Contradictory Woolf

Selected Papers from the Twenty-First Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf

Contradictory Woolf
Selected Papers from the Twenty-First Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf

University of Glasgow Glasgow, Scotland 9-12 June 2011

Edited by Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki

CLEMSON UNIVERSITY
DIGITAL PRESS

Works produced at Clemson University by the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, including The 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 effort 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 first opportunity. Copyright 2012 by Clemson University ISBN: 978-0-9835339-5-5

CLEMSON UNIVERSITY
DIGITAL PRESS

Published by Clemson University Digital Press at the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina. Produced with the Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5 and Microsoft Word. This book is set in Adobe Garamond Pro and was printed by Standard Register. Editorial Assistant & Cover Designer: Jacob Greene To order copies, contact the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina 29634-0522. Information and order forms for Virginia Woolf conference proceedings are available via the digital press Web site, at http://www.clemson.edu/cedp/cudp/pubs/vwcon/index.html. The painting on the back cover is by Australian artist Suzanne Bellamy, entitledWoolf and the Chaucer Horse , 2011, oil on canvas; 13 ft. by 6 ft., originally created as a set canvas for the Glasgow Pageant production, International Virginia Woolf Conference, 2011. The Contradictory Woolf image (front cover & frontispiece) was designed for this conference by the Scottish artist Caroline McNairn (1955-2011).

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Table of Contents
Jane Goldman Preface ................................................................................................vii Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki Introduction to Contradictory Woolf ................................ix Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................xv List of Abbreviations ...................................................................................................xvi Judith Allen ButI had said but too often. Why but? ............................................ 1 Michael H. Whitworth Woolf, Context, and Contradiction ......................................... 11 Patricia Waugh Did I not banish the soul? Thinking Otherwise, Woolf-wise ............... 23 Suzanne Bellamy The Plays The Thing BUT We Are The Thing Itself. Prologue, Performance and Painting. A Multimedia Exploration of Woolf s Work in the Late 1930s and Her Vision of Prehistory ................................................................ 43 Marina Warner Report to the Memoir Club: Scenes from a Colonial Childhood ............ 57 Lois J. Gilmore But somebody you wouldnt forget in a hurry: Bloomsbury and the Contradictions of African Art ................................................................................. 66 Maggie Humm Contradictions in Autobiography: Virginia Woolf s Writings on Art ...... 74 Amber K. Regis But something betwixt and between: Roger Fry and the Contradictions of Biography ................................................................................... 82 Oren Goldschmidt Can I become we?: Addressing Community in The Years and Three Guineas ............................................................................................... 88 Laci Mattison Woolf s Un/Folding(s): The Artist and the Event of the Neo-Baroque ....... 96 Angeliki Spiropoulou Woolf s Contradictory Thinking .............................................. 101 Sowon S. Park The Feeling of Knowing in Mrs. Dalloway: Neuroscience and Woolf ........ 108 Stella Bolaki When the lights of health go down: Virginia Woolf s Aesthetics and Contemporary Illness Narratives ........................................................................... 115 Janet Winston Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns: Dancing To The Lighthouse .............. 122 Claire Nicholson But Woolf was a Sophisticated Observer of Fashion: Virginia Woolf, Clothing and Contradiction ....................................................................... 129 Vara S. Neverow Bi-sexing the Unmentionable Mary Hamiltons in A Room of Ones Own: The Truth and Consequences of Unintended Pregnancies an Calculated Cross-Dressing .................................................................................... 134 Katharine Swarbrick Lacanian Orlando .................................................................. 142 Jeanne Dubino The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and Flush .......................... 150 Derek Ryan From Spaniel Club to Animalous Society: Virginia Woolf s Flush ............. 158 Sam Wiseman Ecology, Identity, and Eschatology: Crossing the Country and the City in Woolf ....................................................................................................... 166 Diane F. Gillespie Please Help Me! Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press ................................................................................................................... 173 Madelyn Detloff Am I a Snob? Well, Sort of: Socialism, Advocacy, and Disgust in Woolf s Economic Writing ................................................................................ 181 Kathryn Simpson Come buy, come buy: Woolfs Contradictory Relationship to the Marketplace..............................................................................................................186 Makiko Minow-Pinkney Virginia Woolf and December 1910: The Question of the Fourth Dimension ....................................................................................................194 v

Jocelyn Rodal Virginia Woolf on Mathematics: Signifying Opposition ........................ 202 Amanda Golden A Brief Note in the Margin: Virginia Woolf and Annotating.......... 209 Gill Lowe Observe, Observe Perpetually, Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and the Patron au Dedans ............................................................................................ 215 Kristin Czarnecki Whos Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble, and the Anxiety of Authorship ................................................... 222 Claire Davison Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron ........................................ 229 Rebecca DeWald A Dialogueabout this Beauty and Truth: Jorge Luis Borges Translation of Virginia Woolf s Orlando ............................................................... 243 Leslie Kathleen Hankins As I spin along the roads I remodel my life: Travel Films projected into the shape of Orlando.........................................................................250 John Coyle Travesty in Woolf and Proust................................................................... 259 Wayne K. Chapman Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of Spilt Milk............................. 265 Sara Sullam Figures of Contradiction: Virginia Woolf s Rhetoric of Genres ................... 271 Ian Blyth Do Not Feed the Birds: Night and Day and the Defence of the Realm Act ........ 278 Karen L. Levenback Approaches to War and Peace in Woolf: A Chapter on the Future ............................................................................................................... 285 Cecil Woolf Duncan Grant...................................................................................... 291 Notes on Contributors .............................................................................................. 294 Conference Program.................................................................................................. 299

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Preface
by Jane Goldman

ut you may say Why Contradictory Woolf? Why Glasgow? Why not? For one thing, Contradictory Woolf, the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (but the first ever to be held in Scotland) opened the delicious opportunity for our assembling Woolf scholars to say But in the Bute Hall, that magnificent Victorian chamber of intellect and scholarly debate at the heart of the neo-gothic edifice, the Gilbert Scott Building, the centrepiece of the University of Glasgow, replete with quads, lawns and gravel. But Woolf scholars take happy note: there is no law of trespass in Scotland! And how splendid to have the rising and setting sun shining through the Bute Halls stunningly beautiful stained glass windows, in which are depicted numerous figures, figures which, as the University website has it, represent a wide range of characters and subjects including writers, philosophers, scientists, theologians, saints, monarchs and women [sic]. (Here we may say but doesnt and sometimes mean but?) The women figures in the eastern windows are personifications of seasons and virtues and other abstractions; the men figures in the western are portraits of great men such as Plato, Chaucer, Thomas Carlyle, et al. But there is one window in the Bute Hall commemorating three women pioneers of Scottish university education, Jessie Campbell, Isabella Elder, and Janet Galloway, and it is pleasing to note that there are still blank panes awaiting stainsHow gratifying to have our Principal remind us in his welcome speech that but in Scotland is also an affirmation, but! But how fabulous, too, to have on display, for the duration of the conference at least, Suzanne Bellamys superb pageant painting depicting Woolf on Chaucers horse with the sun streaming through its rich colours, its golden touches gleaming, while the voices in the Bute Hall for four days sang out their buts and many other wise and contradictory words too. Those voices (and I have space only to mention the five keynotes and must pass over the plenary panels on bi, queer, war, and class as well as the numerous parallel panels held in the Bute) included that of Judith Allen, author of an inspirational but paper on Woolf, and now of the book Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language published by Edinburgh University Press (2010). Teasing out the many valences of Woolf s but in A Room of Ones Own, Judith at one point reeled in the submerged pun on but meaning fish, thereby enriching still more the contradictoriness of Woolfian thought (already figured in that work as fish). Michael Whitworth, reporting on the contradictory terrain between text and context negotiated by scholarly editors of Woolf s writing (he is editing, for the new Cambridge edition, Woolf s Night and Day, contradictory to the core and from the very title) butted valiantly and brilliantly in recognition of Woolf s utterly unconventional and demanding use of allusion and intertext, observations that fuelled his dialogue with the novelist Kirsty Gunn whose plenary reading from her stunning forthcoming novel, The Big Music, followed his paper, and buts came thick and fast. But (have I said but too often?) it was becoming clearer with every contradictory voice that Woolf s but is no simple gainsaying deviceargumentative yes, but dialogical, multivalent, and proliferating, and certainly not crudely reducible to the Cartesian binaryas explored by Pat Waugh in her utterly spell-binding paper on Woolf s engagement with concepts of the vii

soul, consciousness and the extended mind. But dialogical, multivalent, and proliferating are terms that only begin to do justice to Suzanne Bellamys keynote pageant-play, her line of flight out of Between the Acts, and her illuminating prefatory words, an exhilarating contradictory Woolfian event of performative, participatory scholarship that raised the buts to the very vaults of the Bute Hall at noon on the Saturday. But in the evening the same hall took on more intimate mood and focus as we listened intently to Marina Warners compelling Report to the Memoir Club reflecting on the fierce contrariness of the politics of Woolf s but in view of the patriarchy in public and privatethe scorn of official pomp, and her daughterly ambivalence towards her fatherand opening to a reading of work-in-progress drawing on Marinas colonial childhood in Cairo, an eloquent, Woolfian line of flight through fact and fiction that brought new light to the Bute Hall. But how lovely, I thought, as we filed out for the bus that was waiting to take us to dine, how serendipitous that the artist, and friend, Caroline McNairn, whom I commissioned to design the Contradictory Woolf conference logo and poster (and now the image on the front cover of this volume), was the person who first introduced me to the work of Marina Warner, when she took me to a gallery in Scotland in 1987 to hear her speak on Nancy Speros goddess workshow she would have chuckled too to learn that Woolf s but may be a pun on fishbut Caroline had given us Woolf with a dogbut perhaps she and perhaps Woolf knew that but in Spanish is pero which puns on perro meaning dogBut here the three dots mark the three steps we climbed to board the bus which was taking us to dine, and toast Woolf with the Baillie John McLaughlin, at a civic reception in the marbled opulence of Glasgow City Chambers which Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf once visited in 1913 and where our speaker over dinner was to be Cecil Woolf, and we had a splendid evening but!

Thank you to everyone who supported, attended and participated in Contradictory Woolf. And very special thanks to Stella Bolaki and Derek (I am William) Ryan for selecting and editing these wonderfully contradictory papers. No, but! Jane Goldman University of Glasgow March 2012

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Introduction
by Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki
n her 1939 essay Reviewing, published as one of the Hogarth Sixpenny Pamphlets, Virginia Woolf suggests that the growing trade in reviewsthose few words devoted to why I like or dislike this book (E6 204)meant that authors in the twentieth century were less sure than ever of the true opinion of their writing, and that readers were less likely to go out and buy a particular novel or collection of poetry based on them: The clash of completely contradictory opinions cancel each other out (E6 198). In her letters and diaries Woolf also expresses a frustration with the many contradictory reviews of her books, leading to uncertainty on her part about her own critical reception (see for example L2 578, L2 587, L6 116). But contradicting the view that one contradiction negates another, the very contradictory Woolf explored by independent scholars, writers, artists, dramatists, common readers, and academics from around the globe (some of whom are also, indeed, reviewers) at the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf offered a range of fascinating new approaches to, and understandings of, Woolf s writings. Whether opposing, questioning, interrupting or butting, the rich variety of essays selected for this volume represent the view shared by so many of the speakers in Glasgow that Woolf s writing continually refuses settled readings or closed meanings, revealing and reveling precisely in its potential or actual, subtle or forceful, contradictions. How appropriate then that the dialogue was opened by the call for papers which, in honor of the first sentence of A Room of Ones Own (1929), invited participants to make ample use the word but at in their presentation! How appropriate, too, that the first essay in this collection is Judith Allens thoughtprovoking exposition of the repeated difference of Woolf s But, as well as her parentheses and ellipses, in A Room of Ones Own, and of key terms in Three Guineas (1938) including the word word itself. In this first of five plenary addresses, all included in this collection, Allen draws on insights by Mikhail Bakhtin, Hayden White, and Gilles Deleuze in order to focus on the interaction between text and context, illuminating the complicated and contradictory celebration of words in Woolf s writing, and the relationship between her multifaceted language and her continually multiplying readers. Michael Whitworths plenary paper is also concerned with context, and he considers the stakes involved in putting aside old copies of Woolf s texts for the several annotated editions, reflecting on his own experience of editing Night and Day (1919) for the new Cambridge UP edition of Woolf s writings, as well as outlining key critical strands in Woolf scholarship which relate to the question of annotation. Stressing the importance of the reader as maker of meaning, Whitworth argues that the job of annotator and critic is to be rigorous in the process of contextualization, but not to mistake such rigor with providing a definitive context. Our readings of Woolf are always enriched, Whitworth argues, by access to further contextual information, even and especially when this information is potentially contradictory. In her essay Patricia Waugh explores the contradictory notion of an embodied soul and grounded thought in Woolf s writing, and considers concepts of consciousness and the extended mind. Waugh expertly charts the ways in which Woolf, in her novels and essays, challenges Cartesian dualism and reconceptualises the ix

soul in the terms of the vocabulary of nerves rather than spirit, a soul that is bodily, nervy, gossipy, easily bruised and touchy. Suzanne Bellamy takes us from plenary paper to plenary pageant, and her shimmering script, first performed in Glasgows Bute Hall, is reproduced here in full, along with an account of how her pageant was created. Bellamys accompanying painting, Woolf and the Chaucer Horse, was stunningly present throughout the conference, and she has kindly agreed for it to be reproduced on the back cover of this book. Further creative affinities with Woolf are evident in Marina Warners plenary address which focuses on contrariness with respect to authority, class and the British Empire, and which brings Woolf into conversation with Voltaire. Warner discusses the background to her work-in-progress, provisionally titled Inventory of a Life Mislaid, and treats us to some sparkling paragraphs from it. Taken together, the ideas, contradictions, and contexts opened up by these five plenary addresses reverberate through the other essays contained in this volume. Contradictions in Woolf s relationship to art and auto/biography within the context of Bloomsbury are brought to the fore in essays by Lois Gilmore, Maggie Humm, and Amber Regis. Gilmore focuses on Bloomsburys relationship to the African art that was brought to England by that contradictory and catalytic figure Roger Fry, and that was by nature contradictory when de-contextualized and viewed from within Western culture. Focusing in particular on the responses of Fry, Woolf and Clive Bell to the 1920 exhibition of African objects at the Chelsea Book Club, Gilmore demonstrates the nuanced contradictions about African material culture circulating in Bloomsbury. Humm discusses Woolf s accounts of Vanessa Bells art in autobiographical writings including Reminiscences (1976), and in her Foreword to Recent Paintings of Vanessa Bell (1930), arguing that these do not only provide representations of her sisters art, but that Woolf gains a self-presence by experiencing Bells art as a fabric of sensations, activating Woolf s being. The contradictions involved in writing Roger Fry (1940) provides the focus of Regiss paper, which shows how Woolf s view of biography becomes increasingly contradictory from The New Biography (1927) to The Art of Biography (1939). The focus on Bloomsbury also includes further consideration of Woolf and the philosophy of the Cambridge Apostles. Oren Goldschmidt contrasts Woolf s view of the complex negotiation between personal relationships and socio-political community with G. E. Moores Principia Ethica. Woolf s disagreements with Moore, and her metaphorical and syntactical play, help her to imagine functional forms of community which are most importantly explored in The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938). Woolf is placed in dialogue with Alfred North Whiteheads notion of the event and Deleuzes concept of the fold in Laci Mattisons reading of To the Lighthouse (1927). Mattison argues that in Woolf s writing we find examples of non-dialectical un/folding(s) of the neo-Baroque, which Deleuze discusses via Whitehead, and where contradiction stands not so much for notes of dissonance, but as creative, vital moments where order and art continually de- and re-compose. In contrast to this, and extending Woolf s contradictory thinking further beyond Cambridge philosophy, Angeliki Spiropoulou claims that Woolf s thought is resolutely dialectical, and calls on a range of essays including How it Strikes a Contemporary (1923) and On Not Knowing Greek (1925) as illustrative of Woolf working through oppositions between the classics and the moderns, the present and the past, continuity and change. x

The relationship between mind and body continues to be an important area of exploration for Woolf scholars. Complementing Patricia Waughs plenary, Sowon Park asks how the body and mind can meet across disciplinary divides between cognitive science and literature. Taking issue with psycholinguist and cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinkers dismissal of Woolf s modernism, and drawing parallels between the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and Woolf s model of mind, Park asserts that whilst thinking and feeling may seem like contradictory cognitive processes they are reshaped into a continuum of feeling of knowing in Woolf. Park makes brief reference to On Being Ill (1926) as an example of Woolf writing about mind depending upon flesh, and Stella Bolakis essay explores Woolf s contradictory discussion of mind and body in this essay more fully. Bolaki points out the contradictions in Hilary Mantels recent reading of Woolf s essay which repeats the clichd criticism of Woolf as an aesthete while at the same time continuing aspects of her aesthetic project. The legacy of On Being Ill is not so much that it gives us access to Woolf s personal endurance through illness but that it provides contemporary narratives of illness with a workable model of translating pain and raw sensation into verbal form. From mind and body to thought and movement, Janet Winston offers a kinetic reading of To the Lighthouse inspired by dance. Movement, Winston writes, occurs throughout Woolf s novel not only as something observed or heard but also as something felt within the body, so that even when a character like Mrs Ramsay is stationed in a chair her mental processes are strikingly embodied and frequently in motion. Clothes, bodily pleasure and sexuality are discussed by several essays in the volume. Claire Nicholson concentrates on Woolf s relationship to clothing and fashion, arguing that Woolf s perception of dress is not tailored to fit the neutral tones of ambivalence, but is more properly suited to the bolder lines of contradiction. Woolf s observations of dress are subtle and suffused with meaning, but Nicholson also suggests Woolf knew how to indulge in sartorial pleasure, in fabric, as well as in fiction. In her discussion of the four Marys in A Room of Ones Own, Vara Neverow makes the case for reading the historical Dr. George Hamilton, born Mary Hamilton, as one of the unmentioned Mary Hamiltons who haunt Woolf s text. Whilst scholars tend to focus on the old Scottish Ballad which was narrated by Mary Hamilton, Woolf, Neverow suggests, may have also been influenced by Henry Fieldings fictionalised 1746 pamphlet, The Female Husband, in which this lesbian cross-dressing Mary Hamilton was the protagonist. Katharine Swarbrick focuses on sexuality and desire in her Lacanian reading of Woolf s Orlando (1928) and Jacqueline Harpmans 1996 novel Orlanda. Clarifying some key Lacanian concepts, including jouissance, and countering common misuses of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Swarbrick seeks to avoid the reductive impulse to characterize masculine and feminine as phallic/not phallic and to complicate attempts to see the homosexual and heterosexual as pitted against each other. The relationship between human and animal, culture and nature, is of growing interest to Woolf scholars. Noting that Flush (1933) is populated by a menagerie of cats and lions and tigers, partridges and parrots and rooks, elephants and fish and fox, black beetles and blue bottles, hares and fleas, and dogs, Jeanne Dubino highlights the interconnections between species, and considers the coevolutionary dimensions in Woolf s fictional biography. Continuing the focus on Flush, Derek Ryan brings Woolf s canine modernist xi

aesthetics into dialogue with Donna Haraways companion species and Deleuze and Guattaris becoming-animal. Grounded in ordinary, domestic relations, but also reconceptualising species boundaries, Woolf creates an open, entangled zone of human and animal. The crossings between nature and culture are traversed in Sam Wisemans essay which focuses on affinities and interconnections that exist between the rural and urban spheres. Wiseman discusses passages from Orlando, Between the Acts (1941) and Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1927) in order to highlight the modernist cosmopolitan experience portrayed in Woolf s writing. Several essays collected here explore Woolf s contradictory approach to social behavior and class (a theme also discussed at the conference by David Bradshaw and Laura Marcus in the closing plenary panel Class Contradictions). Diane Gillespie pairs Three Guineas with Viola Trees Can I Help You?, published by the Hogarth Press in 1937, in her consideration of rules of etiquette. Although Woolf s writing has a much broader intellectual scope, Gillespie suggests that Trees personal, humorous touch manages to undermine hierarchical rituals. Discussing class and snobbery, Madelyn Detloff seeks to account for that irritating contradictory Woolf who displays simultaneously class bias and an acute understanding of the links between ideology, education, and material wherewithal. Woolf s apparent contradictoriness where class is concerned might be the result, Detloff argues, of an ethical distancing rather than a straightforward elitism. Kathryn Simpson turns to Woolf s contradictory relationship to the literary marketplace. Simpson complicates Woolf s anti-Semitism in The Duchess and the Jeweller (1938), and argues that this short story can be seen to speak of both her wariness about the wolfish greed of the commercial world and her own Woolfishly greedy part in it. Reading literature and mathematics together would seem to be a clearly contradictory act, but Makiko Minow-Pinkney and Jocelyn Rodal illuminate the ways in which these disciplinary boundaries are crossed by Woolf. Minow-Pinkney shows how ideas circulating in 1910 of a fourth dimension might have influenced Woolf s fiction as well as her mischievous theory of character and cultural transition occurring on or about December 1910 (E3 421). In doing so, Minow-Pinkney discusses the connections between Cubism and pre-Einsteinian fourth-dimensional theory, and notes Woolf s own depictions of mathematicians in her novels. Inspired by Woolf s practice of calculating word count on drafts of her manuscripts, Rodal considers the formal similarities in Woolf s writing and the mathematics of David Hilbert who was at the very center of high modernism in mathematics and who shares an almost identical surname with Night and Days Katherine Hilbery. Woolf may have depicted mathematics in opposition to literature in her second novel and elsewhere, but her representations of order and number parallel and refigure Hilberts philosophy of mathematics. Questions of authoriality and the writing process continue to be of interest to Woolf scholarship. Amanda Golden assesses Woolf s practice and views of annotation. Golden focuses specifically on Woolf s early essay Writing in the Margin, her annotations in her copy of Agamemnon, and a depiction of annotation in the first segment of The Years, showing how Woolf s contradictory relationship to academia is further complicated by her encounters with marginalia. Gill Lowe explores the effects of self-censorshipthe patron au dedans or invisible censor within (E4 75)on Woolf s writing and editing. From her very early experiences of this in the Hyde Park Gate News, Lowe highlights the ways xii

in which Virginia Stephen and Virginia Woolf had, recurrently, to remove unwelcome voyeurs; to eradicate the critical voices inhibiting the writing craft. Kristin Czarnecki sees Woolf s anxieties about authorship in her discussion of Woolf s childrens story Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble (1966). Placing Woolf in dialogue with influential essays by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, Czarnecki reminds us of the importance of returning to the text rather than author, the creation rather than creator. Several papers explore cultural connections and contradictions, focusing both on translation and on the cultural travels Woolf s writings take us on. Claire Davison focuses on Koteliansky and Woolf s translation of Dostoevsky, assessing what exactly Woolf s role in this translating process was, and how this translation differed from other English and French versions. Koteliansky and Woolf s translation is double accented and contradictions are not resolved; they achieve what Davison terms an avant-garde translation, an oxymoron if ever there was one. From Woolf as translator to Woolf translated, Rebecca DeWald considers Jorge Luis Borgess 1937 translation of Orlando. DeWald details how the reception of the novel in Latin America differed from its Anglo-American audience as a result of key distinctions between English and Spanish language systems, but argues that a mutually enriching dialogue is created by the presumed equality (rather than a hierarchy) of the original text and its translation. In Leslie Hankinss essay we are escorted on a journey from literary to visual. Illustrating Orlandos cinematic inter-texts in 1920s travel films, Hankins shows that through the creation of film clip portals, Woolf does not simply borrow from film; she re-directs it, offering the gift of travel to Vita SackvilleWest, and other readers, and adding a cinematic element to her playful love letter. Further literary encounters are also documented in essays that place Woolf in conversation with Marcel Proust and W. B. Yeats, and in a consideration of Woolf s relationship to poetry more broadly. John Coyle reads passages from la recherche du temps perdu alongside Jacobs Room (1922) and Orlando, as well as Woolf s letters and diary entries on Proust. Whether through a Proustian moment or a travesty of one, we find in Woolf, as in Proust, a fascination with time, sexuality, and metaphorical flights. Woolf s encounter with Yeats (and Walter de la Mare) at Lady Ottoline Morrells in November 1930 provides the focus of Wayne Chapmans essay. Presenting unpublished material by Yeats alongside Woolf s diary entries and letters recounting their meeting, Chapman contextualises the conversation that led Yeats to write Spilt Milk, a poem that opens with a We which refers to Yeats, Morrell, de la Mare, as well as to Woolf. Sara Sullam elaborates on Woolf s relationship to poetry, poets and poetic forms, arguing that they play a crucial role in Woolf s literary achievement. Considering a range of Woolf s essays which discuss contradiction between prose and poetry, Sullam suggests that Woolf reaches a rhetorical understanding of genres, where distinctions between prose and poetry can never be settled. War continues to provide an important context for our readings of Woolf. Ian Blyth traces some of the darker currents in Night and Day which reveal the conditions on the home front during the First World War. In particular, Blyth argues, aspects of the emergency legislation introduced through the Defence of the Realm Act find their way into Woolf s second novel, evident in all of the surveillance and subterfuge the characters are involved in. War also provided the theme of a plenary roundtable in Glasgow, and Karen Levenbacks introduction is included in this collection. Levenback shows how interest in xiii

Woolf and war continues to grow, and she provides a summary of the contribution made by the other members of this panel: Stuart Clarke, Lolly Ockerstrom, Vara Neverow, Eileen Barrett, and co-chair Jane Wood, whose edited collection, The Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf s Writings (2010), was the inspiration for the roundtable. To end the Selected Papers we are delighted to include Cecil Woolf s talk, delivered at the Conference Banquet in Glasgows City Chambers. Sharing some of his memories of the sole Scotsman in the Bloomsbury group, Duncan Grant, Cecil at one point expresses disappointment that although Duncan enjoyed parties and dressing up, he never saw him in his national dress, a kilt and sporran. Whilst there may also have been disappointment among delegates that no kilts were on show at the first ever Virginia Woolf conference to be held in Scotland, we hope that the energy, creativity and intellectual labour that was so abundantly present in Glasgow is captured in the essays collected in this volume. Work Cited
Woolf, Virginia. Reviewing. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 6: 1933-1941. Ed. Stuart N.Clarke. London: The Hogarth Press, 2011. 195-209.

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Acknowledgments

e wish to thank all those who participated in the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf for helping to make it such a memorable occasion. Thank you to the contributors for their stimulating essays, and we would also like to acknowledge the many excellent papers we were unfortunately unable to find space for in this collection (the full conference program can be found at the end of this volume). A very special thank you to Jane Goldman for being the driving force behind the conference and for inviting us to edit this collection. Thank you to Kristin Czarnecki for her helpful advice as we embarked on the editing process. Finally, we would like to thank Wayne Chapman and his colleagues at Clemson University Digital Press for all their work in bringing Contradictory Woolf to publication.

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(as established by Woolf Studies Annual)

AHH AROO BP BTA CDB CE CR1 CR2 CSF D DM E F FR GR HPGN JR JRHD L M MEL MOB MT MD ND O PA RF TG TTL TW TY VO WF A Haunted House A Room of Ones Own Books and Portraits Between the Acts The Captains Death Bed and Other Essays Collected Essays (ed. Leonard Woolf, 4 vols.: CE1, CE2, CE3, CE4) The Common Reader The Common Reader, Second Series The Complete Shorter Fiction (ed. Susan Dick) The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols.: D1, D2, D3, D4, D5) The Death of the Moth and Other Essays The Essays of Virginia Woolf (eds. Stuart Clarke and Andrew McNeillie, 6 vols.: E1, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6) Flush Freshwater Granite and Rainbow: Essays Hyde Park Gate News (ed. Gill Lowe) Jacobs Room Jacobs Room: The Holograph Draft (ed. Edward L. Bishop) The Letters of Virginia Woolf (ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols.: L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6) The Moment and Other Essays Melymbrosia Moments of Being Monday or Tuesday Mrs. Dalloway Night and Day Orlando A Passionate Apprentice Roger Fry Three Guineas To the Lighthouse The Waves The Years The Voyage Out Women and Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of Ones Own (ed. S. P. Rosenbaum)

Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations

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BUTI HAD SAID BUT TOO OFTEN. WHY BUT? by Judith Allen
hy but indeed? Had one of Virginia Woolf s narrators in A Room of Ones Own (1929) said but too often? And how many times is too often for that dreaded word we all anticipate, the word that may make us angry? Its a word that interrupts, undermines our most cogent assertions, attempts to transform our thinking, as it proffers a differing point of view. Butto immediately express, enact, and perhaps contradict what I have just statedit is also the word we all rely upon to implement those sometimes subversive acts. And we treasure that opportunity! The word but, therefore, in its variously resistant modes, seems to me the perfectly limited yet enormously resonant entry point for my exploration of our richly provocative conference title: Contradictory Woolf. The word butin addition to its varied functions in all of our dialoguesstands as a crucial turning point in my own complicated relationship with Woolf s writings, and can be traced back to my very first reading of A Room of Ones Own. In my initial experience of this text, I was captivated by the narrators self-conscious questioning of her own use of but, partially quoted in my title: ButI had said but too often. One cannot go on saying but. One must finish the sentence somehow, I rebuked myself. Shall I finish it, ButI am bored! But why was I bored? (AROO 104). I knew that I would go back to this passageas I have many times over more than twenty yearsfor those self-conscious references to but always called for further investigation. My focus on words began with an earlier close reading of the beginning of Woolf s To the Lighthouse (1927). The equivocation was palpable as I noted the words if, may, seemed, perhaps, and but in the interchange between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay as they responded to their son Jamess longed for trip to the lighthouse: Yes, of course, if its fine tomorrow; But,it wont be fine; But it may be fine I expect it will be fine; No going to the Lighthouse, James; Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow (TL 9,10,11, 26, emphasis added). This exemplary dialogue conveys the conflictual relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, expressed by the repetitive equivocation and/or certainty of their responses. His parents dialogue provides us with the contradictory yes/no, including the resistance of Mr. Ramsays but, and Mrs. Ramsays retaliatory use of but in her attempt to override her husbands negativity. My subsequent interest in Woolf s use of the word but, and in the political ramifications of but, however, did not emanate from this early reading of To the Lighthouse, although the indeterminate language seemed to jump off each page. The first page of A Room of Ones Own, however, was reminiscent of To the Lighthouse, permeated as it was with similar terms of equivocation: try, might, may, seemed, and, of course, but (AROO 3). Interrogating what the words meant, there were repetitious questions about the title, women and fiction, of what it might mean, what the narrator may have meant it to mean, and offering additional interpretations of what this title might mean, at least six times on that first page. The narrator seemed to be questioning any semblance of certainty regarding what the words meant, for the words seemed not so simple (AROO 3). But the narrator found that the most

CONTRADICTORY WOOLF

interesting examination of these differing optionsinextricably mixed together had one caveat: I should never be able to come to a conclusion (AROO 3). No nuggets of truth prevailed; indeterminacy ruled. And so I forged ahead, with some trepidation, searching for a topic for my first graduate seminar on Virginia Woolf, and kept returning to the narrators question: But why was I bored? With some semblance of relief, it was settled: Boredom will be my topic! Of course, being bored was an important aspect of this passage, as immediately explained by a description of Mr. As novel, with the dominance of the letter I and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree it casts within its shade. Clearly, nothing will grow there (AROO 104). The creative energy of Mr. As mind was blocked, expressing dryness, a distinct lack of life, and it certainly shared much with the compartmentalized mind of the critic, Mr. B, for his feelings no longer communicated, and his sentences were dead on arrival. There is no Mr. C in this text, but we are directed to a very different kind of sentence written by Coleridge, for in ones mind it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas and has the secret of perpetual life (AROO 105). I began to question the relationship between the lifelessness of Mr. As writing and the complex functions of the word but. But more importantly, I questioned writing a paper on the word but? As a pre-medical student, taking mostly required math and science courses, I spent much time looking through a microscopeexploring the building blocks of life, the structure of cells, studying DNA, chemical formulasand had little experience writing papers. Given my background in sciencea seemingly obvious contextual force in my life at that timeI had questions regarding Woolf s intense interest in how meanings are determined, who has the power to designate those meanings, and what part context plays in this important endeavor. I think now about those invisible presences (MOB 80) that held sway in my life, although I had not yet read Woolf s Moments of Being, and was just beginning to think about the infinite possibilities of context. Always in processtext, contexts, readerswe can only speculate about the exceptionally complicated interactions, and the role of context in an extremely complex reading process. Woolf is clearly interested in context and contingency, and her writings utilise multiple points of view, differing seasons, differing time-frames, to intentionally vary contexts, and show contingency. Ultimately, we have learned from studies by Hayden White, M.M Bakhtin, and othersincluding Woolfthat context is undecidable (White 186). As readers, we are pushed to be critical thinkers, to come to our own conclusions (CR2 258), and to accept being in a state of uncertainty. Questions abound. What contextual forces impact our own conclusions, and how conscious are we of any of this? Many of these issues will be addressed in the latter part of this paper, for it is this undecidability that relates to the problematics of language, the multifaceted nature of words, and our inability to know people, our world, or the words from which they are constructed, with any degree of definitiveness. Looking once again at what I have come to call the but passage, quoted above, I began to focus on its repetitive aspects. After five buts in as many sentences, I assume that the reader of A Room of Ones Own is not so much interested in why the narrator is bored, as why she keeps repeating but. Why does this essay, which, incidentally, also begins its first and last sentences with the word but, seem to reverberate with its significance? Indeed, its sentences do get finishedbut with enough equivocation so that but, along

Why but?

with perhaps and might, becomes, inevitably, the expected conclusionor rather, the lack of conclusion. In fact, throughout this essay, Woolf s narrators inform their readers of their difficulties, talk about their feelings, and speculate about the forms and methods used to express their experiences. That the first word of A Room of Ones Own is but does not seem mere chance, for Woolf s narrator in The Modern Essay declares that the essay should lay us under a spell with its first word (CR 1 211). One does wonder, however, what kind of spell is cast upon the reader when but not only begins a text, but is also, in the immediately established dialogue, transferred to the readers lips by the narrator? By giving this line to the reader, the narrator places herself in the position of the one asked (D4 361), thus transferring a sense of uncertainty, as well as resistance, to the reader. Interestingly, the varied definitions of butincluding except, outside, and on the contraryto name just a few, seem to echo the marginal position of women in our culture; and quite significantly, several of these words are used in A Room of Ones Own to describe the woman walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical (AROO 101, emphasis added). But, as a noun, also refers to a fish, which may fit in with Woolf s fishing metaphor; a but, in Scotland, refers to the outer room, especially the kitchen of a cottage. And, of course, to but in is to interrupt, interfere, or to thrust against. All of these reverberate in some sense with Woolf s usage. With the constant intrusion of but, the text simultaneously resonates with the multiple interruptions in womens lives and the resultant openness created by these breaks. One thinks Mary Carmichael must have been using but to break the sentence and break the sequence (AROO 95), for Lifes Adventure surely moves in this way. It seems, very simply, that but will serve to negate the state of boredom which Woolf s narrator both describes and questions, for but refuses that boredom by leaving things open, creating new possibilities; this coincides, of course, with what Woolf considers a necessary vitality, the essence of life. But, in its ambiguity, functions as a connective, as a way of continuing and extending, although it also resists that continuity, cuts things off, and most importantly, negates what was said before its appearance. One can assume that something preceded the narrators opening word, as one always assumes with but that something will follow. But, in its linkage with the marginality of women, serves to enact their exclusion and oppression with its strategically placed interruptions. Leading up to the iconic scene of refusal at the library door, the narrators thoughts turn to that wild flash of imagination (AROO 7) in the essays of Lamb as speculation about Lambs thinking regarding Miltons possible revision of Lycidas, as well as her own thinking about alterations of major literary works, and whether those revisions improved the style or the meaning: But then one would have to decide what is style and what is meaning, a question whichbut here I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the waywith black gown and not white wings (AROO 7, emphasis added). The narrators quest is now interrupted by but, as her path was previously intercepted and diverted by the Beadle. But by interrupting the sentence as well as her entrance to the library, also interrupts her thoughts and imaginings, her intellectual curiosity, and, most importantly, her desire. What follows but is the fact of her exclusion. Her imagination shrinks into the backgroundas does her all-important freedom. This imaginative freedom, although negated,

CONTRADICTORY WOOLF

is, as Wolfgang Iser asserts in another context, still on the pagestill visible to the reader, and thus, still a viable option (Iser 169). Also visible to the reader, and explicitly foregrounded by Woolf s various narrators throughout the text, are ellipses and parentheses; interrupting and intruding themselves into sentences, they call attention to the constructed nature of the text, and to the process of writing. As the narrator poses a question regarding truth and illusion, the ellipsis takes center stage: Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place? For truththose dots mark the spot where, in search of truth, I missed the turning up to Fernham (AROO 15). This questioning of truth and illusion is also replicated as the ellipsis blurs textual boundaries. This mark of punctuation, the ellipsis, is talked about as if the dots which structure it were really marks on the road to Headingley. That no conclusion was found on the road to Headingley similarly blurs boundaries and calls attention to the text as a construct. The narrators pursuit of truth continues with a trip to the British Museum Library; here the narrator designates a different meaning for this particular ellipsis, this time equating it with time, surprise, and confusion: the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment (AROO 26). Readers may also experience surprise at this confusing interruption of the action, for it also foregrounds a direct question to women: Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? (AROO 26). This direct question, albeit qualified, serves to distance her readers in order to gain their attention as the narrator continues to investigate her inability to capture the truth about women. The clearly contradictory aspect is that the most discussed animal in the universe is essentially indescribable, since there is no mark on the wall to mark the precise height of women and that women are almost unclassified (AROO 89)almost meaning all but. This is an important term for Woolf, as her readers try to ascertain definitions, question definitions, and applaud the resistance to definitions. I will add more on the problematics of definingas it appears in Three Guineas (1938) in a latter section of this paper. Another device which functions to distance readers by its intrusion into A Room of Ones Own is the parenthesis. Working as an aside, it can add something new that may seem out of place, or abruptly change the direction of the thoughts being conveyed; in another sense, it makes what had been contextualized in a certain way suddenly become the context for the newly added parenthetical statement. This sometimes self-conscious disruption of the narrators train of thought also serves to disrupt the thinking of her readers; it moves the reader off the path, as the narrator was moved off the path by the Beadle. One is reminded of the Time Passes section of To the Lighthouse where catastrophes are scattered, parenthetically, to place them in the context of another kind of destruction; that they are mentioned as Kafka might mention themso very nonchalantlyalso serves to foreground them, to empower them. These interruptions by but, and by the ellipses and parentheses, serve as a partial solution to the narrators boredom with the discourse of Mr. As and Mr. Bs writings. Mr. Bs mind seemed separated into different chambers (AROO 105), and this lack of connection seemed to deny access to his feelings, and in his sentences, it is the power of suggestion that one most misses (AROO 105); this suggestiveness is a call for openness, for contradictions, and a certain wildness. The smooth lawns (AROO 9) of the mens colleges, perceived as lacking this

Why but?

wildness, are compared to the wild unkempt grasses (AROO 20) of the womens college at Fernham, for the roughness and disorder hold more interest. The narrators boredom is also a critique of this smoothness, of the hard and the barren; these qualities are aligned with cultural traditions that exclude women, with language and forms that cannot express womens lives, and with a rigidity that negates creativity; it is also a critique of an age of pure, of self-assertive virility (AROO 106), of Fascism. There is much that acts to counter the rigidity and fixity of patriarchal institutions, the lifeless inscriptions of members of those institutions, and the spirit of peace which prevails when one stays on the paths, or in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge (AROO 6). For the narrator, trespassing, crossing boundaries, or stepping on the forbidden turf are precipitated by a degree of excitement, and by the mysterious property of ideas; these thoughts flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still (AROO 5). When intercepted and chased from the turf onto the gravel, however, these thoughts and ideas, imaged by Woolf s narrator as my little fishwith fish being another definition of butare sent into hiding. Using but in exchange for fish, and sending it into hiding, reiterates the banishment of the imagination, for in getting rid of this mode of interruption one smoothes out the text as one smoothes out the turf. This sequestering of ideas, of imagination, where the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away (AROO 6), is equated with a dull and lifeless quality. The smooth, firm, and polished surface is reminiscent of F.T. Marinettis Futurist Manifesto of 1909with its dreamt of metalization of the human body, and is equated with speed, violence, contempt for women and a repetition of the past, with war as necessary for the health of the human spirit (Benjamin 241). To counter this stifling of ideas, imagination, and creativity, A Room of Ones Own performs the essayistic, privileging mobility, wandering, and the crossing of boundaries. But enables this activity by opening up possibilities. The desire for movement, and all that that engenders is evident in the deprivation of this activity; even the fact that there was no walking tour (AROO 54) for women contributed to the stifling of their thoughts and imaginings. And if one returns to the varied meanings of the gravelthe place of her exclusionone finds both bewildering and mysterious amongst those meanings; by making the statement, the gravel is the place for me (AROO 60), she has assertively taken backownedher designated place of exclusion, with its rough mystifying surface. The privileging of movement echoes in the oscillation between the rambling (AROO 83) and strolling (AROO 6) of the narrators and the constraints that try to maintain the nineteenth centurys notion that women be silent and still. Subverting societys rules, these women must take the wrong turnas the use of but was responsible for the wrong turn to Headinglyduck around the corner, and let the line of their thoughts dip into the stream (AROO 5). This activity is both their resistance, and their tactic for survival. The desire of a narrator to expose what was in her mind to the air (AROO 19) expresses her need for freedom. As the narrator thinks about the mysterious qualities of the mind, and just how it functions, she simultaneously enacts this process before her readers; her readers/audience watch her as she thinks about the mind thinking, and her tentative conclusion regarding this state of the mind is that it seems to have no single state of being. Most importantly, it is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives (AROO 101).

CONTRADICTORY WOOLF

Woolf s narrator constantly speculates about the readers response to her assigned topic, and her own effectiveness with the assignment. In her attempt to show how one came to hold the opinions one holds (AROO 4), to show the process of her thinking, Woolf s self-consciousness regarding language, punctuation, changes of narrative voice, and changes of scene becomes a prominent strategy. This self-consciousness produces an interesting effect on her readers, for it both engages them and distances them, continuing the oscillating movement that repudiatesin yet another waythe rigidity and fixity of forms, institutions, people, and the language used to construct them. This distancing of the reader has some resonance with Bertolt Brechts estrangement effect. One of the important goals of Brechts Epic Theatre, which relates to many of Woolf s novels1and particularly to A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineasis to have her audience discover the conditions of life. Sallie Sears sees aspects of Brechts Epic Theatre in the context of the audience of Miss La Trobes play in Between the Acts (1941), and finds that it is predicated upon the assumption (so crucial to modernists like Brecht, Artaud, Peter Weiss) that an audience that sees deplorable truths, hitherto unconscious, hidden, or denied, will not only deplore, but seek to abolish the circumstances that brought them into being (Sears 229). This takes place through an interruption of happenings (as Woolf s narrator is interrupted when she opens the door of the library, or the text is interrupted by but, by a parenthetical comment, or a reference to punctuation). The narrator also periodically interrupts her own narrative in order to undermine the illusion her audience has accepted. To accomplish this, the narrator simply points out to the reader that she is creating scenes and fictionalizing, thus causing them to acknowledge that the impervious boundary between fact and fiction is not so easily discernible. Like the songs, captions, and exposed stagecraft of Brechts Epic Theatre, Woolf s use of but, the ellipses, the parentheses, and the other self-conscious references to the text function to impair the illusion. Calling attention to the constructed nature of the text, to words as words, and to what may have been withheld, serves to distance the readersto make them, at times, spectators or outsidersthus enabling them to critique those institutions which continue to structure and have power over their lives, and perhaps to enact some necessary resistance. In their repeated use of but, Woolf s narrators did enact this necessary resistance, and it was interesting to explore the manuscript versions of A Room of Ones Own, along with the Typescript excerpts from Women & Fiction, when finally published in 1992. Referring to Kiplings books which puzzled Woolf s narrator, she went on to call him a man of undoubted genius, and stated that nothing can surpass his vividness, but she definitely had a but to intrude on this positive description: Butwere buts beginning again? What did I mean by but this time? (Women & Fiction 189). These questions about but are clarified as the narrator continues to discuss the works of Galsworthy as she finds that it was precisely the same but that had interposed itself between me and Mr. Kipling (189). She found that she was saying but then to the emotional values. The sentiment of these famous writers seemed to me sentimentality; their reality to me was unreal (189). She was clearly an outsider to these works, and found that it is no more possible for me to write an intelligent criticism of their books than to write intelligently of the Boat race, when I do not know bow from stern or cox from stroke (190). Difference was paramount, and this is clearly established in Three Guineas as the need for resistance

Why but?

becomes evident as the daughters of educated men (a term defining women in relation to men, which in this and its variant forms is repeated over 100 times) work to transform the language of patriarchy, assess their need to stop repeating the words and methods of their brothers, following the procession of their fathers and brothers, or being educated in their brothers schools. Woolf s A Room of Ones Own both expresses and enacts its cultural critique by making certain that its readers not only see the significance of the women of their culture as outsiders, but also appropriate that position for themselves. In Woolf s 1938 feminist anti-war polemic, Three Guineas, she also utilizes her textual strategies for this purpose, but also has her narrator create an Outsiders Society. There is no desire to merge our identity in yours; follow and repeat and score still deeper the old worn ruts in which society, like a gramophone whose needle has stuck, is grinding out with intolerable unanimity Three hundred millions spent upon arms (TG 105). Staying outside, they infuse that society with their values, for the Outsiders Society will not fight with arms. We find that the very word, society sets tolling in memory the dismal bells of a harsh music: shall not, shall not, shall not. You shall not learn; you shall not earn; you shall not own; you shall notsuch was the society relationship of brother and sister for many centuries (TG 105). As the word society is repeated eleven times on this page, and the word, inevitably is also repeated, we gain a sense of the certaintythe rigidity of societys sanctioned operation: Inevitably, we ask ourselves, is there not something in the conglomeration of people into societies that releases what is most selfish and violent, least rational and humane in the individuals themselves? Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will (TG 105, emphasis added). I certainly noticed the repetition in Three Guineas with my first reading, but it took many close readings to gain a sense of the extent of Woolf s use of the rhetorical device of repetition in this text (Caughie 116). Interestingly, this ongoing discovery of repetitive words and phrasesafter multiple readingsis responsible for my decision to focus my latest paper on an iconic passage, the contested scene of the burning of the word feminist. What was so interesting about my latest re-reading of Three Guineas was the realisation that Woolf s narrators do not simply allude to and repeat many significant words defined by those in power, but repetitively refer to these words as words: the word patriotism (TG 9), the word influence (TG 17), the word free (TG 101), and the word society (TG 105). This distinction is significantin ways reminiscent of Rene Magrittes Pipe paintingas it interrogates the problematics of representation, of definition, addressed so self-consciously in Three Guineas. As Laura Marcus notes, Woolf emphasises the written nature of her text and the politically loaded nature of words (Marcus 227), for these words convey the multifarious constructs we designate as meanings. Within this framework, the burning of the word feminist remains, not surprisingly, fraught with controversyand perhaps, like so many words throughout this text, difficult to define. Interestingly, the word definition also permeates this text, for there are repeated attempts to define words, and to express the complex difficulties of such an endeavor. After multiple readings of this scene of burning the word feminist, I was struck by the heretofore unseen repetition of the word word, twenty-five times in this paragraph; the word feminist is to be destroyed because it is an old word, a vicious and corrupt

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word, a dead word that is now obsolete and without a meaning (TG 101). As I explored the various words that were repeated, I read the narrators commentary about repetition, education, history, as these subjects were interrogated. It was not surprising that many of these repeated words such as education, society, influence, and atmosphere, resonate and interact with each other, and with what is generally construed as context, as they each serve to illuminate the gendering of difference. In my exploration of difference, I examined the interaction between context, difference and repetition. Theorists of language, culture, and history, such as Bakhtin, Hayden White, and Woolf, to name a few, have offered interpretations of context that serve to illuminate the relationship between difference and context, and are so important to their mutual interaction with repetition. Before I elaborate on this significant relationship, I will briefly review some approaches to context that elaborate on this terms infinite possibilities. As Mikhail Bakhtin asserts: The meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context; in fact, there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage. And importantly, contexts do not stand side by sideas if unaware of one another, but are in a state of constant tension, or incessant interaction and conflict (Bakhtin 79). Woolf s memoir, A Sketch of the Past, begun in 1939, delves into the perceived contexts that have shaped the writer we have come to know as Virginia Woolf, and highlights those invisible presences; these include the influence of her mother, along with public opinion; what other people say and think; all those magnets which attract us this way to be like that, or repel us the other and make us different from that. Seeing herself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream (MOB 80), resonates with both the power and the inscrutable nature of context. That Woolf s narrator speaks of invisible presences and cannot describe the stream is not far from the tagline of the web-site, War in Context.2 The tagline, With Attention to the Unseen, also resonates with Hayden Whites view of the changes taking place in our ongoing reinterpretation of the conception of context: The text-context relationship, once an unexamined presupposition of historical investigation, has become a problemin the sense of becoming undecidable, elusive, uncreditableAnd yet this very undecidability of the question of where the text ends and the context begins and the nature of their relationship appears to be a cause for celebration, to provide a vista onto a new and more fruitful activity for the intellectual historian, to authorize a posture before the archive of history more dialogistic than analytic, more conversational than assertive and judgmental (White 186). Repetition is intricately connected with context and hence with difference. With each repetition, an incremental change takes place, altering the meaning in some substantial waycreating difference. It revitalizes and reinvents the wordas it is simultaneously interpreted by different readers in different ways; it is this aspect of languageits multifaceted naturethat Woolf s writing enacts. Repetition enacts a sense of continuity, of movement, even as the contextual changes interrupt with difference. Gilles Deleuze, in introducing repetition in Difference and Repetition finds that repetition and resemblance are different in kindextremely so (Deleuze 1), as he begins a study that reflects on the works of many well-known thinkers on this complex subject. In this mode, Deleuze provides a significant part of David Humes thesis: Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it. He finds that Humes famous thesis takes us to the heart of the problem, for repetition does change something in the mindand this is the essence of modification

Why but?

(Deleuze 90). For Deleuze, repetition encompasses difference, and is not the same thing occurring over and over again for there is variation in and through every repetition. Relating to the mysteries of context, repetition also functions to affirm the power of the new and unforeseeable. As a creative activity of transformation, it aligns the new with creativity, and, importantly, finds convention and habit destabilized (Parr 223-25). For Nietzsche, according to Deleuze, heterogeneity arises out of intensity, and calls forth a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity while it works as a possibility for reinvention (Deleuze 136). Within this repetitive mode, words placed in new contexts are continually transformed, reinvented, and have new life. The ashes from the cremation of the word feminista Phoenix-like symbol of regenerationto be stirred with a goose-feather pen, clearly suggests the possibility of creating new words (TG 101-2). But the suggestion that women follow your methods and repeat your wordsis not true. The two classes differ enormously (TG 17). Clearly, though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes (TG 18), and construct different answers. In ways similar to the function of the word but, Woolf s narrators can suddenly undermine a statement made within a sentence, or a few paragraphs down, or, as in the case of Three Guineas, about 34 pages later. As but undermines and resists, so Woolf s narrators remain unreliable and surprising. Perhaps Woolf likes them to be a little wild. Irony frequently rules. In this case, it relates to the burning of the word feminist, why this word needs to be destroyed, and Woolf s narrators statements regarding her suspicions of labels, for they kill and constrict (TG 137-8). As we look back from the vantage point of 2011, we are still grappling with the problematics of language, the dissemination of information from television, radio, newspapers, blogs, social media, mainstream media, alternative media, wikileaks and government leaks (which may be newspaper leaks). Virginia Woolf s writings about words both express and enact her politics, while questioning the language used to communicate to the public. Woolf, like Walter Benjamin, looked back, and as Angeliki Spiropoulou makes clear: Woolf is well aware that how the past is represented is a major stake in the feminist and wider political struggle, and leads her to criticize official historiography for its exclusionist and silencing effects and seeks to develop an alternative historiography which would do justice to the oppressed and the defeated (Spiropoulou 3). In the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, the uprisings known as the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street and worldwide Occupy movements, and too many wars and struggles to mention, we look back to Woolf s narrative commentary regarding the 300,000,000 British Pounds (TG 8) for arms, repeated seven times in Three Guineas, and the repetition of the unseen photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses (TG 11) of children killed in the war in Spain (1936-39), and speaks of the horror and disgust (TG 11) of these photos. Woolf s relevance to the world today is always coupled with the question of how she would respond to the drone strikes, the new weaponry, the violence, and the language used to communicate these horrors. What would she think of social media? Blogging? With the Occupy protests, would she find that remaining outside, but in co-operation with its aims (TG 143) the best answer? Of course, answers are problematicas Woolf s narrator expresses on the first page of Three Guineas. Looking back to Walter Lippmanns Public Opinion, a work written in 1922, and in Leonard and Virginia Woolf s library, I think his words would echo today: Words, like

10

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currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images today, another tomorrow. There is no certainty whatever that that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the readers mind as it did in the reporters (Lippmann 42). We can say, as Woolf s narrator says in Three Guineas: Things repeat themselves it seems. Pictures and voices are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago (TG 141). As I reflect on Virginia Woolf s expression and enactment of her important ideas regarding language, I think she would simply echo the words the late Tony Judt conjured up when asked about his epitaph: I did words.3 Notes
1. 2. 3. For other discussions relating Brechts Epic Theatre to Woolf s novels, see Bishop; Johnston. See warincontext.org Historian and public intellectual Tony Judt died 6 August 2010 at age 62. In an obituary in The Guardian on 7August 2010, entitled: Tony Judt: the captivating wit and intellect of my friend and teacher, Saul Goldberg related Judts answer to a question regarding his choice for his epitaph. Tony Judt simply said he would want it to read: I did words. I thought of Woolf.

Works Cited
Bakhtin, M.M. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Boston: Harvard UP, 1986. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Bishop, Edward L. The Subject in Jacobs Room. Modern Fiction Studies 38.1 (1992): 147-175 Caughie, Pamela. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Athlone Press,1994. Foucault, Michel. This Is Not A Pipe. Illustrations and letters by Rene Magritte. Trans. and ed. James Harkness. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Johnston, Georgia. Class Performance in Between the Acts: Audiences for Miss LaTrobe and Mrs. Manresa. Woolf Studies Annual 3 (1997): 61-75. Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Marcus, Laura. The Cambridge Companion to Woolf. Ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, Cambridge: CUP, 2000. Parr, Adrian, ed. The Deleuze Dictionary. New York: Columbia UP, 2005 Sears, Sallie. Theater of War: Virginia Woolf s Between the Acts. Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant. Ed. Jane Marcus, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983. Spiropoulou, Angeliki. Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin. London: Palgrave, 2010. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of Ones Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957. . The Common Reader First Series. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 19771984. . Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. . Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc, 1966. . To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1955. . Women & Fiction. The Manuscript Versions of A Room of Ones Own. Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum. Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1992.

