we still treat her fi guration as metaphor (with its tendency towards totalization)? In her 2006 book Transpositions, Rosi Braidotti—self proclaimed “materialist nomadic feminist philosopher” (30)—off ers us this concept of “transpositions” as an alternative to metaphor (and metonymy): “Transposing is a ges-ture neither of metaphorical assimilation nor of metonymic association. It is a style, in the sense of a form of conceptual creativity, like a sliding door, a choreographed slip-page” (9). Transposing involves non-linear leaps, mobility and cross-referencing, “no-tions that drift nomadically among diff erent texts” (7). For Braidotti, “the theory of transpositions off ers a contemplative and creative stance that respects the visible and hidden complexities of the very phenomena it attempts to study” (6). In all of this, Braidotti emphasizes that transposing “is no mere rhetorical device” (146); instead it is “connecting philosophy to [science and] social realities; theoretical speculations to con-crete plans”; they are “discursive and also materially embedded” (7). It is by emphasizing


the multiplicitous and complex nature of materiality that we can discover “the positivity of diff erence as a specifi c theme of its own” (5).

Braidotti takes music and genetics—which she argues are both exemplars of non-linear transfer, working as “dissociative shifts or leaps” (6)—as the ‘double source of in-spiration’ for transpositions. Transposing Woolf ’s multiple granites and rainbows onto this model, could they become “the double source of inspiration” (5) for the complex inter-, intra- and extra-textual map of her writings, where these terms are freed from the assignment of unifi cation and from a priori associations, and where their heterogeneity is celebrated? As transpositions that are sustained and enduring precisely because of their fl uidity, uncertainty, and adaptability, granites and rainbows must, then, be considered as the “perpetual marriage” becoming many “swift marriages”; a polygamy of synchroniza-tions, or to use Braidotti’s own words, “a joyful kind of dissonance” (93). Perhaps it is transpositions that could help explain why when we are digging granite and chasing rain-bows we are at the same time unearthing rainbows and—as Woolf writes in Jacob’s Room (1922)—“piercing the sky…like granite cliff s” (JR 61).

Works Cited

Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana and

Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.Dawkins, Richard. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder. London: Allen Lane, 1998.Lawrence, D. H. Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.Lawrence, D. H. Th e Rainbow. Ed. Kate Flint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.Miles, Kathryn. “‘Th at perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow’: Searching for‘Th e New Biography’ in Vir-

ginia Woolf ’s Orlando.” Virginia Woolf & Communities: Selected Papers from the Eight Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jeanette McVicker and Laura Davis. New York: Pace University Press, 1999. 212-218.

“Myths and Legends of Cornwall.” Cornwall in Focus. 20 May 2010 <http://www.cornwallinfocus.co.uk/his-tory/legends.php>

Pitcher, Wallace S. Th e Nature and Origin of Granite. London: Blackie Academic & Professional, 1993.Woolf, Virginia. “Craftmanship.” Selected Essays. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

85-91.—. Jacob’s Room. London: Vintage, 2004.—. Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf . Vol. 2. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: HBJ, 1976.—. Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1978.—. “Th e New Biography.” Selected Essays. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 95-100.—. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Pimlico, 2002.—. Orlando:A Biography. London: Vintage, 2004.—. Th e Pargiters: Th e Novel-Essay Portion of “Th e Years”. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. London: Th e Hogarth Press, 1978.—. “Th e Sun and the Fish.” Selected Essays. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 188-192.—. To the Lighthouse. London: Penguin, 1964.

SUNDERED WATERS:ISOLATED CONSCIOUSNESSES AND OSTENSIBLE COMMUNION IN

WOOLF’S NARRATION

by Dominic Scheck

In Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927), Lily Briscoe voices the modernist pursuit of unity as a desire for intimacy, for personal knowledge of Mrs. Ramsay: “What de-vice [was there] for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same,

one with the object one adored? … How… did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?” (TTL 54). Lily’s problem is a phenomenological one: as a conscious self, she yearns for access to the internal consciousness of an external other. However, the thoughts and emotions of an individually conscious subject belong exclu-sively to her own interiority, as Mrs. Ramsay thinks to herself, “she alone could search into her [own] mind and heart” (66). In order to overcome the alienation of privacy, Lily desires to share interiority, but Woolf consistently evinces the impossibility of communi-cating the intimate knowledge of the mind, what she describes as “nothing that could be written in any language known to men” (54). Instead of actually experiencing the same interior thoughts as an other, or attempting to encode one’s experience and recreate it in an other’s consciousness via language, the individual creates an illusory yet functional communion with others through the perception of mutually exterior objects.

At stake here is our understanding of intersubjectivity, of the experience of being a conscious subject among other selves. Justine Dymond asserts that Woolf ’s narrative proj-ect “explores orientation toward the other as constitutive of a fl uid subjectivity, therefore putting into question what constitutes the boundary between the subject and the other” (140-41). For Dymond, Woolf ’s writing not only expresses a desire for one self to know another but also enacts a successful communion of their subjectivities. However, though free indirect discourse allows the narration to vacillate between consciousnesses of charac-ters, thereby weaving together the perspectives of diff erent selves into a fabric—that is, the novel—this fabric is visible only to the reader. Th e individual threads of thought remain separate for the subjects to which they belong. Although Dymond suggests the possibility of interconnected consciousnesses, I hope to demonstrate that consciousness for Woolf is, as her rough contemporary William James tells us, the quality of an isolated mind:

Th e only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in per-sonal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I’s and you’s… Neither contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belong-ing to diff erent personal minds. (226)

A subject’s consciousness is unequivocally private and therefore divisive: selves are cut off from one another by their inability to share a common interiority. Dymond draws on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to imply otherwise, invoking his experiment

209Sundered Waters

in which one’s left hand feels one’s right, allowing the body to experience itself both as subject and object. It follows that the self can experience itself as the object of an other’s gaze if he imbues the other with a subjectivity analogous to his own. For Dymond, this reversibility of subject and object “upsets the dichotomy of inside/outside” and mysteri-ously blurs the horizon between subjectivities (142). Dymond’s interpretation of Merleau-Ponty, however, fails to refl ect his account of the other:

If there is an other, he is never in my eyes a For Itself, in the precise and given sense that I am, for myself. Even if our relationship leads me to admit or even to experience that “he too” thinks, that “he too” has a private landscape… I do not have that private landscape as I have my own. What I say of it is always derived from what I know of myself by myself: I concede that if I inhabited that body I should have another solitude, comparable to that which I have... But the “if I inhabited” is not a hypothesis; it is a fi ction or a myth. Th e other’s life, such as he lives it, is not for me who speaks an eventual experience or a possible: it is a prohibited experience, it is an impossible. (Merleau-Ponty 78-79)

For Merleau-Ponty, then, the I solely understands the other as a conscious subject, a “For Itself,” by analogy to herself. Th at is, Lily experiences her position as a subject solipsisti-cally and can infer—but not inhabit—the consciousness of others because they appear to be similar to her—for instance, in physical structure, behavior, and capacity to produce language. Th e I, then, is alone in the fi nal analysis; the other’s consciousness may be, but it is “an impossible” to experience it.

In the dinner scene of To the Lighthouse, we see this sealed-off nature of consciousness when Mrs. Ramsay, William Bankes, and Lily turn their attention to the drab political discussion the other men are having:

Lily was listening; Mrs. Ramsay was listening; they were all listening. But already bored, Lily felt that something was lacking; Mr. Bankes felt that something was lacking. Pulling her shawl round her, Mrs. Ramsay felt that something was lack-ing. All of them bending themselves to listen thought, “Pray heaven that the in-side of my mind may not be exposed,” for each thought, “Th e others are feeling this. Th ey are outraged and indignant with the government about the fi shermen. Whereas, I feel nothing at all.” (96)

Instead of saying that they all were listening, feeling, and thinking, the narration describes them individually performing these actions. Lily feels something was lacking, as does Mr. Bankes, as does Mrs. Ramsay, but they experience this common sentiment separately. In addition to this feeling that “something was lacking,” their very thoughts—although similar in quality and content, to borrow James’s language—isolate them from each other. Each character wishes his or her interiority, “the inside of [each one’s] mind,” will not be “exposed.” Each of them thinks the others are all “outraged and indignant” and feels alone for “feel[ing] nothing at all.” Despite their common interior thoughts, they construe themselves as diff erent from the others and subsequently alone because, unable to experi-ence others’ thoughts, they misread them.


Not only does one person’s consciousness lack the ability to traverse James’s barrier into the personal mind of another, but, as Woolf ’s fi ction suggests, language fails to export the experience of an individual’s interior thoughts and feelings. Lily considers telling her thoughts to Carmichael, but refl ecting on language’s limitations, she decides against it:

she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. ‘About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay’—no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. Th e urgency of the moment always missed its mark… how could one express in words these emotions of the body? (181)

Lily not only determines that language cannot communicate the particular emotions she has in this certain situation but also universalizes the failure of language, refl ecting that “one could say nothing to nobody.” Regardless of the speaker, the listener, or the experi-ence being discussed, words cannot accurately externalize a subject’s interiority. Further-more, Lily suggests that language actually violences what it attempts to convey; words “break up” and “dismember” thought. Th e immediacy of an experience is suspended by encoding it in language, thereby losing “the urgency of the moment” and vitiating the meaning of the interior event. An individual, then, can neither experience an other’s inte-riority nor recreate it for himself from the other’s attempted communication.

Laura Doyle argues that instances of language in Woolf ’s fi ction function not only as semantic vehicles but also as tangible objects to be perceived: “Words are not simply names for things that fi x those things within a logical system, or even that sacrifi ce those things to the coded system. Words are themselves things, as palpable and as open to mate-rial struggle as things themselves” (58). Doyle’s characterization of language here points both to its failures and physicality. Echoing Lily, she suggests words misrepresent the things they name by “sacrifi c[ing]” the immediate meaning of the things and reductively “fi x[ing]” them to a meaning within an artifi cial “logical system.” In addition to its prob-lematic semantic power, Doyle emphasizes language’s palpability. Th is material status of language is important to her as she describes what she calls Woolf ’s “intercorporeal narra-tive strategies” (Doyle 43), the use of perceived objects as points on which to shift narra-tive consciousness. She claims that if we think of consciousness as an embodied phenom-enon in which a conscious subject perceives through his body another body, an object, then intercorporeal narrative is the process of switching the narrative perspective from the consciousness of one subjective body to that of another subjective body by means of the common perception of an objective body. As “heard and seen” material bodies, instances of language can also serve as these pivotal objects (Doyle 8).

I will add as an important qualifi cation that intercorporeal narrative entails two sep-arate perceptions and separate consciousness rather than a blending of either. For this reason, it is more accurate to describe this technique as “transcorporeal” than “intercorpo-real” because the consciousness of one body never inhabits another body. Instead, the nar-ration transfers from the embodied consciousness of one subject to another. We see this in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) when the mysteriously primordial and nonsensical chanting of an old woman disrupts Peter Walsh’s interior frustrations about Clarissa. Th e voice serves as a point on which to shift the narration to Rezia Smith’s consciousness: “Clarissa was as cold

211Sundered Waters

as an icicle. Th ere she would sit on the sofa by his side, let him take her hand… ee um fah um so / foo swee too eem oo… ee um fah um so/ foo swee too eem oo / ‘Poor old woman,’ said Rezia Warren Smith, waiting to cross. Oh poor old wretch!” (MD 2597-98). Th e nar-ration begins with Peter’s personal memories and thoughts as he ruminates on Clarrissa, remembering how “she would sit on the sofa.” Peter then perceives the voice, and when the song appears again, Rezia is the subject perceiving it. Th e narration continues from there, reporting Rezia’s consciousness. Th e voice, “absent of all human meaning,” communicates nothing to Peter or Rezia but acts instead as the object of their parallel perception. By “paral-lel,” I mean that two subjects perceive the same mutually external object, but because they have discrete consciousnesses, their perceptions are separate and therefore diff erent. Indeed, in this case, neither Peter nor Rezia is even cognizant of the other’s perception of the “invin-cible thread of sound” (MD 2598) that strings their narrative perspectives together. Woolf ’s narration then respects James’s insistence on insular consciousnesses belonging to personal selves while portraying the internal mindscapes of multiple characters. Transcorporeal nar-ration provides transition between them. While Dymond suggests this polyvocal narration signals a collective or merged consciousness as “the consciousnesses of the characters inter-connect within paragraphs and sentences” (Dymond 142), we must remember that this aggregate of thoughts is a novel, a fi ction, rather than what James calls “consciousness that we naturally deal with,” and within the novel, characters do not experience the interwoven textile of consciousnesses available to the reader; they witness only their own.

Although limited to the isolated confi nes of his own personal mind, however, an indi-vidually conscious subject can create a sense of communal interiority with others through a sort of double awareness: fi rst the perception of an object and then the perception of another self perceiving the same object. In this way, subjects think of themselves as sharing a common experience. In the dinner scene of To the Lighthouse after the moment in which Lily, Mrs. Ramsay, and William Bankes each feel alienated from the group by their respec-tive consciousnesses, the candles on the table are lit. Th e candlelight serves as an object for the common perception of those present, and the diners, aware of each other’s perceptions, experience a sense of communion spurred by a mutual exclusion of “the outside world”:

Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass… Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really hap-pened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against the fl uidity out there. (99-100)

Th e diners experience both parts of the double individual consciousness that generates the sense of belonging to a conscious collective whole. In parallel, they perceive the exterior candlelight and that the others perceive the candlelight, “all conscious of making a party together.” Although the individual feels as though the candlelight has “composed” the disparate conscious subjects “into a party,” into a merged perceptual entity, the narrator points out that this is an illusion that only seems “as if [it] had really happened.”