WOOLF, CONTEXT, AND CONTRADICTION by Michael H. Whitworth

wenty years ago Virginia Woolf s oeuvre expanded significantly. Of course between her death and 1992, many essays had been published posthumously, as had letters, diaries, and autobiographical writings. But 1992 saw the arrival of ten new novels by Woolf, maybe twenty. In addition to the plain, unannotated editions that many of us had first read, whether published by the Hogarth Press, Penguin, Grafton, or Harcourt Brace, there appeared affordable annotated editions from Oxford University Press, in their Worlds Classics imprint, and from Penguin, as Twentieth-Century Classics. (Excellent annotations have also appeared in the Shakespeare Head and the Hogarth Definitive editions, but, as editions intended for the scholarly library market, these did not have the same impact as their paperback counterparts). In addition to Mrs Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf, we discovered two new novels, Mrs Dalloway with annotations by Elaine Showalter, and Mrs Dalloway with annotations by Claire Tomalin; in 2000 followed a fourth new Woolf novel, Mrs Dalloway with annotations by David Bradshaw. I suspect I was not alone in having mixed feelings when I began to teach and to write using the new texts. While the dominant feeling was one of delight and excitement at having such a resource to use and to share with students, there was also a sentimental regret at the practical nuisance of having to lay aside familiar copies, unannotated by any scholarly editor, but full of ones own underlinings and marginal comments. There was also embarrassment at realising that one had not asked the kinds of questions that the annotators had asked, that one had not read Woolf s novels as carefully and as thoroughly as they deserved. But more importantly, there was a worrying suspicion that annotation was not pure gain; that there was a more complicated economy at work in which, by gaining a sharper sense of Woolf s historical referents, particularly in relation to the topography of London, one lost, or at least found it harder to focus on, Woolf s artistry, her formal patterning. The older Mrs Dalloway could be understood in the terms of high modernism, or the New Critical construction of it: it was characterised by echoes and anticipations woven through the text, producing a complex spatial form, and that spatial form served to remove the events of the novel from the concerns of the everyday world. The newer Mrs Dalloways seemed to be closer to realist or naturalist masterpieces, characterised by intense attention to the specific details of urban life, particularly topography and toponymy. Should annotators in some way restrain themselves, or alter their focus, in order to preserve those formal qualities? Or might the palace of wisdom be reached via the road of excess? In thinking about annotation, I would like to emphasise three major strands in Woolf criticism. One, text-focused, is concerned with formal patterns within the text; New Critical. Woolf was accepted so late into the canon that her novels were not worked over to the extent as Eliots poems or Joyces fictions, but there are nevertheless significant examples of critics working within a largely formalist framework, and some were very perceptive readers of Woolf. In the period 1941 to 1975 the relative paucity of background material (diaries, letters, etc.) forced them to focus on the text. Another strand, starting later, is concerned

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with Woolfs political objectives: primarily feminist, but also, slightly later, taking in broader social politics and anti-imperialist agenda. A third, later still, attempted to return her texts to their historical contexts. A significant moment for this strand was Alex Zwerdlings Virginia Woolf and the Real World (1986), though of course the earliest of its chapters had appeared in the late 1970s. These strands are not mutually incompatibleone can be formalist-feministhistoricist, for examplenor is this analysis intended to be comprehensive. While the three approaches need not be incompatible, institutional politics has meant that in practice they often are. One phase of such disputes came in the 1970s and 80s when those who subscribed to the idea of the transcendent art-work were confronted with critics who saw literature as having political motivations and immediate political relevance. The dialectic between political relevance and historicism has been very neatly described by Jonathan Dollimore in his Radical Tragedy: the demand from students in the late 1960s that literary studies be made relevant to the pressing political issues of the moment raised the problem of whether, if the historical and cultural otherness of literary works were dissolved in relevance, there was any merit in studying them; the rise of historicism, in Dollimores account, is the next turn of the dialectic (Dollimore xlviii-l). For the last ten or fifteen years, various kinds of historicism appear to have been in the ascendant; going further back, the New Historicism in early modern studies paved the way for the return of less-theoretically inspired historicisms, including some that were explicitly opposed to literary theory and new historicism. It is notable in early modern studies that, while historicism still appears to be an immensely productive critical mode, there has been a reaction against it. This is apparent in the book series Shakespeare Now, published by Continuum, and in the attempted recuperation of the pejorative term presentism as a label for a critical project (Fernie). Even as a fully annotated edition of Woolf appears, in the form of the Cambridge Edition, there are signs of a reaction against historicism in Woolf studies. In this context, what does contextualisation mean as a practice in editing and in criticism? I would like to consider some of the choices faced by the annotator and critic, and how they relate to the possible conflict of critical modes. I will give five examples, three drawn from my editing work on Night and Day (1919), and two from critical considerations of Mrs Dalloway. The first instance concerns what looks like a topographical allusion. In chapter 18 of Night and Day, as William Rodney and Katharine Hilbery return from Lincoln to the village of Lampsher, they decide to stop the carriage and walk the last two miles. About two miles from Lampsher the road ran over the rounded summit of the heath, a lonely spot marked by an obelisk of granite, setting forth the gratitude of some great lady of the eighteenth century who had been set upon by highwaymen at this spot and delivered from death just as hope seemed lost. In summer it was a pleasant place, for the deep woods on either side murmured, and the heather, which grew thick round the granite pedestal, made the light breeze taste sweetly; in winter the sighing of the trees was deepened to a hollow sound, and the heath was as grey and almost as solitary as the empty sweep of the clouds above it. Here Rodney stopped the carriage and helped Katharine to alight. (ND 249)

Woolf, Context, and Contradiction

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Is there a deeper reason why Woolf has her characters alight at this particular monument? Were her readers in 1919 supposed to recognize the obelisk of granite as a reference to a particular place or to a type of place? The topography is that of classic realism, mingling actual places (Lincoln) with imaginary ones (Lampsher), and at this point on the road between the two we may not know whether we are in the actual or the imaginary. Readers who have used Julia Briggss 1992 edition of the novel may feel they know the answer, but for my own annotations I decided to begin as if I were the first person doing the job. Various internet searches led me to a monument in Wiltshire known as the Robbers Stone. The monument has an inscription explaining its origins: the stone commemorates the occasion when a man, Mr Dean of Imber, was attacked by four highwaymen; during the pursuit of the highwaymen, one of them dropped dead, and the other three were captured and sentenced to transportation. Another lesser-known monument marks the place where the highwayman died, and while the first cannot be called an obelisk, the second has at least the right proportions (Bradley 256). Clearly, however, the narrative inscribed on the Robbers Stone does not exactly correspond to that on Woolf s Lincolnshire obelisk. The Robbers Stone is also not in Lincolnshire, and it seems that Briggs, in making her annotations, felt that if there were a real precedent for the granite obelisk, it ought to be in that county. Her annotations suggest that the model is the Dunston Pillar, a so-called land lighthouse built by Sir Francis Dashwood in 1751, about six miles south of Lincoln (Briggs 446). When first built it was 92 feet high with a 15 foot lantern on top; in 1810 the lantern was replaced by a statue of George III, itself later removed. Though the Dunston Pillar did not mark the gratitude of any person for deliverance from highwayman, an early twentieth century guidebook describes the heath as a lonely tract where inhabitants had not only been murdered by highwaymen, but had even been lost in the storms and snow-drifts on the desolate and roadless moor (Rawnsley 167) ; the Pillar provided travellers with a much-needed point of orientation. Again, the Pillar fails to match Woolf s obelisk in several respects: it is not a memorial to a specific incident of robbery; it is not an obelisk in form, and it is far taller than anything we might call an obelisk. Its status as a land-lighthouse, however, is suggestive when we consider Ralph Denhams later image of the Hilberys house as a lighthouse, a beacon of culture in the trackless waste (ND 418). However, while that association may have been in Woolf s mind, her transformation of the Dunston Pillar completely obscures it. Moreover, so far as I can see, neither the Stone nor the Pillar relate to a story that might inform the narrative at this point. Both might be sources, but Woolf isnt alluding to them in the conventional sense. Nevertheless, I would argue that it is valuable to have an annotation pointing to both of them, because it prevents the text being tied too rigidly to either. But, while disconnecting the fictional pillar from any single referent is interpretatively liberating, the implicit decisionthat the real-world referents are the focus of investigationneeds to be called into question. The dominant expectation of annotations is that they will relate a particular phrase to a particular phrase, event, place, person, or object. Whats harder to annotate, though not impossible, are the passages where a whole narrative unit resembles one in another novel; or, even more abstractly, where it suggests a general type of narrative unit. I wonder if readers unfamiliar with Night and Day might be persuaded that the passage above came from an obscure novel by Thomas Hardy. The elements are all distinctly Hardyean: a heathland; a couple whose relationship is in trouble;

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a place or object that carries strong associations with the past; a melodramatic narrative recalled at an awkward moment. Even the pathetic fallacy of woods that murmur and trees that sigh recalls Hardy, most obviously The Woodlanders. It is possible to point out this sort of family resemblance between narrative units, but in scholarly annotation it is not frequently done. The reasons why not are obvious enough: there is a potential loss of rigour; annotation could turn into a belle lettristic compendium of resemblances which seem insignificant to all but the annotator. But the consequences are a schism within criticism: those who read with an eye for literary lines of descent might feel that they are reading a different book from those who annotate with an eye on the particular. The problem of annotating a single phrase in isolation may also be brought into focus by my second illustration, Night and Days single allusion to the idea of the unearned increment, and its more dispersed references to notions of national efficiency. The phrase arises as Katharine Hilbery reflects on the familys failure to complete a biography of Richard Alardyce. In a subtle and condensed metaphor, it seems to Katharine that Their increment became yearly more and more unearned (ND 35). The concept of the unearned increment dated back to the political theory in the 1870s, and became more prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the state became more involved in creating infrastructure such as gas supplies and sewerage systems (Whitworth, Virginia Woolf 37-8). In 1891 J. A. Hobson provided a pointed example from the Lancashire town of Bury: the municipal authorities had wanted to raise sixty thousand pounds from the rates to provide sewage-works; although such improvements would have provided some benefit to all the towns inhabitants, the benefit would have been felt disproportionately by the dominant local landowner, Lord Derby, because the ground value of his land would have greatly increased (Hobson 195). What Katharine implies, then, is that the value of Richard Alardyces poetry has continued to rise, in spite of the his daughters neglect of the estate; the value of literary works might rise because of the work of other authors who continue the tradition, or because of the works of critics who maintain interest in them. One could annotate this passage in several different ways. There is a personal, familial aspect to the phrase. When Adeline Virginia Stephen was born, her god-father, James Russell Lowell, had sent Leslie Stephen the following doggerel verses; they were later quoted by Maitland in his Life and Letters. Having wished the newborn girl health, wealth, and wisdom, and her fathers wit, Lowell wishes that he inherit her mothers beauty: Now if theres any truth in Darwin And we from what was, all we are win, I simply wish the child to be A sample of Heredity, Enjoying to the full extent Lifes best, the Unearned Increment, Which Fate, her Godfather to flout, Gave him in legacies of gout. (Lowell, qtd. Maitland 319) If I have understood the verse correctly, Lowell is not particularly discriminating about the concept of Unearned Increment. He seems to conflate ones ancestral inheritance

Woolf, Context, and Contradiction

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with ones inheritance from the wider community, as if ones Darwinian heredity were not different from ones social and cultural inheritance. While it is true that one has not earned what one inherits from ones parents, that inheritance is not the same as the unearned increment. However, Lowells misunderstanding is not so much the problem as the danger that the biographical annotation might seem sufficient. Yet really at this point annotation, being tied to the particular annotated item, cannot give a full sense of how many different elements in the text tie together. I have discussed theunearned increment in relation to the novel elsewhere (Virginia Woolf 37-38), and at an earlier Virginia Woolf conference(Night and Day and National Efficiency). There are several other phrases in the novel, and semantic fields that are in themselves unworthy of annotation, that gain in significance once the unearned increment comes to light. It is significant that Marys conversations with Ralph dwell on such topics as the taxation of land values, because such taxation was often proposed as a corrective to the unearned increment. Behind this, it is worth noting that one of the models for Mary may have been Margaret Llewelyn Davies, and that her brothers were all involved to some extent in The United Committee for the Taxation of Land Values, formed in 1908; in 1910 her brother Crompton was one of its secretaries. The language of organization and efficiency in the novel also becomes more significant in the light of the unearned increment theme, the two being linked by the theme of national efficiency. Mrs Hilberys unco-ordinated attempts to write the biography without a central plan resemble the unco-ordinated institutions of the decentralized or small state. Katharine, on the other hand, is resolved on reform (ND 36). Ralph Denham is also characterized in terms of efficiency: when he decides to discourage Katharine by inviting her home to meet his family, and he justifies the move by seeing it as a courageous measure that might end the absurd passions which were the cause of so much pain and waste (394). It is unlikely that any annotator would annotate reform and measures, but their derivation from political discourse is not without significance. I would hope that by annotating unearned increment I might sharpen a readers awareness of the political dimension, and that political associations in other words would thereby become clearer; but in this territory the annotator and the contextualizing critic part company. My third set of examples raises the question of whether annotation can ever be a systematic activity, and of what its limits might be. In the United Kingdom, the requirements of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) are that research projects be articulated in terms of a key research question which is to be investigated in the light of a research method and a research context. In this context, compared to projects that have a sophisticated argument to advance, the practice of annotation can look unsystematic and unscholarly. On every page the annotator needs to respond to whatever difficulties the text has to offer, and to be wary of apparent simplicities that conceal underlying obscurities. When I applied for a grant for my work on Night and Day, the best I could offer the AHRC was to say that I would be examining every phrase in the novel, and asking what associations it might have held for Woolf s earliest readers. However, such a proposal sounds impossibly unfocused and open-ended when confronted with a quasi-scientific demand for method, and so I humbly suggested that proper names and place names would be priorities. In practice, I have found that one also investigates places that are not named but which might have been recognisable to the original audience: so, for example,

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when Katharine goes to buy a map on Great Queen Street, near Lincolns Inn Fields (ND 465), one needs to determine if there were any such map shops. (In fact there were not, but there were on nearby Long Acre.) The investigation of the granite obelisk, while not beginning with a specific place name, is a related kind of investigation. Specific places, phrases, and events are important to the way that Woolf makes meaning, but they are by no means the whole story. Any realist novel makes meaning by reference to known social semiotics, and this remains true even for modernist novels which have shattered the stable perspectives of realism. Night and Day, for example, is full of references to clothes. What does it signify that one character wears a plumcoloured velveteen dress (78), that another is dressed like a Russian peasant girl (376), that another has a yellow scarf twisted round her head (60)? What does it signify that William Rodney wears a faded crimson dressing-gown (70), and later wears light yellow gloves (179)? Night and Day is also full of references to other forms of domestic decoration and display: what does it signify that the Hilberys do not have a tablecloth on their table (97) and the Denhams do (399)? Why is there so much attention to the physical fabric of books, and what do the different bindings signify? Our attention is drawn to this by Mrs Hilberys complaint that the present generation dont print books as well as the Victorians (13), and we see at various points William Rodneys Baskerville Congreve (70), and hear remarks about cheap classics, gold-wreathed volumes, pocket Shakespeares, and lemon-coloured leaflets (19, 103, 157, 269). Such references point not to another text, nor to a place or place name, but to a cultural system of signs: what matters here is not the text of Shakespeare, but the cultural practice of producing and carrying pocket-sized editions of his works. We are all aware what it might mean in a Victorian novel for a respectable person not to wear a hat out of doors; or, more scandalously, for a woman to have her hair down; and we are sometimes aware that less practiced readers might need reminding of it. But there are codes in Victorian novels that are more obscure, and when we come to early twentieth century fiction, the process of recovery becomes still harder: social codes were less rigid, they were, quite probably, faster changing; and we have had less time to undertake the work of reconstructing them. Roland Barthes once wrote of the reality effect being created by any of those descriptive elements within a novel which could not be subsumed under one of his analytic codes (Barthes 141-8). The reality effect is a concept which is very reassuring to the exasperated and exhausted annotator. It raises the possibility that the yellow gloves might be nothing more than gloves that happen to be yellow. But until one has explored every last possibility of there being some lost social semiotic at work, one cannot ascribe the yellow gloves to the reality effect. In the case of William Rodneys light yellow gloves, it is possible to note Alexandra Orrs 1891 biography of Robert Browning, in which a description of the young poet is quoted which describes him as just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid-gloves and such things (Orr 92-3); Woolf was later to draw on this biography for Flush (1933), though it is not essential to a note to assume that Woolf had read it. The difficulty with stopping there is that Orrs association of lemon-coloured gloves and dandyism might have been peculiar to the 1830s and no longer valid in the 1910s; moreover, lemon-coloured might not signify the same as light-yellow. And, even if those problems could be ignored, to provide only one annotation risks implying that the gloves create

Woolf, Context, and Contradiction

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a particular link between William Rodney and Robert Browning. Fortunately Google Books, though unhelpful when it comes to differentiating editions and imprints of books, does allow one to search for phrases. (Or did: Googles right to the texts it has digitised has been disputed during the period of my research). By these means I was led to Gilbert Cannans Three Pretty Men, published 1916 and so exactly contemporaneous with the composition of Night and Day; in it, Clarence Wilcox, an actor, draws on a pair of light yellow gloves (Cannan 77). At one level that tells us almost nothing: it displaces us from the problem of understanding how light yellow gloves signified onto the problem of what actor might signify. That might be seen as a disappointment, but, just as failing to identify a single model for the granite obelisk might be seen as a kind of success, so too might acquiring slightly too much information about yellow gloves. We can complete the note with a forward reference to Woolf s short story The Duchess and the Jeweller (1938), in which Oliver Bacon not only possesses yellow gloves, like William Rodney, but also a crimson dressing-gown (CSF 249). This connection sets up all sorts of curious echoes: Woolf s characterisation of the jeweller places strong emphasis on clothes and appearances, as if they are there to conceal his poor origins; so there is a kind of theatricality about him. And Bacons reflection on his once limited ambition, to sell stolen dogs to fashionable women in Whitechapel (CSF 248) also returns us to the orbit of Flush. In spite of those interconnections I dont propose that the third source or analogue imposes closure on the question. We are left with the suggestion that light yellow gloves might be worn by men who are dandyish, or theatrical, or suspiciously ostentatious, but that does not necessarily mean that William Rodney is: indeed, that background might emphasise the extent to which he is not those things. And while those contexts might raise questions about the glove wearers sexuality, it would not, in this instance, be helpful to annotate as if there were a one-to-one code at work: codes do not make meaning in the same way as systems of signs, and, even if yellow gloves were used as a sign of sexual preference, to treat them as a code would be to lose their evasiveness. There is a contradiction involved in annotation: one needs to clarify the text, especially by recovering lost historical significations, but one must stop short of interpreting, and must allow the reader to continue to be the maker of meaning. To explore this kind of contradiction further, Id like to turn to two examples from Mrs Dalloway. The first concerns the scene where Rezia is in Regents Park with Septimus: I am alone; I am alone! she cried, by the fountain in Regents Park (staring at the Indian and his cross), as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where such was her darkness (MD 20-21). There is a faint echo of Heart of Darkness here, which we will have to ignore: I would like focus on the Indian and his cross. As several editions now note, this refers to a structure in the park known as the Readymoney fountain, which dates from 1869 (Bradshaw 172; Beja 150). The relevance of this goes beyond knowing where Rezia is supposed to be at that particular moment. The cross can itself be treated as a text. Most straightforwardly, it has a text on it. When it was erected it carried a plaque explaining that it was: the gift of the Cowasjee Jehangheer Ready-Money, Companion of the Star of India, a wealthy Parsee gentleman of Bombay, for the protection enjoyed by him and his Parsee fellow-countrymen under British rule in India (New Drinking-Fountain 152). What we have in the

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passage concerning Rezia is an almost paradigmatic case of a Woolfian character glancing at an object while thinking about some other topic. Such objects may seem arbitrary or even incongruous, but on further investigation they turn out to be readable in ways that hold hidden relevance to the characters situation. The Readymoney fountain is more complex than most, because it has the potential to contradict other glimpses of the British Empire that we find in Mrs Dalloway. Parsees, followers of the Zoroastrian faith, had been persecuted in Persia/Iran since the twelfth century, and there was a wave of emigration to India in the mid nineteenth century. Many Parsees did well in the British and Portuguese colonies in India, playing the role of entrepreneurs and mediators between different vested interests (Nanavutty 98-99). Jehangheers success, and his gratitude for British imperial tolerance and protection, contradict the novels more dominant note of criticism of Empire, one in which it consists of Conversion, of dashing down shrines and smashing idols. What might Rezia be thinking as she looks at the drinking fountain? Is she thinking of the similarity between herself and the Parsees, strangers in an alien culture? Does that thought then lead naturally to the thought about the Romans? Or is she thinking of the dissimilarity between the Parsees relatively strong economic and cultural position, and her more marginal one? As well as reading the text that was literally placed on the fountain, we might also consider the design of the drinking fountain as a text. While its appearance is broadly that of a Venetian gothic, when one looks more closely the eastern decorative element that conventionally forms part of Venetian gothic is here more pronouncedly Indian; the fountain is a strange hybrid of traditional English market cross with elements that might have been read as exotic. In looking at the fountain, is Rezia comparing her own peculiar cultural position to its? I do not want to resolve these questions: rather, I would like to treat this experience as typical. Placing a word, phrase, or whole novel in context does not necessarily have to narrow its meaning. By identifying the drinking-fountain, we know more or less exactly where Rezia is at this moment; but we do not know exactly what she is thinking. We know exactly what text appeared in the plaque on the fountain, but knowing that does not determine the different ways it might be interpreted, nor does it determine how its presence in Mrs Dalloway might be dealt with. The second example from Mrs Dalloway concerns Lady Brutons cry of dismay, Ah, the news from India! Commenting on this phrase, Alex Zwerdling goes on to quote some headlines from The Times in June 1923: The Times in June 1923 was full of news from India sure to disturb someone with her values: imperial police overwhelmed and brutally tortured by the villagers (2 June); Extremists Fomenting Trouble (23 June); Punjab Discontent (29 June) (Zwerdling 121). Quoting news headlines is a fairly common means of providing a thumbnail sketch of the context for a given text. It certainly keeps us close to texts, but we need to ask which texts. Why choose the Times? In this particular instance, the fact that Lady Bruton has been engaged in writing a letter to that newspaper may seem like sufficient justification. However, from what we learn of Lady Brutons politics, she was probably far more likely to have sympathised with the conservative imperialist Morning Post. I suspect that there was an element of convenience involved in Zwerdlings procedure: at the time he was writing, microfilms of the Times were far more readily available than those of other publications. If we were to take Virginia Woolf rather than Lady

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Bruton as the object of our inquiries, we might choose a different source. Woolf s diaries for 1920-1924 contain references to a huge range of newspapers: the British Weekly, Daily Express, Daily Herald, Daily Mail, Daily News, Labour Monthly, Morning Post, Pall Mall Gazette, as well as the Times. If we were to turn to the Nation and Athenaeum, which Maynard Keyness consortium acquired in 1923, we would find coverage of India that was slightly more receptive to Indian nationalism. In saying this, I do not wish to suggest that, because of its Bloomsbury connection, the Nation and Athenaeum is the correct or proper source. Lady Bruton would be unlikely to turn to it as a source of news. Rather I would suggest as an ideal for annotation and contextualization that a clash of views and opinions makes for a truer and fuller context. The remarks about annotation so far could be true of any writers, and many of them could be true of any modernist writers. Is there anything distinctive about Woolf s relation to context, and might this affect the way we deal with annotation and contextualizing reading? One way of approaching this question would be to consider Woolf s own remarks on historical context, and in particular her relation to Leslie Stephen, but such an approach would not immediately tell us anything about Woolf s novels. For that reason, it is important to ask whether there are any distinctive formal features of Woolf s novels; any good answer would acknowledge that Woolf developed a distinctive form of free indirect discourse, though it would also have to acknowledge the immense formal variety of her writing practice. What I have to say starts from the mode that is faintly visible in The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day, and which reaches its fullest form in her novels of the 1920s; which disappears for The Waves (1931) and is visible in modified forms in Flush, The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). Firstly, and at the risk of stating the obvious, Woolf very rarely employs an omniscient narrator, and when she does, she hardly ever uses it to state facts directly. She does not have a narrator who might describe calico, or cancer; nor a narrator who might explicitly historicize the action; she does not have an historian-narrator who might state, for example, that it was in this year that the Royal Commission on Shell Shock published its report. One could imagine such a sentence in Thomas Hardys novels, and just about imagine it in George Eliot, but never in Woolf s fiction. In the context of her realist forebears, her most famous sentence of this sort, On or about December 1910 sounds like a parody of historicizing narration. In the absence of such an omniscient voice, our knowledge of the external world is filtered through characters minds, and so it is filtered through sentences that combine the internal and the external. Woolf s use of the present participle is particularly interesting. A common kind of sentence in Woolf runs something like this: X, Y, and Z, thought someone, doing something in relation to something external. In one of the earliest examples, Woolf explicitly remarks upon the incongruity, and thus holds the internal and the external apart from each other: It was while she held a photograph from the Greek in her hands that she exclaimed, impulsively, if incongruously:

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My oysters! I had a basket, she explained, and Ive left it somewhere. Uncle Dudley dines with us to-night. What in the world have I done with them? (ND 140) A few years later, in Jacobs Room (1922), the incongruity of internal and externalin this case, an actionis not remarked upon: This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention. Perhaps, as Cruttendon said, we do not believe enough. Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for the matter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. (190-91) In the absence of a remark, the combination of elements becomes a riddle of sorts, and in the instance from Jacobs Room, the riddle is not hard to solve: that which Jacob wishes to destroy is the outlook of the new populist newspapers like the Daily Mail. In other instances in Jacobs Room, Bonamy thinks about whether Jacob will marry Clara, while pausing to watch the boys bathing in the Serpentine (211), an external context that clearly signals Bonamys sexuality. Elsewhere in the same novel, more cryptically, Fanny Elmer thinks about life: Ones godmothers ought to have told one, said Fanny, looking in at the window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strandtold one that it is no use making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it now, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines. (238) The globe and the steamship lines have some sort of connection to Jacobs long absence Fanny has been sustained by picture postcards for two monthsbut also hints at the world being larger and more complex than any individual can imagine. In Mrs Dalloway, there are instances where the sentence structure is more complex, and some external phenomena are folded into the characters thoughts. For example, Mr Bentley at the end of the aeroplane scene: Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of mans soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theoryaway the aeroplane shot. (MD 24) Of course Woolf does a great deal of the boring realist work of getting from lunch to dinner, but it is not the distinctive characteristic of her writing. The present-participle method allows her to be so slyly allusive. She establishes riddles in which we need to ask whether there is a relation between the internal thought and the external object of perception; and, if there is, whether there is some kind of causality involved. The indirectness of the method can create a situation in which over-specification of context, lengthy

Woolf, Context, and Contradiction

21

description of what Woolf left unstated, can look clumsy and overbearing; but such specifications and descriptions are presupposed by the text, and necessary to the interpretative process. As the example of Mr Bentley reminds us, annotations might be necessary both for the contents of the thought and the external world in which it is placed: an annotator would probably give notes for Einstein and Mendel as well as for Mr Bentleys location, Greenwich. I do not wish to claim that only one half of the construction is the province of the annotator. Rather, whats important is the way that the construction reminds us that thought always occurs in a context. What kinds of things impinge on the consciousness of the character? It is worth remarking that in Woolf the external world only rarely consists of forces that might immediately threaten the material well being of a character. The present-participle verb is very often looking or watching: verbs of detached observation rather than engagement; Mr Bentley rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich is about as engaged as it gets. Although Woolf is profoundly concerned with death, she was apparently not interested in narrating what we might call matters of life and death, or even matters of material well-being. If Bonamy is entertaining sexual thoughts about the boys in the Serpentine, then he might end up fleeing the country or in prison, but Woolf does not pursue those sorts of narrative. The closest Woolf comes to the more melodramatic mode of life hanging in the balance comes with the deaths of Rachel Vinrace and Septimus Warren Smith. Other deaths happen offstage, and what interests Woolf are the consequences for the survivors. But those philosophical and narrative preferences mean that the sorts of things that might come to light in the course of contextualising investigations do not have immediate narrative consequences. At the same time, Woolf has an overarching interest in power relations and in the ways that hegemonic worldviews manifest themselves through ideology, through institutions, and through social practices. Inequalities of power have material effects on the way her characters lives are lived, and we are reminded of those inequalities by the material landscapes that her characters inhabit. Reading Mrs Dalloway, we are in no doubt that London is an imperial metropolis, and it is clear enough how that imperialism has impacted upon Septimuss life, and, with a little more thought, on Clarissas and on Peters. So the relation of the contextual to the question of power is nearly always at one remove, displaced away from plot and event and into the world of image. But that displacement is not a deletion. So while context matters for all authors, it matters particularly for Woolf because she is concerned to establish a dialogue between inner and outer; if our picture of the outer world of her time has become faded or torn, we cannot re-establish that dialogue. Or, to change the metaphor, if the past is foreign country and we have forgotten how to speak the language, contextualization provides a phrase book and a grammar. I have suggested that Woolf s novels are often interrogative, posing questions to the reader; it is not the job of contextualization to solve those riddles, but to enrich them. Having too much information, and providing annotations that are potentially mutually contradictory, is positively desirable: it might define certain boundaries of possibility and by implication might exclude certain identifications, but within the boundaries, it keeps open the free play of the text. Moreover, as the example of the land lighthouse suggests, backgrounds unearthed by these investigations create new rhymes and patterns.

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It may sound as if I propose that we align ourselves with Mrs Hilbery and her inability to settle on any single account of Alardyces life. There is certainly something attractive about Woolf s description of Mrs Hilberys unsteady spells of inspiration, and the way they flickered over the gigantic mass of the subject as capriciously as a will-o-the-wisp, lighting now on this point, now on that (ND 35). There is certainly something attractive about the idea of annotations that flicker in this way. But they need not be capricious in the selection of subjects or in the texts that are found for them. They can be steady and illuminating without compromising the flickering and indeterminate quality of Woolf s works. It is possible to use context much as Foucault described the use of the concept of the author: as a principle of thrift that aims to stop the proliferation of meaning (Foucault 209). But a return to the full historical context, invoking texts beyond the primary text, can also unearth associations and implications which complicate meaning; furthermore, it can place the primary text in dialogue with its contemporaries and forebears. Though the factual scholarly apparatus of historical criticism sometimes appear to suggest authority and closure, historicism can reopen texts, and that reopening can place the past in new dialogues with the present. Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. The Reality Effect. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. 141-8. Beja, Morris, ed. Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. Oxford: Blackwell for the Shakespeare Head Press, 1996. Bradley, A. G. Round About Wiltshire. London: Methuen, 1907. Bradshaw, David, ed. Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Briggs, Julia, ed. Night and Day, by Virginia Woolf. London: Penguin, 1992. Cannan, Gilbert. Three Pretty Men. London: Methuen, 1916. Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Fernie, Ewan. Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism. Shakespeare Survey Volume 58: Writing about Shakespeare. Ed. Peter Holland. CUP, 2005. Cambridge Collections Online. CUP. 20 December 2011 DOI:10.1017/CCOL0521850746.017 Foucault, Michel. What is an Author? Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. Harlow: Longman, 1988. 197-210. Hobson, J.A. Problems of Poverty. London: Methuen, 1891. Maitland, F. W. The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth, 1906. Nanavutty, Piloo. The Parsis. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1977. New Drinking-Fountain in Regents Park. Illustrated London News, 55, no. 1552, 14 August 1869, 152, 160. Orr, Alexandra. Life and Letters of Robert Browning. London: Smith, Elder, 1891. Rawnsley, Willingham Franklin. Highways and Byways inLincolnshire. London: Macmillan, 1914. Showalter, Elaine. Introduction and Notes. Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, ed. Stella McNichol. London: Penguin, 1992. Tomalin, Claire, ed. Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. Oxford: OUP, 1992. Whitworth, Michael H. Virginia Woolf. Oxford: OUP, 2005. . Night and Day and National Efficiency. Unpublished paper presented at the Thirteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, Smith College, Massachusetts, 5-8 June 2003. Woolf, Virginia. Jacobs Room. Ed. Kate Flint. 1922. Oxford: OUP, 1992. . Mrs Dalloway. Ed. David Bradshaw. 1925. Oxford: OUP, 2000. . Night and Day. London: Duckworth, 1919. Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.

DID I NOT BANISH THE SOUL? THINKING OTHERWISE, WOOLF-WISE by Patricia Waugh
If I werent so sleepy, I would write about the soul. I think it is time to cancel that vow against soul description. What was I going to say? Something about the violent moods of my soul. I think I grow more & more poetic. Perhaps I restrained it, & now, like a plant in a pot it begins to crack the earthenware. Often I feel the different aspects of life bursting my mind asunder. (Virginia Woolf, Diary Saturday 21st June, 1924) One great use of the Soul has always been to account for, and at the same time to guarantee, the closed individuality of each personal consciousness. The thoughts of ones soul must unite into one self, it was supposed, and must be eternally insulated from every other soul. (William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890, 1:349).

Thinking Souls in Fictional Worlds

he aim of this essay is to develop an argument that Virginia Woolf banished the soul as what James calls the closed individuality of personal consciousness, in order to retrieve it, through her fiction, as something more closely resembling an enactivist, extended or distributed idea of mind. Part of her strategy for re-fashioning mind involved the laying bare of the assumptions and limitations of metaphysical dualism and the development of narrative techniques and a language for its deconstruction. This is not to claim that Woolf succeeded in overcoming dualism, nor that, in the end, a more distributed idea of mind would, necessarily, provide a foundation for a new conception of the soul. But at the very least, she hoped to prevent the disappearance of the soul or its shrinkage into the biological reductionisms of her own time. The thoughts of ones soul must unite into one self : fiction, as a medium for thinking selves into existence, and thinking about selves thinking, is where this argument begins. Working on To the Lighthouse, Woolf fantasised about writing a novel that might transfer thinking directly onto the page, a novel made solely & with integrity of ones thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they become a work of art (D3 102). She immediately dismissed the fantasy: words would intrude, exert their own pressures, deforming thoughts. But the niggling question of how you might catch and tell a thought remained. For Woolf, the novel is human life as poetry, a place where human lifes ordinary rhythms and processes of thinking might be poetically distilled and understood: as imagining, inferring, deliberating, deciding, remembering, forgetting, day-dreaming, planning, intending and problem-solving. But a novel is more specifically a process of thinking into being an imaginary world. Reading a novel may feel more like an experience of inhabiting the percepts of real and embodied minds, than of looking in, with the eye of the mind, to a flickering realm of passing thought. Woolf most often records her own

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experience of thinking and of thoughts as physical presences, looming out of shadows and streaking with effervescent brilliance across her mind, writing in her diary, for example on 3rd March 1920 how: numbers of old clothes in my dirty clothes basketscenes I mean, tumbled pell mell into my receptacle of a mind. Lily Briscoes vertiginous thinking, as she stands transfixed, abortively trying to will Mr Ramsays austere table into a clear mental picture, is suggestive of Woolf s own sense of the overwhelming effort required, that razor edge of balance between two opposing forces (TTL 296), to preserve, but discipline into coherent shape, the dynamic and contradictory flow that is thought becoming the form of an imaginative world. For novels must give thoughts anchor, local habitation. So, reviewing Forsters Aspects of the Novel in 1927, she notes approvingly his insider knowledge of what a muddled and illogical machine the brain of a writer is. He knows how little writers think about methodshow absorbed they tend to become in some vision of their ownuntidy and harassed people who are scribbling away at their books (E4 458). But he is criticised for his vision of a novel, sogged with humanity. For should life, his ultimate value, be absent in a pattern and present in a tea-party (461). In a novel, life is things emerging out of thoughts, but also things, shaped into and held in a formal pattern immaterial as thoughts. The novel is often defended as an important source of empathetic understanding that facilitates our ability to step into anothers shoes. But meta-representational activity imagining the inside of the mind of anotheris just as often about trying to work out the others intentions from their external behaviour, for some purpose of our own. We do it all the time; Woolf s characters do it all the time: watching, inferring, observing gesture, movement and facial expression, picking up a shift in tone of a voice or a departure from habit. But her characters also try to picture what is in the mind of the other. For Lily, this act, picturing Mr Ramsays imaginary table, for example, is as difficult as the process of transferring her own mental picture onto canvas: the blank stare of the canvas is like the blank slate of another mind: in that moments flight between the picture and her canvas the demons set on herand made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child (TTL 34). The demons are thoughts, her own and yet voices from elsewhere, doubts: women cant write; women cant paint. Similarly clamorous voices assail her as she struggles to picture Mr Ramsays table, so that: to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by ones pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things (43). A myriad possibilities danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic netdanced up and down in Lilys mind (43). As solid as things one minute, thoughts are mercurially out of the window, the next: her thought which had spun quicker and quicker exploded of its own intensity; she felt released; a shot went off close at hand, and there came, flying from its fragments, frightened, effusive, tumultuous, a flock of starlings (43-4). Mr Bankes comes running in, shouting Jasper!; Mr Ramsay starts to boom tragically how Someone had blundered!; the shot, which seems to have detonated out of Lilys brain, is discovered to have been fired by the Ramsays son. But for a moment, it seemed as though Lilys thoughts had germinated, explosively, into things, metamorphosed with magicalrealist panache into the flock of frightened, tumultuous and effusive starlings. But so they have: for the power of poetic language lies in its capacity to overcome the dualist either/or

Did I not banish the soul?

25

and to present the world aspectivally as a seeing as. We do somehow see in the imagination Lilys thoughts as a flock of birds, as we see the poor starlings, flapping in a black whirl of wings, as thoughts whirling out of the enclosed globe of Lilys mind. In the short quotation at the beginning of this essay, William James suggests how thinking and thought are traditionally bound up with the idea of a personal soul. The unity of the soul is believed to arise out of the mental substance of thought: the thoughts of ones soul must unite into one self. The boundedness of consciousness, the idea that I am in my head, is assumed to provide the location for the private self that is guaranteed by the soul. In a secular context, the soul is mostly used to underpin the cherished idea of the privacy of consciousness and the integrity of the individual self. Souls were always individual substances, bounded and discrete, unified in themselves, but discontinuous and separate: like a line of telegraph poles (or gig lamps) vanishing into the all-embracing still point and presence of God. Once the frame is secularised, what still remains is the translucent capacity of the soul to know itself, but to remain insulated, opaque and mysterious to the other. Within this dispensation, Lily will never see Mr Ramsays table, just as she will never peer into Mr Ramsays soul. Woolf knows the difficulty: in her essay On Being Ill, she notes that we do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others (E4 320). For in Woolf too, souls are somehow like, and somehow bound up with, thoughts. But they are rarely the kind of thoughts regulated by a methodical sorting machine, a demon that, unlike Lilys, is somehow pitched at a higher level, and brings thoughts to account for themselves in logical identity parades. In Woolf, the soul is never orderly, never bounded and hierarchical, and is violated precisely by those who try to impose on itthe Holmeses, the Bradshaws, the Brutonsthe kind of measured calibration broadly understood as method. To protect the soul, therefore, and to preserve it, Woolf will need to rewrite it, by rethinking thought. Consciousness, as the closed individuality of each, subtended by an idea of thinking as the guarantor of a privatised integrity that sets off thought-substance from a thing-substance, the mental from the material, will need to be overturned, chased out of the window, at least. In her essay Montaigne (1925), written as she was composing Mrs Dalloway, Woolf offers her most extended reflection on thoughts and thinking. She begins by noting the difficulty of catching thoughts, for the phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up with a wandering light (E4 72). Montaignes achievement lies in his unique ability to resist the pen [as]a rigid instrument and so to communicate a soul in all its contradictions. Woolf implies that in his writing thinking is conceived as an activity extended into an instrument of writing that also shapes the thought, like seeing Lilys brush as a metronomic extension of her hand or the power of the whiteness of the blank canvas that compels the intensity of her gaze. Thinking is not simply in the head: the pen has its own proclivities, all kinds of habits and ceremonies of its own changing the natural stumbling trip of human speech into the solemn and stately march of pens (72). Neither is Montaignes ability to catch the phantom an effect of secluded introspection in the inner room of our tower: for Montaignes thinking follows the exuberant restlessness of one who can lay hold of the beauty of the world with all his fingers. Flickering, multiple, serendipitous, the soulalways casting her own lights and shadows, is viewed in all her duplicity, her complexity (78).

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Woolf is beginning to lay out the terms of her resistance to the traditional idea of the soul, but she is also beginning to suggest why prose fiction might accommodate its overcoming. Already in 1917, she had praised Dostoevsky for his ability to follow the vivid streak of achieved thought, whilst conveying the dim and populous underworld from which it emerges (E2 85). Woolf conveys Dostoevskys picture of the soul as more Leibnizian, than Cartesian, a bounded entity still, but its capacity for clarity of thought arising from a region of minute and obscure perceptions which is its soil (Leibniz 374). In the later essay, Modern Fiction (1925), Dostoevsky is reinvoked. Comparing Joyce to the Edwardian materialists, she praises Joyces spirituality and his concern at all costs to reveal the flickering of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain (E4 161), but that word brain is indicative. Brain in Woolf is almost always associated with logical or algorithmic thinking, with the technical and intellectual. Writing of Mark Gertler in a diary on 18th September, 1918, for example, she notes his intelligence, but reflects that he will need a rupture of the brain to become a real painter. If we want understanding of the soul and heart, therefore, we shall need to turn to the inconclusiveness of the Russian mind (E4 162). Fiction has no method, she concludes, everything is the proper stuff of fiction (164). Interesting that Woolf rejects method and admits only stuff that is inclusive and admits everything for she echoes, but inverts, the terms in which Descartes laid out his ideas on thinking and the soul in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and the Discourse on Method (1637). In the 1637 text, Descartes affirmed his existence as a substance whose whole essence or nature is to think and whose being requires no place and depends on no material thing (32). In The Meditations, he believed that through the application of a pre-emptive and methodical doubt, extended to all material things, including his own flesh, he was able to affirm the reality of at least one entity, his existence as a substance without extension, a thinking thing. From that Archimedean point, he then proceeded to establish the existence of God and to re-establish the reality of the material world of extended substance. And so a new soul is made possible: the modern bounded consciousness, the thinking private self, enclosed unto itself within the substance of its thoughts.

Slippery Souls, Thoughts as Things and Thinking as Walking

Lilys thoughts metamorphose into things, but Woolf s have brought into existence Lilys world. Descartes may categorically separate the substance thought from the substance things, but the ontology of the novels world teasingly confounds such categorisation, providing a peculiarly appropriate medium for rethinking thinking. Orhan Pamuk argued in his Norton lectures of 2009 that the novels defiantly anti-Cartesian nature allowed it to keep alive thinking about the grand narratives of life, increasingly abandoned by technical philosophy: the art of the novel relies on our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory statesdeveloping the habit of reading novels, indicates a desire to escape the logic of the single-centred Cartesian world where body and mind, logic and imagination are placed in opposition. Novels are unique structures that allow us to keep contradictory thoughts in our minds without uneasiness, and to understand differing points of view simultaneously (Pamuk 33). Woolf s 1927 essay Poetry, Fiction and the Future (also The Narrow Bridge of Art) is her own sustained defence of the

Did I not banish the soul?

27

novel in such terms and it is the novel, she claims, rather than poetry, that can most effectively reflect the contradictory nature of the modern mind, full of monstrous, hybrid, unanalysable emotions (E4 429). For it is as if the modern mind, wishing always to verify its emotions, had lost the power of accepting anything simply for what it is (434). The novel, democratic, adaptable, impure, is most satisfactorily able to express this great freshening and quickening of soul in its essential incompleteness and indeterminacy, where every moment is the centre and meeting point of an extraordinary number of perceptions which have not yet been expressed (433). Between the early twenties and thirties, there are an extraordinary number of references to the soul and to thinking, in Woolf s writing. But in that most free-style of thinking genres, the diary, there appears an insistent refrain expressing regret over an earlier unarticulated promise to banish the soul. Paradoxically, of course, the decision to banish the soul, like the instruction not to think the proverbial elephant, keeps the soul squarely at the forefront of consciousness. On February 19th 1923, she writes about how it would interest her if this diary were ever to become a real diary: but then I should have to speak of the soul, & did I not banish the soul when I began (D2 234). A paragraph on, the question of the soul returns: in scribbling this I am led away from my soul, which interests me nevertheless. For it is the soul I fancy that comments on visitors & reports their comments, & sometimes sets up such a to-do in the central departments of my machinery that the whole globe of me dwindles to a button head (235). This seems more the stuff of comic book metamorphosis than any theological orthodoxy. The soul that is traditionally the seat and guarantor of the individual bounded consciousness is now a chatterbox that has a devastatingly disturbing effect on the central machinery (presumably her nervous system) and reduces the whole globe of me, her interior sense of selfhood, perhaps, to a button-head, something that fastens together a garment, a covering for the body. Is Woolf coyly reviving an older, pre-Cartesian hylomorphism, the soul as container of the body, but also contained by it? Possibly. But in the terms of the vocabulary of nerves rather than spirit, for this soul is bodily, nervy, gossipy, easily bruised and touchy. A few sentences on, and more reflections on social comings and goings, soul is back again: Soul, you see, is framing all these judgements, & saying, this is not to my liking, this is second rate, this vulgar; this nice, sincere, & so on. My soul diminished, alas, as the evening wore on (236). So, a soul that appears to harbour violent moods, has devastating effects on the nervous system, is one minute standing back in judgement and the next tossing round gossip and tittle-tattle. This is a slippery soul, indeed. On Saturday 27th February, 1926, Woolf wrote, As for the soul, why did I say I would leave it out? I forget. And the truth is one cant write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle, at the cheaper beasts at the Zoo which are exposed to the walkers in Regents Park, & the soul slips in (D3 62). We are looking in the wrong place: if you want to find the soul look outward and not in. Slipperiness is all. Indeed, partying at Garsington, she writes, on 4th June, 1923, of: Thirty-sevenpeople to tea, a bunch of young men no bigger than an asparagus; walking to & fro, round and round; compliments, attentions, & then this slippery mudwhich is what interests me most at the momentI want to give the slipperiness of people like Ott; I want to give the slipperiness of the soul (D2 243). Now slippery as mud under ones feet, the soul is most likely to turn one upside down. Woolf is being mischievous, of course. But not simply mischievous. As ever, there is

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method in the madness, though hardly of the Cartesian kind. And that surely is the point. For what Woolf is defying in her inimically playful fashion, is the closed idea of consciousness and of thinking which no longer seems appropriate for the nervy, contradictory and distributed soul that seems the expression of the modern world in which she lives. What are some of Woolfs strategies for overturning the old soul and introducing the new? Woolf will use the language of fiction to achieve a philosophical intervention. She undoes Cartesian closure by drawing out its contradictions. First, the idea of thoughts as things, overturning the basic Cartesian opposition using a kind of Swiftian reductio ad absurdam, where she subjects the spiritual ideal of introspection as looking in to a mechanical operation of the spirit that brings the individual soul off the production line of the material brain. If thoughts and things are claimed to be substantially distinct, then she will make thought into things and things into thought. Writing to Clive Bell in 1908 (as she laboriously worked her way through G.E. Moores Principia Ethica), she complains how she has split her head over Moore every night, feeling ideas travelling to the remotest parts of my brain, and setting up a feeble disturbance hardly to be called thought. It is almost a physical feeling, as though some little coil of brain unvisited by any blood so far, and pale as wax, had got a little life into it at last; but had not any strength to keep it. I have a very clear notion of which parts of my brain think (L1 357). Some years later, in a review essay of a biography of Theodore Roosevelt for The New Statesman, entitled, Body and Brain (1920), Woolf reflects that very little is known of the interaction between mind and body. The mind is treated as a separate and superior organ attached to an instrument which is, happily, becoming obsolete (E2 224). Again it is the material brain that takes on the former attributes of the soul, but it is a brain still somehow severed from a living and breathing body, centred in the head; the body is merely a stalk, smooth, black and inexpressive. She wonders whether this is simply because decency requires that a mans body shall be cut off from his head by collar, frock coat and trousers. Other essays Gothicise the materialist turn: in a piece entitled Pictures (1925), comparing the visual skill of the painter with the modern novelists capacity to turn an inward eye on the contents of the mind, she imagines following a train of feeling, for this is how the writer sees, into the deep tunnel of obscure feeling, until we can scarcely follow any more, were it not that suddenly, in flash after flash, metaphor after metaphor, the eye lights up that cave of darkness, and we are shown the hard, tangible, material shapes of bodiless thoughts hanging like bats in the primeval darkness where light has never visited them before (E4 244). This somewhat erratic minds eye, which sees thoughts as bats, and thoughts as gnats, turns up again in The Sun and the Fish, this time as a rather grotesque giant nerve which hears and smells, which transmits heat and cold, which is attached to the brain and rouses the mind (E4 519). Woolf is asking the question: where, inside this newly materialised mind, is the soul to be found? She plays amusingly with fashionable metaphors of brain localisation: the idea that particular functions of mind can be located in specific places in the material brain, an idea introduced in the nineteenth century with the neurological investigations of Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke. Woolf intuits that neurological reduction of the mind to a brain is simply an inverted Cartesianism that saves the Cartesian soul as bounded, integral and private, by substituting for it the material brain now opened up by the tools of the neurologist rather than those of the metaphysician. As we shall see later, Woolfs fears about how the traditional soul is taken over by the material head-pieces of the new tribes of soul-doctors, statistical methods, experts in the dark places

Did I not banish the soul?

29

of psychology (E4 162), neurology, neurophysiology, psychophysics, and other varieties of bio-medical intervention, is most forcefully expressed in Mrs Dalloway. William James too had written of the way in which the new mechanistic philosophies of the body and the bio-medicalised sciences of the brain threatened to establish a medical materialism that might eventually replace metaphysics with science. For abolishing the old soul might simply see its transfer to the new brain sciences in a new metaphysics of materialism, flattened into patterns of neurons firing across an integrated nervous system. Without a philosophical defence of something like consciousness as the expression of a soul, wouldnt character, as ethos, and self, as depth and autobiographical richness, be at risk of reduction to the rattlings of the chains of a species of conscious automata, where mind is simply an effect of nervous response to environmental prompting (James, Principles 1:453)? How might one relinquish the Cartesian version of private consciousness, without rendering up and sacrificing the integral beauty of the soul with its associated qualities of depth? Gilbert Ryle asked the question of Rodins thinker: what is going on as thinking takes place? What is he doing, as he sits there, immobilised, with downcast eyes and furrowed brow: an icon so familiar as to seem parodic? As well as representing thoughts as things, Woolf s writing is full of bodies that think. Of all Woolf s characters, Mr Ramsay comes closest to the Rodin-style professional thinker: What a face thinks Lily, What had made him like that? Thinking, night after night, she supposedabout the reality of kitchen tablesuntil his face became worn too and ascetic and partook of this unornamented beauty which so deeply impressed herhe must have had his doubts about that table, she supposed; whether the table was a real table; whether it was worth the time he gave to it; whether he was able after all to find it (240-1). Few of Woolf s characters think like Mr Ramsay, trying to get to the letter R, with his thoughts ranged like keys on a piano, but even for Mr Ramsay, struggling to frame in his minds eye an austere table, the activity of thinking and the substance of thought mingle indistinguishably and emerge seamlessly out of physical movement through space: the rhythm of gesture, relations with others, the shapes and borders and horizons that encircle and support his body and his proprioceptive sense of himself, his changing moods, the triggers to memory from his feelings and perceptions, his constant watching and observing of his wife watching and observing him, trying to infer from her bodily position what she in turn is thinking and inferring about him, her mind flowing through his own, like the internalised speech and inner dialogue that echoes and picks up the voices of those around him, the books he has read. Never is thinking, even for this most professionally devoted thinker (with his extraordinary mind), a bounded, static, one-track, or solitary occupation. For Woolf, neither Descartes, nor Rodin, got it quite right. He looked; he nodded; he approved; he went on. He slipped seeing before him that hedge which had over and over again rounded some pause, signified some conclusion, seeing his wife and child, seeing again the urns with the trailing geraniums which had so often decorated processes of thought, and bore, written up among their leaves, as if they were scraps of paper on which one scribbles in the rush of readinghe slipped, seeing all this, smoothly into speculationAll this would have to be dished up for the young men of Cardiff next month, he thought; here, on his terrace, he was merely foraging and picnicking (he threw

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away the leaf that he had picked so peevishly).Hours he would spend thus, with his pipe, of an evening, thinking up and down the lanes and commons, which were all stuck about with the history of that campaign there, the life of this statesman here, with poems and with anecdotes, with figures tooHe reached the edge of the lawn and looked out on the bay beneath. (69-71) Mr Ramsays thinking is a kind of walking, just as Lily will think later in the novel, It was an odd kind of road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea (265). But is it because Mr Ramsay keeps turning back, Orpheus-like, to watch his wife in her beauty, to be warmed in the circle, that no one hears his music, or is it because he is too concerned with fame, legacy and reputation thatunlike Lily, who cares not at all what happens to the painting and is ambivalent about marriagehe never seems to get far out enough to see the table close up? Daily, he walks through trails laid by his former thoughts, going over the same ground, deepening the same furrows in field and brow. But is thinking possible at all without well-trodden paths, or boots, or familiar rhythms, to provide the unheard background tune, the necessary attunement, for improvisation and originality? Lilys picture, made out of the residue of her thirty three years, emerges out of the rhythm of her brush, dictated by the hedge and then, as she dips into her past, letting it come, emptying herself of conscious thought, feeling the jar on the nerves and, almost in trauma, the dissociation, the trance-like state that opens up the picture gallery of her past in episodic memory. Peter Walshs thoughts take a stately turn towards Empire, the step of his brain shifting gear and interrupting his buccaneering fantasy of going off-track in London as the boy soldiers march past with rigid military syncopation. The rhythms of places, spaces and bodies organise the field of thinking. Where does movement end and thinking begin? The pause, the conclusion, the slipping into, the foraging and picnicking describe language, thinking, walking, at one and the same time. The geraniums that have adorned thought now bear its impress, as if Mr Ramsay had written thought directly onto their leaves. The familiar landscape through which he walks though is stuck about with old thoughts, as if his mind had turned inside out to be caught in a net. The landscape is his memory. Even his pipe, attuned to the rhythms of the moving body, and the bodys rhythms responding to its inhalation, clears a channel in the brain that ends in thought. But how do we separate thinking from moving, from the body and the earth, from accoutrements and instruments? Thoughts, things, movements, the mind, body and environment, are knitted, like the brown stocking, into the texture of a field of thought.

What Matter, Who Minds: Russell, Moore, James

The resources of the novel offered Woolf the means to suspend, complicate, and challenge the dualistic picture, whilst negotiating a path clear of reductionist materialism, on the one side, or a cosmic idealism, on the other. She wanted to challenge the opposition between an objectivist truth (as facts or logical relations), recoverable thorough a strict scientific method, on the one hand, and a subjectivist meaning (values and affections), requiring an inward turn, on the other. Woolf saw this kind of looking out and looking in as two sides of the same coin, locked in agonistic limitation; she resented being

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set up as a writer whose fiction was inward just because she criticised materialists for counting buttons on a waistcoat. For such a judgement, with its implied distinction between minds and bodies, thoughts and things, assumes that the metaphysical frame of her fiction is Cartesian and dualist. This doesnt require a philosophical account: such distinctions, that thoughts are inside and the world outside, seem indubitable; the most sophisticated literary distinctions between modernism and realism, barely resist their force. Woolf professed no philosophical position, as such. Is it therefore because her work gives off the odour of the metaphysical, and abounds with references to souls, mind, brains and thinking, that philosophically-inclined critics have so often tended to read her within the frame of a metaphysical dualism, despite all the evidence to the contrary? The robust defence of Woolf the realist began with S.P. Rosenbaums The Philosophical Realism of Virginia Woolf (1971), Alex Zwerdlings Virginia Woolf and the Real World (1986) and, more recently, but with different inflection, in Ann Banfields magisterial study of Woolf s relations with the metaphysics of Cambridge Realism, The Phantom Table (2000). Rosenbaums influential essay, however, set her up as a thinker and a writer in almost classic terms of Cartesian method. He reads her novels as entirely organised around private souls (Rosenbaum 334), a collection of individuals essentially alone (334), each central consciousness is isolated with its own frigidity, madness or sentimentality; and for each novel, the logical independence of what is perceived from the action of perceiving can be applied to distinguish self from consciousness of self (350). In Jacobs Room, epistemologically, the dualism of mind and body in the novel is unmistakableJacobs consciousness is so difficult to apprehend not only because of its unity, transcendence, and privacy, but also because of its transience. The room as symbolic of consciousness is so appropriate here because consciousness dies; things like rooms and shoes endure The quest for the mysterious and transient consciousness of another is bewildering if not futile, and these are the conditions of our love and perceiving (329-30). Could there be a closer reiteration of the soul as a Cartesian consciousness than here? Jacobs Room is undeniably a novel that plays, often comically, with the question of epistemological limits and their relation to fictional form. An implicitly female narrator, discovering herself endlessly locked out of the various exclusively male hauntscolleges, libraries, bedrooms and the likeregisters the barriers of gender, culture and class as complications of any pure epistemology. But how does that make the room a symbol for the private consciousness and a confirmation of the substance dualism of thoughts and things? Why should an evidently political and epistemological critique be assumed to be subtended by an ontological argument? On numerous occasions, Woolf expressed her dislike of symbols and the way everything seems to suffer a curious magnification. Nothing exists in itself but only as a means to something else. The solid objects of daily life become rimmed with high purposes, significant, symbolical (The Captains Deathbed 86). If the room becomes a symbol, the solid objects dissolve. But this is a novel that opens with a view wavering in a blur of tears and sorrow and proceeds with a small boy, overwhelmed with panic, mistaking a rock for his nanny: surely Woolf s technique is closer to the expressionism of Proust for whom art alone expresses for others and renders visible to ourselves that life of ours which cannot effectively observe itself (Proust 300). For Woolf, though, the imagination, as part of ordinary thinking, confers on us all such artistic powers of perception.

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For the world shows itself forth to us within a frame of value, feeling and purpose. Like Mr Ramsays boots, Jacobs shoes exist in numerous perspectives within a dynamic field of cognition, just like the steeples of Martinville. And if, as Woolf argues in Fiction, Poetry and the Future, her novels are committed to conveying a sense of the extraordinary number of perceptions that remain unexpressed in any one moment, surely what fascinates in Jacobs Room is that objects acquire their solidity through their defiant indeterminacy, the many possibilities of their showing forth. Like the soul in all its contradictions, objects are solid precisely because they are shifting. This does not require that they are symbols for something else. More recently, Woolf s modernism has been reconciled with the metaphysical realism of Cambridge, circa 1910, later repudiated by the logical positivists for its idealist leanings. The affinities between Russells project and those of Woolf are more evident than Rosenbaums preference for a reading of Moorean influence. Like Woolf, Russell was also struggling to give an account of knowledge which could move beyond the old dualism of mind and matter or subject and object, inspired by specific discoveries in the new physics of his day. His solution is to dissolve subjectivity altogether as the idea of a mind or a soul and to create a space which he calls privacy, a perspective beyond the dualism of mental and physical and representing the kind of virtuality which would be described by physicists such as Heisenberg and Bohr. From this perspective can be inferred the world of being, of logical relations, of mathematics. Woolf s writing is undeniably full of images that resonate with Russellian metaphysics: both are fascinated with the idea of knowledge as a momentary illumination fading away into darkness, thresholds around which things gather and then fade into the wastes of unoccupied time and space. But set her evident concern with pattern, abstraction and logic against the moment by moment concrete images of characters thinking, observing, and inferring others thoughts through bodily gesture and customary rhythm, the preoccupation with emotion as the fundamental vehicle for the sense of reality, the continuous awareness of bodily sensation, the minute and ongoing regulation of the body through a kind of pre-reflective feeling. Strict comparisons with the preoccupations of Cambridge Realism risk underplaying her novelists art. And something else might slip out of the picture. It is the soul again. In Russells philosophy, there is no longer even a consciousness, let alone a soul. In Woolf, the soul is banished to be resurrected in different guise. I want to take a rather different approach and suggest that Woolf is more interested in the idea of an embodied soul and a more contradictory and wayward, though biologically grounded idea of ordinary thinking, than the extraordinary formalism of Russells logic. Woolf surely discovered her metaphysics through the experience of creating fictional worlds and characters rather than thorough close study of logical atomism and logical empiricism. We have seen how she provides an often playful subversion of the Cartesian, but her fiction also offers a post-Cartesian working through and performance of an idea of mind that is close to current developmental systems theory in biology, and the enactive, autopoetic, extended or distributed mind. In some ways, this is hardly surprising: the roots of these recent movements of thought originated in Woolf s own time as a marriage of psychology, philosophy and neurology; they have returned in the last twenty years in our own naturalist turn. We seem to be entering the era of a new biocultural and ecosocial thinking: the awareness that human and natural worlds are integrated, emergent

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and complex systems that cannot be understood, like body and mind, or thinking and things, in isolation from each other. This more complex and dynamic idea of mind is now at the heart of some of the most interesting and challenging developments in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science. They are theories that challenge the terms of Cartesianism, but without emptying out depth, interiority, autobiography. The philosopher Andy Clark, for example, has defined the extended mind as an outgrowth of a developmental systems biology where thinking is viewed as a process that, far from taking place simply in the enclosed parameter of the brain (as the correlate of the unextended Cartesian mind), actually extends out into the structure and physics of the environment, the biomechanics of the body, perceptual information about the state of the agent-environment system, and the demands of the task. Cognition is therefore a complex and dynamic field of processes (Clark 8). Thinking is not simply the individuals private and internal mental manipulation of symbols but is meshed with a substrate of embodied sensorimotor capacity, a body entangled with an environment, a history, and other mind-body-environment complexes (or what are usually thought of as other minds). Neural activity is embedded in a dynamic system that informs an ongoing bodily schema, silently and implicitly orienting a core sense of self through feeling, sensation, perception, in relations of nearness, distance, depth, surface, here and now, and here and there. This provides our most fundamental sense of being in the world, a world of constantly changing and shifting relations where responses to environmental change alter the rhythms of the organism that in turn reshapes the environment as an ecological niche. This idea was first adumbrated by Jacob von Uexkull in 1909 as the theory of the Umwelt (see Bethoz and Christen). It is how Woolf experienced the modern world, as an age clearly when we are not fast anchored where we are; things are moving around us; we are moving ourselves (E4 429). The paired quotations at the outset of this essay are a suggestive coupling. For Woolf s project to revision the soul chimed with that of William James, the key source for the current anti-Cartesian turn in psychology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and social thought: the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2000), the neo-phenomenologist Sean Gallagher (2006), as well as Thomson (2007), Maturana and Varela (1987), Alva Noe (2009) and, with the help of intermediaries such as Bergson (1944), Durkheim and Ribot, Janet and Munsterberg (2009). Other contemporary theories committed to breaking down, in various ways, the Cartesian legacy, and drawing on James and Bergson, are Bruno Latours actor network theory (2005), Randall Collinss interaction ritual chains (2004), and Deleuze and Guattaris rhizomatic conception of thinking and thought (2004). Indeed, the terms and expression of Woolf s preoccupations resonate so closely with Jamess, that one wonders why the similarities between their two enterprises have been so conspicuously ignored. Reading James, we even find a philosophical style close to the language of fiction, metaphorical, concrete, grounded in the senses; reading Woolf, we find an interest in the soul and thinking that philosophically close to Jamess desire for, but awareness of the difficulty of, breaking the Cartesian mould: the sensation that we are sealed vessels afloat on what it is convenient to call reality; and, at some moments, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality (MOB 142). Woolf s affinities with phenomenology have sometimes been observed; more than any other British or American thinker of the time, it was through James and the huge

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network of his cultural influence that European phenomenology filtered at all into the British intellectual scene. It was Jamess neutral monism that briefly influenced Russell before the more behaviourist The Analysis of Mind (1921). Jamess announcement, in Does Consciousness Exist? (1904), that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded (249), was no sudden volte-face, but had steadily grown out of twenty years of mistrust of the term. And by consciousness, he means the bounded privacy of the Cartesian soul. His earlier, seminal, Principles of Psychology, upheld an, albeit uneasy, mind-body dualism in which consciousness already begins to appear as the faint rumour left behind by the disappearing soul upon the air of philosophy (Consciousness, 249): soul now requiring scare quotes. Jamess radical bodily account of emotion and its role in conferring the feel of the real, displaces the primacy of any purely logical account of rationality as the means to confirm our knowledge of the world (Emotion). James brought feeling and knowing and mind and body into a new relationship of homology. In 1904, he spelt out what seems to have been implicit in his work from the beginning: that though thoughts and things are names for two sorts of object, the relation has long been off-balance, and it is time to declare that there is no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made (Consciousness, 248-9). Instead of substances, he discusses thoughts as enactive processes involved in knowing. Suggestively, he considers that thoughts, and not thinkers, think, but thoughts that are somehow enmeshed with a world and bodies and other thinkers. And like Woolf, too, he knew that any attempt to undo so fundamental a concept as consciousness in its Cartesian (or Kantian) manifestations, has to recognise that whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must still provide in some way for that function being carried on (249). In seeking to challenge the bounded unity of the soul, neither James nor Woolf is likely to have wanted to reduce the mind and the self to Russells subjectless subjectivity because of its closeness to the behaviourist picture of the self as a shifting and reactive bundle of nerves with neither agency nor will nor interiority. But if the self is conceived as a distributed soul, part of a network or field or dynamic bio-cultural system where agency exists but is distributed and not simply located in an enclosed consciousness, where do we locate the feeling of selfhood, the sense of continuity through time and of being a person?

Thinking as Sewing: Hats, Gloves and Threads

Neo-phenomenology, as well as the contemporary cognitive neurosciences, owes much to James: on emotion, temporality, the idea of the horizon of experience, the perceptual field, the importance of custom, habit and rhythm and the central role of emotion and feeling in the flourishing and the disturbances of self. For the operations of this distributed or extended mind involve ongoing, moment to moment, affective relations to the world, feelings that, although not necessarily felt in the body, provide the medium of a perceptual relation to the world, a background mood or Stimmung through and against which the world is constituted or shown forth or emerges. The world is never an inert entity upon which I gaze, knowing as its faithful reproduction as a set of internal symbols. As the world changes, the body in the world, the lived body, reorients itself; small disturbances, perturbations, register the shifts and eddies of the flow. If feeling, mood, remain

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broadly constant, I ride eddies and turbulence, stay afloat, and the world flows: it is what Woolf refers to as the fluidity of life (TTL 245). If moods and feelings shift, however, or in affectively heightened moments of perception, even if unperceived or unfelt in the body, feeling as a medium of perception may deliver the world in a radically different hue: perhaps a world that now appears to have retreated behind glass; or whose colours seem bleached out or unusually vivid; suddenly backlit or drained of light; a world where objects may suddenly stand out, stark and altered, bereft of context, obtruded and abandoned by the rhythms of habit. Changes in affective rhythms, barely discernible to consciousness, may register instead as changes in the world itself, the leaden circles dissolved air, in its relations, in formerly implicit metaphysical frames which may now be brought into explicit focus so that world appears like a framed picture and the self a spectator, viewing from outside the frame, Beauty the world seemed to say (MD 59). Similarly, an event may trigger the return of the past, an emotionally charged memory that diffuses the emotional tone of the past into the present. So Clarissa, trying to will the return of the feeling associated with Sally Seton remembers going cold with excitement and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy. But she stands outside the experience, looking on, until now, undoing her hair, the touch of the pins the gesture, suddenly transports her into the first person again, inhabiting the world of the past, for now the old feeling came back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing table (29). Spatially as well as temporally, the world is constantly shifting and reconstituting its relations. Sometimes near, even too close, claustrophobic and stifling, the world may suddenly become far out and distant. So Septimus, who believes his reason to be intact, but cannot feel, is a relic, staring back, on the edge of a lost world, whose spectacular rituals, written in the sky (the crowds stare up at the sky-writing plane) cease to mean: he looked at people outsidehis brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then that he could not feel (75). The conventional beauty of the world shimmers distantly behind glass, while a new and sublime power strings the nerves of his body over rocks in a desert, ravelling them through the universe, promising a new and terrible beauty, a message only for him. Losing the threads of attachment to the world, like Peter Walsh wondering off the beaten track, he feels a wild excitement, but whereas Peter is brought back, falling in step with the military parade, Septimus floats free, so that Rezia must put her hand down with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down, transfixed (19). Rosenberg argues that Mrs Dalloway is organised around private souls (334). But Rosenberg is imposing the authoritative voice of the Cartesian, with its frame of stasis and fixity, one that tempers the force of Woolf s social and cultural critique, her concern with the collective as well as the solitary soul. Surely Mrs Dalloway is organised as well around the distributed mind of a collective and public soul, a vast neural network of forces, threads and pulsions, the soul of a new age of crowds and uncertainties and the infiltration and management of the private? Even the narrative voice takes on the shifting quality of the group, echoing and mimicking tones and hues of standard perceptions, restless and moving, built out of the minute trails, the skeins, habits, rhythms of custom that enter the body, echo in the mind, leaden circles dissolving into air, circulating rumours. Through these incantatory voices, a conventional society is chanted into being, one poised on the edge of something darker still: the march of bio-power, health is proportion, the terroristic intentions of conversionMiss Kilmans, the soul and its mockery she wished

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to subdue (106). This is the dawn of an age that will marry the crowd with the machine, impose statistically calculated norms and measurements, and construct, through scientific calibration, the deviant and the abnormal. New bio-political forces attach themselves insidiously to the invisible threads and networks of customary divisions and hierarchies. The new border cases circle like ghosts amongst the powerful and the toadies and hangers-on: the lower middle class clerks, the mothers of Pimlico, the war veterans who have seen too much horror, the vulnerable old and poor, the refugees and returning exiles, like Rezia and Peter, who gather, on the edges, looking in, knowing themselves to be outside the tribe, carrying knives, waiting to be cut and sliced, endeavouring to read the codes, the writing on the sky. Woolf wrote how I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense (D2 248). She builds the rhythm of this distributed mind as a collective life lived in the shadow of death, a world recovering from war but where a new and deathly bio-politics shadows and ripples through the porosity of every individuals mind. Everyone hears voices. Unexpressed thoughts magically take on the properties of speech while speech enters the mind, echoes, and spills out, to slip in elsewhere. Characters went in and out of each others minds (53): the mind is a whispering gallery. Thoughts are voices heard outside as well as inside: I am alone! I am alone!, Horror! Horror!, Richard! Richard!, No! No! He cried! She is not dead! I am not old! (43); objects strangely transmogrify in new contexts, knobs begin as railings and end as knees (35). Boundaries between inside and outside, thoughts and things, merge as complex actor networks, to borrow Latours term, performing the endless minute, crowded dance of modern life. Mrs Dalloway is both a novel and an anthropological study of the social rituals of groups, those ceremonial aspects of cultural life that, according to the social theorist, Randall Collins, are the lenses through which we see the very structure of consciousness (374). The novel is structured around a series of what he calls interaction ritual chains, emotionally charged and ceremoniously ritualised collective gatherings, events, occasions, which are emblematic and memorialising, inducing a symbolic charged attentiveness and shared gaze, enchaining the group through the gathering and amplification of feeling. The car that leaves its slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and tailors, that causes ladies to pause in their trying on of gloves: to feel something had happened. Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its fullness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in all the hat shops and tailors shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empirethe surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound (15). Writing about Montaigne whilst working on the novel, Woolf was thinking there too about the meaning of beauty as custom, ritual, and ceremony: its power to protect against the new violators of the soul, and its dangerous availability for collusion with their forces. Nothing has only one meaning. But opposed to ceremony in its beautiful garb is the terrible beauty of the mad soul, strung out on a rock, with all its nerves and sympathies peeled open, a protest against the death of the soul (50): Clarissas absorption of herself as the wife of Mr Richard Dalloway, social hostess, wearing her body like rigid armour underneath the fluidity of the dress that she feels she inhabits, stage-managing life as if a spectacle, making it up and loving it, but feeling so spread,

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distributed, there is a nothing at the heart of it, only the absence in her of something central which permeated (26). Except, disconcertingly, hate: it is Clarissas hatred of Miss Kilman, of the idea of her, the rasp on her spine, the shock that remains like a rusty spike in the soul, that restores to her a feeling of her own ipseity, the feeling of being, anchored in and held by the world. Septimus too, hears a voice that rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound, which, concussing broke (19). Violent shocks, trauma, jolts, hitting up against something hard, an over-tuned world registers sensation as vibrations that flow through the body. Such sensations are rarely held as a deep or lasting feeling unless harnessed to the ceremonial use of beauty to induce patriotism, membership of the tribe, deference, awe and respect. Woolf undoes Descartes soul but recognises too that Kants aesthetic of the beautiful may be put to dangerous uses in an age of mass politics, the age of crowds: for beauty binds and seduces through a million invisible threads and vibrations. But Woolf provides her own shocks and surprises too, upsetting the rhythmic tone of lyrical expressionism with forays into Restoration and eighteenth-century styles of satire and Restoration comedy, using their tricks with socially ritualised objects and double entendres, like the china scene of The Country Wife (1675) or the scissors of The Rape of the Lock (1717). For the technique of transfer between things and thoughts, as in the threads that weave class identifications and mend party dresses, are also shown to be concrete agential forces in social symbolic exchange. Hats communicate inclusion, or otherwise, in the shared traditional rituals of the group: a tilt speaks volumes, as in the awkward encounter between Clarissa and Hugh Whitbread. Feeling too the chill corporate atmosphere of the hotel confiscate his sense of his individuality, Peter Walsh finds himself thinking: These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other peoples noses the next visitor a joint of meat (131). Septimuss one moment of sanity and expression of pleasure, though, occurs when he loses himself with Rezia in the mutual sewing and making of Mrs Peters hat. In their mutual flow of activity and concentration, he shares Rezias joy at the beauty of ribbons and textures, his hands caught in the unself-conscious rhythms of making, his mind shaping its soft materials, his body brought back to earth. But Rezia is called away (the arrival of Holmes) and Septimus floats away, outside the frame of the picture, back into the strange landscape where objects, a sideboard, bananas loom, where sounds fade out and the world slides behind glass. He was alone, exposed on this bleak eminence, stretched out (122). He jumps. Gloves are emblems of elegance, social propriety measured as aesthetic value. Metonymically, they stand in for Clarissa herself, in Elizabeth and Miss Kilmans outing to the teashop. Like Lilys sense of knowing Mrs Ramsay by looking at the twist of her glove, but without knowing that she knows, Elizabeth deploys the glove as a strategy to cover her embarrassment at Miss Kilmans crude table manners. Simultaneously, through her fort da gesture of dropping and retrieving the glove, Elizabeth reaffirms her class identification with her mother. Miss Kilman, greedily and nakedly fingers the two inches of clair, eats and wipes her fingers, and registers, silently, as the thick fingers curled inwards, the pain of Elizabeths betrayal. As Miss Kilmans unrefined and large hand clutches at air, Elizabeths, suitably sheathed and gauntleted, set off on their adventure across London. Objects as well as people think, think in people. One of the most amusing episodes in the

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novel, with its echoes of Alexander Pope, is Peter Walshs arrival at the Dalloways as Clarissa sits sewing her dress for the party. Here knives and scissors take the stage, facilitating a gestural exchange that puts their polite social talk sous rature, as objects extend the emotions of defensiveness, jealousy, and rancour into the world. Like duellists flashing their swords, a serious but ritualised game, Peter and Clarissa go at it with knife and scissors, in an edgy pas de deux: And whats all this? he said, tilting his pen-knife towards her green dress. Hes very well dressed, thought Clarissa, yet he always criticises me. Here she is mending her dress, mending her dress, as usual, he thought for theres nothing in the world so bad for some women as marriage, he thought; and politics; and having a Conservative husband, like the admirable Richard. So it is, so it is, he thought, shutting his knife with a snap. Richards very well. Richards very well. Richards at a Committee, said Clarissa. And she opened her scissors (35).

The Souls of Boots: To the Lighthouse

What I thought was this: if art is based on thought, what is the transmuting process? So wrote Woolf as she was working on To the Lighthouse (D3 102). In this novel, Woolf set out to address the burning question, posed but never answered in Mrs Dalloway: in banishing the Cartesian soul as the bounded space of a private consciousness, how do you account for and defend the integrity of the self? Woolf explored that apparent loss of centre by writing a novel about the transmutation of grief into the form of a work of art. In To the Lighthouse, memory is central to both the poetic process and the recovery of the lost centre. Memory might therefore be the final ingredient for recovering and securing a weighted and profound sense of me, as an individual soul. Indeed, Ian Hacking has suggested that for the sciences of mind too, in the early twentieth century, memory, as an entity available to psychological investigation, became a way of rewriting the soul (Hacking, 1995). As Woolf wrote in A Sketch of the Past, the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye (MOB 114). In Woolf, the self, an always moving point, is also a trail, storing up and laying down selected moments, a self making itself into a soul, shoring up and accumulating the deposits of its affective life. In To the Lighthouse, memory works conspicuously through the tense of future anteriority: one after the other, characters self-consciously frame experiences into scenes in order to lay down in repositories, their personal archives of experience. Memory acts as artist and curator at once, shaping, discerning, and selecting. As Lily re-fashions her memories, painting, dipping down with her brush, she also realises, the pictures were there, had stayed in her mind almost like a work of art (249). Each character reaches out to hold moments in the present as they flow into the past. Mrs Ramsay is continually concerned with how things might endure, annoying her husband with her belief that their children will never be so happy again but will need to draw on their store of childhood memory: Children dont forget, children dont forget (101). Mr Ramsay constantly ponders his legacy and how his work will be viewed in fifty years. Has it all been worth the

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effort? Only if the future keeps it alive. In presenting memory as a forward moving but always already retrospective knowing, Woolf builds a store against the riskiness of living. Reversing the teleological shape of memory, so that the present is always already opening out into the future as a moment of the past to be looked back on, the self protects itself against the risk of a traumatic forgetting that would leave it, like Septimus, at the mercy of the roar of outside forces. Woolf establishes personal memory as a kind of decentred centre of an extended mind that allows that mind to become a soul. In so doing, she also offers her own distributed account of the creative process. In this novel, she challenges the view of creativity as a teleological process that involves the transference of an already formulated mental vision onto or into a suitably receptive material medium, realised as design. This is the conception of the creation of art that reaches back to the poetics of Aristotle and forward to Romantic and Idealist theories of inspiration. A version of the dualist account of the soul, this phantom too is as hard to chase out of the window. Even in so evidently a (dialectical) materialist thinker as Marx, in the creative act, the mental is still separated from the material and a bounded conception of mind defines the human essence: A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result exists, which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realises his own purpose in those materials. (Marx 284) The emphasis on Lilys vision, her preoccupation with transferring her mental picture onto the canvas, might suggest that Woolf is endorsing the traditional account of the creative process. But it is only when Lily abandons this perspective that she completes the painting. The abandonment is gradual: first the thinking through on a humble tablecloth with a salt cellar; then the crucial emotional negotiation with Mr Ramsays boots; and then the trance-like state of dissociation in which she allows memories to rise, herself and the world stripped down in a kind of phenomenological reduction. Indeed, the stripping down begins from the moment of her return to the house. Feeling everything queer and asking what does it all mean?, Lily rebukes herself, reflecting what a catchword that was, caught up from some book, fitting her thought looselya phrase to cover the blankness of her mind until these vapours had shrunk (225). She makes a decision then to resume the painting, but she could not see the colour; she could not see the lines (231), because Mr Ramsays demand for sympathy intervenes; his self-pity poured and spread itself in pools at her feet (236). Lily draws back, primly drawing her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she get wet (236). But looking down, she sees the boots: sculptured; colossal; like everything that Mr Ramsay wore (237) and, in a curious reversal of Mrs Ramsays magic (that had transformed the pot of meatwhile they were all talking of bootsinto something that partook of eternity), Lily is enraptured by the boots, though ashamed because Mr Ramsay has asked her to solace his soul (237). In the moment of shared and

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delighted attention, however, Lilys appreciation of the robust workmanship of the boots and her sense of Mr Ramsays delight in that appreciation, allows her to recognise his view of himself as a steadfast worker in the Guild of Thoughtcraft, toiling in his boots across rugged landscapes, to inch thought forward even a step. The image of the table comes at last: austere, something bareit was uncompromisingly plain (240). Lily and Mr Ramsay have travelled to the blessed island of good boots (238) and found peace at last and, though she may not quite stand in his shoes, she catches a glimpse of his soul, in the boots, and at last sees his table squarely standing in her own mind. A lifetime of philosophical doubt now stands out for her, etched in the furrows of his face. All his gnashings and wailings assume a sudden poignancy. For she sees that their lives have shared a joint venture: letting go of the world to risk standing on a ledge, in a strange place, to pursue something vastly difficult, without ever knowing why. Now though there is no way of helping Mr Ramsay on the journey he was going (239): he is setting sail out to sea. His thinking is not her thinking: but his methodical thinking-as-walking is as present to her in his boots as the residue of her thirty three years is present in her painting. So Lily returns again to her easel and takes up her brush with a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back (244). Gradually the brush, her arm, their relation with the canvas, seem filled with an intention that is theirs and not hers, so pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related (244). Now on a precipice, drawn out of gossip, living, out of community with people, the canvas stands in the foreground while, at the fringes of her awareness, the boat fades out into the horizon. Lily has a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body and, like Mr Ramsay, hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt (245). She asks herself, What was the problem then? She must try to get hold of something that evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful phrases. But what she wanted was the jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anythingIt was a miserable machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on. But Lilys vision of Mrs Ramsay, her own picture, refuses to come until, allowing the memories of her to rise up unwilled, scene after scene, she realises that no one had ever seen Mrs Ramsay: all they had seen and worshipped and bowed down to was an icon of beauty in a green shawl. She saw, through Williams eyes, the shape of a womanShe was astonishingly beautifulBut beauty was not everythingit came too readily, came too completely. It stilled lifefroze it (273). Not until Lily has stripped Mrs Ramsay of her iconic status, stripped away the conventional reverence for female beauty, its bedazzling aura, its ceremony, does the felt presence of Mrs Ramsay return. Then suddenly: there she is, on a level with the chair, with the table and in the ordinariness of the woman before her, Lily suddenly sees what she has never realised before: her perfect goodness (310). For the old aesthetic Idealism has also been broken up, fled with the Cartesian and the Kantian souls, for beauty is no longer simply translatable into truth or goodness. Modern art must instead expose its abuses and ceremonial uses that play dangerously on the emotional force of such assumptions. Were it not for Mr Ramsays boots, Lily would not have had this vision either:

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one not just personal, but terrifyingly political in its ramifications. In other writings of the period, Woolf suggests the need to strip away conventional images of beauty and of its complicity with social forces of convention and consensus. As in the essay on Montaigne, and in Fiction, Poetry and the Future, she suggests that the modern soul, contradictory, loving and hating, beautiful and ugly, is most completely assayed in the form of the novel. This thinking into being of the work of art has involved adjusting all the relations of body to brush or pen, canvas and page impelling attention, the eyes moving from the horizon to the edges of a lawn or a room, the process of dipping the brush or the pen into the past, calling up and reconfabulating its meanings. The transmutation that has turned thought into a work of art is also the process that has changed life in bringing forth the work. For in the words of Evan Thompson: the roots of mental life lie not simply in the brain, but ramify through the body and the world beyond the surface membrane of an organism, and therefore cannot simply be reduced to brain processes inside the head (Thompson ix). Even Marx was wrong: mind, intention, vision, are not the cold blueprints of an architect, purely mental acts of initiation, but a living bio-culturally distributed process that emerges through a complex autopoetic emergence out of the mutually interconnected relations of body, mind and world. The process is never-ending and always incomplete. Works Cited
Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: CUP, 2000. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Random House, 1944. Berthoz, Alain and Yves Christen. Neurobiology of Umwelt: How Living Beings Perceive the World. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2009. Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. . The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. London: Vintage, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Edelman, Gerald. Wider than the Sky: the Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004. Descartes, Rene. Meditation VI, Concerning the Existence of Material Objects and the Real Distinction between the Mind and the Body. Meditations on First Philosophy. Ed. John Cottingham. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. . Philosophical Writings, Ed. E. Anscombe and P. T. Green. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: OUP, 2006. Hacking, Ian, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality Disorder and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995 James, William. Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Holt, 1950. . What is an Emotion. The Heart of William James. Ed Robert Richardson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2010. 1-20. . Does Consciousness Exist? The Heart of William James. Ed Robert Richardson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2010. 247-263. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network- Theory. Oxford: OUP, 2005. Leibniz, G. W. 1765. New Essays Concerning Understanding. Selections. Ed. Philip P.Wiener. New York: Scribners, 1957. Marx, Karl. Capital. Ed. Ben Fowkes. Harmondworth: Penguin, 1976. Maturana, H. R. and Francesco Varela. The Tree of Knowledge. Boston: Shambhala, 1987. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Noe, Alva. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.

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Pamuk, Orhan. The Naive and Sentimental Novelist: Understanding What Happens When We Write and Read Novels. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time and Time Regained. Ed. Terence Kilmartin. London: Chatto and Windus, 1992. Ribot, Theodore, Pierre Janet and Hugo Munsterberg. Subconscious Phenomena. New York: Bibliobazaar, 2009. Rosenbaum, S. P. The Philosophical Realism of Virginia Woolf. English Literature and British Philosophy. Ed S.P. Rosenbaum. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1971: 316-356. Russell, Bertrand. The Analysis of Mind. London: Routledge. 1995. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Trans. Philip Mairet. Introd. Mary Warnock. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2007. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: OUP, 2000. . To the Lighthouse. 1927. London: Hogarth Press, 1960. . Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. St Albans: Traid/Panther, 1978. . The Captains Deathbed and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950. . The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press, 1975-1980. . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984. . The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. A. McNeillie (vols. 1-4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5-6). London: Hogarth Press, 1986-2011.

THE PLAYS THE THING BUT WE ARE THE THING ITSELF. PROLOGUE, PERFORMANCE AND PAINTING. A MULTIMEDIA EXPLORATION OF WOOLFS WORK IN THE LATE 1930S AND HER VISION OF PREHISTORY. by Suzanne Bellamy
PROLOGUE
nspired by the experimentation in Virginia Woolf s creative work in the last years of her life, my project takes three interlocking pathways: performance, painting and exegesis. In previous writings and artwork I have based my exploration of Woolf as artist in the idea of synaesthesia, the multiple forms of perception she fuses in the text. Her unfinished novel Between the Acts (1941) is a consummate statement of this method, with performative, visual, voice, documentary and sound structures. I do not read the Between the Acts text as a final work, and I read it as more than a finished work, because it opens so powerfully into an emerging form, not informed by nostalgia or elegy but nevertheless an encounter with the prevailing revivalism of the 1930s decade. It can be seen as a response to the parochial, a loving gesture to kindle creative survival in hard times. My methodology forms a triple creative process of interconnected languages. Reading Between the Acts and Woolf s other works of the late-30s period, while working on my large canvas, and simultaneously developing the pageant play script, I was hoping to tap into my own synaesthesic pathways as writer, artist and researcher. At the same time I was reading within the large body of scholarship on the novel and the period, as well as researching medieval manuscripts, the Luttrell Psalter, the Holkham Bible, Chaucerian text and early woodcuts, the Ellesmere text of Chaucer, all examples of text/image fusions which I wanted to create on the canvas. The canvas draws on typographical and mythological material, rural landscape, local history, elements of the novel and the pageant, held within an illuminated manuscript. The creative process was slow to evolve. Things really started to happen once I had suddenly seen in my mind Woolf riding the Chaucer horse with her hand out in that familiar pointing gesture, the iconic Chaucer image. Early medieval texts all incorporated images on and through the page, fusing text and image without privileging or enforcing separation. I wanted to bring back image to the combination of forms, and then extend that into the performance work. The conference theme Contradictory Woolf proved a perfect synthesizing template. How am I defining contradiction in this project? As a way of seeing a process, a dialectical movement, creative and intellectual, which brings order through embracing complexity and the unknown outcome of experiment. Comic form works well with contradiction, as Woolf s own pageant well displays. The comic played many parts along the way from the gentle whimsy of the painting to the panto-like satire of the scripts new characters. Why Chaucer not Shakespeare? Woolf s invocation to ANON, her drawing on archaeology, prehistory, the fossil record layered into consciousness, contemporaneous time,

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fracturing memories, sediments, also invoked an older form of storytelling, not dominated by the creator of the text but brought forth from the spirit of the creative community itself, authored in an older dynamic of the role of the artist. Folded into this are Jane Harrisons ideas of Greek renewal, and the complex idea of finding some new pathway by encountering archaic sources. The unending, open-ended and unfinished nature of Between the Acts seems in this context very deliberate. Alexandra Harriss book Romantic Moderns, and the works of Angeliki Spiropoulou and Joshua Esty were very timely for me in considering Between the Acts and Woolf s late writings, through ideas of rural and folk revival, modernist exploration outside the city, spectacle, fascistic and nazi-style rallies and local theatricals in the late 1930s. Woolf was working with awareness of experiments by Edith Sitwell and E. M. Forster, the urgency of collecting fugitive local custom and practice, reaffirming deep cultural traditions in the face of impending invasion and the erosion of place, memory and story by development, ecological change and political crisis. Tensions between tradition and modernization, always present in Woolf s own love of place, are now inflamed by the imminent threat of obliteration. Sitwells performance work Faade, which Woolf attended in 1923, was structured a bit like Miss La Trobes pageant, with three sections, past present and future, jazz and ragtime elements, music by William Walton. E. M. Forsters pageant Englands Pleasant Land, first performed in Surrey in 1938, used a meadow, a microphone, trees, lake, manor house, soldiers, pigeons, and was unrehearsed, with music by Vaughan Williams. Published by Hogarth Press in 1940, it was activist based, supporting the preservation of the countryside and preservation societies. As Marlowe Miller and Joshua Esty both show in their work on pageant history and power, the tradition of the pageant was always used by the ruling class to reinforce its power and the idea that nothing ever changes. In this argument, the artist can only encode rebellion within the form, metaphorically leaving town once the play is done. After the critical responses to Three Guineas, Woolf may well have seen her position in this way, as artist on the run. The Chaucerian mode, the pilgrimage, the idea of what happened along the way being more important than the destinationall these ideas resonate strongly with Woolf s essayistic journey, whether to Canterbury or to buy a pencil, and calling forth Montaigne, so that process is all, setting off is the way, not knowing where one is going makes the sanest pathway. As Gertrude Stein had said, if you know where you are going, why go there? Melba Cuddy-Keane tells us that each genre in Woolf was a distinctive mode of thought, and yet Woolf moved more and more into that multiple mode in her late works. What appears as a contradiction is in fact an embracing of the deeper knowledge of where ideas come from, leaving the shore of certainties, carrying tools of trade and making ones way with intent. Neither forward no backward, but in, down and through, the journey unpacks the present moment in transition. This is a whole different way to be creative, a summation of Woolfs own pilgrimage through all her texts. There would have been more to come, and there was never a formal ending. How typical of her!!! She is behind the bushes Between The Acts focuses ideas about Woolf s life as an artist, her creative process and her ideas about that process. In my reading, Miss La Trobe does not fail in her work, but it is her feeling of severe judgement and failure that drives her to continue to create, in the remnant world where she finds herself. This is what artists often feel, a profound discontent with the work, and it is how Miss La Trobe generates her vision to its next form, her separateness allows her work to flow. She embodies creative edginess and risk. I do not see

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her as Woolf or Smyth or any figure, but she is given a deep presence in the text which resonates for artists in hard times. Being new, holding memory, embodying historyall these apparent contradictory ideas co-exist in the works of the late 1930s. Renewal, finding new plots, making change happen within the continuum of life, these goals form the great contradiction of art practice, risking loss to take energy and sustenance from the deeper levers of continuity. Finding new plots, exploring new forms, accessing memory and trusting that everything is still there, source and community, how to get back to those renewal places, these themes recur in the late works. In hard times, artists can find themselves working with inadequate resources, a form positioned at the edge of ritual and improvisation, the deep past and the moment of the present, an eruptive juxtaposition of memory and spontaneity. This spirit is captured in the processes of the pageant form. It represents well the contradictory position of the creative artist, and also invokes this as an ancient role. The role of calling to renewal is a core part of the work. All these ideas are present in the unpublished text of ANON, and Woolf s new idea of writing a Common History Book, with a Chorus of Pilgrims with the Song Making Instinct. Between The Acts is underpinned with these passionate projections. I had written and produced a pageant inspired by Woolf back in 2001, the Twelfth Night Mongarlowe Pageant, performed in the little village of Mongarlowe where I live, in southern NSW Australia. Held on the actual Twelfth night after Christmas, and based on the Twelfth Night drama of shipwrecked confused couples and identities, it is set in a post-colonial Australian village. The core structure is about a dispute between Chaucer and Shakespeare over the power of storytelling and the danger of creating actors on a stage, as opposed to written characters in the text issues of control of the story. Central to the drama is the Miracle Play idea of confronting and unleashing MISRULE and then re-establishing order. The pageant shipwreck drops the characters from a boat into a new unknown culture where they proceed to lose their minds and memory, are confronted by chaos, but regain their old/altered identities, and order is restored albeit in a new environment. The dispute between Chaucer and Shakespeare goes on as the only actual dialogue throughout, as each writes/speaks aloud and changes the story as the actors try to keep up with the drama. At a crucial point the actors go on strike, the playwrights nightmare. A juggler keeps balls in the air throughout, creating the idea of fate and chance. A Virginia Woolf persona wanders through the scene making notes. The project was unrehearsed and improvisational with a narrative and script based in a loose story, told to the players earlier in the day. Once cast and costumed they were instructed to react to the situation, listen to the dialogue and create their parts. There was a large audience of locals and invited guests and their various dogs who were given a Programme and a ticket (not the dogs) and proceeded to erupt and interact with the scene, blurring the boundary between audience and players. This was the Programme: TWELFTH NIGHT PAGEANT Presented under the auspices of The University of Mongarlow A Production of the Medieval Fool Masque TWELFTH NIGHT. Prologue : On the 6th January, sometime between 1401 and 1601, a ship founders off the coast of Illyrium Mongarlis. Three couples are rescued by the good folk of a nearby village and manorhouse. The couples have temporarily lost everything, including their memories

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and their identities. Two bards discuss how to stage such an event, and how it all comes right in the end. As with all pilgrimages, some things are lost and others found, folly and misrule are allowed their day, and the wheel of the year turns. Principal speaking parts: Geoffrey Chaucer, writer and minor trade official, William Shakespeare, writer and sometime actor. A Note on Language and Community: This period saw the fusion of many great Romance traditions, from the Roman De La Rose, the Norman lyric traditions, Latin, Anglo-Saxon and local dialects of the Celts, which developed right through to the time of the Elizabethans. Many people were beginning to find new voices and tell stories. The Twelfth Night Pageant is dedicated to Anonymous and The Common People whose lives are always in the Storm, and who keep alive the Spirit of Humour. The End The experience of this first Pageant experiment informed my approach to the Glasgow Pageant. I learned that it is impossible to script a pageant in any really formal way, and that it is always deeply about what actually happens on the day. My favourite moment back in 2001 was when I stood in front of the players just before we began (I was playing Chaucer) and said Ladies and Gentlemen, have we all read the script? No, no, they all happily answeredlike cockatoos and parrots, chirping with excitement at being dressed up, they didnt even care. Once in costume, they just didnt worry. The fact we had had no rehearsal was a plus, so that the only structured dialogue was between the writers, Chaucer and Shakespeare. My only instruction to the players back in 2001 was to listen and follow the direction of the writers Chaucer and Shakespeare. And so they did, more or less, and it was wonderfully funny. If the juggler dropped her balls or batons, we all stopped and said Too Bad, thus allowing the role of fate and bad luck. In the 2011 Glasgow experiment of course there was a more formal script, and my only additional instruction was to use all the space, keep moving, and feel free to improvise and repeat their lines when moved. They did have scripts, they had all read them through at least once, and there was some creative improvisation. I realized in 2001 that I was really the only one who knew what it might be about and what was happening, and that there were as many versions and experiences as there were players and also audience. The audience could not help feeling they were part of it even if they just sat there. The visual continuity in the scene makes that link. Children, dogs and noise interrupted the scene, it is still talked about as a legend in the village, along with the founding of the University of Mongarlowe. In contrast in Glasgow, there was an informed audience who knew the novel and the Between the Acts pageant and would be alert to the experiment. A whole new mix of experiences were made possible by that ambient circumstance. Writing the Glasgow script was in part an exercise in editing, and in shaping, but principally it was a decision that this was in fact not a repeating form, which is why Woolf subverted the traditional pageant idea and allowed Miss La Trobe to write a new one. What is a pageant? It is a present-time performance of a repeating form where there is a presumption of the familiar. The right spirit was to do it as Woolf did it, not to repeat. There had to be a new production, a movement away from the past, allowing her novel characters to become a new pageant. A pageant is based in real time with real people. That is its power, a trope on not repeating the most repeated of theatrical forms. The influence of Stein is strongly here, and in the act of changing, the idea of repetition is subverted.

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In Between the Acts that pageant is drawn forth out of a vanishing world, with villagers whose names are in the Domesday Book, at a time of modernization and development and possible complete obliteration from foreign invasion. Change is everywhere, but it is the nature of that change that is at issue, violent and sudden or creeping and pernicious. What will survive all this? How to participate? Woolf s pageant embodies the great paradox of combining repeated certainties and historical clichs with spontaneous improvised and unrepeatable expressions of the present moment, injected through Miss La Trobes transgressions. For me to repeat or re-enact her pageant would be to miss the point about the real drama of creating a village play, what happens on the day, on the way to the play, during the play, the ambient landscape. I abandoned any idea of staging her pageant and made a script using the voices of her characters and some of her last works, folded into our present, here now in Glasgow, Bute Hall, 2011. What we never see and yet is there all the time are village players, a chorus of medieval pilgrims weaving in and out of the trees, contradictory voices, but in the end all sound melding together, a gigantic ear attached to a gigantic head as Mrs Swithin sees it. Sound, ambient and intentional noise, music are all important in Woolf s pageant. I wanted to have live sound, mechanical, not CDs and recordings, to play the music and make the noisebeing then improvisation, a once only moment. Jazz forms, silence, breaking the rhythms, disruptive noise. Because the key to Woolf s pageant is the invocation of the Present Moment, we as Woolf s ongoing international community became the next layer of performance. We enact the new conference pageant every year, we have our repetitious rituals and our one-off moments, our eccentricities, our power structures and our secrets, papers and panels, auctions, dinners, readings, new editions, changing fashions, turf wars, virtual community, the list, pilgrimages to holy sites, a mix of rites and traditions. Our annual pageant performs a ritual of consciousness, re-engagement with the text, unfolding the words within new technologies, defining the lines of engagement and transgression. This becomes then also our annual pageant as Conference, an Invocation of community. As Melba Cuddy-Keane says, the characters at the play are also the characters in the play, inhabiting a site in-between. And so the reading audience shifts and becomes the subject, between two worlds liminal and uncertain. Contradictory community of voices, humans and animals, forming a soundscape folded into a community ritual and in the hands of a modernist experimental practitioner, Miss La Trobe. Miss La Trobe is Batty aka Whatshername. Her relationship with her Audience is always in tension, they are distracted, they have singular and group confused responses, no meaning can be decided upon, she fears that she loses them, all is illusion. This is a relationship in constant tension, distraction. She worries that illusion fails. *A comment on creating the character of Queenie Leavis, the Caterpillar, in the Pageant. Her role in the pageant is intended to be more like panto, like the Dame. A complex scholar, Q D Leavis did have a critical conversation with Woolf on issues of education, class and women, and there is a generational tension between them, as with Muriel Bradbrook. However her critical role as part of the Leavisite formation of a dominant canon was somewhat destructive to Woolf s legacy for a time, and so I enjoyed the moment to have some sport with her, and all with her own words.

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THE PAGEANT SCRIPT 2011 Written and Produced by Suzanne Bellamy COMMENTARY
First production was in the Bute Hall, University of Glasgow, June 2011. The script was collaged from a number of Woolf texts, including the 1941 novel Between the Acts; the Letters of Virginia Woolf Vol 6; The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol 5; Craftsmanship (1937) in The Essays of Virginia Woolf Vol 6, edited by Stuart N Clarke; Anon and The Reader, as edited by Brenda Silver in Virginia Woolf s Last Essays, Twentieth Century Literature 25:3/4 (1979): 356-441, and spoken by The Narrator, Anon, and Miss La Trobe; plus the various other characters from the novel Between the Acts. Text for the characters Queenie Leavis, Gertrude Stein and Michel de Montaigne were sourced from their own writings as listed in the Works Cited, and from Frank Bradbrook, Virginia Woolf: The Theory and Practice of Fiction. The Modern Age, edited by Boris Ford. London: Penguin, 1961. 257-269. The two plays within the play, Where Theres A Will Theres A Way, and They want plots do they? were written by Suzanne Bellamy. Noise and Sound play a large part in Woolf s pageant. In this production the jazz interventions were played on the saxophone by Robbie Goldman of Edinburgh and the Noise and Percussion Section was provided by Kathryn Simpson of Birmingham using a childrens keyboard with frog and bird sounds. The general conference audience was encouraged to participate with cow mooing and booing sounds.

CHARACTERS AND FIRST CAST Staged in Bute Hall, University of Glasgow 11th June 2011
NARRATOR: Krystyna Colburn MISS La TROBE: Suzanne Bellamy ANON: Suzanne Bellamy MRS SWITHIN: Gill Lowe Mrs MANRESA: Jane Goldman QUEENIE LEAVIS: Jane Goldman WILLIAM: Derek Ryan BART: Derek Ryan REV STREATFIELD: Mark Hussey AUDIENCE of 4: Jean Moorecroft Wilson, Cecil Woolf, Diane Gillespie, Leslie Hankins GERTRUDE STEIN: Janet Winston COL MAYHEW: Cecil Woolf ISA: Judith Allen MONTAIGNE: Judith Allen SOUND: Robbie Goldman (sax) NOISE: Kathryn Simpson (percussion, keyboard)

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Stage Notes. The four stage members of the Audience were seated at an angle on right. All other characters moved about in the stage space, visible at all times. Sound and Noise were visible at rear left. The Narrator wanders in a wider arc, around stage and through the audience. Props and Costumes. Characters wore their names on cardboard signs around their necks, hats and pearls were principal accessories, in addition to mirrors, and Mrs Manresas makeup. All read from scripts.

The Pageant Begins

ANON(Suz) It was a summers night. A cow coughed. A bird chuckled. BUT dont bother about the plot, the plots nothing. NOISE + Sax (Kathryn and Robbie) ANON (Suz) Now its early morning. Mrs Swithin drew the curtain in her bedroom. Her favourite reading: An Outline of History. Thinking of Rhododendron forests in Piccadilly. The iguanodon, the mammoth and the mastodon, from whom we descend. MRS SW (Gill) Ive been nailing the placard on the barn for the Pageant. If its fine theyll act on the terrace. NAR (Kryst) Every summer for seven years now Isa had heard the same words. Would it be wet or fine: and every year it wasone or the other. MRS SW(Gill) How did we begin this talk? The Pharoahs, the dentist, FishOh yes, you ordered fish. Mrs Manresa, if it comes to a pinch this afternoon, will you sing? MRS MAN (Jane) This afternoon? Is it the Pageant? MISS LaTR (Suz) The very place, thats the place for a pageant. Winding in and out between the trees. There the stage; here the audience and down there among the bushes a perfect dressing room for the actors. NAR (Kryst) Where did Miss La Trobe spring from? She had been an actress. Very little was known. She used rather strong language. She had a passion for getting things up. Nature had set her apart from her kindthe actress in her bed MRS SW(Gill) One year we wrote the play ourselves. People are giftedthe question is, how to bring it out? Thats where shes so cleverMiss La Trobe. Of course theres the whole of English Literature to choose from. But We remain seated. We are the Audience. NAR (Krys) Words this afternoon ceased to lie flat in the sentence. MRS SW(Gill) We havent the wordswe havent the words. Behind the eyes, not on the lips: thats all. BART (Derek) Thoughts without words Can that be? MRS MAN (Jane) Oh what fun. A little bit of everything. For myself, I cant put two words together, once I hold a pen. MISS LA TR(Suzanne) It has the makingsit has the makings. NAR (Krys) Another play always lay behind the play she had just writtenVanity made them all malleable. They squabbled, but she kept out of it. Dont worry about the plot, the plots nothing MRS SW(Gill) We have other lives, I think, I hopeWe live in others. We live in things BANKS (Derek) Im William, Im William MRS SW (Gill) (sings) Come and see my sea weeds, Come and see my sea shells, Come and see my dicky bird hop upon its perch.

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NOISE and MUSIC ( soft Sax) NAR (Krys) Then the play began. All looked at the bushes. AUDIENCE Its begun. Scenes from English History MISS LA TR (Suz) Blast em. Music!! NOISE continuesSax, soft, other sounds NAR (Krys) The villagers were singing, but half their words were blown away. MISS LA TR (Suz) O, the torture of these interruptions. MRS SW (Gill) Sorry Im so late. Whats it all about? Thats England in the time of Chaucer I take it. The Canterbury Pilgrims? Look!!! NAR(Krys) The wind blew away the connecting words MRS MANR (Jane) Scenes from English History. Merry England. Ambitious, aint it? MRS SW (Gill) Were only the present AUDIENCE (4 voices) What comes next, a tableaux? Was it the Globe Theatre? A scene from a play? What a cackle, what a cacophony. Nothing ended ANON (Suz)

THE FIRST PLAY WITHIN THE PLAY

(A Bloomsbury Soap Opera) Where Theres A Will Theres a Way
Virginia was in love with Madge, Janet, and then with Vita, and lives with Leonard. Vanessa is in love with Roger, lives with Clive whos in love with Mary, Lyttons in love with Ralph whose in love with Carrington, whos in love with Lytton, Duncan is in love with Bunny who marries Angelica but no one tells Angelika who her father is, and now Vanessa is in love with everyone, and Vita loves Hilda and various other women, and Virginia outs her in a novel, but its all in the end not a problem. The End. This part takes place behind bushes. NAR (Krys) Did the plot matter? It was only there to beget emotion. Only two emotions: love and hate. There was no need to puzzle out the plot. The plots nothingverbiage, repetition. Peace was the third emotion. Love Hate Peace. Three emotions made the play of life. It didnt matter what the words were, or who sang what. Round and round they whirled, intoxicated by the music. SOUND MUSIC (Sax and other ambient sound) MISS LA TR (Suz) Curse. Blast. Damn em. NAR- MEGAPH (Krys) Interval!! She had agreed to cut the play here. Dispersed are we!!! (three times) AUDIENCE What was in her mind, eh? What idea lay behind, eh? NAR (Krys) Giles Oliver took the short cut to the Barn. Couched in the grass was a snake, choked with a toad in its mouth. The snake unable to swallow, the toad unable to die. Birth the wrong way round. He stamped on them. Action relieved him. NAR (Krys) In the barn, the villagers hung back. MRS MANR (Jane) Its all my eye about democracy NAR (Krys) Isa and William were in the greenhouse. They knew at once they had nothing

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to fear. They could say whatever came into their heads. WILLIAM (Derek) Im William ISA (Judith) Im Isa NAR (Krys) The future shadowed the present. The Audience was assembling again Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Behind the tree Miss La Trobe gnashed her teeth, crushed her manuscript. Every moment the audience slipped the noose. NOISE Music Sax and keyboard AUDIENCE Another scene from another play, I supposeAll that fuss about nothing NAR (Krys) People laughed. The voice stopped. But the voice had seen, the voice had heard. Miss La Trobe for a moment glowed with glory. MISS LA TR (Suz) Louder, louder(Music) Louder, louder. NAR (Krys) The words died away. The Audience sat staring at the villagers whose mouths opened, but no sound came. MISS LA TR (Suz) This is death NAR (Krys) Suddenly cows took up the burden. From cow after cow came the same yearning bellow. The whole world was filled with dumb yearningIt was the primal voice. The cows annihilated the gap, bridged the distance filled the emptiness, continued the emotion. NOISE- (Kathryn and Robbie) Mooing. EVERYONE MOOS GERT STEIN (Janet) A Cow Is A Cow Is A Cow. But is a Cow? MISS LA TR(Suz) Thank Heaven MRS MANR (Jane) If shed put it all in, we should have been here til midnight. MRS SW (Gill) Actors show us too much. Oh Miss La Trobe, I do congratulate you. Ever since I was a child Ive feltwhat a small part Ive had to play. But youve made me feel I could have playedCleopatra NAR (Krys) Youve stirred in me my unacted part, is what she meant, Youve twitched the invisible strings. AUDIENCE (Jean) Whats her game? COL MAYHEW(Cecil) Why leave out the British Army eh? Whats history without the army, eh? AUDIENCE (Jean) Cheap and nasty I call it. MRS SW (Gill) The VictoriansI dont believe that there ever were such people. Only you and me and William dressed differentlyDyou get her meaning?? NAR (Krys) They were all caught and caged, prisoners watching a spectacle. Nothing happened. MRS SW (Gill) And after that, what? WILLIAM (Derek) Present Time, Ourselves. Im William ANON (Suz)

THE SECOND PLAY WITHIN A PLAY

TITLE : THEY WANT PLOTS DO THEY?
In which three Euros are exchanged, and a panel of writers and public intellectuals debate spectacle and propaganda in a CNN/BBC Hardtalk

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co-production. They dissect Dominic Straus-Kahn, Arnold Swartzeneger, Vladko Mladic, Sylvio Berlusconi, and the Saudi Royal Family, with references to the IMF, the World Bank, Fukushima Radiation spread, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the Global Financial Crisis, the bankruptcy of Europe, Climate Change, and the Royal Wedding. They Twitter Throughout. The End. All this takes place behind the bushes. AUDIENCE (Jean) Whats the object of this entertainment? AUDIENCE (Cecil) A fund for installing electric light in the Church. All our village festivals end with a demand for money. Nothings done for nothing in England. NAR (Krys) All their nerves were on edge. They sat exposed. They were neither one thing nor the other. They were suspended. How long was she going to keep them waiting? The Present. Ourselves. AUDIENCE (Jean) But what could she know about ourselves? It was ridiculous. Whats she keeping us waiting for? MISS LA TR (Suz) Try ten minutes of present time, swallows, cows. Reality is too strong, curse em. NAR (Krys) Oh to write a play without an audience Panic seized her. This is deathAnd then the shower fell, like all the people in the world weeping. Then it stopped. Nature had once more taken her part. NOISE + SAX +banging Start waving the Mirrors AUDIENCE Whats her game? Tin cans? Whats the notion? MirrorsOurselves!! But thats cruel, to snap us as we are, in parts. What about the army? NOISE and Mirrors NAR(Krys) Mrs Manresa powdered her nose. COL MAYHEW (Cecil) The plays over I take it NAR/MEGAPHONE (Krys) Lets break the rhythm and forget the rhyme. O were all the same. Hows this wall to be built by orts, scraps, and fragments like ourselves? REV STREATFIELD(Mark) What message was our pageant meant to convey? I have been asking myself. I confess I was puzzled. Each is part of the wholeYes, that occurred to meWe act different parts but we are the same. Nature takes her part. Surely we should unite? Thirty six pounds ten shillings and eight pence has been raised But there is still a deficit of one hundred and seventy pounds odd. And nowa vote of thanks to the gifted ladywho wishes it seems to remain anonymous. NAR (Krys) Twelve aeroplanes like a flight of wild ducks came overheadGod Save The King Robbie (Sax) plays God Save The Kingsome audience stand, confusion. NAR(Krys) The actors were reluctant to go. Each still acted the unacted part conferred by their clothes. AUDIENCE I thought it brilliantly clever. Did you understand the meaning? Well he said she meant we all act all parts AUDIENCE (Jean) Oh my dear, I thought it utter bosh. COL MAYHEW (Cecil) Why leave out the Army, if its history? AUDIENCE But youre being too exacting.After all, remember, it was only a village play.

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They should have thanked the owners. When we had our pageant the grass didnt recover til autumn. The very latest notion, so Im told is, nothings solid Crepe soles? So sensible. What a dither! Nobody seems to know one car from another. Dear me, the parking arrangements are not what you might call adequate. NOISE. Car Horn. General Sound Chaos GERTRUDE STEIN (Janet) A cow is a cow is a cow. But is a cow ? NAR (Krys) The pilgrims had bruised a lane on the grass. The lawn would need a deal of clearing up. MRS SW (Gill) Oughtnt we to thank her? AUDIENCE (Cecil) Thank the actors, not the author. NAR (Krys) At last Miss La Trobe could say to the world you have taken my gift, and then the triumph faded. Her gift meant nothing. Then something rose to the surface What would the first words be? The words escaped her. Words of one syllable sank down in the mud. The mud became fertile. Words rosewords without meaningwonderful words. She set down her glass. She heard the first words. NAR (Krys) Down in the hollow at Pointz Hallthe play still hung in the sky of the mindHadnt she for 25 minutes made them see? ANON (Suz) Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes? MRS SW (Gill) England was a swamp. Thick forests covered the land. Birds sangThen the curtain rose ANON (Suz) Its an age when we are not fast-anchored where we are; Things are moving around us; we are moving ourselves. NAR (Krys) Now the EPILOGUE began QUEENIE LEAVIS (Jane) But its all just a conversation between her and her friends. MONTAIGNE (Judith) No man is free from speaking foolish things, but the on it is when a man labours to play the fool. But what do I know? QUEENIE(Jane) But she has enjoyed the relaxing ease of an uncritical, not to say flattering social circle. Shes suffered no worse injury from mankind than a rare unfavourable review. Theres no reason to suppose Mrs Woolf would know which end of the cradle to rock or the pot to stir. Its self-indulgent, self-righteous sex hostility!!! As my friend Frank Bradbrook says In Between the Acts there are signs of tiredness, her genius has burned itself out. The heart has gone out of her work. A minor talent WILLIAM (Derek) Im William MONTAIGNE (Judith) The greater part of the worlds troubles are due to questions of grammar. But what do I know? ANON (Suz) Having this moment finished the Pageant, my thoughts turn to the next book, ANON it will be called. The desire to Sing. Only when we put two and

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two together, two pencil strokes, two written words, two bricks, do we overcome dissolution and set up some stake against oblivion. NAR (Krys) Did I tell you, Ethel, Im reading the whole of English Literature through. By the time Ive reached Shakespeare the bombs will be falling. ANON (Suz) Make notes. Allegory. Chaucer. Did Shakespeare read Chaucer? If we could see the village before Chaucers time, we should see tracks across the fields joining manor house to hovel, hovel to church. The track between the houses in the village has been grown over, like the track along which the pilgrims road to Canterbury. No-one rides that way now. But before Chaucers time it was trod dailyto the old graves, to the Stones, to the tree, to the well. Enacting their ancient parts. NAR (Krys)There never was, it seems, a time when men and women were without memory. There never was a young world. That is the world beneath our consciousness; the anonymous world to which we can still return. The voice is still the voice of Anon. ANON (Suz)In the old days when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use themHow can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, create beauty, tell the truth. Words are the wildest freest, most irresponsible most unteachable of all thingsThey live in the mindthey believe that one word is as good as another, they hate being useful, they hate making money. For it is their nature to changeWhen words are pinned down they fold their wings and die. Our unconscious is their privacy. Our darkness is their light. Here are we, Ourselves, in Glasgow in 2011, the present moment. The mud became fertile. Words do not live in dictionaries they live in the mind. The truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pike staff to the nextWe are not fast-anchored where we are; things are moving around us; we are moving ourselves. Pilgrims are we. NOISE + Sax + Multiple Voices. General Instruction to all cast to repeat segments of their script over and over. A general cacophony, crescendo then drawn to a close by Miss La Trobe. The end of the pageant

THE PAINTING Woolf and the Chaucer Horse. Canvas dimensions: 4m by 2 m.