We are approaching here a solution—albeit it a troubled one—to Lily’s problem of overcoming the hermetic sense of isolation engendered by the barrier between conscious


selves. Th e experience of a shared exteriority inhabited in common facilitates a feeling of communion; it grants the characters the sense that they are not individual sundered con-sciousnesses but a party. Th e narration suggests, though, that this coming-together, this dissolution of personal boundaries, did not “really happen.” We see this more clearly when we are given access to the characters’ thoughts instead of summaries of them, as when Lily and William Bankes watch waves together on a beach. Th e narration begins with Lily’s perceptions and thoughts and then shifts to Bankes’s, revealing the disparity between the contents of their interiorities:

Th ey both smiled, standing there. Th ey both felt a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves… both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness—because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest. Looking at the far sand hills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay: thought of a road in Westmorland, thought of Ramsay striding along a road by himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his natural air. (24)

In the fi rst paragraph of this passage, Lily perceives the waves and the sand dunes as ob-jects, and she perceives Bankes as another perceptive self watching them. She thinks they are sharing this experience of a mutual exteriority, that they are feeling the same hilarity and the same sadness, but Bankes is actually thinking about Ramsay while Lily contem-plates the land, sea, and sky. Th us, Lily feels a communion with Bankes, a communion that is false but functional in that it alleviates her sense of isolation.

In Woolf ’s novels, then, we fi nd a rich rendering of diff erent consciousnesses, but each belongs exclusively to a particular personal self. Because of this, an other cannot access the interior consciousness of that self, as she can neither experience it directly nor recreate for herself the experience by decoding language. As Lily discovers when she puts her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee in an attempt to discover her inner thoughts, and fi nds that, “[n]othing happen[s]. Nothing! Nothing!” (54), the boundary between self and other, between subject and object, between interiority and exteriority is intraversable. Th e intertwining of consciousnesses remains, as Merleau-Ponty tells us, a fi ction: Although characters are isolated by their insulated consciousnesses, we see in Woolf ’s narration that an individual self creates a sense of communion by thinking that others are experiencing the same mutually exterior object that she is perceiving, that she and they are sharing a common experience via their common perception, whether they are or not. In this way, we may consider ourselves like waters in a single jar; though illusory, it makes us feel less alone, less like hermits in our heads.

Works Cited

Doyle, Laura. “‘Th ese Emotions of the Body’: Intercorporeal Narrative in To the Lighthouse.” Twentieth Century Literature 40.1 (1994): 42-71. Web. 14 Dec. 2009.

Dymond, Justine “‘Th e Outside of Its Inside and the Inside of Its Outside’: Phenomenology in To the Light-house.” Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds: Selected Papers from the Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf.

213Sundered Waters

Ed. Jessica Schiff Berman and Jane Goldman. New York: Pace University Press, 2001. 140-145. Web. 14 Dec. 2009.

James, William. Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt, 1890. Classics in the History of Psychology. Web. 14 Dec. 2009 <http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin9.htm>.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Th e Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1969.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Ed. Mark Hussey. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005. —. Mrs. Dalloway. Longman Anthology of British Literature. Ed. David Damrosch and Kevin J.H Dettmar. 3rd

ed. Vol. 2C. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2006. 2552-2655.

“TO GIVE THE MOMENT WHOLE”: THE NATURE OF TIME AND COSMIC (COMM)UNITY IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S THE WAVES

by Emily M. Hinnov

What I want to do now is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it

includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. (Woolf, THE WAVES 209; D 3: 201)

That is the whole…the revelation of some order…some real thing behind appearances…It is only by putting into words that I make it

whole. (Woolf, MOMENTS OF BEING 71-72)

Virginia Woolf asks her readers to collaboratively discover—through personal and coequal awareness—the socially redemptive value of an art that allows audiences to contemplate human choices and fi nd instances of agency in the real world.

Moreover, her work suggests that a positive, politically-engaged aesthetic project might begin in the present moment of belief within the context of community, even in the midst of a terrifying monolith like fascism that will later be recalled as a horrifi c moment in “History.” Woolf ’s contemporary cultural critic Walter Benjamin also valued the impor-tance of personal perception in the construction of a more humanistic history.1 Woolf ’s “moments of being” coincide with Benjamin’s fl ashes of insight: “the true picture of the past…Th e past can be seized only as an image which fl ashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and never seen again” (Th eses 255). Th rough common engagement in what Benjamin calls the “redemptive optics” available in the newly democratized role of art, Woolf contends that audiences might collaborate and participate with a new version of living aesthetics. For these modernists, the seemingly small, vibrantly lived, personal mo-ments serve as a counternarrative to authorized versions of History as told by fascist and/or patriarchal institutions of power. Consequently, Woolf and Benjamin were proponents of artwork composed of fragmentary materials as a response to the seeming whole of the fascist threat. For Woolf, fascism is a totalitarian ideology stemming from patriarchal no-tions and the success of imperialism, dependent upon militarism, and implicit in British public and private life as well as abroad. Woolf ’s work thus evinces a politico-aesthetics particularly concerned with the threat posed by fascism. Woolf focuses instead on the cosmic pattern that transcends distinctions between the past, present, and future and advocates a larger, more communal awareness of our connection with others and the natural world that envelops us all. Her later works, even as early as Th e Waves (1931), as I will argue, illustrate counternarratives of community2 in action against fascism in order to imagine the future for a still-to-be-redeemed humankind.3

In Th e Waves, Woolf creates the narrative structure of soliloquies as possible medita-tions on each character’s deeper motivations. Th is device complicates her representation of selfhood within a militarized and increasingly fascist society. Th e seven “characters” of the

215“To Give the Moment Whole”

novel are not whole in themselves, but they do experience brief moments of harmony and congruity. Ultimately, they create a composite character in that their multiplicity of perspec-tives off ers a complete organic vision, even in diff erence: “A single-sided fl ower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided fl ower, many-petalled, red, puce, purpleshaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves—a whole fl ower to which every eye brings its contribution”(263). Th is essay will follow the wavelike oscillation between fragment and wholeness as represented in Th e Waves. I aim to illustrate the sense of waxing and waning inherent in the creation of communities that welcome outsiders into the fold, from an individual consciousness revealed as necessarily a fragment, to a coherent and unifi ed natural world.4

Th e symbol of the wave itself suggests chaotic unity, fl uidity of identity where the self merges back, and a cyclical view of the universe. In the movement from collision to sepa-ration, there is a process of psychological growth. Th e Waves predominantly asks how one can form a sound identity or self in light of the pressures of modernity. Each character’s painful process of individuation—“We suff ered terribly as we became separate bodies” (344)—necessitates fragmentation. Yet disunity from the whole is required for eventual reunion as the wavelike movement is both a break and a merge. In this novel, personal epiphanies are often examples of separation that reveal disconnection from the whole in order to reform the self. Bernard frequently attempts to create coherence through Benja-minian fl ashes of insight: “Th e illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. Th is, for the moment, seems to be my life” (341).5 For Woolf, these “ecstatic and violent shocks” of being are potentially “moments of mystical unity, where each person is connected to the other, and all are part of some in-explicable pattern” (Moore 222). Bernard’s performance of identity throughout the novel functions like a wave, and he becomes the ultimate multipart identity at the end when he absorbs all their characteristics into one symbolic whole. Yet even in Bernard’s absorp-tion of the other characters, we are reminded of the fl eeting quality of individual identity, especially when considered against the larger, cosmic whole of natural time.6 I will return to Bernard’s conclusion later in this essay.

Th e undulation between self and greater whole is refl ected not only in the characters’ lives but also in the structure of the narrative itself. In their entirety, the interludes suggest progression in age, the binaries of sunrise/sunset, childhood/old age, rise/fall, summer/winter, the movement through History, the rhythm of life, and most prominently human history versus the cosmology of time and Nature in cyclical, repetitive, and sometimes vio-lent images. In the fi rst interlude we have the phrase, “Everything becomes softly amorphous” (194), suggesting openness and fl uidity. In the second interlude, “the birds that had sung erratically and spasmodically in the dawn on that tree…now sang together in chorus, shrill and sharp; now together, as if conscious of companionship, now alone as if to the pale blue sky” (225), perhaps signifying some kind of cosmic communal ethos, however dissonant it may be. Th is interlude in particular evokes a Darwinian aesthetic—rot and fear of death—yet it also suggests life and renewal: “Down there among the roots where the fl owers decayed, gusts of dead smells were wafted…Th e skin of rotten fruit broke…Now and then [the birds] plunged the tips of their beaks savagely into the sticky mixture” (226). Imagery of natural decay and the survival of the fi ttest simultaneously intimates the cycle of life, as these birds will be nurtured by the spoils of the earth. Ultimately, however, the interludes remind us that we are all of momentary importance in this cosmos of chaos over which we have no control:


“Th e waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back and forth with the energy of their fall…Th em, too, darkness covered” (279-280; 341). Th e invocation of Indian mysticism, the emphasis on astronomy, and the randomness of life in the interludes also contrast with the death of white Western culture—as Jane Marcus reminds us.7

Th e prose-poem quality of the narrative structure, then, presents a rhythmic personal history of these English lives, exposing the rise and fall of empire and its internalized con-structs of whiteness and patriarchal or imperial supremacy. Woolf utilizes the character of Percival in particular to represent fascism’s inheritance of imperialism. Percival is utterly fragmented by death, and he never quite fi nds a sense of unifi ed community. Percival’s death is futile, yet it ironically creates stability, order, and unity for his friends. At the same time, his role as supreme imperialist is bitterly satirized: “Behold, Percival advances; Percival rides a fl ea-bitten mare, and wears a sun-helmet. By applying the standards of the West, by us-ing the violent language that is natural to him, the bullock-cart is righted in less than fi ve minutes. Th e Oriental problem is solved. He rides on; the multitudes cluster round him, re-garding him as if her were—what indeed he is—a God” (269). Percival appears like a knight in Arthurian legend who fi nds the grail—he is an imperialist god and colonizer central to the rise of the British Raj. Each character idealizes him because as a male and a colonial ad-ministrator he holds a position of power in modern British culture. Moreover, Percival does not speak; as an icon of British imperial identity, he is a blank slate, allowing for the other characters’ projection. His high stature in this society contributes to his role as a would-be fascist with too much power. In the recurring images of India, Africa, unexplored territories, and the representation of Percival as cardboard hero projection of those who do not speak, Woolf critiques the violence of imperialism and its resolution in fascism.

Many of the characters see themselves in reference to an exotic or primitive Other. Susan and Bernard, for instance, appear as young adventurers in an undiscovered country—“Let us take possession of our secret territory” (189)—while the gardeners are imagined as hostile natives. In the English schoolchild’s imagination, imperialism is a signifi cant part of selfhood and nationhood, revealing the psychology of empire, and by extension, fascism. If Percival is to represent imperial dominance and its ties to fascism, then Woolf ’s solution to the problem of an individual’s fascistic potential is to dispense with it. Th e death of a proto-fascist character such as Percival reveals the redemptive power of Th e Waves; his untimely and rather unheroic fall from imperial glory on a fl ea-bitten mare shows the rest of the community that there is no hierarchy—we are all equal specks in the universe. Percival’s waning back toward fragmenta-tion reminds characters and readers of the place of self and its correlation with others, bringing us back to the larger presence of a cosmic whole of which we are all a part.

In Between the Acts (1941), Woolf similarly ventures a hopeful resistance against any view of hegemonic history as dominant or overpowering to the masses, even if only for fl eeting moments. Miss LaTrobe is trying to give people this kind of transformative art, from fragmentary moment to moment. As Lucy murmurs, “We’ve only the present” (82). Th e optic shock created by the refl ective glass shards at the end of the performance might draw the audience into positive action. Miss LaTrobe cannot control the play or the reac-tions of the audience, but her eff orts do at times create seized moments of time, a gather-ing in that might make the audience stop to think: “Hadn’t she…made them see? A vision imparted was relief from agony…for one moment” (98). Th e play has opened the pos-


sibility, through its varied imaginings of history, that the audience has agency in choosing what to remember, what to live by, what to discard or re-create. Th ey all search for some kind of pattern or coherence or order, “some inner harmony?” (119) that might explain the whole of existence. Yet again the natural world, that uncontrollable force, establishes unity against the fragments of war: “And the trees with their many-tongued much syl-labling, their green and yellow leaves hustle and shuffl e us, and bid us, like the starlings, and the rooks, come together, crowd together” (120). As in Th e Waves, Nature’s infl uence possibly reveals some cosmic wholeness that is broader than the human universe, as well as a yearning for lost unity and human connectedness in the midst of it all. Th e background conversation is the splintered, fragmented dialogue about the play about British history, which encompasses accounts of “Dictators” and the present of “the papers” and “the Jews? Th e refugees…People like ourselves, beginning life again” (121). Th ere is defi nitely an atmosphere of renewal among fragmentation afoot here.