Researching illuminated manuscripts and Psalters opened the vision of the written page to the visual world that has always been there for me in Woolf as a reader. The page drips with image and interaction with other form, and as a writer of that tradition she embodies that now invisible world. Woolf says in Anon that the printing press ultimately took that rich layered other dimension away, but she is still soaked in it in her visual invocations, in her synaesthesic imagination. I started working on the painting as I was reading the scholarship around Between the Acts, the late 1930s and Woolf s last writings. Seeing her riding on Chaucers horse, as the Chaucer of her times, came visually first then all else flowed from that. The Chaucerian trope of the stories wrapped within the journey infuses all Woolf s work, as also in the essayistic form itself, street haunting being an expression of the pilgrims way. The painting

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is as much an illuminated manuscript as a mapas a collage of layered memory, where everything happens and all at the same time, as in the novel. In harmony with the 1930s rural revivalism and sensitivity to possible loss of cultural heritage, the spirit of continuity is challenged by the threat from the planes and the coming war. But the land itself holds the dream of a common culture which is soaked in Nature and wild forms, animals, birds, structures and sounds. Some images swirled around in my head for weeks but never made it onto the canvas much as I tried to force the issue. The old wall and the ladder, the horse with the green tail, Sohrab the dog, the greenhouse, Mrs. Swithins hammer, and also Mrs Swithins crisscross letter (a term from ancient manuscripts), imps elves demons and mirrors, all the flowers, cars, the barn, the pub, the megaphone, Giles feeling chained to a rock, the white ladythose never made it but are in there somehow. But the stegasaurus and the mammoth made it and the fossils, the Roman roads, the planes, the pond, the house (taken from Vita Sackville-Wests book on English Country Houses), the cows, the Ouse and the map of the Sussex coast, and then the Celtic maze which held it all together. The maze, the Chaucerian horse, and the lines of the Prologue were the moments that gave it all a structure. The idea that words came from hearing birdsong drawn from the core of the maze holds the centre. There are several examples of doubling and tripling images, as for example with the Uffington White Horse, the Guernica Horse and the Chaucer Horse. Also the Circle of Birds and the formation of Lancaster Bombers over the English Channel are contrary formations. There are the South Downs, the coastline, the map of Sussex, Lewes and Rodmell, the River Ouse and tributaries, Prehistory, Mastodons, Cars and Roman Roads, images improvised from medieval illuminated manuscripts. I used the Ellesmere text for the lines from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Painting those five lines of Middle English straight onto the canvas, with my laptop propped open at the online site of the Ellesmere text, was a special deep thrill. (See color reproduction on back cover.) The painting was planned to act as a set canvas behind the pageant performance, but that proved to be technically impossible. In the end it hung in the Bute Hall below the stained glass windows, close to the window of Chaucer. The light streamed through the image of Woolf on her horse, the Chaucer of her times, and all was well. Works Cited
Allen, Judith. Those Soul Mates: Virginia Woolf and Michel de Montaigne.VirginiaWoolf: Themes and Variations. Selected Papers 2nd Annual Woolf Conference. Ed. Vara Neverow. New York: Pace UP, 1993. 190-199. Bartlett, Robert. Medieval Panorama. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001. Bradbrook, Frank. Virginia Woolf: The Theory and Practice of Fiction. The Modern Age. Ed. Boris Ford. London: Penguin, 1961. 257-269. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Prologue. The Ellesmere Text. Huntington Library Press, 1995. Clarke, Stuart, N, ed. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol.6. 1933 to 1941. London: The Hogarth Press, 2011. Coghill, Nevill. Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. London: Penguin, 1977. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. The Politics of Comic Modes in Virginia Woolf s Between the Acts. PMLA 105:2 (1990): 273-285. Delsandro, Erica. Myselfit was impossible: Queering History in Between the Acts. Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007): 87-109. . Woolf s Heart of Darkness : Nature and Natural History in Between the Acts. Kentucky Conference Paper, 2010 (private copy from author).

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Esty, Joshua.D. Amnesia in the Fields: Late Modernism, Late Imperialism, and the English Pageant Play. ELH 69:1 (2002): 245-276. Forster, E. M. Englands Pleasant Land. A Pageant Play. London: The Hogarth Press, 1940. Harris, Alexandra. Romantic Moderns. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2010. Herrin, Judith. A Medieval Miscellany. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Facsimile Editions, 1999. Hussey, Mark, ed. Virginia Woolf. Between the Acts. London: CUP, 2011. Kelley, Joyce.E. Virginia Woolf and Music. Virginia Woolf and The Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. 417-436. Leavis, Q. D. Caterpillars of the Commonwealth Unite! Scrutiny 7.2 (1938). 207-214. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Charro and Windus, 1996. Maika, Patricia. Virginia Woolf s Between the Acts and Jane Harrisons Con/spiracy. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987. Miller, Marlowe, A. Unveiling the dialectic of culture and barbarism in British Pageantry: Virginia Woolf s Between the Acts. Papers on Language and Literature 34:3 (1998): 134-161. Sackville-West, V. English Country Houses. London: William Collins, 1944. Silver, Brenda. Anon and The Reader: Virginia Woolf s Last Essays. Twentieth Century Literature 25:3/4 (1979): 356-441. Spiropoulou, Angeliki. Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Stein, Gertrude. Composition As Explanation. Hogarth Essays. Second Series. London: The Hogarth Press, 1926. Stewart, Victoria. Q. D. Leavis, Women and Education Under Scrutiny. Literature and History 13:2 (2004): 67-85. The Holkham Bible, A Facsimile. The British Library, 2007. The Luttrell Psalter, A Facsimile. The British Library, 2006. Turner, Kay (ed). Baby Precious Always Shines. Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B.Toklas. New York: St Martins Press, 1999. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Oxford, 1973. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. London: The Hogarth Press, 1941. . Craftsmanship (1937). The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol 6. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. London, Hogarth Press, 2011. 91-97. . The Leaning Tower (1940). The Moment and Other Essays. London: Hogarth, 1947. .Montaigne. (1925) The Common Reader 1. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol 4. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London, Hogarth Press 1994. 71-81.

REPORT TO THE MEMOIR CLUB: SCENES FROM A COLONIAL CHILDHOOD by Marina Warner
irginia Woolf s celebrated opening rejoinder, But, you may say,, anticipates an as yet unspoken objection, forestalls opposition, and summons an unseen reader or audience, whose thoughts and words she is confident she can know almost before they do. In fiction, the writer projects herself into the minds of her characters and thinks with them, ventriloquising beyond her own boundaries; likewise, in such polemical and confessional writings as A Room of Ones Own (1929), someone is lurking at the edge of Woolf s consciousness, as she bends over her paper, composing: the implied recipient of the letter, the imagined reader, hostile or otherwise whom she is engaging, interrupting, cutting short. The famous essay began as talks, and although her real-life interlocutors were her hosts, the fellows and students of Cambridge womens colleges, she is addressing over their shoulders other unnamed and unseen presences: imagined fathers and brothers, rulers and taste-makers and power-brokers, who assume there is no connection of her subject, women and fiction with property, power, independence and laws. That many words exist for types and degrees of contradictionrebuttal, refutation, rejoinder, retort, even refusaland that so many are explicitly forms of speech rather than action (even Bartlebys silence must be broken by utterance, by his mild but steady contradictoriness), reveals how the critic and writers task often takes place within existing circuits of value, the logos which they (we) struggle to reshape through a counter-utterance, a counter-script. Contradictoriness also holds contrariness within its compass, on either side of the central syllable, dicto, I say. It is Woolf s contrariness, rather than her contradictoriness that I want to look at, though the two concepts intersect, as noted. And I want to look at her contrariness from two points of affinity that I have felt from the first moment I encountered her voice. Both affinities arise from the questions she puts about authority and class and English history and the ways the personal and public interconnectthrough fathers, especially. How values are passed on from a standpoint of unexamined and effortless authority, how those values grow in a deposit of layer upon layer of English historical self-importance, these are the disturbing areas of inquiry, still. Even as I write this, these comments seem so out of date: Britain is unrecognisable. Yet I still fear this inheritance as Victorians feared syphilis. In The War from the Street (1919), Woolf extends a striking, self-wounding, cold picture of humanity as a mass of jelly to evoke her horror of unthinking consensus: Soon your mind, if one may distinguish one part of the jelly from another, has had certain inscriptions scored upon it so repeatedly that it believes it has originated them; and you begin to have violent opinions of your ownso that there is a very marked sameness throughout the jelly (E3 4). Her metaphor is one of her culinary flourishes, but it also evoked, to my ears when I heard Pat Waugh quote it (in her plenary lecture at the Glasgow conference), the jelly of bone marrow, stem cells, DNA, and Woolf s excoriation touched

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my live fear that I too have been inscribed and the script has sunk all through my jelly without my being aware of it, making me part of thoughts and values that are not my own but come from the cellular mitochondria of my father and his tribal loyalties. There is a famous predecessor of Virginia Woolf s But: an objection that does not provide an opening of a piece of writing, but the tipping point of the story. In this earlier text, which is a story and a fable by an acerbic, combative and oppositional critic of power, one of the most celebrated of contrarians, the speaker raises his voice, puts in his But against the assertions of no less an authority than an angel of the Lord, who has explained to him the arrangements of Divine Providence, arrangements which naturally suit the interests of many powers in place. Voltaire is not commonly linked to Woolf, which is an oversight, as she frequently alludes to him, and the two share many of the same targets, not least the absurd arrogations of power.Zadig, or Destiny is one of the earliest of the short fables which established Voltaires huge readership in his own time and his lasting importance today. It was written in 1746-7 and published in l748, over a decade before Candide (1759); in many respects, it meditates on the themes that Candide explores with even more pointed wit: the workings of Providence, predestination and free will, despotism and venality, corruption, public abuses and hypocrisies personal and other. Towards the mid-point of his misadventures the innocent and virtuous hero meets an old Babylonian hermit who wore a white and venerable beard that came down to his waist. In his hand he held a book (Voltaire 165-168; see also Warner 273-7). The old man offers it to Zadig to have a look. It is the Book of Destiny, he tells him, and it will guide Zadig out of his woes, as long as he submits to whatever the hermit asks him to do, unconditionally over a period of three days. Zadig agrees. Incomprehensible and unspeakable things start happening: on the third night, for example, their host is a philosopher who treats them to wise conversation and generous hospitality, but in the morning the hermit wakes Zadig early, tells him to start moving, and burns down the kindly sages house. As the hermits behaviour grows ever more erratic, Zadig cannot help himself and cries out against it. You promised youd be more patient, the hermit interjected. He explains that everything he has done he has done for the best: for, after Providence burned the house to the ground, the owner found heaps of treasure buried there, and the young man, whos just had his neck wrung by Providence, would have murdered his aunt within a year, and you within two. As the hermit is expounding his meaning, Zadig notices he begins to change: into an angel, with four beautiful wings and a majestic body that was radiant with light. His companion turns out to be none other than the angel Jesrad, who then closes his prophetic disclosure of the predestined future with the solemn axiom: There is no evil from which no good comesforeshadowing the Panglossian optimism of Candide. It is at this juncture that Zadig can no longer help himself, and refuses to submit, unquestioningly. He lets out a single word, Mais (But), and then goes on, what if there were only good, and no evil at all? Jesrad explains that there is an inscrutable order behind all things, and no such thing as chance. Feeble mortal, he cries, cease to argue against that which rather you should worship and adore. Again Zadig cannot contain his sense of contradiction, and blurts out, But But, that nearly wordless objection to the exhibition of Western metaphysical rationality, is spoken by a stock ingnu from Oriental fabulism, the hapless put-upon

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hero. This type of Everyman from the Nights acts as Voltaires alter ego and mouthpiece. Through fantastication taken to extremes of preposterous unlikelihood, Voltaires contes set the reader on the ground of skepticism, dissentand laughter. Here is reason used to dissent, to inquire, to contradict. This is considered a classical position of enlightened Western discernment, the sceptics wisdom, the vitality of the independent mind. (It is worth underscoring that it was shaped by the encounter of the West with the East: straining credulity to the point when sheer entertainment ends and invigorating inquiry breaks out characterizes Shahrazads strategy as she goes on spinning a yarn night after night to save her life and the life of all her fellow victims.) Virginia Woolf s ironies also target acceptance of the status quo as somehow ordained by nature or god; inequalities, social violence, military folly preoccupy her, especially when she tackles the specifically male-made responsibility for the evils of injustice, inequality, violence, and war. Her witty puncturing of pretension is moved by a Voltairean spirit of reason, while her supremely stylish sentences are recognisably sharpened on the whetstone of eighteenth-century esprit. Orlando, in its festive, comic orientalism, nods in the direction of Zadig, Candide and other performances lorientale in Voltaires contes philosophiques. Woolf was more open to turning her contrariness against herself than the French enemy of unreason. Am I a snob? Virginia Woolf asked in a piece to the Memoir Club in December l936.1 She answers herself in the affirmative, and promises to explore the questionto examine her conscience. But she does so glancingly and allusively, with so many vignettes and sallies about friends and hostesses and their delusions and fancies that her wit at others expense dissolves her self-inculpation, and another dazzling performance as satirist and social chronicler of mores overtakes her intention to confess. I have always feared that I am a snob, but a snob deformed by the stamp of colonial ambivalence, the creep and cringe of those exiled from the metropole blended with the brutal superiority of the official, governing class. (In my childhood in Egypt, the British were officially protecting, not governing.) Ive also been afraid throughout that at some deep level of my being, Ive been marked by my early years, and shall betray my childhood saturation in derring-do adventure and empire yarns, in G. H. Henty and Rider Haggard, in The Prisoner of Zenda and the Hornblower books in John Buchan and Captain Marryat, literature I devoured as a child bookworm from the shelves of my father and his parents bookcases, stories in which the world is English (the term British wasnt in use then) and the villains are foreigners, natives of Smyrna, Samarkand, Calcutta, KhartoumOrientals, a term which covers Jews and Arabs almost regardless. Or theyre generically Indians, and indeed the breadth of this term, embracing peoples from the North to the South Pole, the Caribbean to the subcontinent, discloses the blanket sense of otherness that issued from the vantage point of imperial London to demarcate most of the rest of the world. The question I put to myself isnt so much Am I a Snob? as do I see with the eye of the Empire? Later, in Three Guineas (1938), Woolf savaged the members of historic institutions the army, the law, the academyfor their heedless assumption of legimitacy and rightthinking. She vituperates in pictures: word pictures of the ruling class, of the culprits, the bewigged and bedizened men responsible, and photographs of establishment and empire on display, silly ornamentalism masking unapologetic and complacent influence: Encaenia at Oxford, Black Rod leading MPs into parliament, and a Chelsea pensioner, wearing a cuirass of medals.

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Here Woolf is being contradictory and contrary at oncethis decorated veteran looks abashed by his conspicuousness, and to my eyes at least, his eyes have slid sideways as if disowning the heavy panoply of glorious and deadly deeds which loads down his narrow chest, his slight shoulders. He has trimmed his moustache carefully and polished up those medals, but its not impossible to sense something hovering beside him, a ghost, a sound of a cry as someone is hit, the artillery, a rat, more rats. Woolf asks: What connection is there between the sartorial splendours of the educated man and the photograph of ruined houses and dead bodies? Obviously the connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers (TG 180). Her argument then opens out, to connect those gleaming festoons on the veterans chest to the restrictions on womens education and public activity, on access to influence and positions of responsibility. It is a famously stirring tirade, seventy years on, and in a world in continued upheaval from leaders bellicose and financial excesses, the grief and rage and hope against hope of Three Guineas still strike home, with the rawness of truthtelling disregarded, even if Woolf s remedies are fanciful and impracticable, and women in power have notoriously collaborated with abuseseven exacerbated them (think of Margaret Thatcher, Rebekah Wade). While Woolf s partisanship spoke to me powerfully in the Sixties when I first began reading her, her personal writings, published more recently, created another bond. The year after Three Guineas, her thoughts were still turning to the question of the patriarch, both the one she knew and the general, allegorical figure of male power: it was the tyrant father, she writes about Leslie Stephen in Sketch of the Past, the exacting, the violent, the histrionic, the demonstrative, the self-centred, the self pitying, the deaf, the appealing, the alternately loved and hated fatherthat dominated me then (MOB 123). I recognised this, and I recognise, too, the underlying current that flows between Leslie Stephen and male authority, even though he was individually an unusual Victorian in many ways, not at all a routine upholder of Establishment rules. I also recognise the next picture she gives us in her memories of him: It was like being shut up in the same cage with a wild beast. Suppose I, at fifteen, was a nervous, gibbering, little monkey, always spitting or cracking a nut and shying the shells out, and mopping and mowing, and leaping into dark corners and then swinging in rapture across the cage, he was the pacing, dangerous, morose lion; a lion who was sulky and angry and injured; and suddenly ferocious, and then very humble, and then majestic; and then lying dusty and fly pestered in a corner of the cage (123). Discomfort, unease, constraint, suffocation, these almost capture the sense of oppression I felt with my father, a man also given to rage and then to bouts of abject remorse, who also kept everyone around him, most particularly my mother, in a fever of anxiety that a spark might fly at random and his ready fury catch alight. And then, in the name of righteousness, railing that things were to be done this way, that only ignorant fool women could fail to understand how matters stood in the world and what the done thing was, he would explode and as quickly subside, leaving everything undertaken around himthe walk, the meal, the drive in the car, the outing to the theatre, the proposed new dresswrecked. In relation to these two currents in Woolf s fierce contrariness, the scorn of official pomp, and her daughterly ambivalence towards her father, I am venturing to set out some

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work-in-progress from a book Im writing, inspired by the years 1947-1952 when I was growing up in Cairo, just before the Egyptians refused to allow foreign interests to run one of the countrys most lucrative assets, the Suez canal. Its a novel, because I need the freedom to enter characters thoughts and feelings, and I want to write dialogue; besides I was a small child at the time and so my memories, though vivid, are fragments. This is the background: My father Esmond was the son of the cricketer Sir Plum Warner, in his day a man much loved and very famous: his wedding, in l906, to a port and gin heiress was treated like a national holiday and the list of wedding gifts fills two ledgers with a copperplate inventory, packed with silver pepperpots and tortoisehell toilette boxes and other vanished necessities of Edwardian society. My father was brought up rich but become pooror comparatively sofor reasons that will be told later in the booka sad tale of blackmail, celebrity, and coverup which, unlike the pepperpots and tortoisehell toilette cases, remains very familiar today even if the exact circumstances of fear and exposure have altered. During the war, he was a staff officer under Monty (whom he adored) fighting in Eighth Army in the North Africa campaign and then on into Italy. During the liberation there he met my mother, Ilia Terzulli, and they were married. My fathers Anglicanism gave such grievous anxiety to her local parish priest that he would not conduct the ceremony in her parish church, and it took place in a notables private chapel (for a brief moment after our mothers death, my sister and I thought this might not have been quite regular, and she might not have been legally wed at all). The end of the war found him in India or Ceylon and he had to wait for transport home; it took a while as there were so many other demobbed troops. He came back on the Queen Mary with thousands of other soldiers, and found himself thirty-six years old, without settled profession or job, alongside millions of men in a similar position looking for work in a world shrunken by war. Because he had enjoyed Cairo during the Africa campaign, because he was a book lover and a wide reader and a high-spirited traveller, he suggested to friends that he open a branch of their business in Cairo to serve the English and French communities. The cosmopolitan character of Egyptian society was famous, then. The friends were David Smith, the owner of W.H. Smith, the retail book and newspaper business, and his partner, Michael Hornby. It was with Michael that Esmond set out in early l946 to recce Cairo as a business opportunity. They sailed from Marseilles after a flutter in Monte Carlo; the boat ran out of petrol in mid-crossingbut thats another story. Inventory of a Life Mislaid (the current working title) is based in memoir but freely treated. It takes the form of lists, such as the vocabulary my mother had to learn to become the wife of an Englishman who considered himself a gentleman, a lexicon that Woolf would have recognised, in a fine fury, I hope; the bills of lading of the goods my parents brought with them to set up house in Cairo; the ingredients and recipes she learned to cook to conform to his taste; and the products, equipment, and perquisites of an English household abroad after World War II. In early 1947, the things thought necessary for setting up a home under British protection in a distant place where certain standards had to be kept up included silver and silver platelots of it: dredgers and ewers and cream jugs and small muffineers. The first entry in the inventory of their shipment to Cairo is 13 silver inkstands, 1 broken.

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It then continues: snuffers a punch ladle paper knives (7) sealing wax holders pincushions and tea strainers. a snuff case a bridge box wine labels (12) tea caddies silver button hook and shoe lift combination tantalus frames The last entry reads 2 doz cheese, and 2 doz table knives. The whole list closes with the words: All in 14 parcels. Far more than a heap of tableware, more than a young married couples first property, was bundled up in those 14 parcels. A way of life, a time of history, a class and its expectations, a man and his self-image, a handbook of social conventions and an identikit portrait of my father that flooded me with conflicted feelingssomewhere between amazement at how things were and how they have changed, embarrassment at the assumptions behind that journey into Egypt, and of course a sharp sense of absurdity and pathos. Also, my mother is absent from this list: when she arrived in London alone after the war, she brought almost nothing with hershe came from Southern Italy where there are no snuff boxes or combination tantalus framesor at least not in her modest widowed mothers flat in Bari. I am trying to open into stories from the inventory. This is from the section called An Englishmans Thesaurus: Patum peperium, or Gentlemans Relish At tea-time, on the tea trolley which her parents-in-law had given her, with its double shelves and extensible trays, she laid out the afternoon meal, one unknown in Italy, on linen mats of drawn threadwork, and from the fridge, took out the heavy round white pot in which this necessary teatime treat was sealed like a expensive cosmetic or an even more precious salve. The jar reminded her of Mary Magdalene and the expensive ointment she used so prodigally to soothe Jesuss dusty feet, but Francis was like the apostles and didnt like luxuries wasted. The relish was applied in tiny amounts, and it could indeed last for years without turning or fading in potency. Its authenticity was certified by the band of paper which wrapped it round, on which the ingredients were inscribed. Beata did of course try it, and she tried to like it, and she grew to tolerate it especially when dabbed on Crumpets then it functioned like a sprinkling of salt and pepper. If spread more lavishly, Patum peperium had a bracing effect, as if potash or gunpowder had been pounded with spices

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in a mortar and then lit; the mixture exploded against the roof of your mouth and the cavities of your nose and eye sockets. Francis showed her how to prong crumpets on to a toasting fork, as he had done for Ronnie when hed fagged for him at Eton, and hold them against the fire, where thin blue flames hissed as they licked up through three pillars of fossil skeletons and kindled them to a soft coral glow. If there were extra, they could be kept warm in the silver muffineer, under a dome of silver stood on the hearth. No pasta in Bari came close to this chewy sponginess, though just like the crooked anatomy of the gas fires columns, the macaroni, pappardelle, and orecchiette which shed help Lucia press out between her fingertips from the dough spread on a clean cloth laid out on the ironing board, were holed and crannied with curly involutions for sauce to coat and dribble through. But butter, which her husband longed to melt through the toasted crumpets runnels in those post-war years of tight rationing was not used in her own countrys cuisine. And olive oil was not to be had either, not in Hampshire in l945-7; rationing was tight. Horlicks She was expecting her first childexpecting was one of the idioms then in use (some of their friends congratulated her on being in the family way or laughed, happy to hear that she had a bun in the oven. It wasnt polite to be pregnant. Horlicks was recommended. Francis first made it up for her one evening on the Rayburn, heating Carnation condensed milk from the small flat tin hed punched with his army knife, and watching with satisfaction when she sipped it and found she liked it. Just what the doctor ordered, he said, contentedly. Thatll put some flesh on your bones. My bird. My little bird-boned darling. My linnet. In taste Horlicks resembled orzata, cereal, comforting, the air of the fields and the turned earth spiralling in the steam. There was also Ovaltine, very like, but more expensive. The hot drinks helped her through that first English winter, 1946, one of the harshest on record. Trumpers Bay Rum This was a little more familiar, being a version of the hair lotions used by barbers in her home town, and to palm something of this sort on to your hair to keep it smoothed down was a local custom. But her husbands preferred version smelled different from the pomades her father and other men in her youth had used to train their moustaches as well as control their hair. Bay Rum was not hair oil, she learned. Hair oil was foreign, and attracted malign comments (greasy, sleazy, caddish, vulgar). Bay rum was clean and manly. Nothing suspect about it. It came from Franciss barbers, and when he went up to London in his continued search for employment, hed turn up at Trumpers in Curzon Street for a shave and a trim; the establishment had managed to stay open right through the war and the bombing (Mr Albert and Mr Towne being too old to join up), and hed be bound to cross paths there with a chum or two, and see if there were any tips on stocks, or horses, or wines: Mtutor from the old school had written to him in June l945 and the letter had caught up with him in August:I am staying at my flat, hed written, wh. is barely habitable owing to enemy action, but he had managed to enjoy some fine wines laid down before the war, and hed passed on news of his latest flutter in the

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currency markets, urging Francis to buy South African gold as soon as the government allowed it: I think you might buy a few more Blyvoors, & perhaps Crowns. I am only telling you this because I know youre interested. But if you see a good profit anywhere, take itin my opinion, though a good broker friend always says hang on. Our expected boomlet has not yet developed. Cura ut valeas. YoursCMW. It was from Trumpers that Francis had bought, with money his mother had given him for his twenty-first birthday, a pair of twin mahogany brushes with his initials on them. Hed pour some of the barbers special preparation into the palm of his left hand before patting it into his hair; then hed take up the brushes, one in each hand, and attack his head with vigorous strokes, even though he had very little hair left from the red-blonde curls still invoked in his passport on the page under Marks of Identity. Bay Rum (with one eighth oil) was a scalp stimulant, though nobody mentioned baldness. Baldness was unspeakable in those times, as a petticoat showing shamed a woman, let alone bad breath or underarm sweat. Beata learned always to use the word perspiration, and she belonged to an era when the inside of her blouses and dresses were stitched with dress shields. One time, when they had been to a supper dance in Cairo at Shepheards, I think it was, New Years Eve 1948, a footman came and with a small bow whispered to her, The chef would like to thank you for your congratulations in person in the kitchen. Beata was surprised, and as her lips parted to exclaim that the message couldnt be for her as she had not thought to congratulate the chef, though he did indeed deserve such, even as these words were forming on her tongue, she caught a slight widening of the pupils in the messengers eyes, and it stole the breath from her speech, and her head nodded in response, that she would follow him. She put on a brave smile as she passed knots of other guests some at the small round tables, some standing waiting for the band to begin the next set, many of them in cone paper hats, and the drifting smoke from their cigars and cigarettes wreathed about them. Where was Francis? She hadnt seen him for some time, she realised; she had been dancing, with Paolo and with Saddiqi Pasha and with Ben Mendelsohn, one dance after another, because Francis would dance but he liked her to dance more, and positively encouraged her to take better partners than himself. He was a poor performer, hed say with a guffaw, but then she knew he preferred to play cards. So she followed the footman out of the ballroom and into the corridor past the door to the card room and down more of the corridor till they reached a pantry and there was Francis sitting on a chair groaning, his tie pulled out of his stiff collar and everything, everything undone. Thank God youve come, baby, he said. Take me home. She fled to him and then turned to the man whod been with her, but hed been replaced by two others, the doorman and one of the hotel front of house staff, maybe the suffragi, she realised, because both of them in full hotel uniform with tall turbans and long maroon coats. She began crying, as Francis muttered choppily at her,

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Oh dont cry baby, dont cry, just get me home. Weve told the driver to come round to the back entrance, one of the men told her. We can leave through the kitchen. What happened? She cried. Bloody fool, cant count to thirteen. He was trying to shout, she could see that, but the words came out in a kind of croak instead. Oh, its just the gentlemens ways, said the footman. Nothing to worry about. She tried to tidy Francis a bit before they hauled him to his feet, a dead weight, his head rolling as he moaned again. Back at the flat, she woke Abdul and Mohammed and brought them downstairs in their pyjamas to give her a hand with bringing Francis home. They too did not seem surprised or perturbed, and this reassured her. Perhaps, growing up among her sisters with her mother a widow, she just didnt understand much. She thought Francis would explain, but he never mentioned it, though he did keep away from the card room for a while. When he went out for an evenings game, hed add the bay rum to his hair as the final stage of his toilette, and when he kissed her good night, saying, I shant make a late night of it, but all the same, dont stay up, darling, she caught the scent from his hair, and it smelled like her mothers linen cupboard, where she used to lay cut branches from the bay tree to keep away moths. In the mornings, when she was making their bedsFrancis and she had twin beds from the very beginning of their marriage, and she would air them each day by pulling back the covers and lifting the pillows and beating them, as was the custom at homeshe would know which pillow was his from the laurel aroma hanging round it. Note
1. Laura Marcus, during the Class Contradictions panel at the Contradictory Woolf conference, discussed this essay most illuminatingly.

Works Cited
Voltaire. Candide and Other Stories. Trans. and ed. R. Pearson. Oxford: OUP, 2006. Warner, Marina. Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights. London: Chatto & Windus, 2011. Woolf, Virginia. The War from the Street. 1919. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1988. . A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas. Ed. Morag Shiach. Oxford: OUP, 2000. . Am I a Snob? Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Pimlico, 2002. 62-77. . Sketch of the Past. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Pimlico, 2002. 78-160.

BUT SOMEBODY YOU WOULDNT FORGET IN A HURRY: BLOOMSBURY AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF AFRICAN ART by Lois J. Gilmore
etish or art? Ethnographic or fine arts museum? Artist or savage? Aesthetic or magical? Conscious or unconscious?such are the many contradictions of African art. Bloomsburys encounter with African art is deep and complex if one traces the references here and there in the experiences and writings of the various members: the African objects on the window sill in Duncan Grants bedroom at Charleston (photo number 80, Anscombe 154) echoes in the paintings of Bell, Fry, and Grant; Omega; Frys multiple writings on Negro art, Virginia Woolf s thoughts recorded in her biography of Fry, her diary, and her letters;1 or even in the eye-popping ivory bracelets worn by Nancy Cunard on the social periphery of Bloomsbury (Gordon 46, 86, 92). Indeed, in her biography of Fry, more than once Woolf mentions Frys trophy of cotton goods from Manchester suited to untutored negresses (RF 152) and Frys moves from house to house with Chinese statues, the Italian cabinets, the negro masks and with the negro carvings (RF 225, 255). And he would explain that it was quite easy to make the transition from Watts to Picasso; there was no break, only a continuation. They were only pushing things a little further. He demonstrated; he persuaded; he argued. The argument rose and soared. It vanished into the clouds. Then back it swooped to the picture. And not only to the pictureto the stuffs, to the pots, to the hats. He seemed never to come into a room that autumn without carrying some new trophy in his hands. There were cotton goods from Manchester, made to suit the taste of the negroes. The cotton goods made the chintz curtains look faded and old-fashioned like the Watts portrait. There were hats, enormous hats, boldly decorated and thickly plaited to withstand a tropical sun and delight the untutored taste of negresses. And what magnificent taste the untutored negress had! Under his influence, his excitement, pictures, hats, cotton goods, all were connected. (RF 152-53). And certainly images of African art embedded in works like The Voyage Out (1915), The Waves (1931), Orlando (1928), and the very fine Negress of A Room of Ones Own (1929)2all these instancessuggest some importance attached to these artifacts of primitive culture. The contradictions of African Art run through the 20th century and include the problematic use of language to examine the topic in words like primitive, tribal, Negro art, or art ngre. Contradiction is embedded in attitudes toward things African and things Other that occupy a complex place in the history of Bloomsbury. Some points I wish to suggest, however incompletely, are that African art is by nature contradictory when de-contextualized and viewed from within Western culture, that African art is constructed within hegemonic attitudes toward the primitive; that the pivotal moment for the introduction of African art to the West came from the interest of French artists and collectors and was brought into England with the enthusiasm of Roger Fry,

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a contradictory and catalytic figure, and that ambivalence and ambiguity characterize Bloomsbury attitudes.3 First, questions necessary for some kind of understanding of African art and its relationship to the cultural context of early 20th century Britain and ideas of the primitive must be raised. I will focus primarily on Fry and the 1920 writings about The Chelsea Book Club show of African objects, the first in England, because both Frys and Clive Bells responses clearly illustrate the nuanced contradictions about African material culture. Finally, the radiating responses to African objects among members of Bloomsbury further insist on the argument of ambiguity and ambivalence. In the early 20th century Paris was the epicenter of the new movement toward modern art. Incorporating the primitive within Western art was a revolutionary act by Picasso and others in Paris (Green 121). Critics cite the ideology of nineteenth century Britain, the exhibition culture putting Africans and others on display (Coombes 85), the growth of anthropology, the construction of the Other from what Edward Said calls a huge library of Africanisms (67), and the culture of Western art based on the standards of Greek art as the highest level of achievement. Painters of the Royal Academy, critics, and other painters worked within this context of British art, which operated under what Frances Spalding calls mimetic veracity (128-30). Into this climate came the explosion of the first and second Post-Impressionist Shows at the Grafton Galleries. Members of Bloomsbury were intimately connected with the extraordinary hubbub (Woolf s word) generated (RF 153): Fry, the moving force for both shows (C. Bell, Roger Fry 189) coined the term post-impressionism (Spalding 126), Desmond MacCarthy was secretary for the 1910 show, Leonard Woolf operated as secretary for the second show, and several visited the gallery. The two post-Impressionist exhibitions introduced the primitive elements of modern painting to the people of Britain, and many critics have paid attention to how Africa was incorporated into these paintings in the first show of Manet and the Post-Impressionists in 1910.4 The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912-13 of English, French, and Russian artists aroused horror, contempt, and discussion, and yet was a success (Spalding 154). Beyond Edward Saids seminal text Orientalism, critics have argued that the other is always distant as well as different, and against this difference the characteristics of self and society are formed and clarified, which in the history of conquest constructs a child-like noble savage producing primitive art, a Western construct (Hiller 12). It is generally agreed that attitudes toward the primitive are rooted in the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. In the Editors foreword to The Myth of Primitivism, Susan Hiller articulates the critical problem of perspective: Western Artists are[the] beneficiaries [of colonial conquest and expansion] because it has enriched our concept of art, increased our store of visual knowledge, and added to our repertoire of formal means. But artists are also the victims of this legacy, because we have inherited an unconscious and ambivalent involvement with the colonial transaction of defining Europes others as primitives, which, reciprocally, maintains an equally mythical western ethnic identity (1). It is important to understand that African art was viewed only through European eyes, usually juxtaposed against European art. Writing on the affinities between the Cubists and the rediscovery of African art as truly great, Ladislas Segy identifies the concept of plastic structure and the spirit, the underlying ideology, not merely African but universal, as well as (1) the creative will-to-form based on the desire for the expression of individual truth, (2) the

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reaction against prevailing schools, (3) the desire to express an idea instead of perfecting the medium, (4) the desire to express a conceptual rather than visual image, (5) and the abandonment of representational or symbolic imagery for direct statement (118119). Segys lucid list affirms features that resonate with Frys formalist theory. The first show of African sculptures from Paul Guillaumes collection (pieces from the Ivory Coast and Gabon) occurred in 1913 at Alfred Stieglitzs 291 Gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York. Organized by Marius de Zayas, it caused a sensation, not altogether negative (Paudrat 153). Pieces from Guillaumes collection were later shown in London 1919-20 at the Chelsea Book Club. Here, the advertisement for the exhibition contains Frys startling claim that Some of these are great sculpturegreater, I think, than anything we produced in the middle ages.5 Charting a space for the 30 pieces from Paul Guillaumes collection on display (Green 127), Fry raises questions about the relationship of African art to Western art and articulates a value for them in the first of several articles and reprints in which Fry revisits the significance of art from Africa over the course of his lifetime. African pieces had been on Frys radar because of his interest in the French post-Impressionists and his familiarity with artists and collectors of African masks and sculptures like Vlaminck, Picasso, Derain, Apollinaire, art dealer Paul Guillaume since the First and Second Post-Impressionist shows in London 1910 and 1912. In 1919 Fry and Angela Lavelli saw Guillaumes collection of African art in Paris (Spalding 213). Spalding emphasizes Frys role in bringing an appreciation of African art into England and the subsequent shock engendered (217-18). I think the articles appearing in The Athenaeum during 1920 are particularly important in that the contradictions play out for the members of the public (subscribers) interested in art. Frys essay, later collected in Vision and Design, speculates about the importance of the figures by comparing them to Western art. Although he locates what he calls the source of culture in Greece and Greek art6 and repeats imperial attitudes toward the other, namely the Congoleses ignorance and savagery, Fry grants them power and artistic achievement: It seems unfair to be forced to admit that certain nameless savages have possessed this power not only in a higher degree than we at this moment, but than we as a nation have ever possessed it. And yet that is where I find myself (Chelsea 516). He cites complete plastic freedom (the ability to conceive form in three dimensions) as the highest achievement. Fry supports his claim for these nameless savages who are identified as negro artists by the end of the piece, critically examining such points as plastic form, degree of representation, the plane of the mask, emphasis, vitality and potency. While Fry applies Western criteria to the valuation of pieces, he nonetheless identifies two factors crucial for the production of culture which identifies civilized peoples, only one of which is missing. He notes that the first factor the creative artist is present, but the second factor the power of conscious critical appreciation and comparison is absent (Chelsea 516). In another essay for a 1933 exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, Fry would again examine the issue of the creative artist and his relationship to what Fry calls classical beauty. Lamenting the inability of those in the west to divest ourselves of the missionary attitude of past times, Fry argues for the remarkable gifts of the negro sculptor from whom we have much to learn from the poor heathens untutored mind (Lefevre 289-90). Frys special achievement was to open a dialogue in England about what constitutes art and whether the pieces of African art belong in that context. Christopher Green in

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Art Made Modern locates what he calls Frys pan-cultural openness in notions of the primitive, the savage, and the child-like which undercuts existing conventional hierarchies (127). It should be noted that Frys article appeared in the magazine section Fine Arts, which certainly emphasizes the value of what Fry sees in the exhibitions. When he describes the change effected by the experience: we stand naked to the blast (Chelsea 516), he claims a role for African art in the powerful changes occurring in European art during the early twentieth century. Woolf s response to and reflection on the show at The Chelsea Club indicate her ambivalence, while she acknowledges some power in the object to affect her. She notes in a letter to Vanessa Bell, dated 15 April 1920: There is a good deal doing in the art world. A show of Negro carvings at the book clubthe X grouppictures in Shaftsbury Avenue, and the entire works of Bach played; Beethoven next week. I went to see the carvings and I found them dismal and impressive, but Heaven knows what real feeling I have about anything hearing Roger discourse. I dimly see that something in their style might be written, and also that if I had one on the mantelpiece I should be a different sort of characterless adorable, as far as I can make out, but somebody you wouldnt forget in a hurry. (L2 429) Her diary entry further constructs the disturbing aspects of the pieces: The day before I went to the Niggers show in Chelsea; very sad impressive figures; obscene, somehow monumental; figures of Frenchmen, I thought, sodden with civilization and cynicism; yet they were carved (perhaps) in the Congo 100s of years ago (D2 30). Clive Bells response to the exhibition at The Chelsea Club in 1920 follows the lines of Frys but with reservations because he means to keep his head (Negro 247). Locating the discovery of Negro art in Paris with painters Picasso, Derain, Matisse and Vlaminck who began to collect pieces around 1905, Bell acknowledges the role of Frys friend and dealer in African art Paul Guillaume in acquiring first-rate things but also identifies the group of artists, critics, and amateurs as being what he calls the most sensitive in Europe (Negro 247). Refusing to either treat African art with contempt or to over-praise, Bell steers between the contraries in his evaluation. In many ways Bells view reflects the ambiguity and ambivalence of others, not only members of Bloomsbury, in addressing the fundamental questions swirling around what was happening in Paris as artists struggle toward modernity and the practice of incorporating primitive influences in the works. For Bell, Negro art is entitled to a place amongst the great schools, but that it was no match for the greatest (Negro 247). While granting exquisiteness of quality and noting that the thing is alive from end to end (Negro 247), Bell cites the lack of creative imagination, self-consciousness, and provenance: only when you begin to look for that passionate affirmation of a personal vision which we Europeans, at any rate, expect to find in the greatest art, will you run a risk of being disappointed (Negro 247). One limitation comes out of imperial discourse: Savages lack self-consciousness and the critical sense because they lack intelligence. And because they lack intelligence they are incapable of profound conceptions (Negro 247), but Bell sees the influence of Europe as the end: whenever the modern white man has been busy they [the arts] are

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extinct (Negro 248). Once all of the external elements used to judge a work of art are stripped away, there remains what is for Bell of the highest importance: the one thing that mattersaesthetic significance (Negro 248). In the end Bell can only present the [nigger] sculpture like it or dislike itto be judged on its merits. Bells careful negotiation of attitudes toward African art is set up by the introductory paragraph which notes the several exhibitions7 that have induced the curious to ethnographic collections in the British Museum where a variety of people view the relics of a civilization they helped to destroy (Negro 247). It seems that Bells consideration of African art cannot be judged on its merits without empire, and although he writes that he likes the change, Bells use of terminology signifies his ambivalence. Certainly, a letter to the editor on August 27, 1920, protests Bells use of terms Negro and nigger as an affront to the intelligence and race-pride of several million of your fellow-subjects in the British Empire (Harris 284). Although the letter writer praises Bells serious, well-reasoned and critically inspired writing, she sees the terms as objectionable and in bad taste. I believe this letter illustrates the variety of issues embedded in any consideration of African art at this point in time. Drawing a similar conclusion, Green sees Fry transcending the limitations of this baggage by undercutting existing conventional hierarchies (127), but Fry does so without questioning at any level the logocentric and Eurocentric idea of civilization (128). Reminding us that Fry could easily connect African art with childrens art as an especially obvious and objectionable mark of colonial paternalism (130), Green, too, sees the contradictions rooted in the ideologies of primitive and civilized. Two years after Frys death, the collection Last Lectures includes a later version of Frys essay on Negro art which revisits and extends Frys admiration and validation of the art by focusing on the analysis of particular pieces.8 Couched in the racialized, simplistic, Frazerian, anthropological ideas of the Negro mind, Fry, nonetheless, transcends the limitation of cultural theory to recognize African arts value to modern art and, as Green argues, is responsible for his opening of the canon; his pan-cultural opennessundercut existing conventional hierarchies (127). Indeed, Kenneth Clarks introduction reminds us not only the Wests general response to the pieces but also Frys: Negro art provided in concentrated form the qualities which Fry most admired. To him these nameless, dateless masterpieces were as near as anything could be to his ideal construction, a perfectly pure work of art. They have, he says, the same sort of control of the expressive elements of plastic form as the musician has of the relations of notes; they have delicate tact and restraint; they have sensibility and vitality in the highest degree. Nothing shows more clearly the independence of his aesthetic judgments from all associative and literary elements than this impassioned admiration for the art of a people with whom he can have had no single idea or association in common. (xxv) Clark goes on to recognize Frys earlier claim in the 1920 advertisement. Clark writes: The very existence of these sculptures depended on beliefs and emotions which he must have regarded as mere madness, yet their forms spoke to him more intelligibly and persuasively than the sculpture of his own contemporaries or of fifth-century Greece (xxv). Clearly, the contradictions persist.

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There is no question that Virginia Woolf was aware of African art during the early years of the twentieth century: her friendship with Fry, her readings of Fry from Bushman on, and her documentation of the incident of the power of the African mask and Josette Coatmellacs suicide said to have related to an African mask Fry had given her.9 It is equally clear that Woolf s response to the pieces was also ambivalent and ambiguous. The other painters associated with Bloomsbury were, too, affected by Frys enthusiasm and interest in African art. Richard Shone in The Art of Bloomsbury locates Frys influence on Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant around the period of the two post-Impressionist shows 1911-1912: his ceaseless activity changed forever Bloomsburys hitherto culturally restricted profile (16). He sees Bells work as having greater affinity to the work of French and German contemporaries and Grants work of 1911-12 revealing the impact not only of the Post-Impressionists but of his discovery of Byzantine mosaics, Romanesque decoration and African sculpture (74). The Bells traveled to Paris with Fry, met Picasso and Matisse (Shone 16-17), and Vanessa records a visit to Guillaumes gallery in the Faubourg St. Honor (V. Bell, Letters 238-39). Critics note that the early post-Impressionist shows and the visits to Paris suggest some unconscious appropriation of what she had seen in paintings, such as The Tub (Giachero, location 1720). So what do the contradictions of African art mean to Bloomsbury? I believe that this attention changed their perspective forever. Fry revisited what he called Negro Art in Last Lectures and Transformations. In his examination of the Burlington Magazine, Colin Rhodes argues that the interest in primitive art came from the validation of expression over technical mastery, the idea that the primitive, ahistorical products are situated outside of art-historical discourse and could infuse life into degenerated civilization allowing renewal (99-100). Fry, making use of the comparative method juxtaposing European art vs. Africa art, never challenges the notion of civilisation (qtd. in Rhodes102), but it seems clear that the perspectives Fry opened up could not be contained in spite of Torgovnicks harsh judgment of his limited vision (97). Indeed, the contradiction of how African artifacts should be valued and interpreted, whether they are locked into the colonialist, racist discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and whether they are to be viewed in the context of ethnographic or fine arts museum moves forward to the 1984 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York with the Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinities Between the Tribal and Modern exhibition, where tribal works are juxtaposed with pieces by Matisse, Picasso, and others in an effort to understand the Primitive sculptures in terms of the Western context in which modern artists discovered them (Rubin 1). Rashid Arareen in From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts argues the conflicting point of view that sees the exhibition and definition of primitive as part of what he calls an imperialist enterprise (164), further complicating the relationship between the West and African art. Again, in 1993 on the occasion of a new exhibition entitled Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals, Susan Vogel, Executive Director of The Museum of African Art, reflects on the three participants in the life of African art transposed to the West: the art object itself, the African artists and users, with their ideas, and the Western audience and presenters, with theirs (12-13). While the ambiguities and contradictions continue, Vogel acknowledges the importance of events early in the twentieth century, those involving Fry and Bloomsbury discussed in this paper. Although she does not mention Fry or Bloomsbury, Vogel reminds us that contemporary African

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artists and ideas now attract and surprise with the power that African sculptural forms did in the early century (13). Notes
1. 2. 3. See Gerzinas list of instances/references in Woolf s work. See Marcus. A note on terminology: unfortunate terms deemed offensive today were used in much of the writing during the early twentieth century. Since the contested term reflects imperial discourse, I will use the term African art whenever possible. According to Spalding: listed in the catalogue were thirty-five Gauguin oils, twenty-two Van Goghs, and twenty-one Czannes (126). Advertisement, The Athenaeum, 23 April 1920, p. 530. Fry, Negro Art at the Chelsea Book Club, The Athenaeum, 16 April 1920, p. 516. The Chelsea show in 1919 and the show at the Trocadero in Paris, Autumn 1919. According to Clark, none but the first lecture had been prepared for publication before Frys death, and the slides had to be found/reconstituted (Preface, v). See D2 303; L3 110, and Caws and Wright 311.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Works Cited
Anscombe, Isabelle. Omega and After: Bloomsbury and the Decorative Arts. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985. Araeen, Rashid. From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts. The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art. Ed. Susan Hiller. New York: Routledge, 1991. 158-82. Bell, Clive. Negro Sculpture. The Athenaeum, 20 August 1920: 247-48. . Roger Fry (1866-1934). Cornhill 993 (Autumn 1952): 180-97. Bell, Vanessa. Sketches in Pen and Ink. Ed. with Afterword by Lia Giachero. NY: Random House, 1998. E-book, version 1.0. . To Roger Fry. 24 March [1920]. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. Ed. Regina Marler. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. Caws, Mary Ann, and Sarah Bird Wright. Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends. Oxford: OUP, 2000. Coombes, Annie. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. Clark, Kenneth. Preface and Introduction. Last Lectures. 1939. By Roger Fry. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. v-vi; ix-xxix. Fry, Roger. Indigenous American Art. The Athenaeum, 9 July 1920: 55. . Negro Art. Last Lectures. 1939. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. 75-81. . Negro Sculpture at The Chelsea Book Club. The Athenaeum, 16 April 1920: 516. [Collected as Negro Sculpture in Vision and Design: 65-68.] . Negro Sculpture at the Lefevre Gallery. The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 62 (June 1933): 289-90. . Vision and Design. London: Chatto & Windus, 1920. . Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art. 1927. NY: Chatto and Windus, 1968. Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook. Bushmen and Blackface: Bloomsbury and Race. South Carolina Review 38 (2006): 46-64. Giachero, Lia. To Daylight from Darkness: Vanessa Bell as an Artist. Afterword. Sketches in Pen and Ink. By Vanessa Bell. Kindle e-book. Location 1720. Gordon, Lois. Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Green, Christopher. Expanding the Canon: Roger Frys Evaluations of the Civilized and the Savage. Art Made Modern: Roger Frys Vision of Art. Ed. Christopher Green. London: Merrell Holberton, 1999. 119-32. Harris, Vivian. Negro or Nigger. Letter. The Athenaeum, August 27, 1920: 284. Hiller, Susan, ed. The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art. New York: Routledge, 1991. Marcus, Jane. Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2004. Negro Sculpture. Advertisement. Athenaeum 23 April 1920: 530. Paudrat, Jean-Louis. From Africa. Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. Ed.

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William Rubin. Vol. 1. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984. 125-75. Rhodes, Colin. Burlington Primitive: Non-European Art in the Burlington Magazine before 1930. The Burlington Magazine 146 (Feb. 2004): 98-104. Rubin, William. Picasso. Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. Ed. William Rubin. Vol. 1. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984. 241-343. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Segy, Ladislas. African Sculpture Speaks. 4th edition enlarged. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975. Shone, Richard. The Art of Bloomsbury. London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1999. [On the occasion of the exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London. 4 November 1999-30 January 2000] Spalding, Frances. Roger Fry: Art and Life. 1980. Norfolk, UK: Black Dog Books, 1999. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1990. Vogel, Susan. The Museum for African Art: The Second Beginning. Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals. Ed. Mary Nooter. Munich: Prestel, 1993. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of Ones Own. 1929. New York: Harcourt, 1957. . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNellie. New York: Harcourt, 1977-1984. . Roger Fry: A Biography. 1940. New York: Harcourt, 1968. . The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Troutman. New York: Harcourt, 1975-1980.

CONTRADICTIONS IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY: VIRGINIA WOOLFS WRITINGS ON ART by Maggie Humm

Do you think we have the same pair of eyes, only different spectacles? (L6 158). his very well-known question, posed by Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, is not a simple one.1 Issues of how the arts and the visual in general were perceived, and employed, by the sisters, bear heavily on all their auto/biographical encounters. Reading Virginias accounts of art, particularly descriptions of her sisters art, is also to read a palimpsest of Virginias anxious feelings about self representation. This is of particular importance in any examination of modernist writing since, although modernist literature was initially characterised as a movement from outside to inside (Meisel), new modernism is a continuum of theories about representations of subjectivity in both visual and narrative practices. Woolf, as we know, had an abiding obsession with autobiography, just as the autobiographical is never far from the surface of modernist writing (Albright 1, Saunders 12). Woolf s own inter-weavings of the autobiographical with narrative have been the focus of many critics, although this epistemic community has mutated over the years.2 Woolf certainly places the subjectivity of the narrator/Woolf at the heart of her critical writings. I would argue that Woolf s haptic self is most prominent in her accounts of her sister Vanessa Bells art. Virginia Woolf s writings on art often create a kind of prosopopoeia coming to know herself, her identity, by constructing figures of artists and artistic events, for example in The Royal Academy (1919). But while The Royal Academy shows Woolf abjecting her fears, her writings on Vanessa show Woolf constructing a more complex identity. From the momentary rupture in Woolf s description of Vanessa in Reminiscences(1976), to the very brief It is strange as one enters the Mansard Gallery (1924), and to the Foreword to Recent Paintings of Vanessa Bell (1930), Woolf s empathetic understandings of Vanessas art, reveal Woolf s developing sense of being. Woolf did, after all, entitle her autobiography A Sketch of the Past (1976), the piece was written at Vanessas request: Nessa said that if I did not start my memoirs I should soon be too old, and A Sketch foregrounds Woolf s aestheticizing of life events (MOB 64). Just as in A Sketch, Woolf s art writings address the issue of the self s representation. But when writing about art, Woolf does not describe paintings as purely reflecting a narrators emotions. Narrators reactions to paintings in Woolf s art reviews are not the same as Woolf s aesthetic shock moments in her autobiography, for example, seeing this light of waves breaking behind a yellow blind, and the crocus by the door at St. Ives (MOB 64). When writing about art, descriptions of paintings seem to offer Woolf a different kind of subjectivity. Her imaginary portraits in arther prosopopeiaare not conflicted but more embodied. Woolf drew her aesthetic strategies from many sources both past and contemporary. The Stephen family tradition of biographical writing, with her father as founder of the

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Dictionary of National Biography from the year of her birth 1882 to 1891 was an early influence. Woolf s great aunt Julia Margaret Camerons portraits, which hung in Gordon Square and were published with introductions by Woolf and Roger Fry, showed Woolf how to construct subjectivities in imaginary moments carefully posed and performed. By 1905, Woolf owned Walter Paters collected works, and Paters The Renaissance models aesthetic portraits betraying Paters self-conscious self-references (Saunders 43). Woolf thought Pater the writer who from words made blue and gold and green (E3 182-3). Although Woolf did write disparagingly about the art critic Vernon Lee, Woolf owned Lees works and Lees Laurus Nobilis (1909) combines aesthetic critiques with self impressions. Woolf s contemporary sources included, pre-eminently, her Bloomsbury friends. Following the Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, they championed Czanne, for whom representation was no longer photographic but induces affect in spectators. Art theorists offered Woolf critical methods which combined aesthetic and personal reflections, for example, Julius Meier-Graefe and Bernard Berenson. There are similarities, too, between Henri Bergsons notion of reflective perception and what Jane Goldman has called Woolf s doorstop model of aesthetic experience, and Bergson shaped art practice at the Slade attended by Vanessa (Goldman). Woolf read and owned many biographies of artists including the lives of William Morris, Delacroix and Czanne, and art critiques by other modernists, for example Ezra Pounds Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. Woolf s consistently shared these reflections with Vanessa, while buying Vanessas paintings, textiles, ceramics, book jackets and decorations. Woolf s differing autobiographical selves are visible throughout her writing in the interfaces3 of her diaries, letters, and novels. But the aesthetic portraits Woolf creates of Vanessas art are the space of a more embodied response to selfhood as well as the space of a different kind of rhetorical response to autobiography. And it is Vanessa and Vanessas art which seems to trigger Woolf s haptic subjectivity most of all. Woolf wrote extensively about her sister the artist in Reminiscences which interweaves biography with autobiography. Begun in 1907, Reminiscences followed Woolf s imaginary historical figure in her 1906 The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn, and, as Anna Snaith points out, Woolf incorporates autobiography into fiction from the beginning of her career (My Poor Private Voice). Although Reminiscences is largely a naturalistic account of shared family events, moments of rhetorical rupture break into the narrative at points when Woolf remembers looking at Vanessa. In the dark land under the nursery table, a common trope in many autobiographical fictions from Charlotte Bront to Simone de Beauvoir, Woolf joining Vanessa, drifted together like ships in an immense ocean (MOB 29). Woolf evokes strong passions and Vanessa passion for art in innumerable aesthetic associations of smells and flowers (MOB 29). The possibility of writing autobiographical referential bodily sensations first captured here momentarily by Woolf, and triggered by Vanessa, are in stark contrast to the high Victorianism in Woolf s descriptions of her mother going through the shadows of the Valley [of Death] nobly free from all illusion or sentiment (MOB 33). While not overtly autobiographical, the visible traces of Virginias own portrait are nonetheless evident in her other writings about Vanessa, if we look through the bifocals of psychoanalytic and genetic criticism. Genetic criticism does not regard the published essay as an authors final intention and purest outcome, but as a necessary possibility, still in tension with the material multi-layers of its genesis (Deppman et al. 11). In this

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schema, Virginias self-projection onto a published portrait of Vanessa is caught up in her contemporaneous writings about Vanessa. Portraits are always autobiographical. The writer who portrays an individual knows that individual intimately, experiencing the persons very contours. Such intimacy with Vanessa is a constant in Woolf s letters, diaries and contemporaneous materials. More than other approaches, feminist autobiographical criticism (and more recently queer autobiographical criticism) went to the heart of these issues, particularly in the 1990s, by suggesting that generic features should not be seen as bounded. Rather, they argued, we should track autobiographical movements through what might be contradictory texts, recognising the difficulty of pointing to any single individual author.4 So rather than reading Woolf s diaries and letters as ur texts, as transparent windows onto Woolf s real feelings, far better, feminists would argue, as genetic critics do today, to look at the interfaces Woolf makes between her different forms of self-representation whether art review, diary or photography. In her writing Woolf selectively refigures differing aspects of Vanessa, creating a Vanessa who exemplifies many of Woolf s perceptions. Looking at some of these accounts as a palimpsest of submerged identities and paratexts highlights important aspects of Woolf s self. The most authoritative accounts to probe these issues of cultural interfaces and auto/ bios between the two sisters are those of Diane Gillespie.5 From the pioneering The Sisters Arts through to her recent Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Painting, Gillespie expertly demonstrates, in detailed scholarly analysis of Bells paintings, that the aesthetic interactions of the sisters provide a context for Woolf s writings (Woolf, Bell, and Painting 122). As Gillespie points out, Virginia created Vanessa in part as the fictional characters Helen Ambrose, Katharine Hilbery and Lily Briscoe. In turn Bells painting Mrs Dalloways Party may have been a visual impetus for the closing scene of Woolf s novel. The sisters mutual photographic enthusiasms can be viewed as overtly autobiographical (Humm Snapshots). I will follow Gillespies lead, but looking at Woolf s writings on art, not so much as a source of images or fictional and non fictional themes for Woolf s other published work, but rather as autobiographical resonances with Woolf s contemporaneous writing. Before examining Woolf s later accounts of Vanessas art, it is instructive to look at earlier art reviews in which Woolf explores imaginary portraiture. Woolf s subjectivism is particularly visible in her review of the Royal Academys 1919 summer exhibition. Woolf s attack on the Academys subject pictures mirrors Roger Frys 1919 denigration of ordinary historical pictures and she cites Fry in the conclusion of her review (Fry 71 and see Humm Editing). But more revealing of Woolf s feelings is her creation of narrator and spectators exaggerated reactions to John Singer Sargents painting Gassed in the exhibition when the great rooms rang like a parrot-house with the intolerable vociferations (E3 93). Woolf s rhetorical construction of narrator alienation betrays an anxiety formation in her own sense of artistic sensibility. By abjecting onto the narrator aspects of her still unformed artistic understandings, Woolf is able to displace her more conventional liking for subject pictures (as evidenced in her contemporary letters). Art reviews, in other words, were spaces for Woolf of self construction. By the time of her biography of Roger Fry, Woolf could confidently forefront her artistic sensibility and read her own life from the visual surface she creates of Fry. Originally intending to dedicate To the Lighthouse to Fry, Woolf wrote to him that you have I think

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kept me on the right pathmore than anyone (L3 385). In Roger Fry, rather than analysing Frys published works (most of which Woolf knew and owned), she describes attributes of Frys aesthetic sensibility identical to her own. Frys room was a muddle of old newspaper cuttings, a congenial environment for Woolf who collected cuttings in scrapbooks (RF 92). Woolf praises Frys holistic aesthetic, which included the domestic arts, and Woolf recreates Fry as a theorist/practitioner creating art for a common viewer, as Woolf was herself. But it is in her reviews of Vanessas art that Woolf is able to be more complicit, to make direct, unmediated responses, and thus create herself. In Pictures and Portraits Woolf touches on her theme of woman and art by denouncing the National Portrait Gallery for lacking a portrait of Mrs John Stuart Mill (E3 163-6) Four years later in the brief It is strange as one enters the Mansard gallery Woolf openly praises Vanessas art. The brief paragraph appeared in the From Alpha to Omega column in the Nation & Athenaeum and reviews the twenty-first exhibition of the London Group at the Mansard Gallery in October to November 1924 (E3 448-9). While John Maynard Keyness earlier Preface to a London Group exhibition at the Mansard Gallery simply presented an argument for investing in art, Bells work impacts directly on Woolf s aesthetic senses (Keynes 296). Mrs Bell illumines a whole wall, in spite of the drizzle outside, with a flower piece in which every rose seems instinct with brilliant life, yet seized in a moment of intense stillness (E3 448). Woolf s ekphrastic description of Bells paintings is intense. Woolf s self is totally involved in Bells visual appeal and matches Roger Frys claim that art arouse emotions in us by playing upon what we may call the overtones of our primary physical needs, and Woolf s Hogarth Press published Frys The Artist and Psychoanalysis also in 1924 (Fry 37). In what art historians now call relational aesthetics, that is public art in dialogue with spectators, the physicality of Vanessas art embraces Woolf s whole sense of being. Again in 1924, Woolf had invited Vanessa to decorate 52 Tavistock Square joining the paintings and textiles by Vanessa that Woolf already owned. It is instructive to contrast Woolf s eager embrace of the aesthetic moment in looking at Bells art, with her very hesitant public self-representation in speaking about the London Group. Woolf addressed the Group at a dinner in March 1924, on the retirement of its president Bernard Adeney. Osbert Sitwell, who also spoke at the dinner, describes a very different Woolf with pitiable nervousnessher distress was obvious (Sitwell 20). As joint editor of Art and Letters, an organiser of exhibitions and owner of an extensive modern art collection, Sitwell was well placed to judge the value of art criticism. While he sometimes disparages Bloomsbury in his autobiography, calling the group the Bloomsbury junta to whom a correct tone was like giving Hitler the salute or wearing a green turban, Sitwell thought Woolf notable beautiful (Sitwell 18-20). Sitwell calls Woolf s speech a superb display of art, a major rhetorical performance (18-20). Unlike her speech in March, Woolf s review of Vanessa paintings in October is not performative, engendered by distress, but a dynamic conformation of being as Derrida says as if the force of the image has to do less with the fact that one sees something in it than with the fact that one is seen there in it (Derrida 159).6 The self-critical, interrogative self, so much a feature of Woolf and her narrators, is much less evident in Woolf s accounts of Bell. Often it is as if Bells art helps Woolf away from the split self of literary modernism to an encounter with affect and selfhood. This is particularly visible in Woolf s Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell, the catalogue

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of Bells exhibition at the Cooling Galleries in February to March 1930. At first glance the published Foreword seems objective and mediated by Woolf s critical self, particularly in contrast to the earlier manuscript version. Surprisingly for such a short essay, Woolf made many changes and revisions. The main changes are the deletion of some direct commentary on Bell as well as a diminution in Woolf s use of the I-form. Also, in the public piece, Woolf recreates/performs Vanessa in the historical and gendered moment in which the sisters were immersed. How then can we read a text which deletes some personalisations as an autobiographical piece? How can such an essay be autobiographical in the sense of affect? I think autobiography is present in the reflexive interface of Woolf as narrator with Vanessa as a portrait making a shared response to visual representations. The Holograph Notebook of the manuscript is dated June 18 1929 and the published Foreword the 4th of February 1930. There are many disparities and overlaps between the two versions.7 As noted, a distancing is introduced into the published Foreword: syntactically (proper becomes altogether to be commended, E5 137), in persona (Vanessa Bell becomes Mrs Bell except for Woolf s revealing placing of Vanessa Bell into a canon of women artists), in emotional characteristics (Bells stubborn becomes something uncompromising, E5 138), The personal pronoun I becomes one at moments (I have read it in the newspapers to one has read, E5 138). Yet the autobiographical does surface. Woolf s reflections are moved from the manuscript margins into the public light (the group of women is silent, E5 139) and the art works are described in much more embodied detail (with more naked girls and naked boys, E5 138) supported by the introduction of more convincing precision (a hundred painters becomes ninety-nine (E5 138). One key change is ideological with the insertion of a more intense patriarchy (the father objects to becomes her father would have died (E5 137). Most importantly, Vanessas expertise is enlarged, and diminishing comments, such as we could fancy that Mrs Bell had never read a word of Shakespeare, are deleted. There are very vivid descriptions of Bells choice of coloration all the blues and greens (E5 138-9). Blue and Green (1921) is, of course, the title of Woolf s most significantly imagistic short story. Woolf does not simply copy from manuscript to text, nor simply expand and amplify the manuscript. Both texts are improvisations around the theme of identity: Vanessa as a painter and Virginia as a writer. The autobiographical is a trace. This is most evident in the way in which the Foreword is shaped by spatial metaphorsof Woolf herself pausing upon the threshold (E5 137). Goldman has highlighted the aesthetic significance of Woolf s threshold moments. In the Foreword, I would argue, such moments are autobiographical in a Lacanian sense. That is, the portrait that Woolf is hesitant to draw of Vanessa, by delaying her own entrance, instantiates want in Lacanian terms. Woolf s gaze at Vanessas paintings maps the intimately private onto the public in a social setting. In the opening paragraphs, Woolf s switch from associating the personal I said and woman, to one must go into the gallery, might seem less personal, less autobiographical. Yet this transition enables Woolf to claim universality for Bell and womens art in general, and for her own point of view as a woman spectator. What is there here to intimidate or perplex? Are we not suffused, lit up, caught in a sunny glow? (E5 138). Thus the vividness of colour and bodies in the paintings creates in the narrator/Woolf a desire to know, to become the Other. In Woolf s descriptions of Bells paintings there is present Woolf s entitlement as sister, to Bells embodiment. The published Foreword

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then, represents the subjects achievement of subject-hood in a chain of artistic signifiers overcoming absence. In addition, perhaps Virginia is springing Vanessa from the social script that prohibits a female delight in gazing at naked bodies (and certainly prohibits a female delight in scoping female bodies), in order to free herself from this script. She [Vanessa] has looked on nakedness with a brush in her hand (E5 138). In the sisters taking of family photographs there are similar moments where the sisters share the photographic gaze to create identities in order to move beyond the paternal/maternal home (Humm Modernist Women 19 and 81). Genetic criticisms similar focus on intimate features of contemporaneous works helps to highlight this autobiographical permeability.8 If we place the Foreword in Woolf s contemporaneous writings, refusing to see the published text as final, then the interface of auto/bios is more evident. In the year leading up to the Foreword Woolf was writing very self-reflexively about Vanessa and about issues of colour and auto/bios. The Reading Notebooks also show, as Brenda Silver points out, the diversity of her reading at this time including autobiography: Fanny Burneys diaries (Silver 75). Woolf s six weeks in bed from January to March 1929 are directly present, Silver argues, in Woolf s note on Burney, she wrote this after many days in bed and by aligning Burneys illness with her own (Silver 82). Illness always stimulates the need for autobiography because illness disrupts the linear direction of a life and heightens the need to reconstruct one self as well as images of others. In Woolfs contemporaneous diaries and letters Woolf dealt directly with Vanessas image and with the visual. In December 1929 immediately before the Foreword, Woolf thanked Vanessa for the lovely smokey blue cats eyes pair of brooches which conveyed the chill and fervour of your eyes to me (L4 119). Earlier that year, meeting Nessa in Tottenham Court Road they shared that wash of reflection in which we both swim about and she felt that I am more full of shape & colour than ever (D3 219). In April Woolf worried she was to forget the fictitious selfI can see my famous self tapering about the world (D3 222). But by June 1929, with Vanessa in Cassis, Virginia delighted in Provenal colours Duncan in his blue shirtblack & white butterflies (D3 232). In September 1929 Angelica was sent to boarding school leaving Vanessa a painter on her own and Virginia projects herself into Vanessas body feeling that when the sisters visited Angelica together, Nessa will hold her very tight to get the sensation of her childs body again (D3 255, 261). The Foreword revels in these kinds of embodied coloration naked girls crouched on crimson cushionsthe lustre of grass and flower, of the glow of rock and treea sunny slowtemperate warmthsurrounded by vineyards and olive trees (a painting which Diane Gillespie expertly analyses) like the Provenal landscape Virginia had shared with Vanessa that year and the surrogate experience of seeing/holding Angelicas body (Foreword 138 and Gillespie Godiva). Of course Woolf is describing the content and features of Vanessas paintings in the exhibition, but her decision to choose particular features of the paintings inevitably reveals her own feelings. Psychoanalytic theory would characterise Woolf s choice of colour terms and features of embodiment, in her manuscript and published descriptions of Vanessa at this time, as possessing a lexical function. That is, Woolf s constant remaking of her own sensations in descriptions of Vanessas art is what the psychoanalyst and writer Christopher Bollas calls mnemic objectsa projection of self-experience (21). Similarly in the draft Foreword Woolf wrote for the catalogue of Vanessas exhibition in February 1934 at the Lefvre Gallery, Woolf describes

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voyaging in a colour with Vanessa (Holograph 1934), while in the same year refusing to be painted for the National Portrait Gallery. Woolf s descriptions of objects in Vanessas paintings enable the symbolic repetition of the self. Adding genetic criticisms focus on similar attributes of semiotic language allows us to read the overlapping diaries/letters, not as transparent autobiography but as traces of Woolf s self-making. Woolfs constant attention to Bells art is not a simple attachment or literary re-presentation of Bells work. Woolf gains a self-presence through her descriptions of Bells forceful imagery. Woolf experiences Bells art as a fabric of sensations, activating Woolf s being, perhaps beyond any modernist analysis. Clive Bell, Virginia noted, thought my soliloquies, trains of thought, are better than my silhouettes (D5 275). But the vividness of Woolf s silhouette of Vanessa in the Foreword and other writings, cannot be divided from Woolf s sense of identity, and the subjectivity of her own autobiographical soliloquies and interfaces. Bells art allows Woolf to remove the spectacles of modernist subjectivity, and to experience an empathetic somatic being, indeed one with the same pair of eyes. Notes
1. 2. 3. 4. A short section of this essay appeared in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, No. 79, Spring 2011. My thanks to Gill Lowe and Vara Neverow for permissions, and for scholarly editing of that piece. See Hussey (1986), Minow-Pinkney (1987), Porritt (1991), Little (1996), Snaith (2000) Briggs (2005), Light (2007) Fordham (2010) among many others. I take the term and usage from Smith and Watsons Interfaces. My piece here is a brief sketch from a larger project of genetic criticism of Woolf s writings about art. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watsons several collections remain the most authoritative accounts of feminist autobiographical criticism. Approaches to visual autobiographical writings include Heron and Williams (1996), Hirsch (1997), Meskimmon (1996) and Rugg (1997). An excellent account of more recent queer autobiographical criticism is Johnston (2007). This is not to overlook the important work on Woolf and the visual by other Woolf scholars, most notably by Goldman (1998). Derrida also argues that autobiography effaces the I in the sense that the autobiographical I is about memory and naming. Page numbers for quotations from the published Foreword are listed. The manuscript has differing page numbers. Its typed frontispiece paginates the manuscript draft as 53-69, but the CD-ROM paginates as 29-37. To avoid confusion I have omitted manuscript page numbers since the manuscript is easily viewable on the CD-ROM. See Fordhams authoritative account.

5. 6. 7.

8.

Works Cited
Albright, Daniel. Virginia Woolf as Autobiographer. Kenyon Review 6:4 (1984): 1-17. Bollas, Christopher. Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. London: Allen Lane, 2005. Deppman, Jed et al. Eds. Genetic Criticism. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. Mmoires for Paul de Man. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Fordham, Finn. I do I undo I redo: the Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves in Hopkins,Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce and Woolf. Oxford: OUP, 2010. Fry, Roger. Art and Science. Vision and Design. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. Gillespie, Diane F. The Sisters Arts: the Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Syracuse NY: Syracuse UP, 1988. . Godiva Still Rides: Virginia Woolf, Divestiture and Three Guineas. in Woolf and the Art of Exploration. Eds. H. Southworth and E. K. Sparks. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2006, pp. 2-27.

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. Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Painting. The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Goldman, Jane. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual. Cambridge: CUP, 1998. Heron, Liz and Williams, Val. Eds. Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Post-Memory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 2003. . Snapshots of Bloomsbury: the Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 2006. . Editing Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Virginia Woolf and the Royal Academy. Woolf Editing/Editing Woolf. Eds. E. McNees and S. Veglahn, Clemson: Clemson Digital Press, 2009. 154-159. . Virginia Woolf and the Arts. The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. M. Humm, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Hussey, Mark. The Singing of the Real World: the Philosophy of Virginia Woolf. Columbus OH: Ohio State UP, 1986. Johnstone, Georgia. The Formation of 20th Century Queer Autobiography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Keynes, John Maynard. London Group. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes Volume XXVIII. London: Macmillan, 1982. Light, Alison. Composing Ones Self: Virginia Woolf s Diaries and Memoirs. Southport: Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, 2007. Little, Judy. The Experimental Self: Dialogic Subjectivity in Woolf, Pym and Brooke Rose. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. Meisel, Perry. Psychology. A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture. Eds. David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 79-91. Meskimmon, Marsha. The Art of Reflection: Women Artists Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. Brighton: Harvester, 1987. Porritt, Ruth. Surpassing Derridas Deconstructed Self: Virginia Woolf s Poetic Disarticulations of the Self. Womens Studies 2 (1991): 323-38. Rugg, Linda Haverty. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Saunders, Max. Self Impressions: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: OUP, 2010. Silver, Brenda. Virginia Woolf s Reading Notebooks. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1983. Sitwell, Osbert. Laughter in the Next Room: Volume 4 Left Hand, Right Hand! London: Macmillan, 1949. Smith, Sidonie and Watson, Julia, eds. Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. . Eds. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. . Eds. Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Snaith, Anna. My Poor Private Voice: Virginia Woolf and Autobiography. in Representing Lives: Women and Autobiography. Eds. A. Donnell and P. Polkey, Houndsmills: Macmillan, 2000. Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press, 1975-1980. . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979-1985. . Moments of Being. 2nd ed. Ed. J. Schulkind. San Diego: Harcourt, 1985. . The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. A. McNeillie (vols. 1-4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5-6), London: Hogarth Press, 1986-2011. . Roger Fry. Ed. D. F. Gillespie, Oxford: Shakespeare Head, Blackwell, 1995. . Pictures by Vanessa: Holograph Notebook June 18 1929. in Holographs. Part 1. Articles, Essays, Fiction and Reviews. Volume 3. 53-69. MI.3 Major Authors on CD-ROM: Virginia Woolf. Ed. Mark Hussey. Woodbridge CT: Primary Source Media, 1997. . Vanessa Bells Exhibition: Holograph Notebook February 23 1934. in Holographs Part 1. Articles, Essays, Fiction and Reviews. Volume 7. 31-33. MI. 7 Major Authors on CD-ROM: Virginia Woolf. Ed. Mark Hussey. Woodbridge CT: Primary Source Media, 1997. . Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 5 1929-32. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. London: Hogarth Press, 2009. 137-142.

BUT SOMETHING BETWIXT AND BETWEEN: ROGER FRY AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF BIOGRAPHY by Amber K. Regis
n March 1940, Roger Fry received its first bad review. Having read the typescript, Leonard accused Woolf of employing the wrong method: Its mere anal[ysis], not history. Austere repression. In fact dull to the outsider. All those dead quotations (D5 271). When the biography was published four months later, it received positive notices in the press, but Leonards judgment has prevailed and persists in varying forms to this day. In a recent history of biography, for example, Nigel Hamilton surveys the critical tradition and concludes that Roger Fry is not only the worst book [Woolf ] ever wrote, but a complete failure as a biography (162). This failed reputation is borne out in current publishing trends: Roger Fry remains absent from the Penguin and Oxford Classics list, and although Vintage reproduces the text as part of its Lives series, this is a facsimile reprint without a critical introduction or editorial apparatus. Scholars working on the biography must therefore depend on Diane Gillespies excellent Shakespeare Head edition, for elsewhere it is erased from the canon of Woolf s major works. For her part, Woolf was suspicious of Leonards judgment. She failed to satisfy his demand for history, but she considered this a result of dissympathy (D5 271). Leonards assessment reveals a tension between his expectations of formal biography and the methods employed in Roger Fry. He demonstrates a lack of interest in personality (D5 271), and here Woolf invokes the terminology employed some thirteen years earlier in her essay The New Biography (1927). In pursuing the rainbow-like intangibility of personality, Woolf suspects that for Leonard, Roger Fry lacked the granite-like solidity of truth (CE4 229). But subsequent critics have accused Woolf of failure on different and contradictory terms. Catherine Parke, for example, though she concedes the biography employs unconventional digressions, insists on a return to tradition. She accuses Woolf of reverting to practices previously rejected and satirised in Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933), to conventional narrative[s] that [survey] the familiar topics of Victorian biography (77). Thus, in contrast to Leonard, Parke depicts the biographys failure as a result of too much granite and not enough rainbow. Roger Fry, it seems, is caught in a double bind. But one further, alternative reading might help unpick such contradiction. Elizabeth Cooley does not challenge the dominant narrative of failure, but she does offer a more complex explanation. Roger Fry, she argues, is a peculiar double failure: Woolf not only [fails] to produce the Victorians two fat volumes, she also [fails] to allow her invention and intuition free play (81). As such, Roger Fry satisfies neither traditionalists nor seekers after innovation; it is neither a Victorian amorphous mass nor a new modernist biography (CE4 231). Here I want to explore the contradictions in Woolf s theorising of biography as shaped by the experience of writing Roger Fry. This paper will reconsider her apparent retreat from biographical experiment, and will question the evidence and accusations of failure that haunt the biographys critical legacy. Drawing upon the work of Woolf s final biographical subject,

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I suggest new contexts for reading her method and practice. In short, the contradictory responses evoked by Roger Fry are the necessary accompaniment to Woolf s ongoing concern with the genre of biography and its potential to depict a vital, mutable subject.

Art vs. craft

Evidence for the failure of Roger Fry is garnered from Woolf s letters, diaries and her autobiographical Sketch of the Past (1976). Writing is donkey work and sober drudgery (D5 133); it is an appalling grind (D5 138), forcing her to grumble; and sweat (L6 284). Work on Sketch is begun as a holiday from Roger, from the horrid labour that makes Woolf sick (MOB 78, 87). These difficulties and frustrations are typically used to explain the apparent change of heart in Woolf s later theorising of biography. In 1927, while at work on Orlando, she celebrated the potential of the new biographer, a literary alchemist blending the elements of granite and rainbow, fact and fiction: He chooses; he synthesises; in short, he has ceased to be the chronicler; he has become an artist (CE4 231). In 1939, however, while at work on Roger Fry, Woolf published a new essay, revising her position. In The Art of Biography, the incompatibility of fact and fiction is reasserted and the biographer is robbed of his status as an artist: And thus we come to the conclusion, that he is a craftsman, not an artist; and his work is not a work of art, but something betwixt and between (CE4 227). The Art of Biography is thus a contradictory essay, a fact signposted by its titlea seemingly perverse choice, when one considers its conclusion. To follow Woolf s logic, the biographer is a craftsman and his work is a craft. Again, this fits with the evidence of diaries and letters. As Woolf composed her life of Roger Fry, she made increasing use of craft metaphors. In a letter to Ethyl Smyth, for example, she described her work as a piece of cabinet making, claiming to have learnt a carpenters trick or two (L6 381). This transition from art to craft can thus be linked to the grind and drudgery of writing the biography: the negotiations with relatives and friends, Woolf s reticence over sexual matters and professional disputes, and the troublesome organisation of factual material. These difficulties seem to conspire against her, preventing her from creating an artwork: as a formal biographer, Woolf had become a craftsman. But The Art of Biography is also a playful and ambiguous essay. So too is Woolf s craft metaphor, and this becomes clear if we attempt to follow her logic a little further. The biographer is a craftsman, so his work must be a craft; the craftsman is distinct from the artist, so his work must be distinct fromwhat? Here we must stop and pause, for the biographers craft is displaced and located at some unnamed, liminal point betwixt and between the poles of art and some unnamed other (CE4 227). The Art of Biography is not, therefore, a straightforward retraction of the biographers claim to be an artist. Significantly, craft is not the antithesis of art, and the line demarcating one from the other is indistinct and left unclear. If we concede, however, that Woolf s experience writing Roger Fry had an impact on her theorising of biography, then Fry must provide a significant context for understanding her adoption of this ambiguous craft metaphor. In particular, can Frys involvement with the Omega Workshops shed any light on biography as a craft? Woolf immersed herself in Frys public and private writings as she prepared and compiled her biography. In her chapter on the Omega, Woolf makes use of material from Frys essay Art and Socialism

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(1912) in order to contextualise her account of the young artists who were to make chairs and tables, carpets and pots that people liked to look at (RF 151). Her selections emphasise Frys belief in the positive combination of art and craft, for example: Ultimately, of course, when art had been purified of its present unreality by a prolonged contact with the crafts, society would gain a new confidence in its collective artistic judgment (qtd. in RF 151). Fry paints a bleak picture of the contemporary art scene: debased at the hands of snobbery and commercial trade, the artist is subject to market forces, producing work to order and selling beauty as the prostitute professed to sell love (qtd. in RF 151). He is thus a pseudo-artist, his work being imitative and beholden to profit (qtd. in RF 151). Craft, however, provides a means to purify art of unreality, its restorative function providing the impetus behind the Omega. In his Prospectus for the Omega Workshops (1913), Fry imagined the separation of art from craft in terms of divorce: an artificial division to the harm of both (198). Increasing professionalization had robbed art of vivifying contact with practical needs, while the mechanization of craft, bringing with it cheap and uniform production, had served to strip quotidian things of beauty (198). But what might the combination of art and craft produce? Fry claimed the Omega would [substitute] wherever possible the directly expressive quality of the artists handling for the deadness of mechanical reproduction; the workshops would enable artists and craftsmen to create, to employ their power of invention with the utmost freedom and spontaneity (199). In short, the works of the Omega would be paradoxical and oxymoronic, embodying creative utility, functional beauty andto return to Woolf s own ambiguous binaryartistic craft. One significant result (and something to bear in mind as we consider Woolf s later theorising of biography) was that each product would be different, imperfect, unique. In his Preface to the Omega Workshops Catalog (1913), Fry celebrated the companys rejection of shop finish and the pretentious elegance of the machine-made articlethe production line, with its imitation and regularity, was exposed as a humbug (201). There was to be no fixed rigidity of form or appearance; each product would reveal necessary man-made variations. And yet, paradoxically, these products would also cohere, unified under the Omega trademark. In a letter to George Bernard Shaw, Fry described the mark as a guarantee of the Omegas exclusiveness, in opposition to the mechanised craft industry that would inevitably cannibalise their success (197). Emblazoned on each individual product, the mark was thus a symbol of diversity and belonging, of difference and unity. But what does this mean for biography as a craft? In an early caricature of Victorian biography, Woolf appears to share what Allen McLaurin has called Frys anti-professional feeling (6): The Victorian age, to hazard another generalization, was the age of the professional man. The biographies of the time have a depressing similarity; very much overworked, very serious, very joyless, the eminent men appear to us to be, and already strangely formal and remote from us in their likes and dislikes (A Man With A View 29). For Woolf, the nineteenth century heralded the professionalization of biography. As such, the form was reduced to an industry of imitation, kept in a state comparable to the profit-driven art world derided by Fry. The resulting biographies find their counterpart in the work of Frys pseudo-artistboth demonstrate a depressing similarity. And here we might return to The Art of Biography with its recurring motif of solidity and death. Demonstrating the same deadness of mechanical reproduction bemoaned by Fry in the

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Omega Prospectus, Victorian biographies are likened to wax figurescarried in funeral processions through the streeteffigies that have only a smooth superficial likeness to the body in the coffin (CE4 222). To thus purify biography of unreality (to adapt Frys phrase), the biographer must evince the principles of the Omega; he must combine craft with artistic freedom, creating a work that is imperfect, imprecise, yet coherent. However, one further contradiction may be introduced. While still at work on Roger Fry, Woolf delivered a BBC radio broadcast, entitled Craftsmanship (1937), as part of the Words Fail Me series. In yet another example of titular contradiction, Woolf declared that language was no fit medium for craft. Burdened with connotations of utility, the term was incongruous, unfittingwhen applied to words (DM 126). Words shuffle and change, we are told; they are always provisional, mutable, and thus should never be crafted into fixed positions, fixed meanings (DM 127). To attempt this, as a writer or reader, is to be an unreal specialist, to engage in word monger[y]something akin, once again, to Frys pseudo-artist (DM 129). What then for the biographer as craftsman whose necessary medium is words? Do his works pindown the useful meaning? And, as a result, do they fold their wings and die (DM 132)? Is the craft of biography doomed to fail, or could Woolf s something betwixt and betweenher refusal to pin down the meaning of craftsignal a possible solution? Language is certainly no fit medium for the uniform, imitative craft that fixes meaning, and here one is reminded of Victorian biography and its depressing similarity. But Woolf s emphasis on provisionality in Craftsmanshipon the meanings of words that shuffle and change, catching a many-sided truth (DM 131)suggests that language can indeed be the medium for a literary equivalent of the Omegafor an imprecise, imperfect and variant craft. But what kind of biographical subject would be produced by such craftsmanship? In Woolf s Roger Fry, can we see this craft in practice?

Crafting the biographical outline in ROGER FRY

There is a growing body of scholarship that recognises extraordinary, sometimes novelistic moments in Roger Fry. Woolf s only biography proper, it seems, was not so formal after all. Thomas Lewis contends that the work succeeds in [capturing] the essence of [Frys] personality, despite the biographys remarkable lack of detailcertainly no biography contains fewer dates than this one (317, 319-20). Diane Gillespie identifies Woolf s use of motifs that unify her vision of Frys life. These images and scenes recur throughout, such as the red poppies in Frys childhood garden, or the decorative top of a Roman pillar lying half-buried in the sand (Introduction xxiv). Similarly, Lorraine Kooistera identifies a range of structuring, thematic motifs: the individual against the herd, the unknown-stranger-met-by-chance, and Fry as a divided self (34). Kooistera also explores the use of dramatic scenes or vignettes, moments that resonate in the biography, enabling Woolf to [sketch] in [character] with broad strokes (30, 29). These broad strokes and extraordinary moments suggest a method comparable to that proposed in Craftsmanship. Fry as biographical subject is multiple; he is never definitively fixed or finished. For, we are told, Roger Fry was a man who lived many lives, the active, the contemplative, the public and the private, and he lived them simultaneously (RF 160, 161). The disorder of Fry as subject is best encapsulated by the

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image of his scattered traces: The muddle in which these old newspaper cuttings lie is perhaps symbolicalthey are mixed up with passports, with hotel bills, with sketches and poems and innumerable notes taken in front of the picture itself (RF 92). The muddle of Frys disparate writingsthe paper counterpart to his many livesseem to embody the man himself. Indeed, Woolf refuses to order this chaos. In the biographys final chapter, where we might anticipate some form of resolution, we are presented instead with a broken, disconnected narrative. Taking her cue from Frys 1926 collection of essays, Woolf called this chapter Transformations: a fitting title for [] the change and experiment of Frys final years, depicted in a series of fifteen snapshots, producing a rapid and fragmentary sketch (RF 198). In the penultimate section of Transformations, Woolf stands back and observes her subject, attempting to stress the pattern of the whole just as a critic, like Fry, might observe a work of art (RF 242). But Woolf does not offer any conclusive statement or final judgment. Instead, she uses Frys own words, taken from his essay Retrospect (1920), to articulate her refusal: Any attempt I might make to explain this would probably land me in the depths of mysticism. On the edge of that gulf I stop (qtd. in RF 244). Though Woolf may identify the shapes and patterns in the biography as art workthose thematic motifs and dramatic scenes, identified by Gillespie and Kooistera, which make her subject cohereshe insists that Fry remain multiple and mutable; he is allowed to shuffle and change, like the meanings of words in Craftsmanship. Fry is always provisional; he is not, therefore, the product of mechanised reproduction, of the depressing similarity of Victorian biography; he is the product of a vital and imaginative craftsmanship.1 I am suggesting, therefore, that we read Woolf s quotations from and allusions to Fryher often unidentified borrowings from his workas a form of metacritical commentary on her biographical method. For example, we are told that Fry would have refused to sit for the portrait of a finished, complete or in any way perfect human being, and evidence is produced in the form of his critical response to contemporary portraiture (RF 240). John Singer Sargent is reduced to a prcis writer of appearances whose portrait of Sir Ian Hamilton made him exclaim, I cannot see the man for his likeness (RF 88). In sympathy with Fry, Woolf attempts no perfect portrait in her biography, no detailed or exact likeness. And thus, to return to The Art of Biography, we can see her method emerging. Though granite and rainbow, fact and fiction, seem more incompatible than ever, this does not put an end to experiment. Rather, biography must be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face, to [hang] up looking glasses at odd corners (CE4 226). Like the Omega artists and craftsmen, the biographer must eschew fixed and rigid form; he must eschew prescriptive detail; he must give us instead the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders (CE4 228). And yet, just as Omega products were made to cohere under their shared trademark, so the biographer must [shape] the whole so we perceive the outline (CE4 227). Diversity and mutability must be sustained, yet the biographical subject must cohere. Significantly, this notion of an outline returns us to the model of active readership put forward by Woolf in her essay, How Should One Read A Book? (1932). Readers of biography, like readers of novels, must become a fellow-worker and accomplice (CR2 259). While the biographer must stimulate the imagination, the reader, in return, must complete and fill the outline (CE4 227). And here we might forge a connection backwards to Orlando, a work celebrated for

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its engagements with biography, receiving praise where Roger Fry is censured. But here too is an outline, where a readers part is to [make] up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person (O 70). Woolf s theorising in The Art of Biography thus revises and extends her earlier work. But if the craft of biography is to shape an outline, what then might this outline look like? Roger Fry provides us with a glimpse, and the outline is contradictory, of course (RF 239). Note
1. Diane Gillespie has identified Woolf s use of historical provisionality in The Art of Biography. Biographies are written for a particular audience, at a particular time. As such, their subjects alter and change along with this shifting context (Texture of the Text 94).

Works Cited
Cooley, Elizabeth. Revolutionising Biography: Orlando, Roger Fry, and the Tradition. South Atlantic Review 55.2 (1990): 71-83. Fry, Roger. Omega Workshops Fundraising Letter. A Roger Fry Reader. Ed. Christopher Reed. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996. 196-197. . Preface to the Omega Workshops Catalog. A Roger Fry Reader. Ed. Christopher Reed. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996. 201. . Prospectus for the Omega Workshops. A Roger Fry Reader. Ed. Christopher Reed. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996. 198-200. Gillespie, Diane F. Introduction. Roger Fry: A Biography. By Virginia Woolf. Oxford: Blackwell-Shakespeare Head, 1995. xi-l. . The Texture of the Text: Editing Roger Fry: A Biography. Editing Virginia Woolf: Interpreting the Modernist Text. Ed. James M. Haule and J.H. Stape. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002. 91-113. Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brief History. London: Harvard UP, 2007. Kooistera, Lorraine Janzen. Virginia Woolf s Roger Fry: A Bloomsbury Memorial. Woolf Studies Annual 2 (1996): 26-38. Lewis, Thomas S.W. Combining The Advantages of Fact and Fiction: Virginia Woolf s Biographies of Vita Sackville-West, Flush, and Roger Fry. Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays. Ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg and Laura Moss Gottlieb. Troy: Whitson, 1983. 295-324. McLaurin, Allen. Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved. Cambridge: CUP, 1973. Parke, Catherine. Biography: Writing Lives. London: Routledge, 2002. Woolf, Virginia. Craftsmanship. The Death of The Moth and Other Essays. London: Hogarth, 1943. 126-132. . The Art of Biography. Collected Essays. Vol. 4. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967. 221-228. . The New Biography. Collected Essays. Vol. 4. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967. 229-235. . A Man With A View. Contemporary Writers. Ed. Jean Guiget. New York: Harvest-Harcourt, 1976. 2832. . The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vol. 6. London: Hogarth, 1980. . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew McNeillie. Vol. 5. San Diego: Harvest, 1985. . Roger Fry: A Biography. Ed. Dianne F. Gillespie. Oxford: Blackwell-Shakespeare Head, 1995. . Orlando: A Biography. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Oxford: OUP, 1998. . How Should One Read A Book? The Common Reader. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. Vol. 2. London: Vintage, 2003. 258-270. . Sketch of the Past. Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Pimlico, 2002. 78-160.

CAN I BECOME WE?: ADDRESSING COMMUNITY IN THE YEARS AND THREE GUINEAS by Oren Goldschmidt
n a note she wrote while working on To the Lighthouse (1927) in 1925 Woolf made an intriguing link between the forms of individual life and the state of international affairs: How much more important divisions between people are than between countries. The source of all evil (Dick Appendix A. 12). This amplifies, and perhaps reverses, a connection she had touched on in The Voyage Out (1915), where Rachel Vinrace finds Richard Dalloways mechanistic conception of the state to be a failure because it does not touch the mindthe affections of the isolated individual (VO 63). The 1925 note makes a more direct, if still enigmatic, link between personal relationships and political and social issues, but the connection between the two becomes most important for Woolf in the 1930s when she is thinking through feminist and social ideas in The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938). My focus here is on what turns out to be an intriguing point of chiasm between Woolf s accounts of the personal and the social. The logical and linguistic aporias that surround the idea of meaningful interpersonal connection, and the rich set of metaphoric and syntactic moves through which Woolf engages with them, are reflected and transformed in her later attempts to imagine functional forms of community. The importance of personal relationships is a recurrent idea in critical discussions of Bloomsbury, and G. E. Moores Principia Ethica (1903) is often cited as a manifesto for its emphasis on love and friendship.1 The influence of Moore and Principia Ethica on Bloomsbury is well attested. For example, Leonard Woolf talks of being permanently inoculated with Moore and Moorism (Beginning Again 24) and Maynard Keynes lists himself, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, and Saxon Sydney-Turner among others as early devotees of Moores philosophy. Keynes characterises what Bloomsbury drew from Moore as a feeling that: The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and ones prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these love came a long way first (Keynes 251). Moores position on the importance of love, and of personal relationships more broadly, is developed in section 122 of Principia Ethica: It will be remembered that I began this survey of great unmixed goods, by dividing all the greatest goods we know into the two classes of aesthetic enjoyments, on the one hand, and the pleasures of human intercourse or of personal affection, on the other.I think it may be admitted that, wherever the affection is most valuable, the appreciation of mental qualities must form a large part of it.Admirable mental qualities do, if our previous conclusions are correct, consist very largely in an emotional contemplation of beautiful objects; and hence the appreciation of them will consist essentially in the contemplation of such contemplation. (251)

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Woolf read Principia Ethica in 1908, writing in her diary of climbing Moore like some industrious insect, who is determined to build a nest on the top of a Cathedral spire (L1 340). At one point in her reading Woolf writes of how a string of desires makes my head spin with the infinite meaning of words unadorned (L1 340); she is referring to section 13 which is the heart of Moores argument against the naturalistic fallacy, and where sentences like this are to be found: But it is also apparent that the meaning of this second question cannot be correctly analysed into Is the desire to desire A one of the things which we desire to desire?: we have not before our minds anything so complicated as the question Do we desire to desire to desire to desire A? (67). Whatever additional meanings Woolf spun out of Moores unadorned desires, she managed to identify the philosophical significance of this section, its role as a key move in Principias argument, and when the book makes its famous appearance in The Voyage Out it is this argument against naturalistic definitions of good that she quotes (though this time in its more intelligible summary at the beginning of section 14, Good, then, is indefinable). Woolf continued to read Principia Ethica through August of 1908 (10 pages nightly, as she wrote to Saxon Sydney-Turner on the 10th), finishing it on the 29th, when she wrote to Vanessa: I finished Moore last night; he has a fine flare of arrogance at the endand no wonder. I am not so dumb foundered as I was; but the more I understand, the more I admire. He is so humane in spite of his desire to know the truth; and I believe I can disagree with him, over one matter (L1 364). Woolf does not tell Vanessa what her point of disagreement with Moore was in the letter. However, while she does not refer directly to Moores idea of personal relationships, she did write to Lytton Strachey in May 1912 of her frustration at the unreal loves of the Apostles,2 and in The Voyage Out she seems quite deliberately to pick a quarrel with Moores analysis of love as the appreciation of mental qualities (Principia 251). This is most clearly evident in a conversation between Terrence Hewet and Evelyn Murgatroyd: Ive cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them, she said. I suppose Im too fastidious. All my life Ive wanted somebody I could look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men are so small. What dyou mean by splendid? Hewet asked. People arenothing more. Evelyn was puzzled. We dont care for people because of their qualities, he tried to explain. Its just them that we care for,he struck a matchjust that, he said, pointing to the flames. (VO 200) Moores theory is directly contradicted here: Hewet argues that we do not care for people because of their qualities and this is reiterated later when he considers his love for Rachel and finds that he could not analyse her qualities (258)he gets as far as the fact that she is punctual but cannot establish whether or not she likes to answer notes. Not only is Moores idea of personal relationships based on mental qualities disputed and gently mocked here, his whole ontology of distinct individuals with sets of determinate qualities is rejected: People arenothing more. Hewets conversation with Evelyn also harks back to his own attempt earlier in the book to explain personal relationships without

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reference to the qualities and states of mind of independent individuals where he imagines love as an epiphanic contact of auras or bubbles (109). Such contacts, however, seem to be neither commonplace nor unproblematic; indeed, the book describes normal human relationships as something suspect and perilous: Why was it that relations between different people were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed? (201) These were questions Woolf explored in depth in her repeated attempts to capture the phenomenon of personal connection. In The Voyage Out Woolf deploys space and scale to explore it, as when Terence and Rachel are said to have dropped to the bottom of the world together during a picnic tea (291); a little later a shift of scale reverses another moment of connection as the two of them are chilled to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things (323). In her later writing Woolf uses images of intermixing and overlapping, and deploys sound, space, and time to further develop a language that can express the significance of meeting. Alongside these mainly metaphorical explorations Woolf also experimented with syntax, particularly those elements which ineluctably split the world into subject and object. In August 1928, after spending time with Edward Sackville-West in the garden of Monks House, Woolf used her diary to meditate on their meeting. This passage is particularly illuminating because it records a mental and textual process, a series of tentative linguistic experiments through which Woolf can be seen exploring ways to express the felt significance of a moment of connection: Eddy has just gone, leaving me the usual feeling: why is not human intercourse more definite, tangible: why arent I left holding a small round substance, say the size of a pea, in my hand; something I can put in a box & look at? There is so little left. Yet these people one sees are fabric only made once in the world; these contacts we have are unique; & if E. were, say killed tonight, nothing definite would happen to me, yet his substance is never again to be repeated. Our meeting is but the thread of this idea slips perpetually; constantly though it recurs, with sadness, to my mind: how little our relationships matter; & yet they are so important: in him, in me, something to him, to me, infinitely sentient, of the highest vividness, reality. (D3 188) The image of a physical residue left by meeting and conversation is one Woolf had deployed a number of times before she wrote this passage. In Jacobs Room (1922) a conversation between undergraduates creates a spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass (JR 39) and the need for some substance in which to anchor human relationships recurs in the drafts of To the Lighthouse. In a passage in which Mr Banks is trying to understand a brief moment of connection with Mrs Ramsay he worries about how broken & fleeting human relationships are and feels the lack of something solid to mark their significance (Dick 143).3 The thought about solidity seems to have been particularly problematic here, and the passage is heavily revised and fragmentary; Woolf finally breaks off, leaving the sentence unfinished and does not include it in the published text.

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In the diary entry the idea of a physical residue, the small round substance, is also abandoned as a way of figuring her sense of connection with Edward Sackville-West. Instead Woolf continues to explore alternative ways of capturing the significance of their meeting. But here it is not only the idea of meeting that seems to be slipping away from her: language itself is slipping and recurring. Woolf does not want to locate the meeting either in herself or in Sackville-West, it is not in him or in me. The missing connective is significant here because of what it leaves openis the meeting in him or in me? Or is it in him and in me? Neither seems faithful to the feeling of connection: if it is a feeling that is present in only one of them then it is simply an illusion; if it is in both, then could it be two separate, if reciprocal, emotions? Each might experience the other very differently, and might indeed be entirely mistaken about what they experience. This is something Woolf worries about later in the diary entry, imagining that Edward is thinking What impression am I making? constantly & is agitated: as a matter of fact, he is probably making no impression: his agitation is about nothing: he is mistaken (D3 188). The idea continues to slip and Woolf tries to catch it again by shifting the preposition: if their meeting is not in either of them, might it be something to him, to me? She has moved from locating the meeting beyond both participants to locating it within them, and then to the more abstract relationship suggested by to. Finally though, Woolf does not find even this last move convincing and the diary entry turns to a rather disheartening vision of the insignificance of human relationshipsa vision which lasts only until her earlier sense of their significance and value returns, as it does repeatedly in her later writing. Woolf s diary entry also suggests that in their conversation she and Edward SackvilleWest were discussing some of these problems about personal relationships. Sackville-West certainly seems to have been interested in them; a few years later he became involved in an organisation set up by Naomi Mitchison and Gerald Heard called, rather incongruously, the Engineers Study Group. The idea of the group was to meet regularly with the aim of developing some kind of group rapport or common feeling. The members of the group felt, like many in the early 1930s, that the world in its current state was at constant risk of war; as Michison puts it, only an enormous lastminute effort could save us from utter destruction. She goes on to say that Engineers Study Group tried to approach this problem first of all in terms of possible group-mindedness or group communicationthe next step possibly before the much bigger breakthrough to universal consciousness (143). Woolf would hardly have shared Heard and Mitchisons practical faith in their group meetings. However, she may well have been sympathetic to the connection they made between social problems and the inadequacy of human relationships. In a draft typescript of Between the Acts, she writes an echo of these doctrines of social utopia through telepathic communion into Isas thinking, though here the text seems to bring a satirical tone along with these ideas: in a good state of society there would be complete feeling and thought transference; these hatreds, caused by impediments to understanding, would yield. Transparency would result; universal love would follow one sun would shine through our crystal clarity and all would be light (Pointz Hall 81). Heard and Mitchisons practical experiments of the early 1930s, with their emphasis on social change to be achieved through group connection, were based on Heards series of speculative books on the evolution of mankind through various stages of individuality and community. Isas comment may echo these works, which Woolf knew, but they are also related to a more widespread, and

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somewhat cruder, idea of the link between group telepathy and the nature of society. For example, the physicist and psychical researcher William Barrett argued in 1917 that: If we were involuntarily sharers in one anothers pleasures and pains, the brotherhood of the race would not be a pious aspiration or a strenuous effort, but the reality of all others most vividly before us; the factor in our lives which would dominate all our conduct. What would be the use of a luxurious mansion at the West End and Parisian cooks if all the time the misery and starvation of our fellow creatures at the East End were telepathically part and parcel of our daily lives? On the other hand what bright visions and joyous emotions would enter into many dreary and loveless lives if this state of human responsiveness were granted to the race! (294)4 Isas thought about a good state of society which parallels this simple suggestion of a more equal and caring social order generated through involuntary telepathic sympathy with others comes in response to Giless homophobic hatred of William Dodge. In the published version of the text Woolf transformed this oddly specific telepathic utopia into a more indefinite evocation of future unity. This can be read more seriously than the draft, although Isas final image still retains some of the deliberate flippancy of the earlier version: Isabella guessed the word that Giles had not spoken. Well, was it wrong if he was that word? Why judge each other? Do we know each other? Not here, not now. But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dustShe waited for a rhyme, it failed her; but somewhere surely one sun would shine and all, without a doubt, would be clear (BTA 38). Like Mrs Olivers facile one-making that gives her license to ignore the pain of others (108), Isas solution to the problem of Giless prejudice sounds too conveniently utopian. Where simplistic models of personal connection like Isas empathic telepathy or Mrs Olivers quasi-Christian unity lead only to such culpably simplistic utopian consolation, Woolf s more complex and nuanced elaborations of personal connection parallel and inform the equally balanced and complex visions of social community she developed while working on The Years and Three Guineas. There is a common difficulty in describing both personal connection and social forms of community which is described succinctly by Robert Esposito in is 1998 book Communitas. Esposito is interested in a fundamental problem about how political thinkers have been able to think about community. He argues that community isnt translatable into a political-philosophical lexicon except by completely distorting (or indeed perverting) it[t]he truth is that these conceptions are united by the ignored assumption that community is a property belonging to subjects that join [sic] them together [accomuna]; an attribute, a definition, a predicate that qualifies them as belonging to the same totality [insieme], or as a substance that is produced by their union (1-2). Esposito rather neatly lays out here some of the structural problems of thinking about community; they are very close in their logic to the problems Woolf detected in her search for a language of personal connection. There is a parallel dilemma here: on the one hand, there is the unsatisfactory introduction of a separate substance produced by the union of individuals (something solid); on the other there is an equally unsatisfactory notion of a property that belongs to each subject separately (something in him, in me).

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For Woolf, neither version seems sufficient to characterise either personal relationships or political community. One of the clearest examples of Woolf s engagement with this problematic logic of community comes towards the end of The Years where North Pargiter is looking into his glass of sparkling wine and thinking about the kind of world he would like to live in. For him a life modelled on the jet (he was watching the bubbles rise), on the spring, of the hard leaping fountain; another life; a different life. Not the halls and reverberating megaphones; not marching in step after leaders, in herds, groups, societies, caparisoned. No; to begin inwardly and let the devil take the outer form, he thought, looking up at a young man with a fine forehead and a weak chin. Not black shirts, green shirts, red shirtsalways posing in the public eye; thats all poppy-cock. Why not down barriers and simplify? But a world, he thought, that was all one jelly, one mass, would be a rice pudding world, a white counterpane world. To keep the emblems and tokens of North Pargiterthe man Maggie laughs at; the Frenchman holding his hat; but at the same time spread out, make a new ripple in human consciousness, be the bubble and the stream, the stream and the bubblemyself and the world together (Y 358-9) North begins here by thinking about totalitarianismthe fascism and communism of the black shirts and red shirts. These are, in Espositos terms, predicates that qualify followers as being part of the same totalitya totality which, in the form of the totalitarian state and its leaders, supresses the individual.5 Yet North does not want simply to remain an isolated individual: he wants to down barriers. But the problem arises that without any barriers between people there is no individuality: it is erased in becoming part of a single jelly or mass. The community North wants is something that retains individuality and allows him to be both the bubble and the stream. This is very much the kind of community that Esposito argues is inherently untranslatable into political-philosophical lexicons. In The Years Woolf s careful metaphors avoid attempting any such translation, but what happens then when she comes to think through community, if not quite in a politicalphilosophical lexicon, then at least in her most sustained piece of political argument? The question I have quoted in my title, Can I become we? comes from a typescript draft of part two of Three Guineas that Woolf began writing in late June 1937. The section deals with womens entry into the professions, and in the draft Woolf imagines professional men moving round and round in a rutted circle chanting I, I, I, I. It is this individualism and egotism, and the attitudes and structures that support it, that are the fundamental forces that lead to militarism and war. What is at stake here for Woolf is whether, by becoming part of the professional life of the nation, women will simply be assimilated into a system which causes war. Three Guineas argues that so long as women retain poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties or in the June typescript, poverty, contempt and freedom from nationality,6 there is a chance that this can be avoided. Woolf saw a short window of time available (she talks of between five and fifteen years): a unique moment of opportunity, in which women might enter the professional world and yet avoid joining that deadly circuit, somehow managing not to follow the male professional and circle with him; and repeat with him I, I, I, I. What might

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be achieved if that opportunity were grasped, if the Outsiders Society were created, is a transformation of the world which she talks about in terms of we replacing I: And will I become we you ask? That is an old question and a very difficult one. A dream that recurs like so many dreams. We are ourselves; we are here in body, there in mind; we affect and influence others; we overflow the private life; are part of the public life; yet are contained in ourselves. A problem familiar to all artists, novelists in particular. Here is one of the dead. George Sand. And here is Flaubert: Artists naturally express the feeling which we all have now and again. Obvious to the eye, there is in the sight before usthe river the barges the Embankment, this and that and the other which make it a whole, a picture. To the novelist, in character, the same scattered essentials. A question too deep and too broad for us to follow now. Yet a very important question for us wh[o] stand here and now on the bridge.7 Woolf goes on at this point to ask Can I become we? and to figure this possibility in terms of evolutionary change. She uses of these two pronouns repeatedly in this typescript, just as I (in quotes) had been used regularly in the draft of The Years to talk about egotism and individualism. These pronouns give her a way of deferring the problematic logic of community. Just as metaphorical devices, like the seven-sided flower [] to which every eye brings its own contribution (82) in The Waves (1931), allow her to play with subject and object while thinking about personal relationships, this use of I and we lets her at least leave the problem of the communal subject to one side while she is thinking through the idea of community in Three Guineas. Indeed, throughout her writing when Woolf is addressing ideas of community and personal relationship she is able to think effectively through literary language: playing with metaphor and syntax to disrupt or defer the usual structures of subject and object, self and other. Close attention to these linguistic gambits can reveal a surprising amount about how Woolf was troubled by the problematic logic of relationship and community and her literary responses to it. Notes
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. This has been a recurrent theme in criticism about the group. See e.g. Johnstone; Franks; Rosenbaum; and Sidorsky. How difficult it is to write to you. Its all Cambridgethat detestable place; and the ap-s-les are so unreal, and their loves are so unreal (L1 498), 21 May 1912 to Lytton Strachey. The echo of Bankss anxiety about how very little ones friends matter (Dick 143) in the diary entry also reinforces the correspondence between the two passages. Barrett is also quoted in Thurshwell, p. 25. In his formulation of the problem Esposito may have had in mind here the statist ideas of a number of neo-Hegelian thinkers; David Bradshaw examines Woolf s relationship to statist ideas in general and to Bernard Bosanquet in particular. See Bradshaw. The quotations are not included in the typescript although the quote from Sand is in the scrapbooks and in a footnote of the published text. The typescript titled The Second Guinea is item M29 in the Berg collection; the pages are numbered and this passage is from p.120. The Second Guinea, M29, Berg, p. 119.

6.

7.

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Works Cited
Barrett, William. On the Threshold of the Unseen, 2nd ed., revised. London: Kegan Paul, 1917. Bradshaw, David. Vicious Circles: Hegel, Bosanquet and The Voyage Out. Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane F Gillespie and Leslie K Hankins. New York: Pace UP, 1997. 183-191. Dick, Susan, ed. To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft. London: Hogarth, 1983. Esposito, Roberto. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, 1998. Trans. Timothy Campbell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Franks, Gabriel. Virginia Woolf and the Philosophy of G. E. Moore. The Personalist: An International Review of Philosophy 1.2 (1969), 222-240. Johnstone, J. K. The Bloomsbury Group: A Study of E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and Their Circle. New York: Noonday Press, 1954. Keynes, John Maynard. My Early Beliefs (1938) in Two Memoirs, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949. Leaska, Mitchell A, ed. Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts. New York: University Publications, 1983. Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir, 1920-1940. London: Gollancz, 1979. Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica. 1903. Cambridge: CUP, 1993. Rosenbaum, S. P. Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987. Sidorsky, David. The Uses of the Philosophy of G. E. Moore in the Works of E. M. Forster. New Literary History 38.2 (2007), 245-271. Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918. London: Hogarth, 1964. Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. 1915. London: Hogarth, 1990. . The Years. 1937. London: Hogarth, 1990. . The Waves. 1931. London: Hogarth, 1990. . Between the Acts. 1941. London: Hogarth 1990. . Jacobs Room. 1920. London: Hogarth, 1992.