Woolf ’s attention to characters inhabiting the outer edges—outcast fi gures such as the broken and suicidal Rhoda and the alienated, class-conscious Louis in Th e Waves—helps us to connect the role of fascism to constructions of diff erence and division within potential communities. In part, Woolf intended to restore community with her writing, because we must “in no way hinder any other human being, whether man or woman, black or white” (TG 66). If we attend to those characters othered because of gender, class, sexuality or race, then we can become even more aware of the interdependence of Woolf ’s fragmented characters and the ethical impulse to connect.8 Early in the novel we see Rho-da’s longing for human community when she says, “I will bind fl owers in one garland and advancing with my hand outstretched present them—Oh! To whom?” (TW 214).9 Later in the narrative, Louis observes that “Th e circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included…[as] an alien, an external” (240).

Th e collective narrative of Th e Waves itself is one of Woolf ’s prime examples of the literary representation of unity among humanity not based upon the hierarchical, mecha-nistic collective of fascism that would surely obliterate those designated as other. Instead, this anti-“history” is a retelling of communal awareness that resists the strictures of fascism and attempts to include everyone—even the alien or external—in its story. A case in point appears at the conclusion of Th e Waves when the ultimate, symphonic moment suggests the possibility of rebuilding community out of the metaphor of art. Th e community of Neville, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda, Bernard “and a thousand others” transcends time and death to create a “symphony, with its concord and its discord and its tunes on top and its complicated bass beneath…Each played his own tune, fi ddle, fl ute, trumpet, drum, or whatever the instrument might be” (354). Th e merging of those usually othered by fas-cistic modes of being thus creates an alternate “mosaic” (Woolf, D3: 298) of community. In a gesture of total intersubjectivity—“I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am…or how to distinguish my life from theirs” (TW 368)—Ber-nard defi es the divisiveness of fascist history that seeks to pull us apart and away from our collective human unconscious.10 Th e “unborn selves” (377) and the abjected “brute, too, the savage, the hairy man” are all “contained” (378) and thereby presumably restored. Th e colonialist’s “primitive” man is tossed and combined with the would-be white imperialist in this fl uid yet complex composition of community. Th ese multitudes of selves which


become one in “the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again” (383) embody the dance and the wavelike interplay between personal and cosmic time. As Chloe Taylor notes, “Bernard questions whether the six characters of the book are not all one, all him, and whether he is male or female, whether he is not, in being Jinny and Neville, Susan and Louis, Rhoda and Bernard, both (372). Bernard, the poet who cat-egorizes words alphabetically yet longs to howl and bark, who is male, but listens to the sea, may also be read as Virginia Woolf, who, by extension, is all of the characters in one” (17). By novel’s end, the waxing of communal identity and the waning of fragmentation ceases—the seven characters, necessarily refracted through the shared consciousness of Bernard, come home to a coherent and unifi ed world.11

As demonstrated in Th e Waves, Woolf’s organic symbol of ethical community—the sym-phonic seven-sided fl ower—allows us to imagine “a postpatriarchal community of Outsiders [,] reaffi rm[ing] the vital relevance of Woolf for those who work for peace in any sphere” (Hussey 12). Th is fl ower, of course, recalls Woolf’s own musings on the concept of wholeness in Moments of Being as quoted in my epigraph. Virginia Woolf’s work invites collaborative meaning-making when it comes to possible social outcomes of engaging with art in future generations. Further-more, Woolf views aesthetics as a vehicle for social action that might bring about humanistic uni-ty. In her search for coherence and interconnectivity, she speaks to the web-like linkage between all of humanity, accessible through our participation in art: “We—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art, that we are parts of that work of art…we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself” (MOB 73). Here she also describes her profound pacifi sm in that for any wholeness to exist, “peace is necessary” (98). A deep sense of peace can be found in Woolf’s present moment, yet the depths of Woolf’s “deep river” of consciousness contain an interweaving of past, present, and future. She sees beauty in whole “mo-ments of being” that transcend modes of living death with fullness of mind and spirit—all within the mesh of a wider web of humanity—forging connections between her artistic philosophy and the modernist writer’s project of self and communal formulation.

Woolf ’s pacifi sm contributes to her ideas about community because she wanted to destroy the war mindset with her work, which is most often connected with fascist powers seeking to conquer the fragments of society in the form of woman, nonwhite, and non-Westerner. Th e Waves reveals that she had not yet lost faith in humanity’s ability to form a global communal ethos, and therefore that task resides in her readers’ participation. Studying Woolf ’s formations of community illuminates the historic tension between self and other so that we might fully understand her resistance to imperialism and fascism. Woolf writes of our collective emancipa-tion from tyranny through our recognition and recreation of communality. Moreover, examin-ing Woolf ’s creation of ethical awareness on the page is necessary to our understanding of what community can be, and so may determine a future in which we do not repeat the mistakes of the past. For Woolf, the creative mind, body, and soul might fi nally redeem humanity through the potentially transformative aesthetic of cosmic community.

Notes

1. Benjamin famously argued that in the mechanical age of reproduction, art has lost its original aura. For Benjamin, the dialectical image aff orded by the lately egalitarian place of art in modern society off ers a veritable constellation of interpretations. Moreover, the reproduced photographic work of art produces fl ashes of insight about what history as the story of the past might mean, which, with the benefi t of com-


munal interaction, will lead to social transformation for both artist and viewer. Woolf ’s vision of the world as a living work of art in which the wider audience must play an integral part speaks to Benjamin’s concept of redemptive optics; both modernist philosophers provide relevant context for the communal moment as a narrative aesthetic (found both in the novel and the photograph) which creates the opportunity, through cooperative (re)action, to rebuild community.

2. For an extended discussion of what I term modernist choran moment and its subsequent phenomenon of choran community, please see my book, Encountering Choran Community: Literary Modernism, Visual Culture and Political Aesthetics in the Interwar Years (Susquehanna University Press, 2009).

3. Other Woolf scholars have argued that Woolf tackles the spectre of fascism in Th e Waves as well. See in particular AnnKatrin Jonsson, Natasha Allen, Gabrielle McIntire, and Suzette Henke.

4. Madeline Moore similarly argues that “in Th e Waves the representative range of human possibilities focuses on an inevitable cycle wherein individuals are momentarily united with nature, experience both its exultation and its nothingness, and, in order to preserve their autonomy, reemerge into the present of human eff ort” (219).

5. Tamlyn Monson wonders whether any ethical encounter with the Other is possible: An ethical encounter with the Other is indicated as Bernard begins more and more often to con-sciously problematize language, despite its necessity. Woolf ’s sense of the arbitrary nature of the relation between word and reality is tellingly exhibited as Bernard recognizes the mind’s “veil of words for everything” (88)—words that cover over reality rather than revealing it in its essence. Th is recognition is an indication of the self ’s inability to bar the Other through the power of an exclusory representation, and its simultaneous inability to wholly include the Other through some mystical fusion or transcendence to a new, borderless ontology. Recognition of the violence of representation cannot redeem the subject from approaching the Other through the necessarily violent modes of selfhood and language. (183)

She concludes that Woolf’s characterization of Bernard reveals the problem of ordering the narrative: “Th e paral-lel…between Woolf herself and the character Bernard is signifi cant for this reading, suggesting, perhaps, Woolf’s negotiation, through Bernard, of the ethics of her own task in revealing the paradox of the self in literature” (189).

6. Jean Alexander argues that the greater design—larger than persons, forces of nature, or social structures—must be considered a religious or mythic one” (175). Likewise, Lyndall Gordon looks at the novel as “an attempt to defamiliarize lives and see them as phenomena of nature” and argues that this work “asks what shape lifespans have in common” (203-204).

7. According to Jane Marcus, “By making the sun set in the British Empire in her novel…Woolf surrounds the text of the decline and fall of the West (the transcendental self striving and struggling against death) with the text of the East, random natural recurrence” (“Britannia” 155).

8. AnnKatrin Jonsson makes an extensive argument on ethics and the modernist subject in her book of the same title. In regards to Th e Waves, she writes that the novel has “phenomenological tendency[ies]” because of its “emphasis on an ethical subject…by representing the subject in an inescapable relation with the world and the other, a relation depicted as a wavering between signifi cation and indeterminacy, between same and other” (98).

9. Natasha Allen argues that part of Woolf ’s anti-fascist critique in Th e Waves is Rhoda’s “speaking silence, testifying to the voicelessness of the Other” (23).

10. Although Suzette Henke writes on Th e Waves as a meditation on ontological trauma, she also comments on this passage as “an epiphanic moment…[when] the walls of the ego grow porous and fuse with a larger empathic whole” (142). She goes on to discuss the implications of this “utopian dream of community, pitted against the trauma of mortality” (143), which she concludes is, for Woolf, a creative endeavor that is doomed to fail in the face of death; however, “True heroism lies…in human resilience—in the perpetual impulse toward heroic creation” (146).

11. Jonsson would likely agree: “As the last words of the novel…belong not to the subject but to the object—to what is other than the self and outside the control of the self—the novel makes a fi nal comment on the eth-ical priority of the other-than-the-self over the self ” (144-145). Madeline Moore concludes that “Woolf ’s characters do not achieve their potential community. Instead, community is experienced symbolically or in moments of ecstatic longing” (240).

Works Cited

Allen, Natasha. “Th e Critical Silence of the Other: Critique of Fascism in Virginia Woolf ’s Th e Waves.” In Virginia Woolf: Art, Education, and Internationalism, Selected Papers from the Seventeenth Annual Conference on Virginia


Woolf. Eds. Diana Royer and Madelyn Detloff . Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2008. 21-24.Alexander, Jean. Th e Venture of Form in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974. Benjamin, Walter. “Th e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936. In Selected Writings: Walter

Benjamin. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996.___. “Th eses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, Essays and Refl ections. Ed. and

Intro. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1986.Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, and Modernity. New York:

Columbia University Press, 2004.Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life. New York: Norton, 1984.Henke, Suzette. “Th e Waves as Ontological Trauma Narrative: Th e Anxiety of Death (Un)Forseen.” In Virginia

Woolf and Trauma: Embodied Texts. Eds. Suzette Henke and David Eberley with the assistance of Jane Lilienfeld. New York: Pace University Press, 2007. 123-155.

Hinnov, Emily M. Encountering Choran Community: Literary Modernism, Visual Culture, and Political Aesthetics in the Interwar Years. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2009.

Hussey, Mark, ed. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991.Jonsson, AnnKatrin. Relations: Ethics and the Modernist Subject in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf ’s Th e

Waves and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2006.Marcus, Jane. “Britannia Rules Th e Waves.” In Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century Literary

Canons. Ed. Karen R. Lawrence. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. 136-162.McIntire, Gabrielle. “Heteroglossia, Monologism, and Fascism: Bernard Reads Th e Waves.” Narrative 13.1

(2005): 29-45.Monson, Tamlyn. “’A Trick of the Mind’: Alterity, Ontology, and Representation in Virginia Woolf ’s Th e Waves.”

Modern Fiction Studies. 50.1 (Spring 2004): 173-196.Moore, Madeline. “Nature and Community: A Study of Cyclical Reality in Th e Waves.” In Virginia Woolf,

Revaluation and Continuity. Ed. and Intro. by Ralph Freedman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. 219-240.

Pawlowski, Merry, ed. Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictator’s Seduction. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Phillips, Karen J. Virginia Woolf Against Empire. Knoxville, TN: Th e University of Tennessee Press, 1994.Taylor, Chloe. “Kristevan Th emes in Virginia Woolf ’s Th e Waves.” Th e Journal of Modern Literature. 29.3 (Spring

2006): 57-77. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. 1941. Annotated and with an Introduction by Melba Cuddy-Keene. New

York: Harcourt, 2006.___. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and asst. Andrew McNeillie. New York and Lon-

don: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.___. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Ed. and Intro. JeanneSchulkind. Sussex: Th e

University Press, 1976. ___. Th ree Guineas. 1938. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Jovanovich, 1965.___. Th e Waves. Jacob’s Room and Th e Waves: Two Complete Novels. 1931. London: Harvest Books, 1959.

SPENGLER’S THE DECLINE OF THE WEST AND INTELLECTUAL QUACKERY: CHECKING THE CLIMATE WITH LEONARD WOOLF AND W. B. YEATS

by Wayne K. Chapman

One of the objectives of this essay, at points aided by visual matter, is to introduce scholars to two of the resources found on the Bibliographic Studies page of the Clemson University Digital Press website. Without demonstrating the function

of the Annotated Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard Woolf (by J. Manson and W. Chapman) in tandem with my Short-title Catalog of the W. B. Yeats library at the National Library of Ireland, I believe that a selection of work by German philosopher Oswald Spen-gler will demonstrate the utility of these resources. If the intellectual ecology of the essay ranges from the national to the vaguely cosmological, there can be no apology as it is all one with the particular subject.

Th e essay primarily examines Leonard Woolf ’s critique of the two volumes of Spen-gler’s treatise on history, Th e Decline of the West, published, respectively, after each volume appeared in English translation in 1926 and 1928. It happens that, as a set, both volumes were purchased and read by Yeats soon after he published the fi rst edition of his occult philosophy, A Vision, in 1925, and this reading impacted the rewritten 1937 second edi-tion, where aspects of Spengler’s comprehensive outline were cited. Woolf critiqued Spen-gler as an agent of intellectual quackery, fi rst, in two “World of Books” columns (in 1926 and 1929) in Th e Nation & Th e Athenaeum, which he edited, and then, famously, in his book Quack, Quack! (Hogarth Press, 1935). His reading notes in Th e Decline of the West,

Figure 1, detail from CUDP Bibliographic Studies page.


volumes 1 and 2, now at Washington State University, are complemented by notes in a copy of Spengler’s Th e Hour of Decision (1934), but, more importantly, by an unsigned review that Woolf published in the fi fth volume, third issue of Th e Political Quarterly (1934), repeating his case against this book the following year—in Quack, Quack!—to make rhetorically emphatic there the conclusion of his overall analysis of Spengler’s work. One will fi nd the necessary bibliographic leads to this material in Parts 1, 2, and 3 of the Annotated Guide (see screenshot, Figure 2).

One will go to Part 1 for the monograph and the signed reviews, Part 2 for the un-signed review, and Part 3 for the index and location of books within the old Holleyman and Treacher Catalogue of the Woolf Library as the collection existed at Monks House and Victoria Square at the time of Leonard’s death, scarcely to mention links one fi nds to the online Short-Title Catalog at WSU and the university’s network catalog of the archive to which it relates. Th e name “Spengler” is really all one needs to search with the computer Find function (Edit>Find).

Yeats, politically conservative in the 1920s and 1930s, found Spengler’s thought only of qualifi ed use in support of his own account of history in the rewritten, standard edition of A Vision published by Macmillan in 1937. Politically on the Right almost as far as Woolf stood on the Left in relation to Italian Fascism, Yeats would read Th e Decline of the West quite diff erently. We know this because all of the direct references to the book in A Vision were made to serve the same purpose. As a poet—indeed the great poet that Leonard’s wife discerned and studied from encounters at Lady Ottoline Mor-rell’s beginning in late 1930 (D3 329-32; L4 250, 253)—Yeats was interested in Spen-gler’s symbolism and parallels between Spengler’s datings of cultural signifi cance and the “fi rst symbolical map” of European history drawn by Mrs. Yeats’s spirit guides with respect to “years of crisis” and to the juxtaposed “cones or gyres” familiar to students today. In acknowledging agreement with his own work, he was confi rming evidence by means of authority not without taint but still reputable in 1937. He suspected his wife’s instructors were acquainted with the German text of 1918 (AV B 11, 18) because the English translation post-dated his own work by “some weeks” although “not only were dates…given the same as [Spengler’s] but whole metaphors and symbols” (18). He

Figure 2, detail from home page of An Annotated Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard Woolf, 3rd ed. (rev.), by J. M. Manson and W. K. Chapman (CUDP, 2010).

223Oswald Spengler, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats

recognized the precursors Vico (261) and Frobenius, who, Yeats noted, Spengler gave as the authority for “the symbolism of the Cavern in the West” (259). Th ey did not agree that this Cavern is time, which was Yeats’s view, because, he said, “to call it Space, as Spengler does, is to suff er the modern conception of a fi nite space always returning to itself to obsess one’s thought” (260). Th e obsession with “the ‘Time philosophy of our day” must have “made Spengler identify the Faustian soul…with Time”; Spengler had “inverted the meaning of his symbols” (260). And at another party at Lady Ottoline’s, Yeats told Virginia Woolf that he was writing about her novel Th e Waves, which, with Joyce’s Ulysses and Pound’s Cantos, suggest “a deluge of [mental and physical] experience breaking over us and within us” (qtd. in D4 255n).

So Yeats was interested in Spengler’s metaphysics and in Virginia Woolf as a writer and explorer of the metaphysical, like himself but without the supernatural. His reading notes in Th e Decline of the West do not betray much besides what I have already said—not to diff erences that were critical, at any rate.

Th e Yeats Library off ers as manuscripts photocopies made by Anne Yeats and her ar-chivist some thirty years ago (note the bracketed entries in my Short-title Catalog, screen-shot Figure 3). In the National Library of Ireland, the two volumes may be examined to confi rm that Yeats’s encounter with Spengler was essentially a comparative exercise, with points marked on scores of pages but with scant comment in the margins. Th e exceptional

comment occurs in volume 2, at the foot of p. 419. Th e sentence it notes (at the middle of the page) is about the “super-personal form” taken during “the Late Period of [a] Culture”: in “about 450” for the Classical and “for ourselves about 1700.” On this discrepancy with Yeats’s analysis of visual art from 2000 BC to AD 1927, Yeats writes that Spengler “Puts great period of great art and culture too late or ours too early. I put maximum at (say) 1450-1500 but the expression of power incited by attack later. He ignores literature & art. Swift was conscious of the decay of ‘the form.’” Th is transcription is close to the one off ered by Edward O’Shea (257) but made from personal inspection of Yeats’s copy at the NLI.

Figure 3, detail from Th e W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-Title Catalog, Undertaken in Dalkey and Dublin, Ireland, 1986-2006, by W. K. Chapman (CUDP, 2006).


Fortunately, Yeats took care to inoculate himself against suspicion that he sympathized with Spengler’s Faustian politics in the age of the Th ird Reich. A corollary paragraph in A Vision seems aware of the European political climate of 1937: “My instructors certainly expect neither a “primitive state” nor a return to barbarism as primitivism and barbarism are ordinarily understood; antithetical revelation is an intellectual infl ux neither from beyond mankind nor born of a virgin, but begotten from our spirit and history” (AV B 262).

Of course, Leonard Woolf would have considered such hedging an “honest” instance of intellectual muddling or, put another way, “honest quackery.” It might be forgiven of friends so long as it was harmless. But as a public intellectual and editor—and emphati-cally by 1935—he had to denounce Spenglerian historiography as dangerously allied with barbarism in the betrayal of civilization. Lamenting conditions he and Virginia witnessed themselves on tour that year, on the surface of Italian life if running deep in Germany, his Bloomsbury aff ection for Italy found relief from the hostile Teutonic climate of Nazi Germany: “Italian history has been civilizing the inhabitants of Italy so deeply…that no savages…have ever been able to make the Italians as uncivilized as the Germans” (Down-hill 194). Some understandable stereotyping does seem inherent in Leonard’s reaction, yet he took care to acknowledge the little truth he found in Spengler’s opus. For context, we might remember that the Classically educated Leonard Woolf was, between 1931 and 1939, the author of his own two-volume history, After the Deluge: A Study of Communal Psychology, which examined “the psychology of man as a social animal” in the Western democracies from the French Revolution to about 1918. Th e study was popular enough to be reissued, in 1937, as a “Pelican Book,” a progressive series in the fi elds of “Science, Economics, History, Sociology, [and] Art” published by the budding Penguin Books Ltd. Th e Zeitgeist (literally “Time-ghost”) was incidental to his argument. In 1953, Leonard’s magnum opus was capped by Principia Politica, advertised on the dustjacket by Harcourt, Brace (see Figure 4, below) as “Th e third volume of After the Deluge, and a political auto-biography, asserting that freedom is stronger than despotism.”

Figure 4, dustjacket of Leonard Woolf ’s Prin-cipia Politica (Harcourt, Brace, 1953).

Figure 5, dustjacket of Leonard Woolf ’s Quack, Quack! (Hogarth Press, 1937).


Now back to 1935 and Quack, Quack! See Figure 5 (above). Th e book was divided in two parts: “Quack, Quack in Politics” and “Intellectual

Quack, Quack.” As more than twenty pages in the latter were allotted to Oswald Spen-gler, this followed devastating analyses of Mussolini and Hitler and associates such as Herr Wilhelm Kube. Joining Th omas Carlyle in Britain and Henri Bergson in France, Spengler received the greater share of attention in Part II—one might say a greater share of the duck—because of his connection with German quack politics and his considerable reputation among serious thinkers:

Like Carlyle and Nietszche, he is not an ordinary, stupid quack, quacking for comfort or profi t in the contemporary national chorus; he is not the hack quack of Nazi propaganda. He is immensely learned in the German style. He has a streak of originality, understanding, and imagination, which, when controlled by reason and used ingenuously in a search for truth, can strike out suggestions and interpretations illuminating obscurities in human history. (QQ 139)

Th e problem was that “his gifts and talents” were placed “in the service of quackery.” Woolf ’s review of the nonsensical logic-splitting, question-begging, and bombastic rhetoric of Spengler’s Th e Decline of the West was a virtual summary of Woolf ’s conclusions published in Th e Nation and Th e Athenaeum in 1926 and 1929. In the fi rst of these, entitled “Got-terdammerung,” he also led with concessions that recognized the author’s wide “reading and knowledge of history” and a “considerable amount of truth” that, however, got mixed up with pretentious generalizations, a pompous style, and “the most fantastic metaphysic and philosophy of history that the clouded brain of learned man has ever devised,” Woolf wrote (558), parodying Spenglerian exaggeration for sake of ridicule. Of the 443 pages and three tipped-in charts, there were perhaps 100 pages of value. Th e thesis, though “mere moonshine” when “not the fog of a muddled mind,” might have been stated succinctly, thus:

In the history of the human race organic cultures, with specifi c principles of their own, spring up at intervals. Th ey all pass through the same, predetermined stages, like animal organisms, of childhood, adolescence, middle-age, and old age. All cultures degenerate into civilizations, the periods of old age and decay. Th us Western Culture, which sprang into existence about 1000 A.D., became a civilization and began to decline at the end of the eighteenth century. (558)

Th e value to Woolf of those 100 hypothetically compressed pages followed from the “attempt to examine history in the light of eternity rather than in that of the span of a man’s life, or even a nation’s life” (558), echoing Yeats’s regard for the cosmological dimen-sion but without Yeats’s complaint about Spengler’s leaving out art and literature.

Also reminiscent of Yeats’s claim that Spengler’s obsession with “the ‘Time-philoso-phy of our day” resulted in the “inverted…meaning of his symbols,” Woolf said in Quack, Quack! that the promotion of intuition over thought was one with Spengler’s equating “or-ganic necessity in life” with “the logic of time,” allowing nothing to the “necessity of cause and eff ect.” He was “doing for history and politics what . . . others [were] doing for metaphysics and philosophy; he [was] getting rid of defi nition (or the necessity of making your meaning


clear), of analysis and proof, of reason” (143). In Woolf ’s critique of volume 2 of Th e Decline of the West, which had been rehearsed in a review entitled, simply, “Spengler” in February 1929, he said that Spengler’s notions of life and thought “have nothing to do with one an-other” (722). His method is “a bewildering mixture of brilliant analysis, reckless assertion, and dogmatic mysticism,” making “the whole book…blurred and perverted by mystical quackery, by what seems to be almost deliberate muddle-headedness, and a deepseated in-ability to play fair intellectually” (722). What results from this appraisal of a man’s work is

the portrait of a deeply anti-rationalist man (see Figure 6). Th e conclusion of the review—like most of the case Woolf makes against Spengler, thereafter, in Quack, Quack!—is that “in the end what [Spengler] calls life and reality turn out to be simply war” (“Spengler” 722). As a rationalist, Woolf ’s stance against war in Europe implied an underpinning of propo-sitions “capable of proof” wherein one bore the burden of persuading “other people by proof” that the propositions are both reasonable and true. As Spengler held by intuition that “marching soldiers” are the inevitable “cosmic beat” of history “felt with a deep wordless understanding,” then “the only way of settling the matter will be to see which one of us can fi rst shoot the other up or at least whip him off into a concentra-tion camp” (QQ 144).

As personal as this sounds, Woolf closed off his treatment of Th e Decline of the West by making a concession. Th e remainder of his treatment of Spengler—on the embrace of “primitive passions” in the “extreme forms of practical fascist quackery,” on war history as a refl ection of the choice between barbarism and civilization, on the German Nazis and barbarism as “strong race” (the “beast-of-prey man”), and on the cosmic beat of Hitler—relies on another regrettable book. Published in English and vigorously attacked by Woolf in the Political Quarterly in 1934, Th e Hour of Decision, subtitled Part One: Germany and World-Historical Evolution, marked Spengler’s overt turn to the service of the Nazi regime. Th e Decline of the West is the work of a quack, but Woolf allowed that “it at least has the air of honest and disinterested quackery” (QQ 146). His unsigned review compared the other book with Moeller van der Bruck’s propagandistic treatment of the regime in Germany’s Th ird Empire and found little diff erence to Spengler’s credit. “Th e only diff erence between Spengler and van der Bruck,” according to Woolf, “is that Spengler has read more history and is a more astute man” (PQ 456). In essence, beyond that diff erence,

his outlook and philosophy are the same. Th ere is the same sense of inferiority and the same Germanic bombast, the same hatred of civilization and reason, the same reckless disregard of truth.… Human history…must always be war history. (456)

To venture further than this comparison is to go beyond my subject, so I will con-clude by noting an irony that Leonard Woolf did not endorse. Th ere was no second part of Th e Hour of Decision as the author’s reservations about Hitler and the permanence of the Th ird Reich were detected by the Nazis, who prohibited distribution of Part One after ini-

Figure 6, Oswald Spengler.


tial release. In Quack, Quack! Woolf allowed only that offi cial “dissatisfaction…roused by one or two passages” gives one pause to “contemplate with awe their magnifi cent appetite for the humiliation of the intellectual” (146). Irony embodies the German philosopher’s “not undeserved” reputation. For “the student of our history will read [him] with admira-tion, astonishment, and disgust,” the major to all the “minor imitators and little quackers who [then] raise[d] their voice in all the countries of Europe” (160).