WOOLFS UN/FOLDING(S): THE ARTIST AND THE EVENT OF THE NEO-BAROQUE by Laci Mattison
n The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (2000), Ann Banfield describes Virginia Woolf s novels as variances of the Leibnizian monad through influence she locates in the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and the aesthetics of Roger Fry. More recently, Jessica Berman, in an essay entitled Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf (2004), reveals the correlation between ethics and aesthetics through Mieke Bals Enfolding Feminism and Gilles Deleuzes The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993). This paper diverges from these other studies in its examination of Woolf s and Deleuzes conceptions of the fold, with an emphasis not on the Baroque fold (of Leibniz), which organizes Bermans and Bals arguments, but on the un/folding(s) of the neo-Baroque, the intensity Deleuze takes from Alfred North Whiteheads notion of the event. In the neo-Baroque, as Woolf would say, certainly and emphatically there is no God (MOB 72). Thus, the harmony and compossibility of Leibnizs monadology are no longer the necessary factors because God cannot select the perfect world.1 Incompossibility is revealed as the originary state of existence: everything is part of the same fabric, like the silk of the sea and sky in To the Lighthouse (1927), which stretche[s], enfolding the Ramsays, the Macalisters, and the boat as part of the nature of things (TTL 188). Thus, binary opposition, such as harmony and dissonance, becomes irrelevant. It is, after all, through dissonance that supposed harmony is created, as Woolf affirms.2 Through the non-dialectical un/folding(s) of the neo-Baroque, we can differently interpret the supposed contradictions in Woolf s writing: not as notes of dissonance, but as creative, vital moments in which both Woolf and her artists (including those artists-of-the-everyday) recognize and affirm textual and textural incompossibility, the everything-at-once, the unlimited bifurcations of the world. Banfield makes a convincing argument for the connection between Russells philosophy and the aesthetics of both Fry and Woolf, and, in a much earlier essay, entitled Virginia Woolf and Our Knowledge of the External World (1979), Jaakko Hintikka also pairs Russell and Woolf. While both Banfield and Hintikka acknowledge Whiteheads lasting influence on Russell and while Banfield recognizes the triangulation of the philosophies of Russell, Whitehead, and G.E. Moore as that which most influenced the Bloomsbury Group, a discussion of the congruencies in Whiteheads thought and Woolf s writing remains only gestural. For instance, Hintikka writes that space-time in Woolf s work has counterparts inWhiteheads theory of events as the basic furniture of the world out of which other entities can be constructed and, furthermore, that Woolf s emphasis on moments of being has a neat counterpart in the importance of events in Whiteheads metaphysics, but he then returns to a discussion of Russell (10). While Banfield likens moments of being to Russells philosophy, she does not give adequate attention to the way in which Whiteheads thought influenced Russells own. With Deleuzes arguments about the neo-Baroque in The Fold, which have much to do with his own modernist impulse, we

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recognize how Whiteheads rewriting of Leibniz finds its aesthetic counterpoint in many modernist texts, from not only Woolf s writing but also works by writers as various as Joyce, Borges, Beckett, Rhys, Nabokov, and so forth. My intention in coupling a reading of To the Lighthouse with the Deleuzean notion of the neo-Baroque, which I consider to be a theory of Modernism, is to reopen the question of aesthetics in Woolf s writing by way of the event. In this way, chaos can be understood not as a contradiction to order and/or art, but as the originary material out of which order and art continually de- and re-compose. With this understanding, we recognize that art does not create order; rather, the modernist artist, through a creative vision, sees chaos and order as two sides of the same fabric. For Deleuze, via Whitehead, the four components of the event of the neo-Baroque are extensions, intensionsprehensions, andeternal objects (79). In The Fold, Deleuze also appropriates Whiteheads definition of the event as a nexus of prehensions,3 in which subjects and objects fold into each other and, in so doing, radicalize individuality as impersonality.4 Whiteheads example of the event in The Concept of Nature (1920) is the Great Pyramid, which Deleuze also cites in his explication of the neo-Baroque (76). The most obvious example in To the Lighthouse is the lighthouse itself, but to exemplify the event in Woolf s writing, I pause to examine the beams of light as a nexus of prehensions. We can apply all four of the qualifications of the event as set forth by Whitehead and Deleuze. The beams of light which emanate from the lighthouse have extension (i.e., the length or space covered by the light), which also intersects with their intensity (i.e., the brightness of light and the rhythm of the pattern the beams create). The light both prehends (in its enlightening of other objects) and is prehended by Mrs. Ramsay, and it is an eternal object. On this point, Deleuze carefully differentiates Whiteheads eternal objects from Platos as he argues that eternal objects must not be understood as static but as objects that gain permanence only in the limits of the flux that creates them, or of the prehensions that actualize them (79-80). The third beam is, after all, recognizable by its pattern, which is actualized by its particular duration and, furthermore, is later prehended by others (Lily, for instance). In chapter six of The Fold, entitled simply What Is an Event?, Deleuze explains the event as a musical concert: the vibrations of the notes (or, their extensive qualities), intersect with the intensity (timbre, height, and so forth), but the concert is also a nexus of prehensions in that each sound perceives its own, and perceives the others while perceiving its own. Moreover, writes Deleuze, the notes of the scale are eternal objects, pure Virtualities that are actualized in the origins, but also pure Possibilities that are attained in vibrations of flux (80). Or, otherwise put, the notes have some sort of recognizability although they have a range of possible variation given the instruments, players, acoustics, vocal range of the singers, and so forth, and they have a limited duration of actualization: once the concert is over and the sound waves have ceased to vibrate in and off the instruments and bodies that inhabit the concert hall, the notes of the scale return to pure Virtualities, to be actualized in a different network of differentiation. Given this further explication, we can recognize many more instances of the Whiteheadian-Deleuzean event in To the Lighthouse. The image of the shawl, for instance, folded around the skull, slowly drooping, unfolding as time passes, is an event. The weather, the pleats of the sand dunes (TTL 13), the flights of birds as they fold their wings (28), the crumpled glove (49) that Berman takes as her point of departure, or the way in which,

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after Mrs. Ramsay reads to James, she fold[s] herself together and the whole fabric f[alls] in exhaustion upon itself (38) are all events. The front steps, which Lily fills with the purple triangle, the (impersonal) wedge of darkness, are also an event, and these events in the novel all fold and unfold in the event of the text itself (63). Here, I follow Jean-Jacques Lecercles affirmation in Deleuze and Language (2002) that [l]iterature is concerned with the event of language, far more than with the event in language (130). The event of the shawl, for instance, an impersonal object in Time Passes amongst other once personal items that have been left behind, occurs on multiple levels: as an object, the shawl is one occurrence of the event in the text, but, as an image (a repetition with a difference), the shawl is also an event of the novel because it textually patterns the rhythm of the narrative in which it has a particular duration. This material object must be understood as part of the larger nexus of prehensions in and of the novel, moreover, when the vibrations of ominous soundswith their repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and cracked the tea-cups (TTL 133). As with James own experience of time, fold upon fold, layered like leaves (169, 185), the events of Woolf s novels occur, in part, where time is creased, which Berman also gestures toward. The folds of time act locally through creative re-membering like that Lily engages in the last section of the novel. But, on a larger scale, the event of the novel occurs at its central fold: Time Passes envelopes The Window and The Lighthouse.5 While the parameters of this essay do not allow for a detailed examination of these points, I briefly add that the event of language is also enacted through the parentheses and brackets of the novel, which amplify the textual un/foldings visually and also indicate a textural space and timean implication, as Whitehead would have it, that other worlds (other times and places) exist simultaneously in the same universe. Deleuze posits that the neo-Baroque unfurl[s]divergent series in the same world without these divergences being understood as contradictory to that world (unlike Leibnizs monadology). If Deleuzes example of the event is a concert, then music in the neo-Baroque style is much different than that of the Baroque. [H]armony goes through a crisis, writes Deleuze, which leads to a broadened chromatic scale, to an emancipation of dissonance or of unresolved accords, accords not brought back to tonality. The (musical) movement from the Baroque to the neo-Baroque is from harmonic closure to an opening onto a polytonality (82).6 This crisis of harmony occurs also in Time Passes, the irregular, intermittentdissevered music, which is never quite heard, never fully harmonised (TTL 141). These contradictions are incompossible in the Monadology, but, for Whitehead and Deleuze, incompossibility is the fabric which contains everything, the origin of the unlimited, bifurcating series of prehensions and, so, can be likened to the Deleuzean virtual or to Woolf s impulse to achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords.7 Banfield also cites the above quote as part of her argument that the work of art, in and for Woolf, enclose[es] many possible perspectives, many alternatives closed to unreflective common sense (357). Woolf s art does not enclose, however, so much as it un/foldsthe folding is, after all, always predicated on the unfolding; and, in so doing, Woolf s writing reveals not the harmony of the selected world but a polytonality or a textural incongruity: [A]gain [Lily] was roused as usual by something incongruous (TTL 182). The incongruous object, first realized as only a color (brown), is then recognized as a boat, Mr. Ramsays boat (182), which, later, once the fabric stretches, becomes part of that material which

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includes everything. Banfield makes a case for this passage as Post-Impressionist (via Russell and Fry), a description which remains problematic: certainly, the color is first realized and then ordered into form, but the form again dissolves into the textural landscape. Furthermore, while Banfield recognizes that the harmony of the (monadological) work of art is not a priori, she claims that this harmony is still produced ex post facto via a style and an art, although an impersonal, not idiosyncratic, style and art (1). But, to pin-point the completion of a work of art, of a vision, remains difficult in Woolf (and elsewhere)especially given the concept of the fold, for there is, as in Lilys likening of the landscape to fabric, a continual decomposition of form back into the textual/textural material. And, although the novel concludes with Lilys affirmation that she had had her vision (TTL 209), a prior unfolding of the vision is necessary, for Lily was only trying to smooth out something she had been given years ago folded up; something she had seen (199). This artistic ability to bring form from chaos and then to allow that form to deand re-compose back through the mesh of the original material (or, of incompossibility), aligns with the event of the neo-Baroque. Deleuze writes: Events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes. He then seemingly contradicts himself, claiming that [c]haos does not exist, yet clarifies that chaos is inseparable from a screen that makes somethingsomething rather than nothingemerge from it (76). It is in contradiction to Lilys [n]othing, nothingnothing, the nihilistic danger, that Mrs. Ramsay make[s] of the moment something permanent (TTL 160) and that Lily, likewise, creates something through her re-membering of Mrs. Ramsay. So, while the vision is always only momentary in Woolf, it is paradoxically the essential thing (49) struck [] into stability (113) and is, in this way, like Whiteheads fourth category of the event, eternal objects. The moment of vision testifies that something has survived (160), but this something8 is not static because Lily refashions it, refolds it, and, in so doing, she qualitatively changes the texture of the material of which everything is a part. If chaos does not exist, argues Deleuze, it is because it is merely the bottom side of the great screen, and because the latter composes infinite series of wholes and parts, which appear chaotic to us (as aleatory developments) only because we are incapable of following them, or because of the insufficiency of our own screens (77). Woolf s artists, however, have the ability to experience the underside of the screen, to see the order or pattern as part of the chaos out of which it emerges. If chaos is the textured, folded cotton wool of everyday, then order is the scaffolding which is part of that cotton wool (MOB 73). In moments of creative vision, the artist sees not order in contradiction to chaos, but as part of that same chaos, which can then be re-ordered through the unfolding of the fabric, so that a new order might rise to the surface. The event of the neo-Baroque is not the great revelation, but little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark, which Lily recognizes as the nature of revelation when she peers into the midst of chaos and recognizes shape (TTL 161). Notes
1. Leibniz writes: Now, since in the divine ideas there is an infinity of possible universes of which only one can exist, the choice made by God must have a sufficient reason which determines him to the one rather than to another (156).

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2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

See Quentin Bells Virginia Woolf I, p. 138, and Banfield, p. 357. For Whitehead, prehensions do not have to be conscious; in this way, prehensions can be considered as pre-personal, if not pre-human. In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead states: The word perceive is, in our common usage, shot through and through with the notion of cognitive apprehension. So is the word apprehension, even with the adjective cognitive omitted. I will use the word prehension for uncognitive apprehension: by this I mean apprehension which may or may not be cognitive (Anthology 425-6). He later clarifies his distinction between perception and prehension: Perception is simply the cognition of prehensive unification; or more shortly, perception is cognition of prehension (428). See Banfields arguments on impersonality in Woolf s writing through Russells philosophy. Also, see chapter ten of A Thousand Plateaus (particularly pages 279-80). For Deleuze, becoming-imperceptible (a worlding) is the most intense stage of becoming. Imperceptibility in Deleuzes philosophy has much to do with Henri Bergsons intuition, the method of the new metaphysics he proposes in The Introduction to Metaphysics (1903). However, the discussion of imperceptibility in A Thousand Plateaus also occurs alongside Deleuzes comments on Woolf s writing, his acknowledgement of her influence on his philosophy. The image of the window is also an event, as it brings both the public (outside) and, through reflection, the private (inside) together in its own folding. See Bermans discussion of the window in Mrs. Dalloway, p. 168-9, and Banfields comments on the windows in Woolf s work, p. 176. Polytonal music, notably, originates in the early twentieth century, which suggests, again, there is something particularly modernist about Deleuzes theory of the (Whiteheadian) neo-Baroque. This passage from Quentin Bells Virginia Woolf I, p. 138, is cited in Banfield, p. 357. Here, the scene on the beach as re-membered by Lily.

Works Cited
Bal, Mieke. Enfolding Feminism. A Mieke Bal Reader. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. 209-35. Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: CUP, 2000. Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. San Diego: Harcourt, 1972. Berman, Jessica. Ethical Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf. Modern Fiction Studies 50.1 (2004): 151-72. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. London: Athlone P, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Hintikka, Jaakko. Virginia Woolf and Our Knowledge of the External World. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38.1 (1979): 5-14. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Deleuze and Language. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays. Trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Whitehead, Alfred North. Alfred North Whitehead: An Anthology. Eds. F.S.C. Northrop & Mason W. Gross. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1953. . Process and Reality. Eds. David Ray Griffin & Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Macmillan, 1929. 1978. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, 1927. . Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt, 1985.

WOOLFS CONTRADICTORY THINKING by Angeliki Spiropoulou

ontradiction, in its different modes and senses, seems to lie at the heart of Woolf s thinking about the world and the self. It may thus prove interesting to begin to adumbrate some of the modalities of the presence of contradiction in her thinking about being, history, art and even thinking itself in their various inter-articulations and ethico-political implications. Paradoxically, or perhaps appropriately, contradiction itself is manifested in contradictory ways in Woolf s work. To begin with, it appears as both a symptom and a means of pointing to an injustice that needs to be critiqued and corrected. Such an instance paradigmatically occurs in the exploration of the relationship of women to fiction taken up in A Room of Ones Own (1929), which, as has often been noted, is dialectically organized around the striking contradiction, permeating cultural history, between the omnipresence of woman as sign and her absence as producer of signs, her being the object of poetry but being denied the status of the subject of history. By famously condensing this set of contradictions in the fictitious image of Judith Shakespeare, Woolf seems to line up with the Marxian tradition of dialectical materialism which recognizes in identifying contradictions a political task, a revolutionary chance against a history of oppression. As Walter Benjamin puts it apropos the task and method of materialist historiography in his 1940 Theses on the Philosophy of History: Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizesa revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past (254). On the other hand, even though Woolf politically contests historical contradictions which point to and sustain various forms of oppression, she equally employs contradiction as a means of thinking about a subject, especially in her essays. As has been remarkably demonstrated by Judith Allen, Woolf s essays are heavily punctuated with marks of contradiction, such as but and yet, which work to the effect of interrogating received opinion, stereotypical thinking and claims to unitary truth, also manifesting a sensitivity towards antithetical positions, dissenting voices, the complexity of different responses, and the multiplicity of possible perspectives. Allen associates this resistance to singularity, to fixity, to the limitations of generic labels and the need for the clash of oppositional voices to the essayistic itself (27), insightfully evoking Montaigne as a model for Woolf s argumentative style while also alluding to Adornos famous view of the essay as a form generically contesting systemic thought (Adorno 158).1 In as far as the essay is a space of thinking, instead of purely demonstrating a given viewpoint, as is the case with classical rhetoric, Woolf s championing of contradiction in her essays may be deemed to be owing to the formal idiosyncrasy of the genre. However, it could further be argued that Woolf s thinking in/through contradiction also stretches

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beyond the formal frame of the essay to her fiction and is inseparable from certain of her aesthetic, epistemological and even ontological conceptions. With regard to ontology, Woolf can be said to affirm self-contradiction against the logic of self-identity that governs Western metaphysics. She explodes the dominant, principle of non-contradiction that not only governs the construction of logical syllogisms in the classic Aristotelian logical works but also, and significantly, it is set by Aristotle as the very foundation of metaphysics itself, his science of Being.2 Following Parmenides and Plato, Aristotle poses non-contradiction as a founding principle of his Metaphysics precisely because he sees it as the most secure of all principles in the study of being, for he deems it impossible for the same thing to belong and not belong simultaneously to the same thing in the same respect (Metaphysics 3.1005b19-24). However, Woolf s dialectical thinking blatantly contradicts the classical tradition of identifying contradiction with logical falsity and non-truth established by the Platonic dialogues and Aristotelian thought. Her radical subversion of the onto-logic of self-identity, that is, of non-contradiction, is epitomized in the figure of the androgynous and ageless Orlando whose self is humorously depicted in the homonymous novel (1928) as one and multiple, a man and a woman, and an agent of different temporalities at once, as is indicated by the following, much-quoted passage: For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there notHeaven help usall having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two (O 234-5). In addition, Woolf s non-unitary mode of thinking, encompassing antithetical positions, is also extended to the aesthetic plane. As is perceptively noted by Jane Goldman, Woolf s aesthetic vision is markedly dualistic (70), predicated as it is on an explicit call for a marriage of opposites, expressed not only by the androgynous ideal of the writers mind, put forward in A Room of Ones Own (136), but also by Woolf s emblematic urge for an amalgamation of dream and reality, of granite and rainbow in her 1927 essay, The New Biography (478), and, more widely, for a merging, in modern writing, of the material and the spiritual, the inner and the outer, the poetic and the prosaic, truth and fiction, in, for example, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924), Modern Fiction (1925), and The Pargiters (1978), alongside A Room of Ones Own and a series of other essays in which her aesthetic project is sketched out.3 Apart from the centrality of contradiction in Woolf s thought on an ontological and aesthetic level, contradiction appears to be foundational in her work even on an epistemological level, since for her thinking and knowing a subject necessarily involves negation. For example, On Not Knowing Greek (1925), often deemed paradigmatic of Woolf s essays,4 is premised on negation as its title tellingly indicates. The attempt made in this essay to define Greek is both negated a priori and proceeds on the basis of negations. What Woolf seems to suggest is that we can only think about a subject if we admit that we do not know it and, at the same time, that knowing a subject can only be attempted negatively, by exploring what it is assumed not to be, by taking into account the not-I that is part of the identity of the I, instead of positing it axiomatically as self-identical. To the extent that Woolf s representations of identity and knowledge tend to involve their negation in their very definition, they appear closer to the idea of contradiction famously expressed by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus: Into the same rivers

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we step and do not step, we are and we are not (fr. 49a), which inspired the Hegelian redefinition of dialectics as a modern theory of knowledge that views contradiction and movement as internal to thinking, consciousness and history itself.5 Although Woolf does not share in the progressive, teleological impetus of Hegels thought on historical movement, her similar sense of change and contradiction as endemic to historical consciousness is particularly apparent in the way she attempts to describe the modern condition and assess contemporary literature. In her 1923 essay, Poetry, Fiction and the Future, for example, she speculates on the obstacles raised to creativity by that atmosphere of doubt and conflict in which modern writers must work (429) through enumerating the contradictions at work in the consciousness of human beings in modern times. The [modern] mind, she contends, is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that ones fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union have broken (429). Woolf s depiction of modernity stresses its fundamentally antinomical character which fosters antithetical thoughts, extreme sensations and ambivalent emotions. Her definition of modernity as essentially fluid and contradictory, remarkably in line with prominent theories of modernity, such as those propounded by Marx and Benjamin, among others, is in turn related to modernitys heightened consciousness of historicity vis-vis previous epochs. Putting literature in its historical context, Woolf describes contemporary writing as reflecting the contradictory nature of modernity, since: [e]motions which used to enter the mind whole are now broken up on the threshold, so that [b]eauty is part ugliness; amusement part disgust; pleasure part pain (Poetry, Fiction and the Future 433). And while the emotion Keats felt at hearing the nightingale is one and entire, in the modern mind beauty is accompaniedby its opposite. The modern poet talks of the nightingale who sings jug jug to dirty ears (433), she writes, evoking lines from T.S. Eliots The Waste Land (1922), the modernist poem par excellence. In addition, this state of contradiction and collision peculiar to modernity is cause for difficulty not only in terms of modern literary production, impeding creativity, but also with respect to critical reception, the evaluation of contemporary literature. The essay How it Strikes a Contemporary (1923), for example, an essay precisely about the possibility or rather the impossibility of judging modern literature, starts off by stating how critics at a table pronounce contradictory opinions on the literature of their times while they are in perfect agreement over the literature of the past. The essay itself is built on a series of contrasts and contradictions, the word but appearing several times, marking the shifts in an argument which, strikingly, seems to re-enact the seventeenthcentury quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. In summary, the argument goes that when faced with the risky task of judging contemporary literature, the critics would advise us to follow our instinct, yet also to check it by reading the masterpieces of the past. We had better return to the classics because ours is a barren age (27), Woolf goes on, but then if we want life and not the dead, she argues in reverse, we have to turn to our contemporaries again to get refreshed and fascinated by their distinctive originality. But, in the end, we are drawn once more back to the classics, the essay continues, because modern writing feels as if it has been taken down in bleak shorthand, preserving the

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brilliance snatched from life but not transmuted into literature, leaving us with dissatisfaction where there was pleasure (28). Once we go back to past masterpieces in order to anchor our instability upon their security (28), we are, however, shocked by their dullness, their lack of sense stimulation, which is, by contrast, abundantly provided by the moderns. Yet, we are drawn to the classics, because we get convinced by their own belief in knowing the truth about the world they described; something definitely lacking in the modern writers who experience the world as fragmentary and contradictory. Interestingly, the mutual definition and undecided opposition between modern and canonical writers on the basis of which Woolf explores the possibility of appraising contemporary literature in How it Strikes a Contemporary, is resonant of those dialectical moments in On Not Knowing Greek where the value of the ancients is, inversely, dependent on what the moderns lack, namely, order, stability and permanence.6 Compare the closing lines of the essay: Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of Christianity and its consolations, of our own age (105-6). However, at the end of How it strikes a Contemporary, Woolf also seems to imply that there is continuity beyond the apparent turbulence of the present: Literature she writes, has lasted long, has undergone many changesThe storm and the drenching are on the surface; continuity and calm are in the depths (31). These sets of oppositions between the classics and the moderns, the present and the past, continuity and change, encountered in Woolf s thinking about contemporary literature, are related not to a mere contradiction but rather a fundamental aporia between historicity and universality, solidity and fluidity, traversing her writing, and haunting her throughout. In 1929, she writes in her diary: Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on for ever; will last for ever; goes down to the bottom of the world this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous we human beings (A Writers Diary 138). In this sense, Woolf installs a historical problematic in the centre of her modernist work, albeit in oscillatory terms, in marked opposition to modernisms alleged a-historicism. However, the search for continuity, expressed in her writings, is persistently contradicted not only by the structural fragmentariness of her modernist narratives but thematically as well. In The Years (1937), for example, Eleanor Pargiters quest for a pattern in life and history, is immediately contradicted by her niece, Peggy, who had silently concluded that if it were such a pattern, it would be meaningless, like a kitten catching its tail (Y 355). Orlandos continuity across the ages is interrupted by a series of changes and destructions, and in Between the Acts (1941), Miss La Trobes historical pageant, which is supposed to produce a progressively continuous and unifying sense of the nation across time, in fact proceeds with breaks and culminates in ruins. Woolf s disjunctive arguments and discontinuous stories thus throw into question any sense of telos and suspend judgement and decisions. Paradoxically, the use of disjunction in her essays, does not work to the effect of proving false any counter-arguments to a pre-decided point of view but, reversely, it is a gesture of exhausting all potential perspectives. As she herself acknowledges,

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she tends to stretch [her] style to take in crumbs of meaning (D3 235), which makes it impossible to come to a conclusion, to decide in favour of one point of view. Undecidability, which has been foregrounded by Jacques Derrida as the impossibility of opting for one of the poles of a duality, cancels any concept of pre-emptive truth to which texts could be reduced (Points 23-4). However, it is not, as Derrida insists, the symptom of simple indeterminacy, all-present fictionality or relativism, but rather it provides evidence of the porosity of all limits, distinctions, and oppositions essential to thinking, their necessary but provisional status (c.f. Limited Inc 148-9).7 Indecision, the affirmation of both poles of a dualism, should thus be seen as an essentially ethical stance, not in the sense of advocating a particular set of moral or political rules and values, but quite the contrary, in that it takes into consideration the demand made by the other, by what is not I with which the I thus enters into a relationship (116). Indecision, Derrida warns, does not equal paralysis, hesitation, or neutralisation, in the negative sense (Sur parole 52-3). More radically, it is a necessary condition for all decision-making. Because, for a decision to be both possible and necessary, there must be the hesitation between determined choices, without which there would be nothing to decide. And, inversely, even when there is a decision, the undecidable never entirely disappears but rather haunts every decision, as the possibility that things could be otherwise (Points 146-9). Indecidability, then, necessarily involves risk and as such it is closely linked with questions of responsibility which literature paradigmatically takes up by its right or rather its duty to be irresponsible toward established truths or norms, not only with regard to the past or to the present but also with respect to the future (Sur parole 24). It poses the critical question of how to be responsible vis--vis what cannot be reduced to received knowledge or morality; a question crucially evoked by the innovative subversiveness of Woolf s writings too. It is telling in this respect that the essay How it Strikes a Contemporary exemplary of Woolf s eschewing evaluative conclusions ends with a strikingly similar call for taking on responsibility toward what is to come in the future, asking the critics to scan the horizon; see the past in relation to the future; and so prepare for masterpieces to come (31). What, then, Woolf seems to be doing, by encompassing irreconcilable contradiction, by resisting conclusions and completion, is to create an opening for all those unforeseen possibilities of texts that are yet to come. Notes
1. Besides Allens perceptive analysis, Edward Bishop has also noted Woolf s subversive essayistic style, Rachel Bowlby has foregrounded the oscillatory mode in Woolf s essays, while Elena Gualtieri and Cuddy Melba Keane have respectively explored different aspects of Woolf s essayism, emphasising its dialogical and inconclusive nature. Parmenides is deemed to have first formulated the principle of non-contradiction in his poem (fr.7.1): For this shall never be forced, that things that are not exist (Tarns translation). Also see Diels and Kranz. Platos conceding to the principle of non-contradiction as founding self-identity is most explicitly expressed in the Republic (IV 436b) where it is stated that the same thing will not consent simultaneously to do or suffer oppositesat any rate not in the same respect and in relation to the same thing. Besides, Socratess dialectical method consisted in showing the interlocutors initial hypothesis to result in contradiction and therefore to non-truth. The principle of non-contradiction and of the oneness of a thing is further dwelled upon in Platos dialogue Parmenides. For an interesting discussion of the latter that sets it in the context of contemporary theoretical debates, see Wood. Finally, in Aristotles logical works, the principle of non-contradiction comprises one of his privileged illustrations of the common principles

2.

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

[koinai archai] underlying the art of dialectic, while in his Metaphysics, this principle forms the criterion of self-identity, of what it is to be one thing, that is, to be something, and hence of what it is to be at large (Metaphysics 2.1003b22 ff). Compare, for example, the following passage from The Pargiters: If you object that fiction is not history, I reply thatI prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction (9). See for example, Bishop. C.f. Heraclitus, fr. 80, which claims that strife as common to all things and that it is through strife that things come into being and also cease. See also fr. 126, which refers to the warm becoming cold or the dry wet, for example, as proof that things are not static but are governed by (self )change. For a collection, translation and commentary of Heraclituss fragments in English, see Kahn. With respect to Hegels famous championing of contradiction, compare, for example, his affirmation that [e]verything is inherently contradictory (Science of Logic 439). For a thorough discussion of the role of contradiction in relation to Hegels logic and dialectical method, see Burbidge; and Forster. See for example, Bishop. Alongside Derridas pinpointing of certain undecidables, such as the words hymen or pharmakos, which hold together two antithetical meanings, he also talks more generally of undecidability as essential to thought and indeed as precondition for any decision-making. For a thorough discussion on the meanings and uses of undecidability in Derridas work, and especially in relation to literature, see Hills thorough Radical Indecision, on which I heavily draw here.

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. The Essay as Form. Trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Fredric Will. New German Critique 32 (1984): 15171. Allen, Judith. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Aristotle. Metaphysics. Ed. W. D. Ross. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 (1924). Benjamin, Walter. Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940). Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992. Bishop, Edward. Metaphor and the Subversive Process of Virginia Woolf s Essays. Style 21(1987): 573-88. Bowlby, Rachel. Introduction: A More Than Maternal Tie. Virginia Woolf: A Womans Essays. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. ix-xxxiii. Burbidge, John. Hegels Conception of Logic. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Ed. Frederick C. Beiser. Cambridge: CUP. 86-101. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1988. . Points, Interviews 19741994. Trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. . Sur parole: instantans philosophiques. La Tour dAigues, ditions de lAube, 1999. Diels, Hermann, and Walther Kranz. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th edn. Berlin: Weidmann, 1951-52. Forster, Michael. Hegels Dialectical Method. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Ed. Frederick C. Beiser. Cambridge:CUP. 130-70. Goldman, Jane. Modernism, 1910-1945: Image to Apocalypse. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004. Gualtieri, Elena. Virginia Woolf s Essays: Sketching the Past. London: Macmillan, 2000. Hegel, Georg W. F. Science of Logic. Trans. A.V. Miller. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969. Hill, Leslie. Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Kahn, Charles H. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Plato. Parmenides. Trans.comm.intro. Samuel Scolincov. Berkeley: California UP, 2003. Plato. The Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. Spiropoulou, Angeliki. Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin. London and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010. Tarn, Leonardo. Parmenides: A Text with Translation, Commentary, and Critical Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965. Wood, Kelsey. Troubling Play: Meaning and Entity in Platos Parmenides. New York: SUNY Press, 2005. Woolf, Virginia. How it Strikes a Contemporary (1923). The Crowded Dance of Modern Life. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. 23-31.

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. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924). A Womans Essays. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. 69-87. . Modern Fiction (1925). The Crowded Dance of Modern Life. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. 5-12. . On Not Knowing Greek (1925). A Womans Essays. Ed. Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. 93-106. . The New Biography (1927). The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. IV. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego and New York: Harcourt, 1994. 473-80. . Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927). Vol. IV. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1994. 428-41. . Orlando: A Biography (1928). London: Grafton, 1977. . A Room of Ones Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Ed. Morag Shiach. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. . The Years (1937). London: Grafton, 1977. . Between the Acts (1941). London: Hogarth Press, 1947. . A Writers Diary (1953). Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Harcourt Brace, 1982. . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. III. Eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press. 1980. . The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. London: Hogarth Press, 1978.

THE FEELING OF KNOWING IN MRS DALLOWAY: NEUROSCIENCE AND WOOLF by Sowon S. Park
I.

apturing consciousness has been the spur to many great literary ambitions but in the last three decades we have witnessed a remarkable growth in consciousness studies in many fields, and especially in the natural sciences. Disciplines as disparate as cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, cognitive linguistics, evolutionary biology, anthropology and phenomenological psychiatry have found a common focus in consciousness, making it an exceptionally multidisciplinary field. Literary studies are not unaffected by the cognitive turn: significant emerging areas spurred on by the recent growth in consciousness studies are neuro-literary criticism and evo (evolutionary) literary criticism, whose messianic tones were captured in the 2002 special issue of Poetics Today. Entitled Literature and the Cognitive Revolution, it pronounced that evo and neuro approaches will revolutionize the study of literature by overthrowing the rule of poststructuralism (Poetics Today 167). To what degree this nascent field will overturn poststructuralist knowledge still remains to be seen. However, it is clear that there are unresolved and ongoing methodological issues arising from attempts to generate an integrative framework that can accommodate responses across the divide between the two cultures. By examining the particular case of Steven Pinker on Woolf, I will foreground the general issues. I will then consider certain neuroscientific discoveries which illuminate and provide a scientific framework for the literary methods developed by Woolf and other modernists. Though neuroscientific evidence varies vastly in its explanatory scale, Antonio Damasios science of consciousness has stunning parallels with Woolf s model of mind, a link which has not been made by cognitive or evolutionary literary critics. This paper will argue for the significance of affect, offered as the feeling of knowing, in developing an adequate theory of consciousness that speaks across the divide between the two cultures, as well as for the centrality of Woolf to the field of consciousness studies.

II.
Towards the end of his internationally acclaimed book The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness, Antonio Damasio, one of the worlds leading neuroscientists, poses this question: [A]s a consequence of our greater understanding of consciousness, [will] weeventually be able to gain access to each others mental experiences? (305). To answer this question he proposes a hypothetical scenario. Set in the near future when a high-powered scanner is able to represent the brain at an unprecedented level of accuracy, he invites us to experience what goes on in his mind as he looks over San Francisco Bay. Damasios retinas, his lateral geniculate nuclei, his visual cortical regions that form the image of San Francisco Bay are all scanned, providing the patterns of neuron firings that correspond to what he sees. The spatial and temporal resolution of this scanner

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is so advanced that you can see with crystal clarity the buildup of the sight before his eyes: the rapid volumetric acquisition of images provided by the scanner gives a precise and compelling measure of the raw pixels as they are developed into shapes, colours, movement and three-dimensions. In addition an equally sophisticated computer will provide you with the description of the physics and chemistry of the neural-activation patterns, yielding a remarkable set of correlates of the contents of the image in Damasios mind. Does this process not lay bare, objectively, the distinct, phenomenal, qualitative and subjective character of Damasios consciousness? Have not the magnificent developments in neuroscience finally provided us with the means to gain the profoundly longedfor knowledge of the mind of another? Is this not the answer to the Whats it like to be someone else? question, otherwise known as the W.I.L. question that has occupied most theorists in contemporary philosophy of mind? Damasios answer is no. He points out that the advanced technology, even if perfectly realized, will give us the neural data but not the experience of that data. The immediacy and the vitality of actual perception in ones mind cannot be completely transmitted to another because the ultimate mental image in ones brain is the result of the process of the visual stimulus triggering a wave of changes in the physical viscera and then these bodily changes being detected by the cortex which connects them back to the initial visual stimulus. In other words, or in Damasios words, it has undergone the body-loop (The Feeling of What Happens, 79-81). When we see Damasios conscious processes, all we will experience is the image of that body-loop without the body-loop itself. The somatic response is uniquely his and is fundamentally irreproducible to those who do not inhabit his body. That our perception is generated in the body, by the body and that the bodily responses are an essential element of the rational thinking process is Damasios thesis, which has arguably revolutionized the field of cognitive science. Along with Francisco Varelas 1991 landmark neurophenomenological study, The Embodied Mind, Damasios theory of embodied cognition has established that the mind is not in the head but in the body as a whole. They are generally credited with co-pioneering the furthest reaches of the human brain, now sometimes called the feeling brain (or the affective brain) and their explanations of the neural, somatic basis of the processes of ones mind which demonstrate why mappings of the body are well suited to signifying the self in the mind (Damasio, Nature 227) are reshaping traditional areas of scientific and philosophic study based on Cartesian dualism; indeed, Damasios book Descartes Error (1994) is regarded by some as having solved the mind-body problem. For all that, Damasios conclusion that sensory perception cannot be reproduced on non-sensory grounds should not surprise us. Those of us working outside the boundaries of positivist conceptions of scientific truth will not find it remarkable that life as we experience it cannot be reduced to fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance images) of the brain, no matter how deep or how clear the resolution. What we should be surprised by is the premisethat the only valid methods for accessing another persons mental experiences are those based on verifiable injunctions. Damasio, like other scientists, makes little attempt to incorporate the study of consciousness in the field of literature, which is so rich and so full of what it is like to be in someone elses mind. But, as David Lodge has forcefully argued in his essay Consciousness and the Novel, the rise of the novel at the end of the eighteenth century marks the beginning of modern discussions of consciousness

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and the novel is mans most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time (10). However, in the current climate, literature is mostly overlooked as a serious field of knowledge by the natural scientists.

III.
On the other hand, recent constellations of scientific knowledge charted by those at the interface between cognitive neuroscience, cognitive linguistics and post-Darwinian neuropsychology are not without attempts to incorporate literature, and the work of Steven Pinker, the psycholinguist and cognitive neuroscientist, is representative. Unlike the majority of cognitive scientists, he recognizes literature as a serious field of knowledge: Fiction in particular offers a precious gift to evolutionary psychology he writes (Consilient Study 163). But if hopes for the opening of a vista upon a new transdisciplinarity are encouraged by the premise, they are stalled as quickly as they are conceived because Pinker, like other scientists, simply ignores the epistemological problem of aesthetic knowledge and proceeds his investigations on the premise that knowledge about literature can be ascertained with the same strategies and with the same claims to truth as other scientific investigations. Thus literature is taken as stable data about what interests the human species which can be analyzed scientifically for their adaptive and functional value. [T]he people and events on display in fictive worlds presumably reflect our species obsessions, and provide an ecologically valid source of data about what matters to us, he maintains (Consilient Study 163). In regarding literature as data, Pinker abolishes the experience of the data from the field of knowledge and thus his analyses cannot but yield profoundly reductionist explanations of literature, such as the following: Fiction may be, at least in part, a pleasure technology, a co-opting of language and imagery as a virtual reality device which allows a reader to enjoy pleasant hallucinations like exploring interesting territories, conquering enemies, hobnobbing with powerful people, and winning attractive mates. Fiction, moreover, can tickle peoples fancies without even having to project them into a thrilling vicarious experience. There are good reasons for people (or any competitive social agent) to crave gossip, which is a kind of due diligence on possible allies and enemies. Fiction, with its omniscient narrator disclosing the foibles of interesting virtual people, can be a form of simulated gossip. (171) Pinkers reasoning does not take into account the most profound human experiences great literature can undoubtedly provide because he erases the phenomenological process through which any reading is performed thereby reducing the reading of literature to factual transaction of the most crudely instrumental value. More pertinently for this discussion, his model has no room for literature which does not entertain nor offer any obvious adaptive value. Modernism does not fit into the evolutionary logic and thus remains, for him as with evolutionary critics, a mystifying scientific puzzle. Pinkers response is to deplore it. He despairs of the downhill turn the humanities and the arts have taken in the last century, the origin of which can, apparently, be traced back to a single statement made by Virginia Woolf that is to be found in countless English course outlines: In or about December 1910, human nature changed (The

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Blank Slate 404). Pinker not only misquotes Woolf but takes her hyperbolic gambit for discussing character in fiction as a hypothesis which must be verified in the literal sense. So he does not shy away from solemnly concluding: Woolf was referring to the new philosophy of modernism that would dominate the elite arts and criticism for much of the twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature was carried over with a vengeance to postmodernism, which seized control in its later decades. The point of this chapter [The Arts] is that the elite arts, criticism, and scholarship are in trouble because that statement was wrong. Human nature did not change in 1910, or in any year thereafter (404). That human nature did not change in a biological sense has patently very little to do with Woolf s theory of representing character in fiction. But rather than widening the scope of literature as biological adaptation and considering modernist innovations and achievements from a literary perspective, Pinker denigrates and dismisses the major literary achievements of the twentieth century, revealing little more than deep-grained, C P Snowlike ideological prejudices against the humanities. For example he asserts: The study of literature in modern universities strikes many observers (insiders and outsiders alike) as being in, shall we say, critical conditionpoliticized, sclerotic, and lacking a progressive agenda.Fiction has long been thought of as a means of exploring human nature, and the current stagnation of literary scholarship can be attributed, in part, to its denial of that truismits distrust of science (and more generally, the search for testable hypotheses and cumulative objective knowledge) has left it, according to many accounts, mired in faddism, obscurantism, and parochialism (Consilient Study 163). The assumption that science is alone in seeking to produce general laws and culmulative knowledge effectively stultifies the consilience he attempts. In addition, it might be reasonable to expect a cognitive neuroscientist linguist specializing in consciousness to take a reasonable interest in the phrase stream of consciousness, but in The Blank Slate this phrase is just another way of saying bad writing. He despairs of modernist style which he summarizes thus: omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose (410). Not for a moment does he consider the idea that by cutting loose from orderly introductions of characters and structured plots and tracing the ordinary mind on an ordinary day (E4 160) Woolf recreated not just a knowledge of the mind or the world but mind in the world as it is in the process of being constituted by the world, as Pat Waugh has convincingly argued in The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (see also Waugh in this volume), which is precisely what Pinker had also been arguing for in the preceding chapters. By divorcing the data of fiction from the experience of that data, Pinkers methodology distorts the fundamental principles of the act of reading and overlooks the opportunity to build on the convergences. Pinkers appropriations are particularly unfortunate because one of the very aims of his book is to illuminate the phenomenological nature of human consciousness, precisely the field in which Woolf made giant strides. But his reading of Woolf is that she based her theory of art on a false theory of human psychologythe Blank Slate which not only led to the current malaise of the arts and the humanities as he sees it, but culminated in Alan Sokals famous 1996 hoax article, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity in The Social Text (Pinker, The Blank

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Slate 410). All of modernism and postmodernism was a mistake in Pinkers viewone big hoax. So is the idea of convergence even desirable when the methods and the standards of the natural sciences are automatically assumed to be a way of improving the nonscientific soft disciplines? How can consciousness scientists process what they regard as speculative, evidence-free observations if they take their epistemological goal and their conception of truth only from the empirical sciences? And how can we rely on analyses of literature offered by scientists whose critical theorising and practice, whose textuality and linguisticity, whose readerliness and imagination, are as poor as that?, as Valentine Cunningham sums it up (108). It is difficult not to see todays scientists, including those informed by post-positivist quantum theories and those with accumulated literary competence, as versions of Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times, whose mantra is Now, what I want is, Facts.nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.Stick to Facts, sir! (Dickens 15). But facts without an understanding of the experience of facts in relation to consciousness can only amount to the Gradgrindian blindness that Dickens satirized.

IV.
Nevertheless, the idea of convergence remains alluring if only because when it comes to the W.I.L. question, there are so many overlaps and coincidences whether it is approached logically, neurobiologically or literarily. Damasios investigations into the Whats It Like question may have been on neural, physical and material grounds but his conclusion extends, not alters, the conclusion Thomas Nagel logically came to in his celebrated 1974 philosophical essay which posed the question: What is it like to be a bat?i.e. it may be possible for a human to know what it is like for him to behave as a bat behaves which not the same as what it is like for a bat to be a bat because of the differing perceptual systems. Woolf has a simpler phrase for the W.I.L. question: she called it creating character. My name is Brown. Catch me if you can so Woolf wrote of the long odyssey that the writer embarks on when attempting to convey what it feels like to be someone else (E3 420). The epistemological problem of the knowledge of the minda perennial preoccupation for both novelists and philosopherswas Woolf s abiding obsession and her contributions were as profound as they were radical. How, thendid one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? (TTL 57-8) wonders Lily Briscoe as she sits close to Mrs Ramsay, the sacred inscriptions of whose heart she longs to learn. Martha Nussbaum has considered this question in exemplary detail in The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse. She argues that Woolf reconstituted the question of other minds by depicting repeatedly, both our epistemological insufficiency toward one another and our unquenchable epistemological longing.Virginia Woolf tackles a venerable philosophical problem. I believe that she makes a contribution both to our understanding of the problem and to its resolution (731). The question of knowledge that Nussbaum examined is one between Woolf s characters. And to this another dimension might be added: the question of knowledge between the reader and Woolf s characters, an area to which Woolf s contributions are no less significant.

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The chief task of the novelist, Woolf stated, was to convey the mind receiving an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself (E3 33). Novels should not merely provide the data that a character is processing in the mindthe shower of atomsbut express the experience of that data, to record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall (E3 33). So Woolf represents to the reader not just the information of what a character may see, hear, smell, taste and touch but the process of what it feels like to have that sight, sound, smell, taste and touch and the kind of thoughts and memories they trigger, making us acutely aware that while only some mental processes are conscious, all mental processes are physical. This produces in the reader a perceptual mimesis of consciousness which approximates the process of the sensations and cognitions of lived experience. Likewise, Damasios discovery about how the body-loop functions in the normal mind was that the feelings generated by the body are an essential part of rational thought. Rationality requires feeling and feeling requires the body. So the body and the mind are actually indivisible. He asserts that we live inside this contradiction of anatomical reality: rationality produced from the flesh. Long before Damasio, Woolf wrote continually of mind depending upon flesh. For example, in On Being Ill (1930) Woolf observed that although literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of glass through which the soul looks straight and clearOn the contrary the opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the panesmudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant. (4) That we do not have a body but are a body is a fact of our existence she captured, as well as produced, which is one of the reasons her prose feels so alive. Feelings and thoughts are never immaterial: they are formed through the body. She begins Mrs Dalloway (1925) with the squeak of Rumplemayers men taking the doors off the hinges, triggering in Clarissa the physical sensation of plunging into open air 30 years before when she burst open the French windows at Bourton, the memory of which feels like being flapped and kissed by the waves of the sea. Woolf presents physical sensations as vehicle for knowledge, undercutting the presumed opposition between reason and emotion. And emotions are suffused with highly discriminating responses to what is of value to each character. The following is Clarissa Dalloways famous feeling of knowing from Mrs Dalloway: Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores. Then, for that moment, she had an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed the moment (MD 24). What may seem like contradictory cognitive processesthinking and feelingin the conceptual scenography of the two cultures are reshaped into a continuum of feeling of knowing in Woolf, as they are in the experiments of Damasio.

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The novel ends with Clarissa, whose talent is knowing people by instinct, feeling very much like Septimus, feeling that she knows him, not through various facts but through her bodily responses to those facts: Always her body went through it, when she was told, first, suddenly (MD 133). Septimus, who cannot translate his sensations into emotions who cannot feelcannot think rationally either. But the feeling of knowing does not lead to complete knowledge between the characters in Mrs Dalloway (nor does it in the experiments of Damasio). Clarissas romanticized interpretation of Septimuss death as a glorious act of defiance is a reconstruction which bears little relation to reality: after all, Septimus wanted to live. In this sense, the novel confirms the radically subjective nature of our perceptions. But even as the question of knowledge between the characters is dealt with profound skepticism, Woolf offers one of the most successful answers to the W.I.L. question. By incorporating feeling into epistemology, Woolf guides the reader's mind through the structure of the somatic responses that gave rise to the thoughts of the characters; this in turn creates "as-if" responses in the reader as to how another mind thinks, how another body feels.

V.
Recent neurobiological breakthroughs have provided us with a solid framework for understanding the workings of the phenomenology of consciousness of an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. And while there are serious unresolved issues involved in bringing the concepts and methods of one disciplinewhose difference is chasmicinto a working relation with the concepts and methods of another, on the feeling of knowing, at least, accounts of consciousness have converged across the divide promising a new ground, even if they were developed on either side of the two cultures. Works Cited
Cunningham, Valentine. Figuring Out. REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Eds. J. Schlaeger and G. Stedman. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2008. 95-112. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes Error. New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1994. 227. . The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. London: Heinemann, 1999. . The Person Within. Nature 423 (May 2003). Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. 1854. London: Methuen, 1987. Jackson, Tony E. Issues and Problems in the Blending of Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, and Literary Study. Poetics Today 23:1 (2002). 161-179. Lodge, David. Consciousness and the Novel: Collected Essays. London: Secker and Warburg, 2002. Nagel, Thomas. What Is It Like to be a Bat? Philosophical Review 83 (1974). Nussbaum, Martha. The Window: Knowledge of Other Minds in Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse. New Literary History 26 (1995). 731-753. Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton, 1997. 162-178. . The Blank Slate. London: Penguin, 2002. . Toward a Consilient Study of Literature. Philosophy and Literature 31:1 (April 2007). Waugh, Patricia. Revising the Two Cultures Debate. The Arts and Science of Criticism. Eds. P. Waugh and D. Fuller. Oxford: OUP, 1999. Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Andrew McNeillie (vols. 1-4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5-6). London: The Hogarth Press, 1986-2011. . To the Lighthouse. 1927. London: Penguin, 1992. . On Being Ill. 1930. MA: Paris Press, 2002. . Mrs Dalloway. 1925. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Edition, 2003.