Works Cited

Chapman, Wayne K. Th e W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-title Catalog, Undertaken in Dalkey and Dublin, Ireland, 1986–2006. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2006. <www.clemson.edu/cedp/cudp/pubs/YeatsSTC/ index.htm>

Manson, Janet M, and Wayne K. Chapman. An Annotated Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard Woolf. 3rd edition (revised). Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2010. <www.clemson. edu/cedp/cudp/pubs/lwguide/index.htm>

O’Shea, Edward. A Descriptive Catalog of the W. B. Yeats Library. New York: Garland, 1985.Spengler, Oswald. Th e Decline of the West. 2 vols. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1926, 1928. ——. Th e Hour of Decision. Part One: Germany and World-Historical Evolution. Trans Charles Francis Atkinson.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934. [No more than Part One was published.]Woolf, Leonard. After the Deluge: A Study of Communal Psychology. 2 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1931, 1939.

[Volume 1 only was reissued as a six-penny Pelican Book in 1937 by Penguin Books Ltd.]——. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1949. London: Hogarth Press, 1967.——. Quack, Quack! London: Hogarth Press, 1935. [Abbreviated as QQ.]——. Unsigned review. Th e Political Quarterly 5.3 (1934): 454-7.——. “Th e World of Books: Gotterdammerung.” Th e Nation & Th e Athenaeum, August 14, 1926: 558.——. “Th e World of Books: Spengler.” Th e Nation & Th e Athenaeum, February 23, 1929: 722.Woolf, Virginia. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie. Vols. 3 and

4. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, 1982.——. Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4: 1929-1931. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York

and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.Yeats, W. B. A Vision. 1937. London: Macmillan 1962. [Abbreviated AV B.]——. 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. [Abbrevi-ated AV A.]

LISTENING-IN, TUNING OUT: LEONARD WOOLF’S CRITICISM OF THE BBC DURING THE 1930S

by Luke Reader

We can think of Leonard Woolf in many diff erent ways: essayist, novelist, pub-lisher, journalist, Labour Party theorist, international relations scholar, and hus-band. Yet how often do we consider this polymath a media sensation? Hyperbole

perhaps, but during the 1930s and 1940s, Woolf appeared regularly on British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio, lecturing on topics as diverse as the British Empire, democracy, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and pedagogy. After a silence of 15 years, Woolf re-emerged during the 1960s as a frequent contributor to radio and television broadcasts in Britain, Austra-lia, Canada, and Sri Lanka. Woolf contributed to programs regularly, so much so that he required reassurance about his over-exposure to the public after featuring on the airwaves twice in a week (Watkins). Conversely, in 1967, he also expressed concern that a program he was participating in would air on the mainstream television station BBC 1, and not the highbrow arts service BBC 2, which was of limited interest to many viewers (Woolf, “Letter to Powell”). Woolf ’s desire to use his interpretation of the past to meld the present encour-aged his re-engagement with broadcast media late in life. Woolf ’s fi ve autobiographies, pub-lished during the 1960s, used his prominence as a public intellectual—essayist, publisher, and political theorist—to become an architect of perceptions of the Bloomsbury Group, which was rapidly becoming an object of academic and literary scrutiny. As one prescient BBC researcher noted in 1967, Woolf ’s cultural interventions now and then situated him at the center of a nexus of artistic and literary endeavor (Richardson).

Woolf ’s television and radio work of the 1960s, however, is signifi cant less for its literary curatorship than for the connection it provides to his interest in public education, intellectual development and improvement, and artistic production during the 1930s. One typical method for examining Woolf ’s cultural interventions is to consider them through the terminology he provided us: civilization and barbarity.1 A more eff ective ap-proach might be to consider how he engaged with modes of artistic production and in-terpretation. Th e act of commemoration is, in this circumstance, an explicitly politicized act defi ning how a public consumes and understands literary products. It molds historical interpretation. Here, the word interpretation appears critical to understanding Woolf ’s aim in broadcasting. It connects the nostalgia of the 1960s to his use of radio and jour-nalism in the 1930s to engage in a cluster of political and cultural debates during this period. Todd Avery, for example, argues in his monograph Radio Modernism that during the 1930s radio became a site of “ethical struggle,” which sought to determine national direction (8-9). If this is correct, then it is possible to present Woolf ’s broadcasts and journalistic expositions on BBC policy as marking an individual’s participation in an ethi-cal struggle to determine cultural, social, and political habits and direction. Yet what was this struggle? For Woolf it was to determine the intellectual foundations of an idealized public sphere. It was to create and forge an intellectual environment. Th e BBC provided him with a locus for public education that would encourage the development of an im-

229Listening-In, Tuning Out

proved civic space. Yet as part of an ethical struggle, Woolf ’s journalism about the BBC attempted to defi ne how public intellectuals used their cultural capital as journalists, es-sayists, publishers, and political theorists to disseminate information across a broad public and construct their vision of the nation.

Woolf ’s approach towards the BBC appears infl uenced by Labour Party policy to-wards that broadcasting institution during the 1920s and 1930s. His approach was one that suggested broadcasting limited rather than expanded access to information. Historian Simon Potter suggests in his article “Webs, Networks, and Systems” that new forms of communications technologies such as radio, cable technology, and mass circulation news-papers allowed individual fi gures to control how people gained knowledge and under-standing. Capitalist and government control of cable and cheap print technology encour-aged “rigid structures of communication” and constructed a system that reinforced elite control over media and cultural production (Potter 634-635). Another historian, Laura Beers, connects Potter’s idea to the 1926 General Strike to argue that this determined later Labour Party policy towards the BBC. She suggests that the government’s attempt to portray striking mine-workers as agents of Bolshevism received considerable support from the BBC as well as the Conservative capitalist press (142). Th is, Beers continues, re-inforced the attempts of mine-owners to reduce wages and working conditions in the face of declining profi ts and productivity and ensured there was no outlet for voices support-ing Labour or the unions (142). Whilst some in the Labour Party, such as Philip Snowden and Norman Angell, questioned the credulity of the “mass mind” and its susceptibility to patriotic appeals, others, like party leader Ramsay MacDonald, took a diff erent approach; following the General Strike he urged a “national political discourse” to provide an outlet for the interests of the Center Left (Beers 133, 148). Th is required sustained engagement with the BBC as an institution of public education and information.

Woolf ’s work for the BBC during the 1930s refl ected both these aspects of Labour policy. His book After the Deluge (1931) asserted that the government was able to defeat the striking workers, despite initial middle-class support, by encouraging the BBC to sug-gest that the strike represented a threat to the interest of the middle class (242-243). Th e charter of the BBC, drafted by its Director General Sir John Reith in 1924, argued that a national broadcaster should act as a tool of enlightenment, with its content defi ned by middle and upper class views of acceptability (McDonnell 2, 15). Woolf disagreed. Rath-er, the aim of the BBC, he charged in an article for the Political Quarterly entitled “Th e Future of British Broadcasting,” was to avoid controversy in its radio output. In a thinly veiled attack on Reith, he said that constructing policy in this manner amounted to a form of dictatorship in which “listeners-in will not be given all the truth and all opinions, but only that particular cross-section of truth and opinion which the dictator thinks good for them” (Woolf, “Th e Future” 178). He explained that for human society to function ef-fectively in an era of participatory politics, universal suff rage, and mass-media, its people should learn knowledge and opinion, for “the controlling factor in human society [was] an educated, informed, tolerant, and rational public opinion” (Woolf 175). By avoiding challenging programming, the BBC monopoly merely homogenized national debate, lim-ited access to alternative, particularly socialist, opinion, and presented the broadcasting authority as the sole repository of insight into British and imperial aff airs and disengaged the audience from public discussion (Woolf 175).


Woolf continued this critique in two essays for the New Statesman and Nation. Th e fi rst, “Educating the Listener-In,” was written in the autumn of 1931 to coincide with Woolf ’s six talks that marked his participation in a BBC radio lecture series, Th e Modern State. Here, Woolf suggested that what concerned him the most was what the BBC chose to omit from the airwaves. Woolf ’s lectures considered democracy a communal psychol-ogy guiding the development of modern Britain and so allowed him to range freely across an examination of democratic, socialist, communist, and fascist beliefs. Yet as he argued in “Educating the Listener-In,” producers for the preceding set of talks, Th e Modern Di-lemma, which considered varieties of religious belief, forbade any discussion of atheism or agnosticism (Woolf 274). Woolf ’s experience was that the BBC practiced self-censorship. Like other hosts of radio talks, the BBC required that he submit a draft of his talks for examination before broadcast (BBC). Th e consequence, according to Woolf, was that the BBC appeared unable to escape its didactic impulse, resulting in weak programming, beholden to a belief amongst BBC directors that “all knowledge which can be related to life is dangerous and that the expression of any opinion, except their own, is immoral” (Woolf, “Educating the Listener-In” 275). Th is policy reduced the complexities of public discourse by determining appropriate modes of conduct regarding discussions of religion on the radio. Th e result, Woolf argued in a 1933 New Statesman and Nation essay, “Ethe-real Problems,” was that the BBC attempted to manage and defi ne cultural interests and opinions instead of letting its listening audience establish their own pleasures (Woolf 99). Th e consequence of this action was to encourage institutions and public bodies to grant themselves both presumption of knowledge and “the divine authority to impose it upon other people” (Woolf 100). Instead of allowing for intellectual growth through broadcast-ing, the BBC sought to defi ne how people behaved, thought, and acted.

In one sense, the roots of Woolf ’s analysis sat within a Marxist framework. BBC policies alienated both intellectual workers and a broader working population from their labor. Both sides failed to possess any control over cultural or informational means of pro-duction, the former because they could broadcast only within strictly defi ned parameters, and the latter because debates about what form radio programs should take privileged middle-class voices only. Th e broad public was instead the body upon which it was pos-sible to enact broadcasting policy. Unlike many in the Labour Party, however, Woolf un-derstood the potential the BBC off ered to remake an entire mode of cultural production. Broadcasting presented the possibility for ending a privileged elite’s monopoly of knowl-edge and provided other intellectual, political, and cultural forces with an opportunity to democratize access to information. It was, he mused in “Th e Future of British Broadcast-ing,” the most revolutionary invention in human history, with the power to change both public debate and the processes involved with intellectual thought (172).

Woolf had access to the radio and he intended to use it, forging broadcasting into a rhetorical space through which he could educate a listening audience. A leitmotif for Woolf ’s intellectual labor during the interwar period was an attempt to defi ne a com-munal psychology that shaped British society and culture. Radio allowed him to inform listeners of his conclusions. In his six radio talks in the autumn of 1931, also printed in the BBC current aff airs periodical, Th e Listener, Woolf argued that participation in a democratic society provided a commonality that had determined British society since the eighteenth century. Democracy, he contended in the fi rst of his talks, “Is Democracy Fail-


ing?” off ered three provisions: the assurance of happiness through government policies; the treatment of each person, politically, as an individual; and a belief in the liberty and freedom of that individual (572). Th e consequence of Woolf ’s argument was an attempt to build a society or community through an appeal to an unspecifi ed we or us. Woolf used broadcasting to educate, not reinforce.

Woolf ’s six talks provided his listeners with two diff erent services, both of which were located in the immediate historical context of the period. Th e fi rst was to inter-vene directly in contemporary political debates. Woolf ’s work responded to beliefs that with Britain mired in decline and facing potential economic and imperial dissolution, the only solutions lay with the authoritarian right and left (Woolf, “Democracy and Equal-ity” 668-669). Since 1918, Britain had suff ered from continued high unemployment, a growing wealth divide between the booming South East of England and the industrial north, exemplifi ed by the withdrawal of the pound sterling from the Gold Standard in September 1931, and the gradual adoption of protectionist economic policies to maintain control and fi nancial stability within the empire (Williamson 290-295). Infl uential and popular lower-middle class newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the more up-market Times responded to these events by expressing approval of Mussolini’s Fascist government as well as the nascent Nazi movement in Germany, and demanded the adoption of Ital-ian economic and social policies at home. Infl uential fi gures on the left such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and Harold Laski looked towards Stalinism to provide a vigorous solution to economic woes (Overy 265-313). Woolf challenged these views and spoke on democracy to prevent authoritarianism from forging a new national communal psychology. Woolf argued in his talk “Democracy and Equality” that while democratic society built community, all authoritarian government could create was an at-omistic society that based itself upon competing interests (668). Priorities like education, or an equitable economic system, the focus of reform in England, remained incompatible with the need to benefi t party cadres and revolutionary vanguards (668). Woolf developed this idea again in a later discussion, “Gods and Bees,” suggesting that communist and fas-cist regimes could only off er strong government by sacrifi cing individual life and liberty to the interests of the ruling party and its adherents (767).

Secondly, Woolf deployed a carefully calculated use of logos that sought to educate his listening audience about a democratic society’s ability to improve the life of all of its citi-zens regardless of class or creed. Only a democratic system of government could transcend particularistic interests. Woolf ’s talk “Have We the Right to be Happy?” educated listeners about the implications of the expansion of democracy in England. As the franchise ex-panded through the class structure during the 19th century, so too did legislation regulat-ing working hours, wages, and mandatory holidays, beginning to balance the interests of the capitalist with those of the worker (616). Municipal improvements at the turn of the century provided the public with services such as healthcare, transport, and universal edu-cation, which served to obfuscate class diff erence further (616). Only through democratic governments could one see reforms improving the material conditions of daily existence and providing the means through which people could enjoy themselves, such as public parks, libraries, and municipal facilities, regardless of particularistic interest (615-616).

Despite his history lesson for listeners, Woolf generally remained slow to perceive the cultural value of his talks. Th e publisher George Allen and Unwin, who printed the BBC


radio series as a book entitled Th e Modern State, suggested that Woolf write an introduc-tory essay for his talks that would explain further to his audience the ideas that he was attempting to argue (“Letter to Woolf”). George Allen and Unwin were interested in the manner by which his talks sat alongside those of Lord Eustace Percy, a Conservative politi-cian, whose lectures following Woolf ’s provided a counterargument to Woolf ’s discussion of democracy. Although Woolf was initially unwilling to print his talks, the publishing company convinced him that the publication of his lectures in book form would provide an opportunity to explain how his arguments encouraged the development and reform of public debate (“Letter to Woolf”). Woolf reluctantly agreed, noting the possibility it off ered for public education (Woolf, “Letter to George Allen and Unwin”). Woolf grasped how a popular audience required further education in democracy as a form of national communal psychology. His thinking followed on from an earlier suggestion to Lord Percy that it would be useful for the education of the listening public to hear a debate between the two presenters that explained their divergent positions (Woolf, “Letter to Percy”).

Woolf presented a further two talks in the 1930s that similarly used the radio as an ethical and pedagogical tool that would create an educated community. A 1933 broadcast discussing Jean Jacques Rousseau for the series Some Makers of the Modern Age demon-strated how his enjoyment of hiking brought him into contact with a broad strata of society and in doing so undermined a system of privilege and rights based upon social class (Woolf, “Rousseau” 277). Here, Woolf informs public intellectuals of the implica-tions of their role as pedagogues in a manner similar to that found in his expositions on the writing of history for the “World of Books” column in the Nation and Athenaeum and his literary reviews in the New Statesman and Nation. Woolf ’s view of Rousseau was Aristotelian. He considered him an intermediary between an elite who possessed exclusive access to information and an emerging literate bourgeois who demanded knowledge but required a responsible form of education. Uniting them was the fact that education was no longer the possession of an elite. It was something portable, easily distributable through the available mediums of the period, whether the novel in Rousseau’s time or radio and mass-market publishing in the 1930s (Woolf, “Rousseau” 278). Woolf ’s concern lay with mode of dissemination of information. While Rousseau outlined in Emile a pedagogical method based upon freedom to learn from experience and to develop a natural capacity for education, Woolf worried that current practices in schools, universities, and institu-tions sought to police the boundaries of public and private expression (278).

Woolf further explored the question of education and restrictions on knowledge in a 1937 talk entitled “Does Education Neutralise Th ought?” In this discussion Woolf drew upon the themes of his examination of BBC broadcasting policy in the New Statesman and Nation and Political Quarterly from the early 1930s, in particular the concern that the management of opinion was an eff ort to control and stifl e dissent. Following a series of discussions with radio talk producer Roger Wilson, the BBC invited Woolf to speak on the subject of thinking. Wilson suggested that Woolf ’s discussion consider some of the points raised about impediments to clear thinking in Robert Henry Th ouless’s Straight and Crooked Th inking (1930), an examination of argument style and forms of reasoning, and Graham Wallas’s Th e Art of Th ought (1926), which examined the infl uence of social environment upon the creative process (Wilson). Woolf seemed to follow through on Wilson’s prompting. Th e purpose of his talk was to criticize the methods by which fi gures


who held positions of intellectual or moral authority sought to educate or disseminate opinion. Woolf ’s discussion scrutinized modes of pedagogical practice in particular, con-sidering how educational institutions failed to provide individuals with the capability to think clearly for themselves. Th is was a fault of their imbrication within their intellectual surroundings. Th e result, Woolf argued, was the application of “immense pressure upon us from our earliest years in our homes, our schools, our universities, our libraries, and our newspapers to prevent us from questioning accepted beliefs and so to prevent us from acquiring the habit of thinking” (Woolf, “Does Education Neutralise Th ought?” 1366). In order to prevent the acceptance only of what others thought to be true, Woolf argued that individuals should establish the pursuit of “clear thinking” by developing patterns of creative thought, in particular the investigation of ideas and counterarguments (1367-1368). It was in this form of intellectual engagement that individuals could develop skills to forestall education’s discouragement of thought (1368).

Yet if during the 1930s, radio provided Woolf with a space for oppositional dis-courses, during the 1940s it provided him with a platform to expound upon constructing a post-war world. A 1941 talk, “Th e New Democratic Order,” printed in Th e Listener, ex-amined how planning, led by a cadre of trained experts and intellectuals, would encourage a “renascence” of public life after the war (535). An August 1943 talk on the empire, “A Challenge to All of Us,” also published by Th e Listener, encapsulated for a broad listening audience Woolf ’s work for the Labour Party Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions to develop a post-war policy regarding the empire. As with Britain, so with the colonies; education was key to creating a population that in Woolf ’s opinion could govern itself justly (Woolf, “Memos to the Labour Party”). Woolf situated the empire and the colonial metropole within the same interpretive plane, suggesting that practices intended to im-prove public life in Britain could be used to develop its imperial possessions (Woolf, “A Challenge” 180). Finally, a memorandum for the Labour Party in the autumn of 1944 considered how an international broadcasting service could function as a tool of interna-tional peace and cooperation (Woolf and Robson, “International Broadcasting” 2). Radio would construct an international post-war society by developing global news program-ming and cultural programming that would dismantle prejudices about one’s supposed enemies (1-2). Woolf intended this entity to possess its own means of production by maintaining control of its own transmitters and to remain divorced from national govern-ments by retaining its management through intellectual fi gures who would administer according to the needs of education and improvement rather than chauvinistic aims (3).

Woolf ’s writings and broadcasts on BBC policies during the 1930s served to redefi ne the role of the public intellectual in British cultural life. If radio during this period was a site of ethical struggle, then Woolf ’s talks on the BBC and writings about BBC policy provided a sustained intervention within this debate. His work attempted to manage how people received information and gained knowledge, and in reality, it is possible to understand how both the BBC and Woolf shared a vision of broadcasting as a form of education. Th e question was to its purpose. Both Woolf and the BBC off ered two equally hegemonic views of society. Broadcasting, for the BBC, functioned as a refl ection of the nation’s conscience (McDonnell 15). Woolf ’s writings on broadcasting policies presented a methodology for public intellectuals to follow in managing emerging forms of mass media. His broadcasts served to place him within a system of cultural production and


allowed for his participation in the very processes he sought to decry. Radio allowed him to educate a broad listenership about democracy at a moment in which it appeared im-periled. Yet it also served to validate his credentials as an individual able to participate in a discourse determining national direction. By inserting himself into this debate, Woolf di-rected his cultural capital—as political theorist, essayist, novelist, and publisher—towards managing the consumption of and participation in a range of cultural, social, and political practices and activities. Listeners were a body of people upon whom it was possible to enact policy, experiments, and conjecture surrounding cultural, economic, and political organization. Woolf wrote and broadcast in order to forge a community. He presented an us, but this was a binary in which one side suff ered from a lack—in this case the correct education regarding cultural models—that only the other could provide. Th e diff erence was that Woolf, unlike the BBC, did not underestimate the receptiveness of the audience to this message.

Notes

1. For scholarly discussions of Woolf ’s writings as an attempt to defi ne a struggle between civilization and barbarity see Yasmine Gooneratne 1-3; Simon Joyce 633-641; Selma Meyerowitz 198-199; and Amindo Roy 146-151, 174, 177.

Works Cited

Avery, Todd. Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922-1938. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Beers, Laura. “Education or Manipulation? Labour, Democracy, and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain.”

Journal of British Studies 48.1 (2009): 129-152. British Broadcasting Corporation. Letter to Leonard Woolf. 26 August 1931. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers.

University of Sussex, Falmer. George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Letter to Leonard Woolf. 20 April 1932. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers. Univer-

sity of Sussex, Falmer. Gooneratne, Yamsine. “Leonard Woolf in Ceylon 1904-1911.” Th e Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.3

(2004): 1-3. Joyce, Simon. “On or About 1901: Th e Bloomsbury Group Looks Back at the Victorians.” Victorian Studies

46.4 (2004): 631-654. McDonnell, James. Public Service Broadcasting: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1991. Meyerowitz, Selma. Leonard Woolf: A Biography. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Overy, Richard. Th e Twilight Years: Th e Paradox of Britain Between the Wars. New York: Viking-Penguin, 2009. Potter, Simon. “Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth and Twen-

tieth Century British Empire.” Journal of British Studies 46.3 (2007): 621-646. Richardson, Joanna. Letter to Leonard Woolf. 15 March 1967. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers. University of

Sussex, Falmer.Roy, Amindo. Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India 1822-1922. London: Routledge,

2005. Watkins, Gordon. Letter to Leonard Woolf. 13 January 1967. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers. University of

Sussex, Falmer.Williamson, Philip. National Crisis and the National Government: British Politics, the Economy, and the Empire,

1926-1932. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Wilson, Roger. Letter to Leonard Woolf. 25 June 1937. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers. University of Sussex,

Falmer. Woolf, Leonard. “A Challenge to All of Us.” Th e Listener 12 Aug. 1943: 180-181. —. After the Deluge: A Study in Communal Psychology. London: Pelican Books, 1937. —. “Democracy and Equality.” Th e Listener 21 Oct. 1931: 668-669. —. “Does Education Neutralize Th ought?” Th e Listener 22 Dec. 1937: 1366-1368.


—. “Draft Memorandum Formulating a Colonial Policy for the Labour Party After the War.” Memo to the Labour Party Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions. September 194. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers. University of Sussex, Falmer.

—. “Educating the Listener-In.” Th e New Statesman and Nation 5 Sept. 1931: 274-275. —. “Ethereal Problems.” Th e New Statesman and Nation 22 Jul. 1933: 99-100. —. “Th e Future of British Broadcasting.” Political Quarterly Apr.-Jun. 1931: 172-185. —. “Gods or Bees.” Th e Listener 4 Nov. 1931: 766-767. —. “Have We the Right to be Happy?” Th e Listener 14 Oct. 1931: 615-616.—. “Is Democracy Failing?” Th e Listener 7 Oct. 1931: 571-572. —. Letter to George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 3 May 1932. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers. University of Sussex,

Falmer. —. Letter to Lord Eustace Percy. 2 December, 1931. Leonard Woolf Papers. University of Sussex, Falmer. —. Letter to Tristram Powell. n.d. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers. University of Sussex, Falmer.—. “Memorandum on the West Indies and Other British Colonies in America.” Memo to the Labour Party Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions. n.d. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers. Univer-

sity of Sussex, Falmer.—. “Th e New Democratic Order.” Th e Listener 10 April 1941: 535. —. “Rousseau: A Modern Man in the Ancient World.” Th e Listener 22 Feb 1933: 277-279. Woolf, Leonard, and William Robson. “International Broadcasting.” Memo to the Labour Party Advisory

Committee on International Questions. November 1944. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers. University of Sussex, Falmer.

Xiaoqin Cao teaches English literature at North University of China. She got her MPhil in European Modernisms at the University of Birmingham, UK in 2006 and has pub-lished articles on Virginia Woolf and China, reception and media. Her current interest is a postcolonial interpretation of Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group and the East. Wayne Chapman is Professor of English at Clemson University, editor of Th e South Carolina Review, and executive editor of Clemson University Digital Press. His most recent book is Yeats’s Poetry in the Making: “Sing Whatever Is Well Made” (Palgrave Macmillan 2010). He has written two other books on Yeats and edited three more. With Janet M. Manson, he is the co-author of An Annotated Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard Woolf (2006) and co-editor of Women in the Milieu of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: Peace, Politics, and Education (1998).Beth Rigel Daugherty, Professor of English at Otterbein University, is working on a book manuscript entitled Virginia Woolf ’s Apprenticeship: Th e Education of a Woman Writer. She recently published an essay on Virginia Stephen’s reviewing practice in Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace, edited by Jeanne Dubino.Jeanne Dubino is Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. With Beth C. Rosenberg she co-edited Virginia Woolf and the Essay (St. Martin’s 1997), and she most recently edited Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace (Palgrave MacMillan 2010). She has published essays and articles on Woolf, travel literature, popu-lar culture, and postcolonial writers.Diane F. Gillespie, Professor Emeritus of English at Washington State University, is author of Th e Sisters’ Arts: Th e Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and of numerous essays, most recently chapters for Bonnie Kime Scott’s Gender in Modernism, Maggie Humm’s Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, and Helen Southworth’s Virginia and Leonard Woolf: Th e Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. She is editor of Woolf’s Roger Fry: A Biography and of Th e Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf as well as co-editor of Julia Stephen’s writings, the selected papers volume Virginia Woolf and the Arts, and Cicely Hamilton’s Diana of Dobson’s. Jane Goldman is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is a Gen-eral Editor of the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Writings of Virginia Woolf and author of Th e Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge UP 1998), Modernism, 1910-1945: Image to Apoca-lypse (Palgrave, 2004) and Th e Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge UP 2006). She is editing Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse for Cambridge, and is currently writing a book, Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog.Emily M. Hinnov is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Southern New Hamp-shire, where she teaches composition and British and World Literature. She has published a book, Encountering Choran Community: Literary Modernism, Visual Culture, and Political Aesthetics in the Interwar Years (Susquehanna University Press 2009) as well as other pieces on Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Her forthcoming publications focus on subjects ranging from being a Generation X academic to the essays of Harlem Renaissance era writers Elise Johnson McDougald and Marita O. Bonner.Catherine W. Hollis received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and currently teaches in Berkeley’s Fall Program for Freshmen. Her monograph Leslie Stephen as Mountaineer (2010) is available from Cecil Woolf ’s Bloomsbury Heritage series.Jane Lilienfeld is a Professor of English at Lincoln University, an historically Black college in Jeff erson City, MO, the location of the Th ird Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf in