WHEN THE LIGHTS OF HEALTH GO DOWN: VIRGINIA WOOLFS AESTHETICS AND CONTEMPORARY ILLNESS NARRATIVES by Stella Bolaki
n her introduction to Virginia Woolf s On Being Ill (1926), Hermione Lee asserts that this essay has, in recent years, gained another kind of recognition in a burgeoning literature of pathology, cited on medical websites (xxiii)literature that includes illness memoirs and medical humanities books which are becoming increasingly popular. Looking at such websites we notice, however, that in most cases Woolf s essay is mentioned as an example of a time when there was a scarcity of narratives about illness. For instance, the annotation of On Being Ill on The Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, at the School of Medicine of New York University, reads as follows: The essays premise [that illness is not a subject of literature despite how common it is in real life] is no longer true; we now have a great deal of writing about illness. Are we meant to conclude then that On Being Ill is a bit dated now that so much has been, and is being, written about illness? Has what Woolf called the unexploited mine1 been exploited and has this paradoxical richness of illnessthe main contradiction in Woolf s essaybeen resolved? A fruitful use of On Being Ill for those interested in the intersection of literature with illness or medicine would be to juxtapose its claim that in 1930 the body was not taken seriously as a literary theme, with our contemporary obsession with the body (The Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database). This is demonstrated by the proliferation of first and third-person narratives that record the daily drama of the body (Woolf 5): ranging from Joan Didions essay about her migraines In Bed (1968), Audre Lordes Cancer Journals (1980), Paul Monettes AIDS memoir Borrowed Time (1988), to Anatole Broyards account of prostate cancer in Intoxicated by My Illness (1992), Jean Dominique Baubys story of his stroke that left him physically paralysed in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997), and Hilary Mantels memoir dealing with her struggles with severe endometriosis entitled Giving Up the Ghost (2003), to mention but a few examples. Woolf s salient points regarding language and illness in On Being Ill surely raise questions such as whether illness has emerged as a more prominent theme in literature, if the ill have a better vocabulary for communicating their experiences today, and who is listening to what they have to say. In this essay, I wish to reclaim Woolf s relevance by addressing in particular the importance of taking seriously the aesthetic dimension of contemporary illness narratives. I will do that by staging a dialogue between Woolf s On Being Ill and the diary essay published in 2010 by Hilary Mantel, which offers a certain contradictory response to Woolf even though it seems to continue her aesthetic project. Attention has been paid to the affinity between aesthetics and illness in readings of On Being Ill. For instance, in Exposing the Nerves of Language, Kimberly Engdahl Coates shows how Woolf uses illness to create a modernist aesthetic (247) that connects sensation and intellect and presents the ill body as an analogue for the artists mind (258). Woolf writes: In illness words seem to possess a mystic qualityIn health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in

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illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poems by Mallarme or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent and distil their flavour, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour (On Being Ill 21-22). For Woolf, the ill body possesses a fundamental relationship to language and creativity, and illness has something important to tell us about aesthetics. But what can aesthetics tell us about the experience of illness? In On Being Ill Woolf calls illness the great confessional (11) and the essay invites her readers to inhabit an entirely different world, but this project raises new contradictions when approached from a medical humanities perspective. Within this field, the aesthetic mode is often viewed as an escape from the reality of the body, that is, as not a realistic model for many people dealing with pain and serious illnessone thinks here of Susan Sontags well-known polemic Illness as Metaphor (1978).2 Even among those who take seriously the role of storytelling and personal narrative, however, the aesthetic is often seen as a subjective realm which romanticises illness and which can hardly constitute a firm foundation for sustained ethical or political consciousness-raising (Major 109). An example of such scepticism is William Majors critique of Broyards Intoxicated by My Illness: Broyard believes that he is able to avoid the conventional because his illness [cancer] has freed him from socially scripted patterns of behavior. Ironically, however,the image Broyard cultivates is middle class to the core, a well-trodden cultural trope: the existential man who suffers for truth, and who uses art as a way to distance the self from the social fabric (98). As Major concludes his reading, It is worth pointing out that such intoxication may be available to a select fewMany of us may see our illnesses through a glass darkly, where only the feeble light of aesthetic redemption peeks through (119). Woolf s celebration of ceas[ing] to be soldiers in the army of the upright (12) and her preference for solitude in On Being Ill runs a similar risk of being seen as an irresponsible and disinterested stance towards illness (both adjectives appear in the essay).3 Likewise, her eclectic web of images and literary allusions may be dismissed for not representing a realistic paradigm for most people suffering from serious illness. Mantels essay to which I will now turn echoes, however implicitly, the above criticisms. The opening of Mantels hospital diary published in The London Review of Books in November 2010 records the voices, visions and hallucinations brought after her surgery, including a smoking circus strongman squatting on [her] bed in a no-smoking hospital.4 This resonates with Woolf s dentist-visit hallucination on the first page of On Being Ill: when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentists arm-chair and confuse his Rinse the mouthrinse the mouth with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us (3). Like Woolf, Mantel suggests that ill people inhabit a strange world: The nurses think Im gallant, a tractable patient; they dont know Im in another country. But the similarities seem to stop here, or at least this is what Mantel wishes to convince us of. In one of her letters, Woolf wrote about the privilege of being ill at home as opposed to an institutionalised setting: The horrors of illness cease when one has a book or a dog or a cup of ones own at hand (303). Unlike Woolf, Mantel is in the hospital, the place where the body is handed over to professionals and especially to technology: On 12 July I am attached to a small, heavy black box, which will vacuum out the cavity and gradually close its walls. A clear tube leads from beneath my dressings

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into the box, and the box is plugged into the wall. It snorts like an elderly pug, and bloody substances whisk along the tube. Through August, as the weather warms up, it will smell like a wastebin in a butchery, and flies will take an interest in it. I can unplug myself for a few minutes, but reconnecting is painful. While Woolf s patient can look outwards (round and up) to the sky, for instance, and the cloudswhat Woolf calls this gigantic cinema (14)for Mantels patient everything points inward: the furthest extension of her consciousness is not the rattle of car keys, the road home, the first drink of the evening, but the beep and plip-plop of monitors and drips, the flashing of figures on screens; these are how you register your existence, these are the way you matter during illness. The clouds are invoked in Mantels essay but differently: [Hospital] walls recede, vanish into grey mist, like clouds over a cathedral. As soon as the last hospital visitor leaves, Mantel continues, the inner drama of the ward is free to begin again; the drama enacted without spectators, written within the confines of the body a still more secret drama. Death stays when the visitors have gone and the nurses turn a blind eye: he leans back on his portable throne, he crosses his legs, he says: Entertain me. Mantels humour is dark. Even though Woolf s pastoral imagery may come across as lighter, as she adds after her vision of an overcoming nature, divinely beautiful as this spectacle of clouds may be, it is also divinely heartless (14). She reiterates this idea when she considers the indifferent but comforting rose standing still and steadyin the earth and preserving a demeanour of perfect dignity and self-possession as opposed to the domesticated or romanticised rose that has become a symbol of human passion (14-15). As in Mantels essay, ill people are closer to an awareness of death: It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, nature is at no pains to conceal that she in the end will conquer we shall cease to drag ourselves about the fields (On Being Ill 16). Mantels direct objections to On Being Ill are fraught with contradictions: I read On Being Ill, by Virginia Woolf. What schoolgirl piffle, I think. Its like one of those compositions by young ladies mocked in Tom Sawyer. I cant understand what she means when she complains about the poverty of the language we have to describe illness. For the sufferer, she says, there is nothing ready made. Then what of the whole vocabulary of singing aches, of spasms, of strictures and cramps; the gouging pain, the drilling pain, the pricking and pinching, the throbbing, burning, stinging, smarting, flaying? All good words. All old words. No ones pain is so special that the devils dictionary of anguish has not anticipated it. There is even a scale you can use to refine it: Tell me, the doctor says, on a scale of one to ten, how much this hurts. It is striking that Mantel defends the ready made here (in other words, the quantitative medical language) when earlier in her essay, and elsewhere in her work, she is a strong critic of the short exclamatory hospital talk with its swift acronyms and of the belief that everything can be measured scientifically. In essence, her diary offers her hallucinatory visions precisely to communicate something that cannot be conveyed through the old words, to rescue her experience from the narrower definition of the clinic so that it makes sense to her, and thus to complement the biomedical model. It is not accidental that Mantel notes that the hospital staff cannot see the two simultaneous realities she is

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living inshe is even calling her literary or religious preoccupations an elitist pursuit suggesting, more than a criticism, that each sufferer is entitled to their own special language. The one size fits all approach of medical reports and case studies that concentrates on disease rather than the lived experience of illness, however strange the latter is, is clearly inadequate. But Mantels attack on Woolf is also directed at something else: No doubt language fails in that shuttered room called melancholia, where the floor is plush and the windowless walls are draped in black velvetBut then, mental suffering is so genteel;Virginia only has decorous illnesses. She has faints and palpitations, fevers and headaches, though I am mindful that at one stage they tried to fix her by pulling out her teeth. But she is seemly; she does not seep, or require a dressings trolley, she does not wake at dawn to find herself smeared with contact jelly from last nights ECG. Virginia never oozes. Her secretions are ladylike: tears, not bile. She may as well not have had bowels, for all the evidence of them in her book. Here it seems Mantel sets up a hierarchy that partly involves the distinction between mental and physical illness5 and echoes critiques such as those against Broyard mentioned earlier. For Mantel, Woolf s suffering seems to be curiously devoid of the messy reality of human affairs, genteel and ladylike, and as a result does not appear to be authentic or real enough. In contrast, Mantels essay repeatedly returns to the abject body and its unspeakable fluids, and consciously uses language that is not elevated even though metaphors still abound: My flesh is swollen, green with bruising, and the shocking, gaping wound shows a fresh pink inside; I look like a watermelon with a great slice hacked out. I say to myself, its just another border post on the frontier between medicine and greengrocery. Even when religion comes in, Mantel makes a point of dismissing the special status of her body and wounds: There is a term for what is happening to St Teresa in Berninis sculpture; it is transverberation. But she was pierced suddenly by the fiery lance of Gods love, whereas I was pierced by prearrangement, in a hospital just off the M25. Illness strips you back to an authentic self, Mantel summarises, but not one you need to meet. On Being Ill offers an image of the recumbent as having dropped out of the race and thus having time for fantastic and unprofitable excursions of the mind (10). Mantels idea of stripping back to an authentic self is literal: In sickness we cant avoid knowing about our body and what it does, its animal aspect, its demands. We see things that never should be seen; our inside is outside, the bodys sewer pipes and vaults exposed to view, as if in a woodcut of our own martyrdom. In response to Mantels comment about mental illness being more genteel, we can note that On Being Ill privileges physical maladiesWoolf mentions for example toothache, pneumonia, typhoid, influenza (4), and one of the earlier versions of the essay included appendicitis and cancer (Lee xxxii n12). This is further expressed through the language of the essay calling for a new literature of the body versus the mind: All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the panesmudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like

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a sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe (On Being Ill 4-5). Woolf does not write explicitly about herself (she does not say I) but her approach towards the body is not as genteel or conservative as Mantel suggests: Woolf calls it a monster (6) and writes that to look at illness squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer (5); and even though she reiterates her point about the lack of of words for pain, by the time of The Waves (1931) she has found a more primitive or brutal6 language through Bernard: For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness, passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting (220). Illness narratives are not significant only because they record personal experience, though it is important here to recognise the politics of writing in the first person about ones illness, especially when it comes to considering the history of the female bodys pathologisation. However, Alan Radley is right to stress that we should go beyond interpreting illness accounts according to content and pay attention to their aesthetic dimension which is not separate from the realm of ethics or politics. As he explains in Works of Illness, aesthetic activity should be seen as a kind of work (185) rather than as synonymous with aestheticisation. Illness narratives partake of two worlds, the mundane world of disease or the body and a figurative or aesthetic worlda world of illnesswhich they fabricate and into which the reader is invited (Radley 188). The idea of transfiguration of the ordinary into the aesthetic (in Radleys quotation) suggests that the latter is grounded in the sensuous or the mundane. Illness narratives do not gesture towards some ethereal or transcendental space into which the author escapes from the pains of illness. Woolf writes that we need a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth to deal with illness and pain, otherwise the body will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism (On Being Ill 5-6). And even though her mundane reality is not that of Mantel, more recognizable to the modern reader who is perhaps thirsty for graphic confessional material, Woolf draws her imagery from the natural, outside world, rather than an ethereal space, and conjures a world of illness into which she invites us. However personal Mantels account may appear, it is important to note that her readers do not bear witness to unmediated suffering; the work of transmutation that writing about her experience entails creates a screen through which the terrors of illness can be contemplated with distance by both author and readers (Radley 184). To provide an example from her diary, Mantel writes:For a while I think I have grown a new line on one of my hands, a line unknown to palmistry. I think perhaps I have a new fate. But it proves to be a medical artefact, a puckering of the skin produced by one of the tubes sewn into my wrist. We call those lines, too. The iambic pentameter of the saline stand, the alexandrine of the blood drain, the epidurals sweet sonnet form. The line here is a double signifier as it stands in the world of medicine but also in the aesthetic and grounded world of illness which Mantel conjures for us. This is one of several incidents when, to borrow Radleys argument, a part of the world of medicine is transformed into a fragment that exemplifies another world without being separated from reality. Through this process of aesthetic

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communication (reconfiguration or translation), disorder and disintegrationand what is more disordered that the artificial drip of liquids in and out of ones bodyare turned into something ordered and meaningful like meter that can be grasped afresh by others (Radley 184). Rather than being an example of sentimentalising or romanticising illness, such a process of transformation opens the possibility to understand works of illness as deriving their significance from the deployment of an ethic of freedom [for the person who is ill], realized in terms of aesthetic practice (Radley 38). Thus, Mantel notes in her diary that the black ink, looping across the page, flowing easily and more like water than like blood, reassured me that I was alive and could act in the world.7 Woolf may not be reporting with graphic immediacy like Mantel from the undiscovered country of illness but she is no wuss, as Mantel calls her in what is perhaps the most provocative moment in her diary essay. Rather than settling on the idea of the ineffability of pain, which Mantel suggests is a result of being afraid to look at illness squarely in the face, Woolf s image of crashing together gestures towards the idea of aesthetics as workand here she counters Mantels preference for the ready made language mentioned earlier. Woolf s phrase makes its first appearance in On Being Ill when she tells us that there is nothing ready made for the ill person: He is forced to coin words and taking his pain in one hand and a lump of pure sound in the other crush them together so that a new word in the end drops out (7). This is an image of translating pain and raw sensation into verbal form. Crashing together not only fabricates a new word or world but also gives agency in the face of suffering. The phrase reappears on the last page of the essay when the great lady, Lady Waterford, crushed together the plush curtain in her agony as she watches her husbands body being taken to his grave (28). More than what On Being Ill says indirectly about Woolf s own endurance and courage (Hermione Lee has uncovered this dimension in her introduction to the essay), its lasting legacy in relation to contemporary narratives of illness lies in the fact that it reinforces the importance of taking seriously the aesthetic dimension and imaginative work underlying illness narratives. This dimension is fundamental to the communication of illness to both the one who suffers and others who have no access to it. Notes
1. 2. Woolf s essay appeared in 1926 under the title IllnessAn Unexploited Mine in the American Journal Forum before becoming published by the Hogarth Press in 1930 under its original title. Sontag opposes the confessional aspect of illness: I didnt think it would be usefuland I wanted to be usefulto tell yet one more story in the first person of how someone learned that she or he had cancer, wept, struggled, was comforted, suffered, took couragethough mine was also that story. A narrative, it seemed to me, would be less useful than an idea. For narrative pleasure I would appeal to other writers (98). There is no space to address the affinities between Broyard and Woolf in any detail here. Though they both echo the idea of illness as a tool that helps restore some kind of alienated identity (and thus free the individual from the army of the upright), Woolf would probably find Broyards I in his narrative as hard as a nut (AROO 98). All citations are from the LRB online version (Hilary Mantel, Diary, Vol. 32 No. 21, 4 November 2010) even though a shortened version of the essay reappeared under the title After Visiting Hours in The Guardian (Saturday 13 November 2010). The full diary was also published as an eBook called Ink in the Blood: A Hospital Diary (2010). This might stem from Mantels personal experience, as illustrated in her memoir: The more I said that I had a physical illness, the more [the doctors] said I had a mental illness. The more I questioned the nature

3.

4.

5.

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6. 7.

of, the reality of the mental illness, the more I was found to be in denial, deluded.It was in the nature of educated young women, it was believed, to be hysterical, neurotic, difficult, and out of control (Giving up the Ghost 177). In the manuscript of the essay Woolf had brutal instead of primitive (Lee xxvi). Mantels memoir reiterates this idea: I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into beingeven if the writing is aimless doodling that no one will ever read, or the diary that no none can see till Im dead (Giving up the Ghost 222).

Works Cited
Coates, Kimberly Enngdahl. Exposing the Nerves of Language: Virginia Woolf, Charles Mauron, and the Affinity Between Aesthetics and Illness. Literature and Medicine 21.2 (Fall 2002): 242-263. Lee, Hermione. Introduction. On Being Ill. Ashfield: Paris Press, 2002. xi-xxxiv. Mantel, Hilary. Diary LRB 32.21, 4 November 2010: 41-42. Web. Accessed 10 January 2012 <http://www. lrb.co.uk/v32/n21/hilary-mantel/diary>. . Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir. London: Fourth Estate, 2003. Major, William. Aesthetics and Social Critique in Anatole Broyards Intoxicated by My Illness. Journal of Narrative Theory 32.1 (Winter 2002): 97-121. Radley, Alan. Works of Illness: Narrative, Picturing, and the Social Response to Serious Disease. Ashby-de-la-Zouch: InkerMen Press, 2009. Sontag, Susan. Illness As Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. London: Penguin, 1991. The Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. School of Medicine of New York University. Web. Accessed 10 January 2012 <http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=218> Woolf, Virginia. A Room of Ones Own. London: Penguin, 2000. . The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press, 1975-1980. . On Being Ill. Introduction by Hermione Lee. Ashfield: Paris Press, 2002. . The Waves. Oxford: OUP, 1998.

KINETIC TROPES, COMEDIC TURNS: DANCING TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Janet Winston

t hardly needs saying that To the Lighthouse, perhaps more so than Woolf s other novels, is concerned with ephemeralityboth its impact on knowing and being, and how to represent it in writing. In that sense, then, Woolf s novel shares a preoccupation associated with dance. Dance scholars since the sixteenth century have lamented the fact that dance, more so than the performance arts of theater and music, is by its very nature impermanent (Lepecki 125-29). As dance theorist Mark Franco explains: All danceis constituted by loss in the form of its own immediate disappearance which then engenders a desire for its reappearance, ultimately for its reconstruction. Reconstruction and choreographytwo facets of the science of making dances happenare distinguishable from dancing as the irretrievable mystery of what happened in those dances (4). Dance critic Marcia Siegels comments about dances comparatively low status vis--vis the other arts calls to mind the parallel Woolf draws between Mrs. Ramsays dinner party and Lily Briscoes painting that would be hung in the attics,would be destroyed (TTL 211). Siegel writes, [dance] doesnt stay around long enough to become respectable or respected. Its ephemerality is mistaken for triviality (xv qtd. in Lepecki 130). In this paper, I have set myself the task of fashioning a reading of To the Lighthouse inspired by dance.1 In so doing, I wish to open up Woolf s work to a more expansive approach: one that goes beyond visual and auditory registers to consider the kinetic and the kinesthetic. I am indebted to the scholarship of Evelyn Haller, Rishona Zimring, and Susan Jones, whose research on Woolf s attitudes towards her own experiences dancing socially and watching dance in performance as well as their startling analyses of dancing as influence, motif, and metaphor in several of Woolf s novels has laid the foundation for my reading of To the Lighthouse. For example, in her essay Her Quill Drawn from the Firebird: Virginia Woolf and the Russian Dancers and her more recent Virginia Woolf and Dance, Evelyn Haller documents the influence that Sergei Diaghilevs Ballets Russes had on narrative themes and allusions in Woolf s fiction as well as structural and thematic parallels between some of Woolf s novels and Japanese Noh theater. In her work, Haller concentrates primarily on dance performance and the rich repository of stories, structures, imagery, shapes, and sounds it provided Woolf. In her essay The Dangerous Art Where One Slip Means Death: Dance and the Literary Imagination in Interwar Britain, Rishona Zimring shifts our attention to the role of social dancing in Woolf s writing. Analyzing specific scenes of dancing and the use of dance as metaphor in such novels as The Voyage Out, Between the Acts, and Mrs. Dalloway, Zimring argues that dance is often linked in Woolf s writing to anxiety, destruction, and the antithesis of contemplation. Like Haller and Zimring, Susan Jones, in her essay Virginia Woolf and the Dance, offers a surprisingly extensive archive of Woolfs written comments on dancing and her connections to Londons modern dance scene, and analyzes several discreet descriptions of dance in Woolfs novels. Joness approach to reading Woolf through a dance lens emphasizes both Woolfs rhythmic prose and what she refers to as the choreographic patterning of Woolfs experimental narratives (188). I find particularly compelling Joness sensitivity to

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non-choreographed bodily gestures and everyday movement in Woolf s fiction (171). Of Night and Day, The Waves, and The Years, Jones writes, Woolf grappled with the difficulties of representing corporeal as well as psychological movement in relation to the apparently inexorable temporal movement suggested by rational divisions of clock time (189). Given its concern with temporal movement in relation to the movement of the thinking mind, To the Lighthouse surprisingly gets short shrift in Hallers, Zimrings, and Joness analyses. True, Haller sees a correspondence between the Noh play Suma Genji and Mrs. Ramsays otherworldly appearance in The Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf and Dance 469); Zimring identifies Lily Briscoe as one of Woolf s dancers because she is described as making a dancing rhythmical movement with her paintbrush (TTL 161; Zimring 721); and Jones refers to the dinner party scene as an example of the type of kinetic structuring that Woolf adopts from dance, and which she would fully develop in The Waves (183). However, unlike many of Woolf s novels, such as The Voyage Out, The Waves, The Years, and Between the Acts, To the Lighthouse does not boast any dance scenes, fully realized choreographic patterning, or allusions to known dancers or dance productions. To sum up, as the scholars discussed above demonstrate, there are multiple ways to consider Woolf s writing through a dance lens. We might loosely group dance-inspired approaches to her work into three categories. First, one can locate evidence in Woolf s diaries and letters, and through her connection to other artists, such as Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Lydia Lopokova, of her familiarity with performances of specific dances (see Haller, Her Quill 181, 187; Jones 173-76). One then examines these productions with their myriad narrative, visual, and rhythmic components as potential influences on her novels (see Haller, Her Quill 194-215, 221-25). Secondly, one can analyze fictional scenes of social dancing or specific references to dancing and dance performance as special sites of narrative meaning (see Zimring 717-23). One begins to decode these scenes by examining Woolf s attitudes toward her own experiences of partnered dancing and of watching new forms of dance as entertainment. Thirdly, and this is the approach I favor with To the Lighthouse, one can explore the kinetic, kinesic, and kinesthetic aspects of Woolf s prose (see Jones 180, 188-90, 195-98). Kinetic denotes movement; kinesics refers to communication through movement; and kinesthetic signifies the sensation of muscular effort felt within ones own body when willingly initiating movement of ones body (Kinetic; Kinesics; Kinaesthesis). A central concept, popularized in the 1930s by modernist dance critic John Martin and re-evaluated beginning in the late twentieth century by dance scholars and neuroscientists, is kinesthetic empathy (what Martin calls inner mimicry)the ability to experience in ones own observing body the corporeal sensations of an others dancing body (J. Martin 47, 53; What Is Kinesthetic Empathy?; Foster 245-50). These movement-specific terms suggest some preliminary questions: At what points do we attend to movement in To the Lighthouse? What kinds of movement arrest our attention, and why? How might we distinguish among these movements to make sense of them in a narrative context? Here, we might consider not only descriptions of body language and locomotion as characters go about their business but also the characters and the readers sensate experience of motion achieved by Woolfs use of imagery and metaphor, and by changes in prose tempo: a kind of literary kinesthesia. In what ways does To the Lighthouse depend upon movement for its effect thereby making it a kinetic art (Kinetic, def. 6.)? Guided by these questions and a curiosity about, what Randy Martin refers to as, the

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project of thinking through dance (as opposed to simply identifying dance), I began to notice elements of To the Lighthouse I had not seen before (204). For example, a focus on, what Randy Martin calls, the kinesthesia of daily lifethat is, ordinary actual or quotidian uses of the bodyreveals Woolf s reliance on descriptions of movement to delineate character, create narrative tension, and construct ontological and epistemological oppositions that undergird the novel (187, 184). For exampleand this example will serve as the central premise for the explications that followsome quotidian movements in To the Lighthouse evoke the music hall while others, the free dancing style made famous by Isadora Duncan,2 suggesting aesthetic parallels if not direct influences. Evelyn Haller and Rishona Zimring have documented Woolf s ambivalent response to British music hall acts, such as the slapstick routines of stars Harry Tate and Will Evans, and the singing of Marie Lloyd (Haller, Virginia Woolf and Dance 461, 464; Zimring 712). Tate and Evans shared the program at Londons Hippodrome and Coliseum with more highbrow choreographies, like the Ballets Russes. In 1918 Woolf went to see the second run of producer Albert De Courvilles revue Box o Tricks,3 a variety show known as a Revue combining musical theater, instrumentals, choreographed dancing, and physical comedy in a series of theatrical sketches broken up by shorter acts with each new sketch or act called a turn (Bedells 97-101; Moore 17-25, 44-45, 54-58, 75-78, 92, 104-6, 129). Writing in her diary about the nights entertainment, Woolf complained about the incredible, pathetic stupidity of the music hall, which discomfited her in its lack of refinement and wit (D1 144). She admitted, however, that Harry Tates (in her mind) authentically English humor (he was a Scotsman, born Ronald MacDonald Hutchinson) made her laugh despite herself.4 After seeing another of Tates performances in 1924, this time at the London Coliseum in a program featuring the Ballets Russess performance of The Faithful Shepherdess, Woolf theorized about the aesthetic function of the music hall comedic turn: The peculiar pleasure of the ballet arises no doubt from this combination of sensual ecstasy with an extreme severity, having its roots presumably in the religious element which lies at the origin of the dance. Sandwiched between Harry Tate and other characteristically British turns, the seriousness, the religious quality of the Russians is all the more apparent. One, indeed, serves as relish to the other. Harry Tate accentuates [Bronislava] Nijinska and [Lydia] Sokolova. (From Alpha to Omega 443 qtd. in Haller, Virginia Woolf and Dance 464). I would argue that Woolf employs this same aesthetic formula of the comedic turn in To The Lighthouse in the form of her character Mrs. McNab. Like Harry Tate, Mrs. McNab is a Scot, and she shares her name with Sandy McNab, one of the Scottish comedians of the Edwardian stage (Russell 77). Alison Light, in Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, remarks that Mrs. McNab is not quite a comedy-turn (though she leans towards it) (201). I would go further. The references to Mrs. McNabs social milieu combined with her bodily movements connect her both to music hall audiences and to their comedic performers. The narrator of Time Passes imagines Mrs. McNabs youth spent at the public house, drinking and describes her now at seventy, mumbl[ing] out the old music hall song and continu[ing] to drink and gossip as before (TTL 135).5 According to Bonnie Kime Scott, [t]his music serves as an extension of Mrs. McNabs indomitable character, and bears some promise of renewal as she works to restore the crumbling Ramsay summer home (103). In depicting Mrs. McNab, however, Woolf relies on the association, at least in the minds of Victorian middle-class reformers, between music halls and the supposed

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excessive drinking of the laboring classes who attended themdespite the fact that by the 1890s alcohol was banned in newly built halls and audiences were a mix of the working and middle classes (Bailey, Music Hall ix-xii; Conspiracies of Meaning 166-67; Moore 17). Moreover, Mrs. McNabs hulking ambulations and exaggerated gestures provide not so much a glimpse into her resolute soul but rather, a view of a performance of physical comedy. Woolf writes: As she lurched (for she rolled like a ship at sea) and leeredand hauled herself upstairs and rolled from room to room, she sang. Rubbing the glass of the long looking-glass and leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound issued from her lipssomething that had been gay twenty years before on the stage perhaps, had been hummed and danced to, but nowwas like the voice of witlessness, humour (TTL 134). In addition to lurching, leering, and swinging, Mrs. McNab moves through the house rolling, ambl[ing]hobbl[ing], stooping,groaning, singing, slapp[ing]slamm[ing], flopp[ing], standing arms akimbo, wagg[ing] her head this side and that (TTL 135, 143, 139, 141). Unlike the disciplined and sensual movements of the Russian ballet dancersabout which Woolf had sensed a religious qualitythe song and dance routine performed by the toothless, bonneted Scotswoman lacks any connection to, as the narrator of Time Passes tells us, dignified ritual or solemn chanting (TTL 134, 143). Just as Harry Tate accentuates Nijinska and Sokolova, so too Mrs. McNab accentuates Mrs. Ramsay. Whereas Mrs. McNab lurches and leers, Mrs. Ramsay steps quickly and glanc[es] discreetly (TTL 17). In Charles Tansleys and Lily Briscoes imagination, Mrs. Ramsay moves nimbly and gracefully, stepping with her usual quickness across fields and among flowers, with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair (TTL 184, 18). Although her actual movements are rarely described, Mrs. Ramsays kinetic presence in the novel is palpable. It finds expression in metaphors of nature, particularly the motion of water flowing and spurting, but also the swaying of tree branches, the hovering of birds, and the folding in of flower petals (41, 106, 107, 42). Maggie Humm, in her essay Beauty and Woolf, argues that [b]ecause it lacks a specific project, Woolf s ethics of beautymight be misread as a Hegelian vision of spiritualized nature, but Woolf s ethics is crucially embodied (241). Indeed, Woolf uses Romantic tropes to represent Mrs. Ramsays internal movements as embodied acts. Such movements include not only Mrs. Ramsays mental processesthe silent act of contemplation and of reading poetry, for examplebut also her bodys organic dynamism. In what might be described as a form of kinesthetic empathy, James, [s]tanding between [Mrs. Ramsays] knees, senses his mothers motile energy at the moment where she shifts her attention from him to his father: Mrs. Ramsayseemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminatingthis fountain and spray of life (TTL 41, 40). The next moment, James felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs (41). Mrs. Ramsays own kinesthetic self-perception matches the impressions of her son: It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one (66). Mrs. Ramsay directs this belief seaward so that when listening to the sound of the sea and watching the lighthouse beam stroke the water, she becomes both light and wave (67, 66, 68). First, with the third stroke, she sees her own eyes meeting her own eyes,

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and then, in a state of rapture induced by the light upon the sea, waves that curved and swelled and broke upon the beachraced over the floor of her mind (66, 68). The link between Mrs. Ramsays inner processes and her kinetic corporeality as well as the descriptions of her as windblown and quick stepping, upward spraying and swaying, embodying waves and light evoke the theories and choreographies of Isadora Duncan, the socalled mother of modern dance. In 1920 Duncan wrote that [t]he dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body.She will dance the changing life of nature, showing how each part is transformed into the other (The Art of the Dance 6263). For Duncan, the source of all natural movement was the wave. As early as 1905, she saw waves rising through all things.[W]hen we come to the movements of organic nature, it would seem that all free natural movements conform to the law of wave movement (69). Of Duncans dance technique and choreography, Deborah Jowitt explains that [w] aves pervade her dancesas line, pattern, gesture, and, in a deeper sense, as impetus.In a solo like her wildly popular The Blue Danube, the phrases were built on the impetus of a wave of water: the rush forward, the slight suspended pause, the retreat as if being sucked backward (91-92). Jowitt notes too that Duncan emphasized the upward gesture (92) and, according to one enraptured eyewitness, had a wonderful way of running, in which sheleft herself behind, and you felt the breeze running through her hair (Frederick Ashton qtd. in Jowitt 90). One of the ways Duncan differentiated her dance technique from that of ballet was in her description of discovering the central spring of all movement (My Life 75). Ballet located this spring at the base of the spine, thus produc[ing] an artificial mechanical movement of an articulated puppet (75). By contrast, Duncan located it in the solar plexus, which she called the crater of motor power (75). In language that conjures images of Mrs. Ramsays rain of energy and the lighthouses beam of light, Duncan describes how she harnessed the power of this one Centre of her body, filling it with vibrating light, so that it became a fount of light (75). I am not claiming that Woolf, in her descriptions of Mrs. Ramsay, intentionally drew on Duncans philosophy of spiritual embodiment or her dance aesthetic. To my knowledge Woolf never saw Duncan dance, nor did she remark on Duncans influence despite the dancers popular appeal with members of London society and with several prominent artists, among them William Holman Hunt, Henry James, Auguste Rodin, Anna Pavlova, and Mikhail Fokine (Jowitt 69, 83, 101). What I am suggesting, however, is a potential, if indirect, influence.6 Eschewing the music halls, Duncan danced solo concerts in London in 1900, 1908, and 1921 at private homes, the New Gallery, and the Duke of Yorks Theatre (Jowitt 83; Koritz 47). It was at the New Gallery in 1900 where Woolf s friend, the classics scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, read Theocrituss poetry aloud to accompany Duncans dancing (Jowitt 83). Woolf was aware of Duncan, for in 1928 she sent her sister, Vanessa Bell, a copy of Duncans autobiography and listened to the true history of Isadora Duncans life as told to her by fellow writer Rebecca West (L3 501). Duncans style of dancing reached Woolf by way of the Ballets Russes through the choreography of Mikhail Fokine and the dancing of Anna Pavlova. Ballet Russes Director Sergei Diaghilev asserted that Fokine was mad about her, and Duncans influence on him was the initial basis of his entire creation (qtd. in Garafola 39). Duncans dance style as well as her choice of costumes and music directly

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influenced numerous Fokine ballets, including Les Sylphides, Firebird, and Le Spectre de la Rosedances that, according to Evelyn Haller, Woolf saw performed.7 As a spectator of dance, Virginia Woolf reflected on her ambivalent position as audience member. After attending a performance at the London Coliseum in 1918 of Diaghilevs ballet Le Carnaval sandwiched between slapstick comedic turns, she wrote in her diary: What a queer fate it isalways to be the spectator of the public, never part of it (D1 222). She was referring to what she sensed was the music hall audiences lackluster response to the dance: though they had been bellowing like bulls over the slapstick routine, they were merely tolerant, buta little bit contemptuous about the ballet (D1 222). Woolf may have wanted to believe, as she stated in her 1924 review of The Faithful Shepherdess, that she appreciated, in a way that her fellow audience members did not, the aesthetic value of juxtaposing new forms of movement with what she called the well worn routines of low gradeEnglish humour (D1 144). Her employment in To the Lighthouse of kinetic tropes of free dancing next to comedic turns supports this view. However, as a spectator of spectators of dance, her empathykinesthetic or otherwiseonly went so far. Instead she granted such spectatorial powers chiefly to Mrs. Ramsay. As an embodiment of Woolf s mother, Julia Stephen, Mrs. Ramsay is both a keen spectator of human character and an empathetic ear. Add to this the novels focus on painting and perspective, and its stream-of-consciousness style, critical analyses of To the Lighthouse have rightly focused on the role of vision and rhythm in Woolf s prose. What I am arguing here is that we consider as well how movement operates in the novel, not only as something observed or heard but also as something felt within the body. Mrs. Ramsay is not just empathetic; she is kinesthetic. Woolf s depiction of her illustrates modernist dance critic John Martins explanation of what happens when spectators observe a dance performance: though to all outward appearances we shall be sitting quietly in our chairs, we shall nevertheless be dancing synthetically with all our musculature (53). Mrs. Ramsay may be sitting quietly in [her] [chair] throughout most of To the Lighthouse, but her mental processes are strikingly embodied and frequently in motion.8 Notes
1. I am indebted to Stephen Pelton and to the Stephen Pelton Dance Theatres dance production it was this: it was this: (2009) for motivating this project. Inspired by Woolf s use of punctuation in To the Lighthouse, the dance builds a movement-based grammar from the passage in which Charles Tansley, accompanying Mrs. Ramsay on her errands in town, realized that it was this: it was this:she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen (TTL 18). Susan Jones, in her discussion of dance in The Voyage Out, notes that Woolf may have been alluding to a contemporary vogue for improvisation in dance as exemplified by Isadora Duncan and others (186). According to Catherine Parsonage, the earliest jazz song contained in the British Library sheet music collection was included in Box o Tricks (1918) (13). As Rishona Zimring explains, Woolf s interest in authentic working-class culture only went so far (712). I am grateful to my student Mary Locher for bringing Mrs. McNabs inebriation to my attention. Susan Jones argues that the unselfconscious free style achieved by solo dancers such as Loe Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and Maud Allanmay also have prompted Woolf to consider the metaphorical liberation of her narrative strategies from a more restricted form of realism associated with the Victorian and Edwardian novel (186-87). Conversely, Rishona Zimring, whose article on Woolf and dance brought this single mention of Isadora Duncan in Woolf s autobiographical writings to my attention, explains that Bloomsbury (perhaps with the exception of Maynard Keynes) did not turn to the female dancer [including Duncan] for inspiration (711). For an in-depth discussion of Duncans influence on modernist aesthetics, see Carrie Prestons The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan and Modernist Performance.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

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7. 8.

See Haller, Virginia Woolf and Dance 457; Her Quill 226. For a nuanced discussion of Duncans influence on Fokine, see Souritz 108-115. My point is in keeping with Susan Joness observation, about Woolf s oeuvre more broadly, that one of the ways Woolf uses dance in her writing is to suggest an alternative to the Cartesian separation of mind and body (171).

Works Cited
Bailey, Peter. Conspiracies of Meaning: Music-Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture. Past and Present 144.1 (1994): 138-70. . Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure. Philadelphia: Open UP, 1989. Bedells, Phyllis. My Dancing Days. London: Phoenix House, 1954. Internet Archive. Web. 27 May 2011. Duncan, Isadora. The Art of the Dance. 1928. Ed. Sheldon Cheney. New York: Theatre Arts Books,1969 . . My Life. Garden City: Garden City Publishing, 1927. Foster, Susan Leigh. Kinesthetic Empathies and the Politics of Compassion. Critical Theory and Performance. Revised ed. Ed. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007. 245-58. Franko, Matt. Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. Garafola, Lynn. Diaghilevs Ballets Russes. Oxford: OUP, 1989. Haller, Evelyn. Her Quill Drawn from the Firebird: Virginia Woolf and the Russian Dancers. The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane Gillespie. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993. 180-226. . Virginia Woolf and Dance. The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. 455-74. Humm, Maggie. Beauty and Woolf. Feminist Theory 7.2 (August 2006): 237-54. Jones, Susan. Virginia Woolf and the Dance. Dance Chronicle 28 (2005): 169-200. Jowitt, Deborah. Time and the Dancing Image. New York: William Morrow, 1988. Kinaesthesis. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1989. Online version. Sept.2011. Web. 27 May 2011. Kinesics. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1989. Online version. Sept. 2011. Web. 27 May 2011. Kinetic. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1989. Online version. Sept. 2011.Web. 27 May 2011. Koritz, Amy. Gendering Bodies/Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-Century British Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Lepecki, Andr. Inscribing Dance. Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Ed. Andr Lepecki. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2004. 124-39. Light, Alison. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Martin, John. Introduction to the Dance. New York: Norton, 1939. Martin, Randy. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Practice. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Moore, James Ross. An Intimate Understanding: The Rise of British Musical Revue 1890-1920. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Warwick, 2000. Web. 27 May 2011. Parsonage, Catherine. The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880-1945. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Preston, Carrie. The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan and Modernist Performance. Modernism/modernity 12.2 (April 2005): 273-89. Russell, Dave. Varieties of Life: The Making of the Edwardian Music Hall. The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage. Ed. Michael Booth and Joel Kaplan. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. 61-85. Scott, Bonnie Kime. The Subversive Mechanics of Woolf s Gramophone in Between the Acts. Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Pamela Caughie. New York: Routledge, 1999. 97-114. Siegel,Marcia. The Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance. Berkeley: U of California P,1985. Souritz, Elizabeth. Isadora Duncan and Prewar Russian Dancemakers. The Ballets Russes and Its World. Ed. Lynn Garafola and Nancy Van Norman Baer. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. 97-115. What Is Kinesthetic Empathy? Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy. The Watching Dance Project, U of Manchester, 2006. Web. 27 May 2011. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 1. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Hogarth Press, 1983. . From Alpha to Omega. The Nation and the Athenaeum. 20 Dec. 1924: 443. . The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt, 1978. . To the Lighthouse. 1927. Ed. Mark Hussey. New York: Harcourt: 2005. Zimring, Rishona. The Dangerous Art Where One Slip Means Death: Dance and the Literary Imagination in Interwar Britain. Modernism/modernity 14.4 (Nov. 2007): 707-27.

BUT WOOLF WAS A SOPHISTICATED OBSERVER OF FASHION: VIRGINIA WOOLF, CLOTHING AND CONTRADICTION by Claire Nicholson

he scholar or common reader does not have to look very far to find Virginia Woolf making conflicting statements on clothes and fashion. Her diary records how, in May 1926, she finds a visit to her dressmaker the most enjoyable of proceedings and confesses to a lust for lovely stuffs (D3 86), but just a few weeks later she sinks to the depths of gloom and declares herself unhappy as I have been these ten years due to criticism of her hat (D3 91). Observing Woolf s volatile relationship with dress, Ethel Smyth noted what is amusing is her loving to cut a dashto put on a smart gownand then despising herself for it (Stape 41). In another diary entry clothes become the dominant worry in a chaotic and comprehensive list of her current anxieties: the inane pointlessness of all this existence; contempt for my lack of intellectual power; society; buying clothes;terror in the night of things generally wrong in the universe; buying clothes; how I hate Bond Street and spending money on clothes (D4 102-103). Only a week later, after attending a dinner party she was able to claim last night I conquered my profound trepidation about my clothes on the doorstepI fluctuated and shivered, like a blown candle flame, but when I came in and found onlygrubbyRex Whistler, why have I dressed at all I asked (D4 104). Her appearance provoked conflicting opinions from those who knew her. Rebecca West recalled how Virginia and her sister Vanessa looked as if they had been drawn through a hedge backwards before they went out (Noble 90), whereas Elizabeth Bowen recalled how Virginia wore her clothes with very great flowing charm (Noble 47-8). Leonard Woolf considered his wifes sartorial habits to be unique: she had a flair for beautiful, if individual dresses he recalls in his autobiography, before acknowledging that to the crowd in the street there was something in her appearance which would provoke laughter and ridicule. In pondering the cause he thinks it had much to do with her demeanour and movement, but it was also partly that her dress was never quite the same as other peoples (BA 28-9). Woolf s deployment of clothing in her fiction has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Lisa Cohen, Randi Koppen, Jane Garrity and other critics have noted how Woolf uses clothes within her fiction to evoke modernist tensions of surface and depth, of appearance and reality. Clothes for Woolf s characters can act as vehicles for self-construction, as signifiers of cultural resistance, and as a means of contemplating the boundary between the self and the other. This subtly assured use of clothing in her fiction has been held in counter-balance to her own problematic sartorial practice. Catherine Greggs study Virginia Woolf and Dress Mania: the Eternal and Insoluble Question of Clothes (2010) explores Woolf s self-confessed clothes complex, tracing its origins to her Victorian childhood and adolescence. The word most often applied to Woolf s relationship with clothing is ambivalence; indeed, Woolf herself uses this term when recording two hectic days spent in London in December 1939. After a shopping expedition where she was tempted

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to buy jerseys and so on she states I dislike this excitement. Yet enjoy it. Ambivalence as Freud calls it (Im gulping up Freud) (D5 249). In the same year Woolf had been revisiting her complex associations with clothing when writing A Sketch of the Past and it has been suggested that here lies the origin of Woolf s fundamentally ambivalent relation to dress (Garrity 195). Whilst I concur with the idea that Woolf held conflicting responses of love and hate towards the whole question of clothing and self-presentation at the same time, I believe the term ambivalence may obscure or even diminish the sophistication and subtlety of her observations on the powerful language of clothes and the pleasure she sometimes took in it. My point is that Woolf s perception of dress is not tailored to fit the neutral tones of ambivalence, but is more properly suited to the bolder lines of contradiction. This paper will explore Woolf s positive and pleasurable experiences with dress in fabric as well as in print. I begin with her sartorial observations in the novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) and related short stories. I will then place these fictional fashion choices in context with Woolf s own sartorial experiences during the period in which she showed a particularly heightened interest in clothing and which saw a marked evolution in clothing styles, the decade from the early 1920s to 1930s. Woolf s powers of observation have long been acknowledged. As Alex Zwerdling states, From her earliest years she had specialised in the art of noticing (12) and in one of her last diary entries she reminds herself to mark Henry James advice, Observe perpetually (D5 357). Whilst I make no claim that Woolf was an avid follower of fashion in the Alice-in-Wonderland sense of running fast to stand still, which is the futile enterprise of being in fashion, she was certainly capable of showing an appreciation for the aesthetic dynamic of dress. For example, she describes a dress made for the stylish Mary Hutchinson by the American designer, Charles James as like that cold dish at Fortnums, all white with black dice, or Christabels hall, or like anything thats symmetrical, diabolical and geometrically perfect. So geometric is Charlie James that if a stitch is crooked, the whole dress is torn to shreds; which Mary bears without wincing (L5 158). This is matched by her undisguised admiration for a gown worn by Ottoline Morell: I must spare a phrase for the sealing wax green of Ottolines dress. This bright silk stood out over a genuine crinoline. She did control the room on account of it (D2 19-20). These observations demonstrate sensitivity in visual response to shape and colour worthy of the Post-Impressionist concept of significant form. Self-observation, however, was more problematic. Her diary is full of sharp criticism of her own appearance and often she berates herself for the vanity of falling prey to these trivial concerns. She reveals her anxiety when acquiring new clothes, such as this entry in February 1940: I suffered from my clothes complex acutely buying 2 new sets of clothes, & being persuaded into a blue striped coat by an astute and human woman at Lewises. But I want you to have this I dont want you just because youre in the country, to fling on anything. Youve got to think of others she said, as if she guessed all my private life queer: she seemed genuine. Of course, I looked like a shaggy, dowdy old woman (D5 269). Her self-perception as sartorial failure is belied by her astute use of selective clothing detail in her fiction, and nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Mrs Dalloways gloves. As we all know, the 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway grew out of a short story Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street published in 1923, and the opening sentence Mrs Dalloway said

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she would buy the gloves herself is altered in the novel to replace gloves with flowers. I am indebted here to Mark Gaipa whose incisive essay Accessorizing Clarissa: how Virginia Woolf changes the clothes and the character of her lady of fashion (2009) charts the implications of that substitution. The word herself implies the errand could be delegated to someone elseprobably her maid, Lucybut the purchase of flowers is a more plausible candidate for this than gloves. As Clarissa recalls in the short story, a lady is known by her gloves and her shoes (151) and her gloves signify her social position: they symbolize the material trappings that separate her from working women; they insulate her from direct sensory contact; theyre expensive; they are the badge of a lady of leisure. But it is not glove-wearing itself that is significant, it is the immaculate fit that carries the true mark of distinction. Woolf knows the importance given to correct fit when purchasing gloves; in the story she shows each customer striving to achieve it. One customer rose very sadly and took her bag, and looked at the gloves on the counter. But they were all too large always too large at the wrist (CSF 151). Miss Anstruther demonstrates the tightness of the pair she tries on by splitting a seam (152). The gloves Clarissa wears on her shopping trip have been stretched by her jewellery, and the snug fit of the new glove she tries on requires powder to ease it into place. Although mail-order gloves were available in England as early as 1907, sizing was not fully standardized until the late 1920s, hence there was no real substitute for visiting the glove-shop in person to achieve the desired close fit. In the light of this, Clarissas observation of Lady Bexborough sitting in her carriage in Bond Street carries the sartorial sign of reduced circumstances: The white glove was loose at her wrist (150). Clarissas critical eye has already been demonstrated with her bemusement at another woman she sees before entering Bond Street: No! No! No! Clarissa smiled good-naturedly. The fat lady had taken every sort of trouble, but diamonds! orchids! At this hour of the morning! No! No! No! (149). But here her judgement of sartorial bad taste is explicit; the loose fit of a glove carries a more subtle meaning, the reduction in circumstances possibly accompanied by the suggestion that Lady Bexborough has lost weight, or is reduced to wearing old, stretched gloves (it was usual practice for a woman in Lady Bexboroughs position to purchase new gloves each year at the start of the summer social season in London). Mark Gaipas analysis of this story reveals Clarissa to be trapped by a numbing high-class fashion sensibility (24); her identity as a lady of fashion fits her like a glove. Her quest to achieve perfectly fitting gloves (like the pre-war French gloves with pearl buttons she remembers) suggests a desire to return to the buttoned-up Edwardian fashions of the secure and peaceful era before war broke out. As her mind turns to the sacrifices made by countless young men in the conflict Clarissa equates post-war existence with the triumph of once again finding correctly-fitted gloves: Thousands of young men had died that things might go on. At last! Half an inch above the elbow; pearl buttons; five and a quarter [her glove size] (153). Woolf s handling of sartorial matters in the novel which grew out of this short story reveals Clarissa as a more sympathetic character. The evolution of this character from story to novel, from a woman hemmed in by fashion sensibilities to the person who repairs her own evening dress, follows the direction taken by womens clothing in the early 1920s; from Edwardian restrictive styles to looser-fitting, more relaxed, youthful dress, and the rise of ready-to-wear clothing. At her party Clarissa achieves that sense of social

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ease which Woolf termed frock consciousness (D3 12), denoting the perfect synthesis of body, mind and garment. The use of this term in her diary in April 1925, shortly before the novel was published, is prompted by her being photographed for Vogue, and ushers in a period when Woolf has an increasing engagement with the fashion world. Perhaps the best illustration of frock consciousness is when Clarissa, as hostess, escorts her most important guest, the Prime Minister, around the room. In her silver-green mermaids dress she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment (154). We are not given a precise image of the dress, but it exemplifies her social success. And other guests, too, achieve this heightened sartorial state: Nancy, dressed at enormous expense by the greatest artists in Paris, stood there looking as if her body had merely put forth, of its own accord, a green frill (157). But Woolf s own frock consciousness has been compared with the sartorial humiliation suffered by Mable Waring, the protagonist of one of the short stories based on various guests at Mrs Dalloways party, written after the novel.1 In The New Dress (1927) Mabels attempt at being economical and original by getting her dressmaker to produce an unusual, antique-style dress becomes an embarrassing failure when she is ridiculed at the party. This has been compared to the humiliation described by Woolf when her new outfit and hat, bought on the recommendation of the editor of Vogue, Dorothy Todd, is criticised by Clive Bell: Clive suddenly said, or bawled rather, what an astonishing hat youre wearing! Then he asked where I got it. I pretended a mystery; tried to change the talk, was not allowed & they pulled me down like a hare; I never felt more humiliated (D3 91). The hunting imagery reinforces the depth of her despair. However, the humiliation suffered at the hands of Clive is actually transformed into triumph the following day when she bumps into him, accompanied by Mary Hutchinson, whereupon the same outfit is praised to the skies (D3 91). Woolf received advice from Mary on the use of cosmetics and she acknowledged her as an authority on clothes sense, though she recognised that Marys perfect elegance did not provide protection from criticism. Revelling in her own ability to rise above the dictates of fashion, Woolf uses Mary as an illustration of how the perfectly fashionable woman sets herself up for destruction. I played a funny trick. I had no hat. Bought onein Oxford Street: green felt; the wrong coloured ribbon; all flop like a pancake in mid-airI wanted to see what happens among real women if one of them looks like a pancake in mid-air. In came the dashing Mrs Montague. She started. She positively deplored me. Then hid a smile. Thought Ah what a tragedy! Liked me even as she pitied me. Was puzzled. & Finally conquered. You see, women cant hold out against this kind of flagrant disavowal of all womanliness. They open their arms to the flayed bird in a blast; whereas, the Marys of this world, with every feather in place, are pecked, stoned, often die, every feather stained with bloodat the bottom of the cage. (L3 471-2) It is interesting to note how Woolf sees herself as the victor in this scenario, and Mary as a victim. But to return to Woolfs Todd-endorsed outfit, just three days before Clives criticism she had worn the same coat, dress and hat at Garsington, and the many photographs of her taken by Ottoline Morrell on this occasion confirm it as a fashionable success. Shortly after

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she writes to Vita Vanity compels me to admit that I should cut a very fine figure, in Todds dress (L3 281) so clearly her pleasure in dress was not confined to observation. When Woolf became involved with fashion adviser Dorothy Todd, on whose recommendation she bought the outfit worn at Garsington, her reaction was I tremble & shiver all over at the appalling magnitude of the task I have undertaken to go to a dressmaker recommended by Todd, even, she suggested, but here my blood ran cold, with Todd (D3 78). But I have come across an instance of Woolf placing herself in the very same position as Todd, just a few years later. Some years ago I met Nadine Marshall, a splendid, lively woman in her nineties, with whom I developed a close friendship and visited often. She was the sister-in-law of Frances Partridge, being married to her older brother, Tom Marshall, and through him she met members of the Bloomsbury Group. When I asked her about her wedding she showed me a photograph of the occasion in July 1934, and described the outfit she wore made from pale lime-green crepe de Chine, trimmed with navy and white spotted silk and accessorized with her mothers fox fur. When she told me the outfit was made by Ronald Murray, a young Scottish designer, I enquired whether this was her mothers dressmaker, knowing her mother had been considered a very stylish woman. She replied, Oh no, I was recommended to him by Virginia Woolf. She set up the appointment for me and took quite an interest. She was very pleased with how it all turned out. So in the spirit of contradiction, I conclude with this example of someone most unexpected; Virginia Woolfs fashion protg. Woolf could advise a twenty-three year-old on the most important outfit of her life in 1934, the same year in which she described her own complex about clothes as dress mania. The observations of sartorial detail in her fiction are subtle and suffused with meaning; she read the language of clothes and used it to inform her reader, to identify with the pleasures and complexities of dress. But it was not mere observation; she knew how to indulge in sartorial pleasure, in fabric, as well as in fiction. Note
1. See Gregg 8.

Works Cited
Gaipa, Mark. Accessorizing Clarissa: How Virginia Woolf Changes the Clothes and the Character of her Lady of Fashion. Modernist Cultures 4 (2009): 24-47 Garrity, Jane. Virginia Woolf and Fashion. The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.195-211 Gregg, Catherine. Virginia Woolf and Dress Mania: the Eternal & Insoluble Question of Clothes. London: Cecil Woolf Publishing, 2010. Noble, Joan Russell. Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries. Ohio UP,1972. Stape, J. H. Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995. Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again (Autobiography vol. 3). London: Hogarth Press, 1964. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway London: Hogarth Press, 1925. . The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-1980. . The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (ed. Susan Dick) London: Hogarth Press, 1985 . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984. Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf in the Real World. London: U of California P, 1986.

BI-SEXING THE UNMENTIONABLE MARY HAMILTONS IN A ROOM OF ONES OWN: THE TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES OF UNINTENDED PREGNANCIES AND CALCULATED CROSS-DRESSING by Vara S. Neverow
irginia Woolf states in A Room of Ones Own (1929) For we think back through our mothers if we are women, immediately asserting: It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quinceywhoever it may be never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. The weight, the pace, the stride of a mans mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully (75, my emphasis). The narrator does not mention Henry Fielding in this list of male British literary luminaries or anywhere else in the essay. Since, like most of Woolf s published work, A Room is about what is cleverly not said and what cannot be said directly without undesirable consequences, I argue that by not mentioning Fielding Woolf indicates she has learnt a few tricks [from him] and adapted them to her use, with particular reference to one of the three unmentioned Mary Hamiltons who haunt Woolf s essay. In the second paragraph of A Room, the nameless narrator mentions three well-known Marys, saying, parenthetically, call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you pleaseit is not a matter of importance (5, my emphasis), a phrase with a shrug similar to whoever it may be above. The speaker suggests any surname will do as long as the given name is Mary; but, when the narrator of A Room, with a rhetorical wink, says by any name you please (5), she hints that we may also call her George, as in Hamilton.1 Using Fieldings narrative strategies as a template for A Room, Woolf slyly reveals she has lift[ed] something substantial from him successfully, revising Fieldings work by writing in a similarly evasive and euphemistic style to protect delicate ears (Fielding 23). The George mentioned above is Dr. George Hamilton, born Mary Hamilton. Both a historical figure and the protagonist of Henry Fieldings heavily fictionalized, anonymously published 1746 pamphlet, The Female Husband: Or The Surprising History of Mrs Mary, Alias Mr George Hamilton, Taken from Her Own Mouth Since Her Confinement, Hamilton achieved notoriety when she was, as Caroline Derry notes, arrested in 1746 and charged under the Vagrancy Act 1744 with imposing upon his Majestys subjects after her wife, Mary Price, made public complaint (595). Hamilton, a lesbian who by cross-dressing successfully passed as a man and a doctor, had married multiple women (possibly as many as fourteen, according to some contemporary sources), garnering the privileges of a mans life until she was exposed as an imposter, tried for her transgressions, imprisoned, sentenced to six months of hard labor and publically flogged in four market towns. Many Woolf scholars have noted that the narrator of A Room, by naming the three Marys, evokes another missing Mary Hamilton.2 Lynne T. Hanley explains the connection in her 1984 article:

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The three Marys figure in an old English [sic] ballad narrated by a fourth, Mary Hamilton,awaiting execution for bearing the Kings child. The opening lines of the ballad succinctly pronounce her doom.Since each of the three Marys appears in Woolf s textMary Seton presides over custard and prunes at Fernham; Mary Beton provides the legacy which, to her niece, is so infinitely more important than the vote; Mary Carmichael writes the novel in which Chloe likes Oliviawe can assume that Woolf takes the nameand the fateof the fourth Mary to be her own. (426) Jane Marcuss Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction (1987), Krystyna Colburns Womens Oral Tradition and A Room of Ones Own (1995), and Jane Goldmans3 The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (2006) also discuss the Mary Hamilton named in this Scottish ballad.4 Albert H. Tolman in his 1927 PMLA article discusses the ambiguous iterations of this particular Mary and her ballad, generally known as The Four Marys, the Fower Maries, or, eponymously, Mary Hamilton. In the version Joan Baez sings, the ballad ends with Mary Hamilton stating: Last night there were four Marys; / Tonight therell be but three: / There was Mary Beaton and Mary Seton / And Mary Carmichael and me,5anticipating her impending execution for infanticide. In most versions, this Mary Hamilton is a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Scots. Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge in their 1904 selection of ballads from Francis James Childs five-volume The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898) note: The ballad purports to relate the tragic history of one of the queens Maries.The ballad seems to have taken its rise in an incident which occurred at Marys court in 1563, which involved the queens apothecary and a French woman who served in the queens chamber. There is also a striking coincidence between the ballad and the fate of a Mary Hamilton who, in the reign of Peter the Great, was one of the attendants to the Russian empress (421). Marcus links the disastrous pregnancies of these two Mary Hamiltons to the untoward fate of Woolf s Judith Shakespeare, the imaginary sister of the bard, who similarly suffers for her heterosexuality. As the narrator in A Room observes, soon after Nick Greene the actor manager took pity on Judith Shakespeare, she found herself with child by that gentleman and sowho shall measure the heat and violence of the poets heart when caught and tangled in a womans body?killed herself one winters night (111). In Sketch of the Past, Woolf assiduously avoids direct statements, relying on hints, insinuations, euphemisms, allusions, and other devious rhetorical maneuvers that are partly based on her own tea-table training6 (MOB 150; see Neverow Woolf s Editorial Self-Censorship and Freudian Seduction), but also mimics and mocks the calculatedly elusive, yet salaciously suggestive rhetoric of Henry Fielding. Woolf s subtle writing strategies have been misinterpreted. Eve Patten, in April 2011, reviewing the final volume of Virginia Woolf s essays, edited by Stuart N. Clarke, overlooks Woolf s witty insider jokes, remarking: Throughout her life Woolfwrestled with the style of her critical writing, hindered by an instinctive politenessher tea-table training, she called itthat held back her pen. She rarely matched the best of her contemporariesWoolf too often simply overwrote, lumbering herself with verbiage she didnt really need. But Woolf does not suffer from an instinctive politeness, nor does she h[o]ld back

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her pen because of a lack of derring-do. Instead, as her narrator in A Room states quite explicitly, she is afraid of the lash (89). This phrase can be viewed metaphorically, evoking fear of public humiliation, yet implicit in this choice of terminology is a very different kind of writingspecifically that of scarification. While Woolf s narrator fears the lash, Fieldings narrator in The Female Husband savors its succulence as a titillated spectator enjoying Hamiltons whippings: those persons who have more regard to beauty than to justice, could not refrain from exerting some pity toward her, when they saw so lovely a skin scarified with rods, in such a manner that her back was almost flead (23). Though the narrator mimes compassion, he actually expresses sadistic pleasure (see Finlay 159). As Emily Bowles argues: Hamiltons body is overwritten with signs of transgression that, Fielding suggests, have aesthetic and erotic meaning to her readers. She becomes a site of desire and an alternative to the codified norms of sexual and textual order. But she also literally transforms from a sexual agent into a text that corresponds to Fieldings ideas about poetic justice.The story written on her skin is not her own, impressed on her as it is by scarifying rods, but her body continues to write it (15). Marcus seems to be the earliest Woolf scholar to refer to Fieldings pamphlet,7 stating: There was, however, another historical Mary Hamilton, whose story may have surfaced during the meetings regarding the defense for the Radclyffe Hall trial, which both Virginia and Leonard attended (179). This Mary (or George) never suffers the discomforts and dangers of pregnancy or gives birth, nor is she executed or commits suicide. Two of the three Mary Hamiltonsand the ill-fated Judith Shakespeare as wellare literally destroyed by their embodied femaleness. They dare to enjoy the pleasures of their bodies but cannot escape the dire consequences of child-bearing out of wedlock. Unlike the others, the third Mary Hamilton thwarts the potentially fatal creativity of her female body (Hanley 426). This Hamilton enjoys her own sexuality and offers her multiple wives a satisfying alternative to the dangers of heterosexual intercourse. When a recalcitrant wife tells her female husband, you have notyou have notwhat you ought to have, Dr. Hamilton, unsuccessfully attempting to assuage spouses anxiety, promises: she would have all the pleasures of marriage without the inconveniences (Fielding 15). These inconveniences cause the untimely deaths of the other Mary Hamiltons and Judith Shakespeare. Bonnie Blackwell describes Dr. Hamiltons solution, her infallible nostrum (60; Fielding 14), as a medicine of secret composition (60), a prosthetic substitute for male genitalia (see Castle below). Woolf was certainly familiar with the Four Marys of ballad fame since Leonard Woolf references the Scots ballad tradition in his 1914 The Wise Virgins (Marcus 174). Woolf would have had access both to Francis James Childs five-volume work, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898), and to Sargent and Kitteridges 1904 volume quoted above. Possibly, Woolf might have read Tolmans 1927 article while researching the Four Marys for her argument. But more importantly, could she have had access to Henry Fieldings extremely scarce pamphlet, The Female Husband? In 1920, J. Paul de Castro wrote an article, The Printing of Fieldings Works, that included the publication history of The Female Husband. Relying on Wilbur L. Crosss 1918 Fielding biography for identification of the anonymous work, de Castro indicates at first that no print version of the work exists (261), but adds a note in which he states: Since the above was written, I have discovered a copy of The Female Husband. It