Notes on Contributors

237Notes on Contributors

1993. In 2000 Jane Lilienfeld’s book Reading Alcoholisms: Th eorizing Character and Nar-rative in Selected Novels of Th omas Hardy, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf won a CHOICE award from the American Library Association. Jane’s scholarly essays have appeared in Woolf Studies Annual, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Twen-tieth Century Literature, and in numerous anthologies, including the essay, “‘Could Th ey Tell One What Th ey Knew?’: Modes of Disclosure in To the Lighthouse” in Virginia Woolf: Embodied Texts, edited by Suzette Henke and David Eberly. Currently Jane is working on an essay entitled “Virginia Woolf, War and Peace.” Barbara Lonnquist is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, PA, where she teaches modern Irish and British literature. Her publica-tions include a co-authored essay on Joyce’s “Clay”; the Easter Rising in Yeats, Joyce, and Edna O’Brien; and Cleopatra as precursor to the female vampire in British literature. Her current research is on Woolf and modernist travel narratives.Alice Lowe is a freelance writer in San Diego, California. Her Woolf publications include Beyond the Icon: Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, a 2010 monograph in the Blooms-bury Heritage series from Cecil Woolf Publishers.Gill Lowe is Senior Lecturer in English at University Campus Suff olk, Ipswich, UK. Her specialist areas are auto/biography, issues of adaptation and reading and writing short fi ction. She edited the fi rst edition of Hyde Park Gate News, the journals of the Stephen children, which was published in 2005. Laci Mattison is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University studying Modernism and critical theory. Currently, her work examines the creative intersections between Henri Berg-son’s philosophy and modernist literature and the later ways in which Bergson and modern-ist writers such as Woolf and Samuel Beckett infl uenced Gilles Deleuze’s thought.Rebecca McNeer is a retired Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean Emerita at the Southern campus of Ohio University. Her doctoral dissertation subject was Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando, and she has published articles on Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and Aus-tralian writers.Patrizia A. Muscogiuri received her Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies—with a the-sis on radical inscriptions of sea metaphors including a chapter on Virginia Woolf—from the University of Salford, where she currently teaches Translation Studies. She has pub-lished research on fi lm and cultural studies and is currently preparing for publication her “Sea and coast between metaphor and history in Virginia Woolf ’s writing” (forthcoming in Navigating Cultural Spaces: Images of Coast and Sea, edited by A. Horatschek, Y. Rosen-berg and D. Schäbler) and an essay on the poet H.D.Vara Neverow is a professor of English and Women’s Studies at Southern Connecticut State Uni-versity. Her recent publications include the Introduction and annotations to the 2008 Harcourt edition of Jacob’s Room as well as “Virginia Woolf and City Aesthetics” in Maggie Humm’s Vir-ginia Woolf and the Arts (2010) and “Woolf’s Editorial Self-Censorship and Risk-Taking in Jacob’s Room” in Jeanne Dubino’s Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace (2010). Erin Kay Penner is a doctoral candidate in English at Cornell University, with interests in British and American modernism, literature of the American South, and the elegiac tradi-tion. In her dissertation, “Characterizing the Modern Elegy in the Novels of Faulkner and Woolf,” she reads the two authors as engaging in an extended rewriting of the poetic elegy, as they use the heteroglossic novel to make room for the voice of the elegiac subject.


Luke Reader is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of California, Irvine. He is working on a dissertation about Leonard Woolf ’s work for the Labour Party Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions.Carrie Rohman teaches at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, and her research interests include animal studies, modernism, and posthumanism. Her essays on writers such as Djuna Barnes, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, and Italo Calvino have appeared in such journals as American Litera-ture, Criticism, and Mosaic, and in a number of essay collections. Her book, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal, was published in 2009 by Columbia University Press.Diana Royer is Professor and Coordinator of English on Miami University’s Hamilton Campus. She is co-author (with Carl Royer) of Th e Spectacle of Isolation in Horror Films: Dark Parades (Haworth 2005) and author of A Critical Study of the Works of Nawal El Saadawi, Egyptian Author and Activist (Edwin Mellen 2001). Derek Ryan is a Ph.D. student at the University of Glasgow. His thesis explores the relationship between Virginia Woolf ’s writings and contemporary theories of subjectivity, focusing in particular on questions of sexual diff erence, materialism and post-humanism. His essay on Woolf and contemporary philosophy will be published in the upcoming volume Woolf in Context (Cambridge University Press), and he is also part of the organizing team for the 2011 Woolf conference.Dominic Scheck is an undergraduate studying English at the University of Minnesota Mor-ris, where he works as a writing tutor and community adviser. His research interests include British literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of the English lan-guage, critical theory, and composition studies. An etymological descendant of *dem, the Proto-Indo-European word for “house,” Dominic, as a rhetorically constructed textual per-sona, enjoys the play between sign and referent in this sentence in this book.Bonnie Kime Scott is Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies at San Diego State Uni-versity. She is a former President of the International Virginia Woolf Society. Her earliest writing helped set the Irish political and literary contexts of James Joyce, including the feminism of his day, as found in Joyce and Feminism (1984). Th e feminist re-vision of liter-ary modernism has been at the heart of her research for decades. Th e collaborative critical anthology, Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007), serves as a sequel to Th e Gender of Modernism (1990), her ground breaking work in this area. Woolf is one of three women authors investigated in her two-volume study, Re-Figuring Modern-ism (1995). Recently she has pursued a lifelong interest in the environment. She teaches a course on “Women and the Environment” and recently completed the manuscript of Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature: ‘in the hollow of the wave.’Kate Sedon received her B.A. from John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, and is cur-rently pursuing an M.A. in literary and cultural studies at the University of Pittsburgh. As the recipient of the University of Pittsburgh’s Scottish Room Nationality Scholarship, she looks forward to a lovely summer of researching the poetry of Edwin Morgan.Kathryn Simpson is Senior Lecturer in English at Th e University of Birmingham, UK. Her recent research has focused on Virginia Woolf ’s engagement with economies and her book, Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf (Palgrave 2008) explores this in detail. Her research interests include the work of other modernist writers, H.D., Gertrude Stein and Katherine Mansfi eld, and most recently contemporary writers, such as Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters and David Mitchell.

239Notes on Contributors

Elisa K. Sparks is an associate professor of English at Clemson University in South Carolina where she also directs the Women’s Studies program. She has published a series of articles on parks, gardens, and fl owers in Virginia Woolf ’s life and work (and produced a number of woodblock prints) as well as several articles exploring connections between the works of Woolf and the American Modernist painter Georgia O’Keeff e. An active participant in both the American and British Virginia Woolf Societies, she co-edited the Selected Papers from the 2005 International Woolf Conference at Lewis and Clark College.Verita Sriratana is the 2006 recipient of the Anandamahidol Foundation Scholarship under Royal Patronage of HM the King of Th ailand. She gained her B.A. (First-Class Honors with highest marks) in English Literature from Chulalongkorn University and M.A. (Distinction) in Colonial/Postcolonial Literature in English from the University of Warwick. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of St. Andrews. Diana L. Swanson is associate professor of women’s studies and English at Northern Illinois University, where she has taught courses on women, gender, nature and the en-vironment as well as served as the founding coordinator of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Studies Program. She has published essays on Woolf in Woolf Studies An-nual, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Creating Safe Space: Violence and Women’s Writing (SUNY Press), and several volumes of the Selected Papers.Elise Swinford is a doctoral student in English Literature and Women, Gender, and Sexu-ality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also teaches courses in gender and literature. Her research is focused on transnational modernisms and subversive gender performances during the interwar period.Cecil Woolf is the nephew of Leonard Woolf by Leonard’s youngest brother, Philip. He was fourteen when his Aunt Virginia died and had paid many visits to his uncle and aunt in the country and in London. Following in the steps of Leonard and Virginia, he set up his own independent literary publishing house in 1960. Cecil Woolf Publishers have pub-lished, among many publications, the Bloomsbury Heritage monographs, which celebrate the life, work and times of the members of the Bloomsbury Group. He is married to the acclaimed biographer, Jean Moorcroft Wilson.Rachel Zlatkin is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati and teaches Brit-ish literature and writing courses at the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University. She is currently working on a critical dissertation, Social Relations and Rep-resentations of the Maternal in Early Modern Literature, an object-relations study of the dynamic social relations between subjects and their surrounding environment.

THURSDAY, JUNE 3

FEATURED PANEL 1:15-3:00 Th e Other Sides of the Fence: Borders and BoundariesChair: Jeanne Dubino (Appalachian State University)Judith Allen (University of Pennsylvania): Virginia Woolf and the Politics of GrassJody Rosen (New York City College of Technology): Vacillation and Mixture: Orlando, Nature, and Gender in Orlando: A Biography Gill Lowe (University Campus Suff olk): Wild SwimmingGeorgia Johnston (Saint Louis University): Woolf ’s Natural Iteration

FEATURE PRESENTATION 3:30-4:30Elisa K. Sparks (Clemson University): Virginia Woolf ’s Literary and Quotidian Flowers: A Bar-Graphical Approach

4:30-4:45 Free Time

OPENING KEYNOTE 4:45-6:15Welcome, Bill T. Crouch, President of Georgetown CollegeRosemary Allen, Provost of Georgetown College Bonnie Kime Scott (San Diego State University): “Ecofeminism, Holism, and the Search for Natural Order in Woolf”

OPENING RECEPTION, Art and Rare Book Exhibit 6:30-8:30Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Gallery

8:40-9:30 “Life in the Country: A Dramatic Reading for Five Voices” by Roberta Palumbo (Holy Name University) and Ruth PearceWilson Lab Th eatre

FRIDAY, JUNE 4

Session 1 Friday 8:30-10:00 a.m.

1A: Philosophy and Th e WavesChair: Barbara Lonnquist, Chestnut Hill CollegeIrene Klosko (Bucks County Community College): “No Fin Breaks the Waste of this Immeasurable Sea”: Bernard’s Existential Vision in Th e WavesLaci Mattison (Florida State University): Th e Metaphysics of Flowers in Th e Waves: Virginia Woolf ’s “Seven-Sided Flower” and Henri Bergson’s IntuitionTiff any McCormack (Southern Oregon University): Th e Sublime Nature of Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse and Th e Waves 1B: Failure and Functionality in Woolf ’s Natural OrdersChair: Brook Miller, University of Minnesota, MorrisKT Engdahl (University of Minnesota, Morris): Th e Nature of the Sexes: Androgyny and Communication in Woolf ’s “Kew Gardens”Joshua Johnson (University of Minnesota, Morris): “Th e meaning of my life”: Partial Signifi ers and the Pursuit of the Essential Self in Woolf ’s Th e WavesDominic Scheck (University of Minnesota, Morris): Sundered Waters: Isolated Consciousness and

Conference Program

241Conference Program

Ostensible Communion in Woolf ’s Narration

1C: Woolf and Ecocritical PerspectivesChair: Emily Kopley, Stanford UniversitySarah Dunlap (Ohio State University): Root and Blossom: Plants in Th e Waves Rachel Zlatkin (University of Cincinnati): Th e Flesh of Citizenship: Red Flowers Grew Kelly Sultzbach (University of Oregon): Virginia Woolf as an Ecocritical Reader

1D: “Uncanny Proximity”: Th e Human and Nonhuman in WoolfChair: Christine W. Sizemore, Spelman CollegeJustyna Kostkowska (Middle Tennessee State University): Diversity in Relationship: Ecological Form in Th e WavesVicki Tromanhauser (SUNY New Paltz): “What she liked was simply life”: Mrs. Dalloway’s PosthumanismMayuko Nakazawa (Chukyo University): “A Million Atoms”: Virginia Woolf ’s Primeval Trees in Th e Waves

1E: Woolfi an LandscapesChair: Keri Barber, University of California, RiversideXiaoqin Cao (North University of China): “Walking over the bridge in a willow pattern plate”: Virginia Woolf and the Exotic Landscapes Lolly Ockerstrom (Park University): Landscapes, Longing, and Cornwall: Virginia Woolf and A.L. RowseRenee Dickinson (Radford University): Writing the Land

Session 2 Friday 10:30-12:00

2A: Victoriana in Mrs. DallowayChair: Lolly Ockerstrom, Park UniversityAnjanette Rodgers (Independent Scholar):Th e Language of Flowers in Mrs. Dalloway Christine W. Sizemore (Spelman College): House and Garden in Mrs. Dalloway: Patriarchal and Heterotopic SpacesAnn Marie Lindsey (CUNY Graduate Center): Mrs. Dalloway’s Flowers and Molly Gibson’s Gardens: Th e Floral Imagery of the Victorian Domestic Novel in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway

2B: Nature, Technology, and Scientifi c DiscoveryChair: Diana Royer, Miami University HamiltonEmily Kopley (Stanford University): Woolf ’s Anxiety About Nature and Auden’s Th e Age of AnxietySara Bryant (University of Virginia): Woolf ’s Animalistic TechnologyDerek James Ryan (University of Glasgow): “Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us”: Digging Granite and Chasing Rainbows with Virginia Woolf

2C: Painting WoolfChair: Jody Rosen, New York City College of TechnologySuzanne Bellamy (Th e University of Sydney): Painting the Natural World: Visual Composition in Woolf ’s Texts Cara Lewis (University of Virginia): Nature Morte in To the LighthouseMarty Epp-Carter (Clemson University): Contemporary Graphic Design Creates a Visual Interpretation of Virginia Woolf ’s “Kew Gardens”


2D: “Nature’s Eternal Return”: Rural and Urban ControversiesChair: Melissa Wisner, Yale UniversityTeresa Boyer (Claremont Graduate University): Red Asters and Purple Heather: Th e Battered Old Woman in Mrs. Dalloway Tonya Krouse (Northern Kentucky University): Th e Politics of Nature in the Domestic and Urban Landscapes of Woolf ’s Th e Years Mark Hussey (Pace University): “I’d make it penal, leaving litter”: Rural Preservation in Between the Acts

2E: Breaking Boundaries: Geographical, Psychological, BiographicalChair: Laci Mattison, Florida State UniversityBarbara Lonnquist (Chestnut Hill College): Woolf ’s “Solitary Trampings” in CornwallChristopher Brown (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona): Á rebours: Nature Fetishism as Death-Drive in To the LighthouseLisbeth Larsson (Gothenburg University): Doggraphy as ultimate biography

Lunch 12:00-1:30IVWS Business Meeting and Virginia Woolf Miscellany Meeting

Session 3 Friday 1:30-3:00

3A: Of Cities, Horses, and the Historical Moment in Jacob’s RoomChair: Kate Sedon, Independent ScholarVara Neverow (Southern Connecticut State University): Th e Woolf, the Horse and the Fox in Jacob’s Room and Orlando Keri Barber (University of California, Riverside): Virginia Woolf and Horses: Jacob’s Unnatural Death in Jacob’s Room

3B: Nature, War, and Mrs. DallowayChair: Irene Klosko, Holy Family UniversityMolly Hoff (Independent Scholar): It Was a Very Nice Place Brenna McLaughlin (Independent Scholar): Death and Life Amongst the Trees: Culpability in Mrs. DallowayJane Lilienfeld (Lincoln University): Th e Besieged Garden: Nature in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway and Willa Cather’s One of Ours

3C: Leonard Woolf and the Intellectual EnvironmentChair: Wayne Chapman, Clemson UniversityLuke Reader (University of California, Irvine): Listening In, Tuning Out: Leonard Woolf ’s Criticism of the BBC During the 1930s Wayne Chapman (Clemson University): Th e Decline of the West and Intellectual Quackery: Checking the Climate with Leonard Woolf and W.B. Yeats Janet Manson (Clemson University): An Annotated Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard Woolf: Th e Revised Th ird Edition

3D: Water in WoolfChair: Catherine Hollis, UC Berkeley Extension Hongling Lu (Nanjing Normal University): Th e Ecological Signifi cance of Water Images in Th e WavesPatrizia Muscogiuri (Independent Scholar): “Th is, I fancy, must be the sea”: Th alassic Aesthetics in Virginia Woolf ’s Writing


Melissa Wisner (Yale University): Mermaids, Salmon, and Pirates: Aqueous Imagery in Mrs. Dalloway

3E: Th e Nature of PatriarchyChair: Cara Lewis, University of VirginiaKimberly Coates (Bowling Green State University): Volatile Beauty: Virginia Woolf, War, and the Natural WorldMegan Branch (Fordham University): “Th e hour, irrevocable”: Time and Patriarchy in Virginia WoolfAustin Riede (University of Illionois at Urbana-Champaign): Human Nature? Mrs. Dalloway, Shell-shock, and the Man of the Forest

FEATURE PRESENTATION 3:30-4:30Virginia Woolf and the Horse Capital of the World: Closer Th an We Th oughtChair: Renee Dickinson, Radford UniversityBeth Rigel Daugherty (Otterbein College): “Taking Her Fences: Th e Equestrian Virginia Woolf”Emily Bingham (Independent Scholar): “Kentucky in Bloomsbury: Henrietta Bingham, Black Culture, and the Southern Gothic in Jazz-Age London”

SPECIAL PRESENTATION 4:45-5:45Cecil Woolf (Cecil Woolf Publishers): As I Remember Th em: Virginia and Leonard

SATURDAY, JUNE 5

Session 4 Saturday 9:00-10:304A: Environmental ExtremesChair: Gill Lowe, University Campus Suff olkRebecca McNeer (Ohio University Southern): Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian: Swimming and Diving as Metaphors for Writing Charley Mull (University of Massachusetts Boston): Environmental Excess in Virginia Woolf ’s Between the ActsAnn Gibaldi Campbell (Independent Scholar): Virginia Woolf and the Explosive Silence of Dogs, Rabbits, and Other Beasts

4B: “A planet full of scraps”: Th ings and the Spaces Between in Woolf ’s Later Works Chair: Patricia Morgne Cramer (University of Connecticut) Meghan Fox (SUNY, Stony Brook): Between Nature and Nation: Possibility in the Liminal Spaces of Between the ActsSarah Cornish (Fordham University): Imagined “Ineff able Space”: Woolf ’s Architectural Release in “America, Which I Have Never Seen”Kate Nash (Fordham University): Natural Birth, Capital Death: “Rubbish” in Woolf ’s Th e London Scene

4C: Nature’s Scars: Critiquing Nationalism and ImperialismChair: Joanne Tidwell, University of North Carolina, Chapel HillAmy Jones (Wright State University): Nature Knows No Borders: Woolf ’s Critique of Nationalism in To the Lighthouse Kate Merz (University of Wisconsin-Madison): Decolonizing the Metropole: Woolf ’s Empire-Ecologies “Unburied”Erica Delsandro (Bucknell University & Washington University in St. Louis): Woolf ’s Heart of Darkness: Nature and National History in Between the Acts


4D: Th e Personal is PoliticalChair: Erik Fuhrer, Independent ScholarKathryn Simpson (University of Birmingham): “Lappin and Lapinova”: A Woolf in Hare’s Clothing? Erin Penner (Cornell University): Crowding Clarissa’s Garden Rita Kondrath (Duquesne University): “…Perhaps she wasn’t altogether a lady?”: Female Wartime Self-Defi nition in Between the Acts

Session 5 Saturday 11:00-12:30

5A: Multifaceted Woolf: Essays, the Academy, and the Hogarth PressChair: Pat Collier, Ball State University Pat Collier (Ball State University): Contextualizing the Common ReadersBeth Rigel Daugherty (Otterbein University): Virginia Woolf and the Teaching of English LiteratureJohn Young (Marshall University): Woolf ’s Bibliographical Environment: Toward a Philosophy of Hogarth Fiction

5B: Cornwall and St. Ives: Images and Infl uencesChair: Erica Delsandro (Bucknell University & Washington University in St. Louis)Keiko Okaya Tanaka (Shizuoka Sangyo University): Why was the Ramsays’ Summer House in the Isle of Skye?Drew Shannon (College of Mount St. Joseph): “Th e lifeboat in the storm”: St. Ives, Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, and Jill Paton Walsh’s Goldengrove and UnleavingVanessa Underwood (Actress/Lecturer): To the Hebridean Lighthouse

5C: Creative Writers Reading Th eir WorkChair: Teresa Boyer (Claremont Graduate University)Laura Pimienta (Indiana University South Bend): Señora Diaz (fi ction)George Ella Lyon: “Vision Given Voices”: Poems for Virginia Woolf

5D: Th e Natural World and Woolf ’s Short WorksChair: Christopher Brown, California State Polytechnic University, PomonaJennifer A. Williams (University of Maryland): To “Seize the Splendor”: the role of the Lyric in Virginia Woolf ’s “Th e Mark on the Wall”Qinghong Wu (Jiangsu University): A Chinese Interpretation of “Th e Death of the Moth”Catherine W. Hollis (UC Berkeley Extension): “Th e real problem is to climb to the top of the mountain”: Virginia Woolf as Mountaineer

5E: Undergraduate RoundtableStudying Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group: Seven-minute presentations followed by discussion.Chair: Kristin Czarnecki (Georgetown College)Kelsey Kallhoff (Morningside College)Becca Anderson (Morningside College)Whitley Arens (Georgetown College)Cortney Th orn (Georgetown College)Kyle Huskin (Georgetown College)Josh Slone (Georgetown College)Ashlyn Anderson-Keelin (Georgetown College)


12:30-2:00 p.m.—Lunch

Pedagogy Workshop 12:45-1:45Leslie Werden (Morningside College): “Prolifi c & Profi cient: Writing with Students and Virginia Woolf”

Planning Committee Meeting 12:45-1:45, for 2011 Conference

Session 6 Saturday 2:00-3:30

6A: Woolf and Nature: New Visual and Verbal Contexts Chair: Elisa K. Sparks (Clemson University)Diane Gillespie (Washington State University): “Th e Bird’s the Word”: Virginia Woolf and W.H. Hudson, Visionary OrnithologistLeslie Kathleen Hankins (Cornell College): Seascapes, Treescapes, Wordscapes: Virginia Woolf and the Artists of St. IvesJane Goldman (University of Glasgow): Th e Dogs that Th erefore Woolf Follows: Some Canine Sources for A Room of One’s Own in Nature and Art

6B: Nature in the CityChair: Tonya Krause (Northern Kentucky University)Jessica Glennon-Zukoff (Mills College): “Out to Sea and Alone”: Microcosm of the Protagonist in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. DallowayJoanne Tidwell (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): Nature in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway and Ian McEwan’s SaturdayZachary Hacker (College of Mount St. Joseph): “Th e Scars”: Virginia Woolf ’s and Charles Dickens’ English Landscapes of Potential

6C: Th e Waves: Primeval, Cosmic, BiblicalChair: Charley Mull (University of Massachusetts Boston)Margaret Sullivan (Saint Louis University): Let Th ere be Rose Leaves: Lesbian Subjectivity and Religious Discourse in Woolf ’s Th e Waves Erik Fuhrer (Independent Scholar): Th e Waves: (re)Cycling Biblical NarrativeEmily Hinnov (BGSU Firelands College): “To give the moment whole”: Th e Nature of Time and Cosmic Unity in Virginia Woolf ’s Th e Waves

6D: Th eories of NatureChair: Ann Marie Lindsey (CUNY Graduate Center)Benjamin Hagen (University of Rhode Island): It Is Almost Impossible Th at I Should Be Here: Wordsworthian Nature and an Ethics of Self-Writing in Virginia Woolf ’s “A Sketch of the Past”Diana Royer (Miami University Hamilton): Mining With the Head: Virginia Woolf, Henry David Th oreau, and Exploring the Self Th rough Nature Deborah Gerrard (De Montfort University): Th e Infl uence of Edward Carpenter’s “Back-to-Nature” Philosophy on Woolf ’s Th e Voyage Out (1915) and Jacob’s Room (1922)

KEYNOTE 4:00-5:30Carrie Rohman (Lafayette College)


FEATURE PRESENTATION 5:45-6:30Suzanne Bellamy (Th e University of Sydney): Tribute to Isota Tucker Epes

BANQUET 7:00Virginia Woolf Players“Th e Great Frost” (20-minute animated fi lm, scenes from Orlando)

SUNDAY, JUNE 6

Session 7 Sunday 8:30-10:00

7A: Transformative/Transforming Nature: Fantasy and Myth in OrlandoChair: Kimberly Coates (Bowling Green State University)Elise Swinford (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Trans(gendered)formation: Orlando as ElegyErin Douglas (Miami University, Ohio): Scripts of Femininity Queered: Femininity, Pleasure, and Orlando’s Floral Transformation Lynn Hall (Miami University, Ohio): “[H]er God was Nature”: Th e Natural and the Fantastic in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando

7B: Bodily Woolf: Food, Illness, AgingChair: Austin Riede (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)Alice Lowe (Independent Scholar): “A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage”: Dining Well in Virginia Woolf ’s Life and WorkKatie Rapier (Georgetown College): Th e Convoluted Consciousness of Virginia Woolf Kate Sedon (Independent Scholar): Moments of Aging: Revising Mother Nature in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway

7C: Animals, Social Deviants, and EvolutionChair: Megan Fox (SUNY, Stony Brook)Elizabeth Mathews (Mills College): “Impaled by a Bird’s Sharp Beak”: Lust and Violence in WoolfSara Henning-Stout (University of St. Andrews): Natural Autobiography: Birds as Social Deviants in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. DallowayJeanne Dubino (Appalachian State University): Woolf, Darwin, and Flush; or, Th e Origin of Spaniels

7D: Weather in WoolfChair: Sara Bryant (University of Virginia)Verita Sriratana (University of St. Andrews): “It was an uncertain spring”: Reading the Weather in Th e Years Paula Maggio (Th e University of Akron): Woolf and Weather: Nature’s Revelation of “the essential thing”

Shuttles to Main Campus Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Gallery 10:30

CLOSING KEYNOTE 11:00-12:30Diana Swanson (Northern Illinois University): “Virginia Woolf and Ecofeminism”

(pdf) "it was an uncertain spring": reading the weather in

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