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consists of 23 pages, and is the report of a case heard at Wells Quarter Sessions. It is a vividly written account of a Manx girl whotravelled through Devon and Somerset in male attire as a doctor. While in Devon she married two women consecutively and then decamped.[I]n Wells she there married a young girlbut was shortly after identified as a wanted person [and]was committed to Bridewell (The Printing 270). In 1921, de Castro wrote another brief article, Fieldings Pamphlet, Female Husband,8 published in the periodical Notes and Queries. Now in possession of a copy of the pamphlet, de Castro speculates that Henry Fielding wrote the work for financial gain, that Fieldings first cousin (identified as Henry Gold both in this article and in the note from the previous article)9 heard the case against Hamilton, that Fielding may have been present at the trial seated among counsel, and that, therefore, he may actually have witnessed Mary Hamiltons testimony. Given this possibility, de Castro suggests that, as was stated on [Fieldings] title-page, the information was actually taken from her own mouth (185). Sheridan Baker, in his landmark 1959 PMLA article, Henry Fieldings the Female Husband: Fact and Fiction, contends that Fielding did not attend Hamiltons trial or interview the prisoner and was not present at the trial (219). Regarding the actual artifactthe pamphlet itselfBaker observes that, as of 1959, one of four surviving copies of Fieldings pamphlet was listed in the British Museum catalogue.10 I have confirmed that the pamphlet was accessioned in 1926, five years after de Castro published his second article. Since the British Museum acquired the document during the same period that Woolf herself (as opposed to her narrator) was researching all that men have written about women (AROO 27) for A Room, it seems possible that Woolf may have actually read this particular pamphlet. There are actually two anonymous versions of the pamphletthe one published in 1746 during Henry Fieldings lifetime and the other republished in 1813, with significant alterations. It seems unlikely that Woolf ever saw or heard of the 1813 edition. It differs in content from the earlier version, being far more salacious, and boasts a lurid color frontispiece depicting a platform where a portly fully-clothed man whips Mary Hamilton (restrained by the wrists and stripped naked to the waist while wearing trousers) as another man in judicial garb and wearing spectacles looks on with apparent interest. He stands next to a man dressed, perhaps, as a squire. Below the platform, the hoi-polloi watch the quasi-theatrical scene. This pamphlet is not listed in the British Library or any other major libraries to which Woolf might have had access, though a copy is in the collection of the New York Public Library and was also a featured item on the Antique Roadshow (http:// http:// www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/200201A06.html; www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/200201A06.html ;11 for those who are interested in seeing the NYPL image of the frontispiece and title page, the permanent web link is http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?PS_CPS_CD5_069). This image from the NYPL is also included in Adrienne L. Eastwoods article, Surprising Histories: A Comparison of Two Pamphlets, published in 2007 in Notes and Queries. Eastwood examines the differences between Fieldings 1746 pamphlet and the far more explicit 1813 variant published anonymously under the title The Surprising Adventures of a Female Husband!, [and] retain[ing] some of Fieldings prose, [though] many alterations have been made (491). She also observes that Baker was the first to write about this text in 1959 (491 n4), oddly neglecting to mention de Castros 1921 Notes

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and Queries article. As Eastwood concludes, in the comparison of these two pamphlets, we can see a demystification of female homoerotic behaviours that sensationalizes these behaviourspossibly for a more exclusively male audience and for different (primarily pornographic) purposes (496). One must speculate that this slackening restraint of expression offered opportunities to male writers, but did not apply to Woolf or any of her female peers even in the subsequent century. In his article, Baker rigorously investigates the life of the historical Mary Hamilton. According to his research, she was born in Somerset, moving when still young to Angus County, Scotland. Baker states, at fourteen, leaving home in her brothers clothes, she entered a[n]apprenticeship as a quack doctor (213) and, continuing to wear mens clothing, began her own business using the nomenclature Dr. George Hamilton. As Terry Castle12 observes, cross dressing was a direct if risky way for a woman to escape those constraintsimposed by rigid sex roles (606). Castle describes Fieldings narrative not just as a lesbian picaresque (605) but as a cautionary tale (see 609) intended to discourage women from passing as men or exploring same-sex relationships. Marcus, aligning the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Halls The Well of Loneliness with A Room, perhaps goes a bit too far in arguing that the heroine of the essay, Judith Shakespeare, [is] Radclyffe Hall, and the unnamed Mary (Hamilton) of the old Scots Ballad of the Four Maries, speak[s] in the voice of Mary (Llewelyn), Stephen Gordons lover in The Well of Loneliness (163). I would suggest instead that, by donning Dr. George Hamiltons identity, the narrator of A Room (not entirely playfully) also tries on the garb of Dr. Hamilton, modeling not just Radclyffe Halls attire but Orlandos outfits after her sex-change and, by association, Vita Sackville-Wests cross-dressing costumes. The cross-dressing motif of The Female Husband has such strong resonances with Orlandos own eighteenth-century sexual adventures that it seems Woolf integrated it into the narrative. Her cautionary phrasing in A Room regarding Sir Chartres Biron and Sir Archibald Bodkin eavesdropping on womens privacy (see Marcus 166) replicates Orlandos Sapphic visits with Nell, Prue, Prue Kitty and Kitty Rose, who had a society of their own of which they now elected her a member (O 160, my emphasis). [A]lways careful to see that the doors are shut and that not a word of it gets into print, these eighteenth-century women are about to speak of what All [women] desire, when the gentleman took the very words out of our mouths(O 160), just as Fielding claims to do in the title of The Female Husband. The narrator also mocks the fictitious but very Fielding-esque Mr. S. W. who believes when women lack the stimulus of the other sex, women can find nothing to say to each other and Mr. T. R. [who] has proved that women are incapable of feeling affection for their own sex (O 160, my emphasis). A Room suppresses the naming of Mary Hamilton in any of her manifestations and echoes the ambiguous and suggestive style of Fieldings The Female Husband, a narrative in which absolutely nothing is said explicitly. Regarding the 1746 pamphlet, in So Lovely a Skin Scarified with Rods: Modern Notions in Fieldings The Female Husband, Emily Finlay remarks: critics have often noted the scarcity of the lines Fielding allows Hamilton, [but] I would argue that this silence, like the absence of description regarding her [sexual] equipment, both forces the issue of Hamiltons sexuality to the forefront of the text and positions her as the erotic object of the sadistic male gaze. The latter is evident in the relish the narrator takes in describing instances of the partial unveiling of Hamiltons body (159). Finlay highlights the narrators arousal as he describes an incident in which: Hamilton,

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dancing with her fianc[e], becomes involved in a quarrel. A man seizing [her] violently by the collar, tore open her waistcoat and rent her shirt [Fielding 20]. The narrator then describes Hamiltons breasts as beyond expression beautiful [Fielding 20] (Finlay 301).13 Given Woolf s subtly playful, suggestively sly style, it seems feasible that she modifies Fieldings tricks to make her points and counters his patriarchal views by endorsing her own Sapphism and the expression of female sexual desire, teasing her readers much in the same way Fielding tantalized his. Whether the narrator is making insider references to The Well of Loneliness obscenity trial or using ellipses to represent the intimate relationship between Chloe and Olivia, the same strategies are evident in The Female Husband, where ellipses and dashes are rifesee the you have not passage (15) marking the absence of Mary Hamiltons sexual wherewithal (12). When Fielding declares, probably facetiously, that Mary Hamilton was born on the Isle of Man (see Baker 223), most Woolfians immediately think of the ambiguously sexual tail-less queer and quaint Manx cat (AROO 11)14 which evokes associatively how Dr. George Hamilton compensates for the lack of a tail.15 In A Room, Woolf writes: as I watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed different.The tailless cat, though some are said to exist in the Isle of Man, is rarer than one thinks. It is a queer animal, quaint rather than beautiful. It is strange what a difference a tail makes (11). Similarly exploring what seems to be missing, Castle observes: Hamiltons dildofor that is what one must assume is signified by the none-too-mysterious wherewithal in the foregoing passagereappears later on as that something of too vile, wicked, and scandalous a nature discovered in her trunk and produced in evidence against her (609). Woolf s choice of the word quaint (an obvious variant on cunt) aligns with Fieldings coded sexual terminology in the crudely written letter from Mary Price to her suitor, Dr. Hamilton. Price is determind [to] be so distant and cool, that the woman of the strictest virtue and modestly in England might have no reason to be ashamd of having writ it (Fielding 18); however, the letter itself, as Finlay observes, is composed of puns, which contribute to the metaphorical chain [of sexual allusions in the narrative]. Kan nut and Kuntry instantly evoke cunt, while cummand plays on cum, designating the letter as the space of explicitly female sexuality (164). From a different perspective, Bowles notes that Dr. Hamiltons object of desire, Mary Price, actually wants a lover who does not have what he ought to have (34, my emphasis). Pairing the Manx cats missing tail and the narrators fear of the lash invokes a complicated associative reference to whips. As the narrator reads Mary Carmichaels fictitious novel, Lifes Adventure16 she alerts abruptly and pauses, saying ominously: then I went on very warily, on the very tips of my toes (so cowardly am I, so afraid of the lash that was once almost laid on my own shoulders) (AROO 89, my emphasis), noting later that Carmichael would have to face her trial to take her fence (AROO 92, my emphasis). The lash is explicitly linked to the judiciary and its power to punish (thus evoking Dr. Hamiltons four public whippings). The second reference is less obvious. Metaphorically it tests Carmichaels skills in writing (AROO 92, my emphasis) but embedded in the same phrase is the legal term trial (AROO 92)evoking again the judicial system and its punitive authority. Aligning A Room with Dr. Hamiltons actual fate surfaces in Woolf s references to the newspaper industry, a consummate representation of the patriarchal control of society

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and, concomitantly, the legal control of women. As Bowles observes, Dr. George Hamilton achieved tabloid celebrity status while in prison but then disappeared from historical records (15), for Hamiltons fate was amplified by newspapers before she was forgotten. Centuries later, Woolfs narrator in A Room finds, in the lunch edition of the evening paper, the same sensationalism as that of the newspapers of Fieldings and Dr. Hamiltons era: I began idly reading the headlines.Mr Justicecommented in the Divorce Courts upon the Shamelessness of Women.A film actress had been lowered from a peak in California and hung suspended in midair.The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He wasthe Foreign Secretary and the judge. (AROO 33) Woolfs reference to testimony (linguistically and historically linked directly to male wherewithal) and to exclusion of women from positions of power are subtle reminders of Dr. George Hamiltons fate as chronicled in the newspapers, the judicial system, Fieldings 1746 The Female Husband, and the anonymous 1813 redux, The Surprising Adventures of a Female Husband! Countering the patriarchy, the anonymous narrator of A Room of Ones Own obliquely but insistently defends the autonomy of all women, channeling Dr. George Hamilton, the cross-dressing female husband, who suffered both physical injury and public humiliation for enjoying the liberties accorded to men and for loving women. Notes
As Sheridan Baker notes the factual Charles Hamiltonbecome[s] Fieldings George (213, emphasis in text). Multiple variants of the Marys names include the spellings Beaton and Seaton. Marcus observes that Woolf, on 27 April 1928 (L3 487), wrote to Vita Sackville-West I rang you up just now, to find you were gone nutting in the woods with Mary Campbell, or Mary Carmichael or Mary Seton, but not me (209 n1). 3. In Ce chien est moi (2007), Goldman writes: In one version of theFour Maries Ballad, Mary Hamilton, whom Woolf pointedly elides and leaves unnamed, sings from the gallows of This dogs death Im to die (102). 4. Erik Fuhrers article, A Woolf in Priests Clothing explores intriguing religious references embedded in Woolf s discussion of the Marys in A Room of Ones Own. 5. In this version, Mary Hamilton is executed in Glasgow. All three of the Mary Hamiltons have a connection to Scotland. 6. The term appears in A Sketch of the Past, where Woolf refers to how her tea-table trainingallow[ed] oneto slip in things that would be inaudible if one marched straight up and spoke out loud (148). 7. Marcus (68) relies on Lillian Fadermans inaccurate assertion in Scotch Verdict: Fielding found [Hamilton] guilty of marriages to three woman and ordered her whipped publically (180). Evidence does not support the view that Fielding tried, convicted or sentenced Hamilton. 8. Some versions cite the title in quotation marks. 9. Fieldings first cousin is variously identified as Henry Gold (see de Castro, The Printing 30; Fieldings Pamphlet 84-85), Henry Gould (see Castle 604) and David Gould (Donoghue 74). 10. Baker does not specify the provenance of the British Museum item. 11. The story of The Female Husband was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 play of the same name, starring comedian Sandi Toksvig. 12. Strangely, Jane Marcus does not cite Castles work in Sapphistry, though the article is contemporary with her research and highly relevant to her argument. 13. Footnotes used in Finlays article are replaced with page references. 1. 2.

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14. De Castro refers to Mary Hamilton as a young Manx girl (The Printing 270). 15. See also Marcus 173 regarding the cats attributes. (The Manx cat has been discussed extensively by many scholarssee, for example, Briggs 225-26.) 16. Carmichaels book is aligned not only with the obscenity trial of Radclyffe Halls The Well of Loneliness but with Marie Stopess controversial Loves Creation published under her birth name Marie Carmichael rather than her married name (Marcus 175-76; see also Goldman, Cambridge 97).

Works Cited
Blackwell, Bonnie. An Infallible Nostrum: Female Husbands and Greensick Girls in Eighteenth-Century England. Literature and Medicine 21.1 (Spring 2002): 56-77. Bowles, Emily. You Have Not What You Ought: Gender and Corporeal Intelligibility in Henry Fieldings The Female Husband. Genders OnLine Journal 52 (Dec. 2010). Web. Accessed 10 January 2012 <http://www. genders.org/g52/g52_bowles.html>. Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. New York: Harcourt, 2006. Castle, Terry. Matters Not Fit to Be Mentioned: Fieldings The Female Husband. ELH 49.3 (Autumn 1982): 602-22. Colburn, Krystyna. Womens Oral Tradition and A Room of Ones Own. Re: Reading, Re: Writing, Re: Teaching Virginia Woolf: Selected Papers from the 4th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. New York: Pace UP, 1995. 5963. De Castro, J. Paul. The Printing of Fieldings Works. The Library series 4-1.1 (June 1920): 257-70. . Fieldings Pamphlet, Female Husband. Notes and Queries Series 12-VIII (151) 5 March 1921. 184-85. Derry, Caroline. Sexuality and Locality in the Trial of Mary Hamilton, Female Husband. Kings Law Journal 19.3 (2008): 595-616. Donoghue, Emma. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. Eastwood, Adrienne L. Surprising Histories: A Comparison of Two Pamphlets. Notes and Queries (Dec. 2007): 490-96. Faderman, Lillian. Scotch Verdict: Miss Pirie and Miss Woods v. Dame Cumming Gordon. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Finlay, Emily. So Lovely a Skin Scarified with Rods: Modern Notions in Fieldings The Female Husband. Dj Vu: antiTHESIS 17 (2007): 154-70. Fielding, Henry. The Female Husband: Or The Surprising History of Mrs Mary, Alias Mr George Hamilton, Taken from Her Own Mouth Since Her Confinement. Oxford Text Archive. June 1, 2011. Fuhrer, Erik. A Woolf in Priests Clothing: Female Prophecy in A Room of Ones Own. Virginia Woolf Miscellany 80 (Fall 2011): 10-11. Goldman, Jane. Ce chien est moi: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog. Woolfian Boundaries: Selected Papers from the Sixteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Clemson: Clemson U Digital P, 2007. 101-07. . Ce chien est moi: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog. Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007): 49-86. . The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. Hanley, Lynne T. Virginia Woolf and the Romance of Oxbridge. The Massachusetts Review 25.3 (Autumn 1984): 421-36. Marcus, Jane. Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 163-87. Neverow, Vara. Freudian Seduction and the Fallacies of Dictatorship. Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators Seduction. Ed. Merry Pawlowski. NY: Palgrave, 2001. 56-73. . Woolf s Editorial Self-Censorship and Risk-Taking in Jacobs Room. Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace. Ed. Jeanne Dubino. New York: Macmillan, 2010. 57-72. Patten, Eve. Virginia Woolf s Battle with Her Tea Table Training. Irish Times, 2 April 2011. Web. Accessed 10 January 2012 <www.irishtimes.com> Sargent, Helen Child and George Lyman Kitteridge, eds. English and Scottish Popular Ballads Edited from the Collection of Francis James Child. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904. Tolman, Albert H. Mary Hamilton: The Group Authorship of Ballads. PMLA 42.2 (1927): 422-32. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of Ones Own. 1929. Introduction and annotations by Susan Gubar. Gen. Ed. Mark Hussey. New York: Harcourt, 2005. . Orlando. 1928. Introduction and annotations by Maria DiBattista. Gen. Ed. Mark Hussey. New York: Harcourt, 2006. . Sketch of the Past. Moments of Being. 2nd ed. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt, 1985. 61-158.

LACANIAN ORLANDO by Katharine Swarbrick

or many years the work of Virginia Woolf has attracted perceptive psychoanalytic interpretation from a variety of perspectives. When Makiko Minow-Pinkney first offers an in-depth account of the relationship between Woolf s texts and the preoccupations of continental psychoanalysis in 1987, the stage is set for radical insights and debate. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject remains a key text in terms of presenting the framework in which such insight and debate has unfolded. Woolf s aesthetic and feminist concerns entail the deconstruction of a hegemonic masculine discourse whose structure and effects are seen as represented, indeed endorsed, by Lacanian theory. Lacans Symbolic order, the bedrock of language and culture, is supported by the signifier of the phallus, through which man, as bearer of the phallus, asserts a monosexual control of the Symbolic domain. Feminist writing is, of necessity, a protest against this domain, to which all subjects accede through their assumption of the Oedipus complex. As such feminisms attempt to recover and communicate what has been severed from the Symbolic register often involves a circumvention of Oedipus or a return to an earlier stage. Minow-Pinkney, as a feminist critic focusing Woolf s construction of a feminine perspective, highlights the importance of the work of Julia Kristeva who is central to her analysis of Woolf s novels. Kristeva forefronts the significance of a primary pre-Oedipal stage repressed by phallocentricity. The Imaginary and the maternal lie at the heart of Kristevas semiotic modality and constitute a new means, for Minow-Pinkney, of understanding Woolf s feminist aesthetics. A focal point in the discussions that follow is Woolf s endorsement of the writers mind as androgynous. Woman is ideally placed in this respect being simultaneously both inside and outside the Symbolic domain. From this position she subverts the phallocentric ideology which, for critics of Lacan, structures his theories concerning speaking subjects. Minow-Pinkney reminds us that there are dangers in thinking of this androgyny as merely difference. She cites Stephen Heath who points out in The Sexual Fix that the idea of female androgyny can simply re-emerge as the term which designates the feminine as not man, not phallic, re-establishing the status quo. Brenda Helt further emphasises in her article Passionate Debates on Odious Subjects the complexity of Woolf with regard to issues of androgyny and sexual identity. Helt argues we must remain alert to the strategies which Woolf uses to dissociate desire from actual gender, and, at another level of the sexual debate, to resist seeing her work as pitting homosexual against heterosexual desire. What emerges from this framework is an initial view of Lacanian theory which whether it is seen as prescribing, or merely describing, the status quo, presents a phallocratic, repressive system. What ensues next is the fear of an impasse which threatens to close down the possibility of moving beyond the binary phallic/not phallic, which is interpreted as lying intransigently at the heart of that system. Have we attributed at the outset too great a rigidity to aspects of Lacanian theory which might be far more useful in highlighting these crucial subtleties contained in Woolf s work than originally thought?

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In the study which follows I aim to revisit aspects of Lacan as a means of testing whether that theory can, after all, serve such a purpose. To this end, I shall focus on one particular Lacanian concept, jouissance, which bears a close affinity with Woolf s literary representations of desire. In a joyous moment in Orlando (1928), a text at the core of her ideas on sexuality and desire, she tells us that our bisexual protagonist enjoyed the love of both sexes equally (O 211). What can Orlandos enjoyment tell us about psychoanalysis, the feminine, and the projects of Woolf in general? Jouissance, the French term, commonly rendered as enjoyment, has a stronger sense than its translation implies. Freud conceives it as energy, a force which originates in the erogenous zones of the body, and strives toward discharge in its pursuit of an object of satisfaction imagined in a multiplicity of forms. For Lacan, jouissance cannot be so clearly defined. Impossible to articulate or represent, even by means of the rigours of mathematical calculus as energy can, jouissance is related to Lacans order of the Real, an ineffable dimension beyond the Symbolic and Imaginary manifestations of words and images. The drive toward jouissance is consequently doomed to repeated failure, as this location of jouissance renders it impossible to reach. Lacanian jouissance can thus only be understood as highly localised or residual; whether it is contained within the circumscribed limits of phallic enjoyment or tied to the rims of the erogenous zones, it is productive only of an enjoyment which is partial, curtailed, transitory. At this point the idea of the dominance of the phallus already comes under threat, in that the phallus is marked by failure. The subject nonetheless maintains the sense of an absolute enjoyment, a horizon beyond reach where the idea of complete jouissance takes the form of madness, death or the realisation of incestuous relations. On the borders of the text Orlando, this horizon expresses itself distinctly in a sustained thematics of death which leaves Orlando in love with death (226) as a boy, and as a woman desirous only of meeting death by herself (247); this obsession is matched by energetic bids to seize the quintessence of life Whats life we askLife, Life, Life! (258), which in its absoluteness, shares the same horizon as death. A further means by which the speaking subject strives to keep alive the possibility of reaching absolute jouissance is to invest the phallus with the capacity to signify enjoyment in this sense. At this point we see how the phallus has come to be endowed with monolithic power despite the truth about the limits it dictates to jouissance. This attribution of power to the phallus is not a supposition of the masculine alone, but also characteristic of the feminine subject who in terms both of sexual satisfaction, and wider social freedoms, is subject to significantly greater constraints than her masculine counterpart. Woolf s Orlando has spawned such an interpretation in the French text Orlanda (1996), a humorous rewriting of Woolf by Belgian author and psychoanalyst, Jacqueline Harpman. Harpmans text, as I shall discuss, allows us to see with particular clarity certain conceptions of jouissance at work, whose orthodox alignment with commonly held assumptions regarding masculine and feminine sexuality affords us a re-reading of Woolf s text which illuminates all the complexity of the latter at the level of sexual enjoyment. Harpmans text is the story not of a boy who becomes a woman, but of a woman who usurps the body of a young man. The repressed sexuality of Aline, rational, respectable, heterosexual academic, travels into the body of Lucien, a stranger she crosses at the Gare du Nord, and who becomes the sudden, random host of Alines imprisoned libido. Lucien is not chosen for any individual quality, but for his sex alone, and is summarily

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transformed into a hybrid persona of feminine desire and masculine body named Orlanda. Once inside Luciens body, Aline embarks on an orgy of jouissance focused around the sexual organ of Lucien and targeting the phallus of other potential masculine partners. Orlandas first act is to masturbate with unbridled satisfaction and his second is to seduce a man on the train to Brussels as he embarks on a career of unrestrained promiscuity and immediate pleasure. Meanwhile the devitalised body of Aline continues to live her conventional life until the point at which Orlanda meets Aline and the two protagonists initially play out the mythical scenario of Aristophanes in which two severed halves of an originally undivided body unite in complementary and blissful harmony. This short-lived state of affairs is succeeded by Alines realisation that the unscrupulous pleasure machine must go; she murders Lucien, and, reabsorbing her escaped libido, returns to life as a woman with renewed sexual purpose. Harpmans role as a psychoanalyst, suggests that we interpret this outcome as the therapeutic modification of a feminine subject whose highly repressed sexuality has been allowed recognition and expression. Nonetheless, the surface events suggest that it is the phallus, whose properties are embodied in the organ of the penis, which remains the key to sexual satisfaction. The masculine subject is presented as in undisputed possession of these. As such Orlanda exemplifies the impasses to which psychoanalytic readings of sexual identity as phallic/not phallic give riseand Lacan is often made to answer for them. However, close readings of Lacan point to a quite different conception of the phallus. Lacans theory insists first and foremost on the phallus as a signifier, removing its essentialist association with the male genital. Next Lacan insists that this signifier is lacking: there is no signifier of jouissance because jouissance cannot be represented. Crucially, as a signifier (and one which is missing) the phallus is something with which the Lacanian subject, masculine or feminine, can only identify, a position of subjectivity which underlines its lack of identity with the phallus. It follows that no subject can master or possess the phallus, whilst the type of identification which the masculine subject maintains with it accords him only the limited satisfaction of the erogenous zone. All these structural impossibilities which act as a bar to absolute enjoyment highlight the lure of the latter as a powerful neurotic fantasy which lies at the core of Harpmans fiction and numerous others. What of Woolf s Orlando in this respect? It will be clear from the outline of the text Orlanda above, that Orlando presents jouissance in quite a different way. Let us consider the early reference to the oak tree, an image which endures throughout the three centuries spanned by the text, both in the title of Orlandos poem, and in the tree on the hill which appears in the opening and closing pages of the biographical fiction. Orlando flings himself onto the earth at the foot of this tree as a boy of sixteen: He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earths spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be (O 18). The hardness of the root, its animate energy which can be ridden, and the capacity of the oak to signify, through its fecund generation of streams of images, the back of a great horse or the deck of a tumbling ship (19) layers Woolf s figure with connotations of the phallic signifier. Orlando as a subject moors himself to this root as something external which lends him coherence, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to (O 19). The signifier oak tree is a stable point of identification which, centuries on, serves the same purpose for Orlando as a woman: Flinging herself on the ground, she felt the bones of the tree running out like

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ribs from a spine this way and that beneath her. She liked to think that she was riding the back of the world. She liked to attach herself to something hard (309). Woolf s image is crucial. The tree as phallus belongs neither to Orlando the boy nor Orlando the woman, but remains a common point of reference with which each identifies in subtly different ways. For the boy, the metaphor of the spine is the salient image; for the woman, the expanding network of ribs characterises its shape. For the boy, the image of the horse or the ship, concrete and clearly defined, connotes the pleasures afforded by the roots of the oak; for the woman, an image of extended, unlimited freedom emerges as she rid[es] the back of the world (309). Phallic jouissance is connoted here in the introduction of the oak at the start of the text, but this enjoyment is not presented as having the monopoly of jouissance as such. Beyond it lies a jouissance intimated in the final appearance of the oak tree and experienced by Orlando as a woman. Orlando the boy incarnates this initial phallic jouissance; the aura which surrounds him from the outset alludes, in its exaggerated colour and beauty, to the magical enchantment, the glamour, which the phallus radiates onto reality. And Orlandos beauty expresses this propensity of the phallic actively to conquer the space around it. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must goOrlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career (14). Phallic enjoyment in Lacanian theory resonates with this connection with enjoyment of the worldly, the material, the gift, the penis. Woolf s evocation of phallic enjoyment highlights consistently the seamlessness between Orlando and the public space which surrounds him. For Orlando the woman, this above all is the difference between man and woman; the role of writing will be given the task to bridge a gap which, significant as it is, does not reside in an essentialised, anatomical organ, but in the forces of social convention. The boy Orlandos affinity with the space which surrounds him does not, however, offer him mastery over sexual pleasure as it does in the case of Harpmans Orlanda. As bearer of the phallus he suffers its frustrations. Orlando is unlucky in love, disappointed in the Clorindas, Favillas, Euphrosynes on offer to him, and abandoned on the night of the flood by his Muscovite Princess; sexual satisfaction is elusive, spasmodic. His writing is ridiculed by Nick Greene and his inspiration falters for, he scratched out as many lines as he wrote (108); the pleasure he takes in ownership, in the refurbishment of his vast mansion, crumbles to nothing; and the refinements of love degenerate into the horrors of lust as the Archduchess-harpy dispossesses Orlando utterly by driving him from his home. At this point in the text Woolf indicates unmistakeably the limits of phallic enjoyment within Orlandos private world and transports him to high office in Constantinople to test its limits in the very public context of the role of the Ambassador Extraordinary. Here Orlando is brought to the pinnacle of his worldly achievements and raised to the highest rank in the peerage (121). Phallic enjoyment, enjoyment of the world and all its resources beauty, birth, honouris brought to a climax on the occasion of Orlandos investiture as duke on the centre Balcony of the Embassy, where he places the ducal coronet on his head. This climax is no sooner reached than over, as in place of some expected miracle, chaos ensues; the duke retires summarily only to fall into a death-like sleep of seven days duration. This bathetic turn of events conveys Woolf s humorous illustration of the conviction that we have gone as far as we can with the body and projects of the man: it is time to bring on Orlando the woman.

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If we consider the presentation of Aline in the reading of bisexuality which Orlanda represents, Woolf s feminine reincarnation is incomparably more positive and multivalent. The lady Orlando emerges, not from a process of splitting which renders her lifeless and unfulfilled, but on the same corporal site of an original self with which she remains inextricably linked: Orlando had become a woman there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatsoever to alter their identity (133). The impact of the figures of Chastity, Modesty and Purity is telling in this respect. Whilst Harpmans Aline remains trapped between the allegorical ladies, lamenting the inescapable, respectable decency in which they have shrouded her life, in Woolf s text it is the ladies themselves who lament: But men want us no longer; the women detest us. We go, we go (131). Chastity, Modesty and Purity fail to cover the nakedness of Orlando and henceforth desert their post forever. They abandon her to remarkable freedoms, for her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped a twofold harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased and its experiences multipled (211). For Aline such enjoyment is beyond reach; she fails as a woman to enjoy the man with whom she lives and, as Orlanda, seeks only to seduce men, the object choice of the original self, Aline. In this respect the homosexual desire which seemingly drives the erotic life of Orlanda is a superficial disguise. It is Alines libido which dictates the gender of the individuals pursued, and she enjoys these men as a woman whom fantasy has endowed with a penis. As devitalised woman or as the fantasy of this sexual hybrida woman with a phallusHarpmans protagonist remains convinced that jouissance is fundamentally under the remit of the phallus. It is this conviction that binds Aline and Orlanda together. On the other hand we are told that Woolf s Orlando, now established as a woman, enjoyed the love of both sexes equally (O 211). She does this, I would argue, from the vantage point of a most sophisticated understanding of jouissance. For Woolf s protagonist, as the figure of the oak tree implies, the phallus belongs to neither sex and as such defines neither sex entirely. The story of the boy Orlando highlights the failure of the phallus to represent absolute jouissance, such that its limits are clearly established. In respect of the feminine, Orlando by no means endorses the notion of an a priori frigidity in woman dictated by castration; woman is not castrated, she is woman. Hence the new body of Orlando connotes erotic potential from the start, for none has ever looked more ravishing (132). Orlando is constrained only in terms of her relation to public spacea problem which the act of writing is set to address. As a subject she now embraces, the strength of a man and a womans grace (133), indicating, I would argue, that she moves at will, not between male and female genders in any literally performed way, but subjectively between two different forms of jouissance. But how can this feminine jouissance be understood as something which takes us beyond the familiar binary phallic/not phallic in which the feminine simply re-emerges as lack? A way of illustrating this asymmetry between modes of enjoyment is provided in Lacans formulas of sexuation. Lacans chapter 7 of Le Sminaire Livre XX, Encore charts the different modes of jouissance experienced by masculine and feminine subjects (73). For the feminine subject, using mathematical antinomies based on Kantian logic, Lacan gives two crucial definitions. The first states there is no woman who is not submitted to the phallic function; the second, not all of a woman is submitted to the phallic function.

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The first statement implies that the phallus functions in the arena of feminine sexuality. Woman is not devoid of any relation to the phallus, but similarly to the masculine subject, her relation to it cuts her off from absolute enjoyment and inscribes her within the order of the Symbolic. This is precisely what the function of the phallus achieves. Unlike the masculine subject, however, she remains at some level outside the Symbolic since not all of a woman is submitted to that function. At this level woman subverts the dominance of the phallus and her jouissance connects with a radical otherness which lies outside the field of language, and by extension, knowledge. This otherness, however, cannot be defined as a lack, or a complementarity, or a binary opposite; it cannot be designated as different to; it cannot be labelled a dark continent which stands ready for epistemological penetration; in short it cannot be defined as anything which puts it in some position relative to the phallus. This otherness emerges as absoluteas otherness as such. The logic of mathematical antinomies is the key to understanding this place occupied by the feminine which ultimately indicates a dimension beyond the reach of experience as it appears to us. To fall under the aegis of the Symbolic which supports and grounds perceptual reality entails our experience of the world as located in space and time. To introduce the category of not-all entails that a world in which all phenomena can be objects of experience does not exist. Feminine jouissance lifts the limit on the totalised, finite world and points to a place where Symbolic and Real meet.1 Let us be clear that the experience of feminine jouissance is not tied to gender; it cannot be for the reason that Lacanian psychoanalysis charts two unconscious subjective positions, not two genders, and notes that these positions cannot be tied to anatomical males and females. Psychoanalysiss use of the term woman implies a subject who, at the level of the unconscious, has taken up the feminine position. As such feminine jouissance is open to a biological male who chooses the position of the feminine subject. It is also paramount to observe that phallic and feminine jouissance do not dictate the choice of an erotic attachment even in terms of a particular object, still less in terms of an object which might be characterised as heterosexual or homosexual. The object cannot be prescribed. Let us return to Orlandos story in respect of these subtleties. Since Lacan charted feminine jouissance it has become equated with feminine sexuality as such and we have tended to overlook the fact that the feminine position encompasses two relations to jouissance, one phallic and one, as Lacan calls it, supplementary; this choice itself indicates a further difference with masculine jouissance as, for the latter, the phallic function remains the only option. Orlando the woman is a robust illustration of this choice. The interminable legal process which attempts to determine her sexual identity may be read as a metaphor for the manner in which the feminine both eludes and experiences the full impact of castration. The axe falls so infinitely slowly that it never makes its incision; yet the axe has always already fallen and Orlando has always been a woman. The significance that Woolf s text attributes to the house and its contents, to Orlandos lovers, to her marriage and her enjoyment of Mar/Bonthrop/Shel, to the birth of a child, to department stores, and motor-cars which Orlando drives [m]asterfully, swiftly (O 300), testifies to her capacity for phallic enjoyment. These are far from being whimsical details. Beyond these worldly symbols, however, lies her connection with something beyond, a vanishing point where the world becomes indeterminate, impossible to symbolise. It is a connection expressed in significant images as the text draws to a close. Orlandos

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experience on the banks of the Serpentine is striking in this respect. The toy boat on the ripples of the pond becomes, in its intimate connection with her husband as Bonthrop, the brig on which he sails in its perilous ascent of great walls of Atlantic waves. Its link to the masculine, to the absent husband, and its function in navigating and charting the currents of infinite forces which support it, points to the boat as a representation of the phallus which cannot signify jouissance but merely mark it out. The boat/brig fully points out the limitless forces which swell around it at the moment it disappears as an object of perception and passes into a beyond which Orlando can only intimate with the exclamation Ecstasy! (274). The term is Orlandos breathless attempt to convey the jouissance of an otherness which lies beyond; which is not other in terms of any conceptual quality to which we may compare it, but an otherness which resides in itself.2 A later image which intimates this otherness is that of the multitude of selves; a succession or sequence of selves which knows no end: For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand (294-5). The world, and the self, as Orlando knows, can never be fully finalised, totalised. There is no self of hers that is not a possible experience, but not all selves are possible to experience as we do not have room for them all in representation. Again the unending chain of selves goes hand in glove with feminine sexuality as the jouissance which goes beyond; the multiple selves are a means by which Woolf expresses the crucial logic of sexuation which states that not all of a woman is submitted to the phallic function. We are now in a position to appreciate fully Woolfs choice of phrases as indicating the privileged position of the feminine subject, simultaneously within and outwith the Symbolic, when we read her reference to Orlando as being of the age whilst remaining herself (254), and her truth that when we write of a woman everything is out of place (297-8). In conclusion, Woolf s literary anticipation and transposition of the logic of the feminine structure of sexuation proposed by Lacan is striking. Focusing the detail of this transposition is an exercise which can be of assistance in avoiding the reductive impulse to characterise masculine and feminine as phallic/not phallic; it likewise counters the reductive impulse to tie subjectivity to gender; and it further confounds the readers attempts to see the homosexual and heterosexual as pitted against each other. The logic of sexuation further opens the new possibility of reinterpreting the feminine in its relation to the border of the Symbolico-Real rather than envisaging its unique route of escape in an Imaginary pre-Oedipal situation. Woolf s fiction yet again proves to be a key unlocking multiple doors to an infinite sense of possibilities for readers of all sexes. Notes
1 2 For a more detailed discussion of Lacans Kantian formulae please consult Derek Hooks Lacans Kantian Logic of Sexuation to whom I am indebted for my understanding of points of this argument. Woolf scholars have analysed this episode in Orlando in ways which are both intriguingly similar and different to my interpretationsee in particular Minow-Pinkney 138-9.

Works Cited
Harpman, Jaqueline. Orlanda. Paris: Grasset, 1996. Trans. Ros Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999.

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Heath, Stephen. The Sexual Fix. London: Macmillan, 1982. Helt, Brenda. Passionate Debates on Odious Subjects: Bisexuality and Woolf s Opposition to Theories of Androgyny and Sexual Identity. Twentieth Century Literature 56.2 (Summer 2010): 131-167. Hook, Derek. Lacans Kantian Logic of Sexuation. The Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research 19 (2009): 89-117. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. 1781. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1990. Lacan, Jacques. Le Sminaire Livre XX, Encore. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975. Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. Brighton: Harvester P, 1987. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. 1928. Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics, 2008.

THE BISPECIES ENVIRONMENT, COEVOLUTION, AND FLUSH by Jeanne Dubino

We will get by, we will get by, we will get by, we will survive. The Grateful Dead, Touch of Grey somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway he first headnote, clearly, puns on the prefix bi in the title. The by in Touch of Grey is linked to survivalwe will get by, as the Grateful Dead repeat, and add, as an almost redundant coda, we will survive. In Mrs Dalloway the freefloating narrator links survivalbut after death, not in lifeto trees. It is through our tree-like linkageour branching outto other people that we survive. Trees are, or can be, a lattice, a network. Woolf here suggests that our survival is dependent on this kind of network. It is not just through a one-on-one, binary connection, that we continue on after death, but rather through a mesh of multiple connections. And the Grateful Dead acknowledge this multiple dimension of survival too. The refrain beginning We will get by is repeated throughout the song as I will get by; the first-person pronoun changes to we only in the very last line of the song.1 This notion of survival through a complex system is an integral part of Darwinism. Darwins emphasis on an inextricable web of affinities (Darwin 415) is highlighted now by many scientists who hope to suggest the complexities of evolution through the use of the term coevolution.2 Coevolution is conceived of in multiple ways, but for the sake of this essay I will define it as the way two interacting species or groups of species change in response to each other (Vermeij 219). Coevolutionary approaches, as the sociologist Myra Hird writes, consider selective pressures as more involved with each other, more enmeshed (740). Coevolutionary histories privilege species interdependence (McHugh 160). Though co might suggest binary, coevolution is not binary, but rather heterogeneous. As the environmentalist Anders Pape Mller writes, coevolution involves interactions among interactions; scientists thus recognize that any single case of interaction between two parties may be affected by an entire range of additional interacting factors (180). Scientists who work within the framework of coevolution often include a consideration of the ecosystem in which these interactions take place; indeed, some conceive of coevolution as the interaction between the species and their environments.3 All would agree that these interactions among species, and among species and their environments, are multi-directional (Haraway, Encounters 112). As Donna Haraway colorfully

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characterizes the coevolutionary scene, living critters form consortia in a baroque medley of inter- and intra-actions (Encounters 112). Humans, of course, are part of what Haraway calls this bestiary of agencies (Companion 6). Carrie Rohman highlights Darwins genius in linking human life species with other animal forms (22). Myra Hird reinforces humans symbiotic relationship with the worldwe must, she concludes in Coevolution, Symbiosis and Sociology, learn from this filthy lesson of our connection with the world (740). In Flush we see how Elizabeth Barrett learns this filthy lesson from her excursion to Whitechapel, and that she never forgets the connection between the worlds of the underground and her own ultrarespectable Wimpole Street: They were in a world that Miss Barrett had never seen, had never guessed at. They were in a world where cows are herded under the bedroom floor, where whole families sleep in rooms with broken windows; in a world where water is turned on only twice a week, in a world where vice and poverty breed vice and poverty. They had come to a region unknown to respectable cab-drivers. In this mysterious world a cab with two ladies could only come upon one errand.It was sinister in the extreme.This, then, was what lay on the other side of Wimpole Streetthese faces, these houses. (F 94-95; emphases added) But Flush is replete with other worldswebs of worlds. In Darwins Plots Gillian Beer notes that web in Victorian England referred not to a spiders web but rather to the weave of a fabric (168). In Flush, web also specifically refers to fabricwhen Flush first enters a shopping arcade he observes webs of tinted gauze (F 28)but more significantly, Flush is a novel filled with textiles: gleaming silk, ponderous bombazine, thin white muslin, the stuff of skirts and trousers, banners and shawls, tapestry and plush, carpets and runners, knitting and needlework (F 28, 120, 149, 154, 166, 18, 19, 158, 123). These webs swooshing around Flush are suggestive of the interwoven worlds within the novel, and a reminder of Woolf s lifelong desire to render the manifold textures of life in all its plenitude and profusion. In this essay I focus on the life of the natural world. While Woolf populates Flush with wild and tamed speciesa menagerie of cats and lions and tigers, partridges and parrots and rooks, elephants and fish and fox, black beetles and blue bottles, hares and fleas, and dogs purebreds and mixed breeds, generations of greyhounds and of course breeds of spanielsI will consider the interconnections and links she makes among only a few of these animal families. In an earlier paper on Flush I had considered the image of the chainas in a dog on a chain, and Woolf s use metaphor of the chain of lovean image used to expose the constrictions binding the Victorian world, and to parody the Victorian urge to connect, only connect (see Dubino). Yet Woolf is at the same time more subtle than the overt use of the chain would suggest. In Flush she portrays other ways species are linked together, and how these links shift. While her focus, in this feeling-filled novel, is on the emotional bonds, she also represents the physical ways species connect to each other. Scientists hypothesize the many ways species coevolve together. The ecologist Geerat Vermeij explains four of the dominant hypotheses: predator-prey, competitors, host-guest, and mutual beneficiaries (this last is also termed symbiosis). The zoologist James Thomson complicates this

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taxonomy with his term diffuse evolution (52), whereby a species can function as a mutualist in some ecological circumstances and as a parasite in others (52). Other scientists4 would agree that relationships shift. The marine biologist Charles Veron states simply, everything is always on its way to becoming something else (Holland 53). Woolf s genius lies in her understanding of the myriad shades and degrees of relationshipsand, here, more specifically, of bispecies affiliations. It is almost as if she were anticipating the way scientists have teased out the coevolutionary dimensions of Darwinian thought. In the rest of my paper I will examine four instances of these shifting relationships in Flush.

Predator-Prey
The first page of the novel introduces the first of these relationships, or the predatorprey: where there is vegetation the law of Nature has decreed that there shall be rabbits; where there are rabbits, Providence has ordained there shall be dogs (F 3). Within this one sentence Woolf not only sets forth the life-dinner principle (Vermeij 227), she illustrates the way beings do not preexist their relating.5 At the same time Woolf parodies the notion of divine intervention: Providence here does become the means by which beings enter into co-constitutive relationships (Haraway, Companion 12). This particular relationship, as Vermeij reminds us, is an asymmetrical one; success for the preyescape from the predatormeans life, or survival, while capture means injury or death. Failure for the prey, on the other hand, may mean just waiting that much longer to acquire a meal, and possibly, ultimately death if too much time passes before it can eat again (Vermeij 227). Clearly, in Flush, the predatorthe Spanieldoes prevail, and does go on to propagate and develop into lines and families (e.g. the Clumber, the Sussex, the Norfolk, the Black Field, the Cocker, the Irish Water and the English Water; F 5). Woolf does not tell us what happened to the hares; by implication, they seem to have vanished. 6 Later, when Flush is in London, he dreams of haresbut then opens his eyes to the harsh reality that [t]here [are] no hares; they have been displaced by the Victorian world in which Elizabeth Barrett lives, with only Mr. Browning in the armchair talking to Miss Barrett on the sofa (59). But Woolf would never settle for just an easy eat-or-be-eaten relationship; she complicates it in her portrayal of Flush himself chasing after hares in Three Mile Cross. Here she reminds us of how plants and animals interact in much more sophisticated and intricate ways than nonspecialists could imagine from a walk in a field or forest (Thompson 596). We see that kind of understanding in Flush as well in his walk with Mary Russell Mitford early on in the novel: The cool globes of dew or rain broke in showers of iridescent spray about his nose; the earth, here hard, here soft, here hot, here cold, stung, teased and tickled the soft pads of his feet. Then what a variety of smells interwoven in subtlest combination thrilled his nostrils.But suddenly down the wind came tearing a smell sharper, stronger, more lacerating than anya smell that ripped across his brain stirring a thousand instincts, releasing a million memoriesthe smell of hare, the smell of fox. Off he flashed like a fish drawn in a rush.He forgot his mistress; he forgot all humankind.He raced; he rushed. At last he

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stopped bewildered; the incantation faded.And once at least the call was even more imperious; the hunting horn roused deeper instincts, summoned wilder and stronger emotions that transcended memory and obliterated grass, trees, hare, rabbit, fox in one wild shout of ecstasy. Love blazed her torch in his eyes; he heard the hunting horn of Venus. Before he was well out of his puppy-hood, Flush was a father. (12-13) Preceding Flushs flight after the hare is a foreplay of an orgiastic sensory intermingling of textures and smells, followed by a lightning-like bolt of predatorial instinct shooting through his brain and releasing atavistic, prehistoric memories of the chase, but then arousing yet deeper instincts and resulting in his survival not through a capture of the prey but rather through his becoming a father and perpetuating the species.

Competitors
While it would seem that the predator in Flush has been supplanted by the lover,7 Flush still has antagonistic relations with a species. This antagonism is manifested not with hares, which he would simply prefer to chase, but with a rival from another species, the human. Flush and his challenger, Robert Browning, are not competing for survival, but rather, in this emotional world, for the attention of another. Woolf complicates and even mocks Flushs role here by portraying his competitorMr. Browningas indifferent to his adversary. As she had with the predator-prey scene that turns into a hunt for love, Woolf builds up the suspense leading to Flushs attack on his enemy. Flush can tell that something dangerous is looming simply by a gestureby the way Elizabeth picks up a letter. Inside of him stirs a warning of some danger menacing his safety (51). Soon this danger takes shape; Flush comes to envision a contemporary version of his enemy, who is not another dog, but a Victorian-looking figure resembling the vampire Count Dracula, a man in a cloak,a cowled and hooded figure (52). When this figure physically appears in the shape of Robert, Flush, overcome by feeling, flings himself at target and bites his trousers. Flushs attack is met not by an assault in kind, but far worse, by a flick of the hand and not even a beat in the action: Robert continues talking with Elizabeth (63). The arms race scenario that has been used to characterize competition, with each side continually deploying new defenses and counterdefenses (Thompson 596), is quickly made ridiculous, becoming that of a gnat pestering a giant. Flushs second attack on Robert is met by the same indifference. Eventually Flush lays down arms (paws, you might say) and, by the end of the novel, becomes the best of friends (117) with his former rival. In the transformation of this relationship alone we can see an instance of how, to use the words of the biologist John N. Thompson, mutualismshave evolved from initially antagonistic interactions (596).

Host and Guest (Pet)

If Flush is similar to a troublesome gnat flicked off by a large member of another species, he takes on the opposite role in the third of the bispecies relationships: that of the host-guest, or, less euphemistically, the parasitic. This time, Flush is the host to a plague of

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fleas who successfully torture him; his suffering, wrote Barrett Browning herself, is comparable to Savonarolas martyrdom (133). Flush cannot, of course, as easily flick off his tormenters as Robert can flick him off; he requires human agency to remove his scourge. As a pet, he depends on a human for his care. Indeed, in his role as pet, one may argue that he himself is a parasiteand certainly there are scientists who do. Stephen Budiansky attributes the dogs brilliant evolutionary success (5) to its parasitic shrewd adaptation (14). He argues that dogs loom as a huge net biological burden upon mankind, competing for food, diverting vast economic assets in the form of labor and capital, spreading disease, causing serious injury (7). No doubt, as the zoologist James Serpell notes, the costs of pet-keeping alone are staggering (12); in 2010 $55 billion was spent on pets in the US alone (Martin). Flush may have been a gift to Elizabeth, but his maintenance requires effort on her partthose purple drinking jars and collars cost something. In addition, to save his life when he is kidnapped, she must pay a somewhat sizable ransom, and, moreover, a price of another kinda willingness to risk her familys censure and even her relationship with Robert.

Mutual Beneficiaries
But this last examplethe price she is willing to pay for her dogshows us that rather than being a pest, Flush has become a soul mate to Elizabeth: She loved Flush, and Flush was worthy of her love (F 49). They are mutual beneficiaries. In the annals of dog literatureand by literature I mean the range from the fictional to the scientificit is this form of mutualismthe symbiotic relationship between dogs and humansthat scientists and dog experts emphasize rather than the parasitism propounded by Budiansky. Because the entire plot of Flush is primarily about the relationship between a dog and his human, it would be difficult to address all the ways that the novel illustrates this mutualism in this short essay. I will rather highlight some of the key features of Flushs symbiotic relationship with Elizabeth. This relationship is above all an emotional one, one reflective of the tie that has bound humans and dogs together since the earliest beginnings of civilization. Darwin writes in The Origin of Species, It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive in the dog (240). The anthropologist Mary Elizabeth Thurston encapsulates her Lost History of the Canine Race as Our 15,000-Year Love Affair with Dogs. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, another anthropologist who studies dog and human behavior, argues that thoughts and emotions have evolutionary value. If they didnt, we wouldnt have them. Thought is an efficient, effective mechanism that we, and many other animals, would be hard put to do without (viii). Flush has certainly inherited the mechanism of thought and feeling; from the beginning of the novel we are told, Spaniels are by nature sympathetic; Flush, as his story proves, had an even excessive appreciation of human emotions (11); His flesh was veined with human passions; he knew all grades of jealousy, anger and despair (133). Again covering a range of genres and disciplines, the number of dog books testifying to the way this emotional creature make humans emotional is legion. Linda Hogan et al. write, From them we have even learned about love and the depths of community and familial bonding.We are animated by animals. Their lives have transformed our lives

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(xi-xii). Vicki Hearne describes the way dogs specifically are domesticated to, and into, us, and we are domesticated to, and into, them (28). Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson believes that dogs make us human (xi); they heighten our capacity for love (14). Caroline Knapp rhapsodizes, in moments, on dogs, who are able to lead us intoa place that can transform us (7). Falling in love with a dog, she continues, is like enter[ing] a new orbit (7). Elizabeth Barrett Browning herself made this claim in her sonnet to Flush; he is one of those low creatures who lead[] to heights of love (qtd. in F 160). Flushs entry into Elizabeths life does momentarily send her out of her grief; in an early scene, when she is crying, he presses his head against her and looks into her eyes: Was it Flush, or was it Pan?, she thinks, Was she no longer an invalid in Wimpole Street, but a Greek nymph in some dim grove in Arcady?For a moment she was transformed; she was a nymph and Flush was Pan (38). In her typical way, Woolf immediately deflates this intensity: But suppose Flush had been able to speakwould he not have said something sensible about the potato disease in Ireland? (38). Though Woolf seems to give the lie to dogs devotion to their humans in this particular scene, the rest of the novel certainly bears out Flushs love, as we have already seen in his one-sided competition with Robert Browning for Elizabeths attention. If Flush brings love to Elizabeths life, he is given not just the material well-being he receives in his role as a pet/parasite, but also love and attention, and he comes to depend on that. The novel bears out an essential fact of domestication: Mary Elizabeth Thurston notes that [t]rue domestication requires the animals to remain beholden to humans (7). The ethologist dm Miklsi finds that if dogs have a choice they seem to prefer to join human groups (165). That is certainly true for Flush when he is at his most domesticated: Naturally, lying with his head pillowed on a Greek lexicon, he came to dislike barking and biting; he came to prefer the silence of the cat to the robustness of the dog; and human sympathy to either (F 47). But this preference was not without a cost, as Woolf shows; even Elizabeth herself was too just not to realize that it was for her that he had sacrificed his courage, as it was for her that he had sacrificed the sun and the air (F 48). Woolf would agree with other ethologists that dog love is not unconditional love.8 As Haraway writes, A cursory glance shows that dogs and humans have always had a vast range of ways of relating (Companion 33). Haraway and others note that being a pet is a demanding job for a dog, requiring self-control and canine emotional and cognitive skills matching those of good working dogs (Companion 38). Roger Grenier writes that too close a proximity to humans makes domestic animals unhappy.Everything is a sign: a cough, a glance at a watch.Every minute carries its ration of anguish (32). After long years of training in the bedroom school, Flush has learned to read signs that nobody else could even see (F 51). But the stress on him is intense; his move to Florence gives him leave to break out of this close proximity, and he is free to roam about the city without the protection of his chain, and so remind us, as the behavioral ecologist Barbara Smuts writes, that most dogs are perfectly capable of negotiating and managing many aspects of their world without us (124).

Conclusion
There is much more one can say about the subtleties and the permutations of this

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last form of coevolution, including the way dogs and humans are companion species who break bread together la Donna Harawayand the ways pet-keeping can, as James Serpell writes (187), make us aware of our biological affinities with other species. Woolf does treat these dimensions as well in Flush. She hints, for example, at another form of beneficial mutualism, queer knowledges, or a more inclusive sense of the social as enriched by abundance beyond reproductive calculation (McHugh 162). But what I have hoped to do here is conjoin the worlds of literary studies and animal studiesor, more broadly, the humanities and the sciencesin an effort to enrich our understanding of literature. Woolf s writing in particular is nothing if not, to include a phrase from Haraway, demonstrative of a layered and distributed complexity (Companion 63). To understand this complexity means we need to go to other disciplines, and to that end I have consulted the work of evolutionary biologists, cognitive ethologists, sociologists, and other scientists.9 Writes Haraway, Dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships (Companion 12), and in studying these relationships, Anders Pape Mller emphasizes, one needs an integrative approach (181). Edward O. Wilson calls for a consilience of knowledges, or a synthesis of disciplines across the spectrum, from the humanities to the sciences, to create a new groundwork of explanation (8; see also Nordlund). A coevolutionary approach to literary studiesin this case, one that analyzes four forms of bispecies relationshipsshows how Woolf, ever attuned to the fluidities, volatilities, and disruptions that are a part of human relationships, was also sensitive to the ebbs and flows of the patterns of interactions among nonhumanand humananimals. Notes
1. 2. 3. There are other versions of this song, some of which have the final line of the refrain repeating the firstperson singular pronoun. See, for example, Blondel, Hird, Laland et al., Mller, Thompson, Thomson, and Vermeij. For example, according to the Red Queen hypothesis, evolutionary changes in a species cause the environment to deteriorate unless the species continues to evolve (Vermeij 220). See also Blondel, who reports on the ways human societies and Mediterranean landscapes have interacted through the millennia; Laland et al., who describe how organisms modify their environment; and Stone, who argues on behalf of dual inheritance theory, or the coevolutionary, dialectic interaction of genetic make-up and cultural conditioning, and their effect, in turn, on environment and culture. For example, see Thompson and Mller. As Donna Haraway insists throughout her writing on companion species relationships; they are ever contingent, co-regulated, and creative (Smuts 115). In fact, the population of hares in Spain has been considerably diminished; see David and DeMello. And yet, at the same time, by having him respond to the hunting horn of Venus (119) Woolf here equates the chase after the prey with the chase after the beloved. Haraway insists that belief in unconditional love is pernicious (33). But literary theory certainly provides useful frameworks; for example, Raymond Williamss notion of structures of feeling, with its emphasis on relations, particularly on the relations, over time, between lived and felt experience, and formal and systematic beliefs, would be another window through to consider coevolution (Williams 132).

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Works Cited
Beer, Gillian. Darwins Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 1983. Boston: Ark, 1985.

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Blondel, Jacques. The Design of Mediterranean Landscapes: A Millennial Story of Humans and Ecological Systems during the Historic Period. Human Ecology 34.5 (2006): 713-29. Budiansky, Stephen. The Truth about Dogs: The Ancestry, Social Conventions, Mental Habits and Moral Fibre of Canis Familiaris. London: Phoenix, 2002. Darwin, Charles. The 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. Dubino, Jeanne. Dogs, Women and Adaptation: Virginia Woolf s Flush. Woolf and the City: The Nineteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. 5 June 2009. Lecture. The Grateful Dead. Song. Touch of Grey. lyricsfreak.com, Lyrics Freak, n.d. Web. 30 May 2011. Grenier, Roger. The Difficulty of Being a Dog. 1998. Trans. Alice Kaplan. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm P, 2003. . Encounters with Companion Species: Entangling Dogs, Baboons, Philosophers, and Biologists. Configurations 14.1-2 (2006). Hearne, Vicki. Adams Task: Calling Animals by Name. 1982. Pleasantville, NY: Akadine P, 2000. Hird, Myra. Coevolution, Symbiosis and Sociology. Ecological Economics 69.4 (2010): 737-42. Hogan, Linda, Deena Metzger, and Brenda Peterson, eds. Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals. New York: Fawcett, 1998. Holland, Jennifer. The Reef s Greatest Test: Australias Great Barrier Reef Faces Unprecedented Change. National Geographic 219:5 (May 2011): 34-57. Knapp, Caroline. Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs. New York: Delta, 1998. Laland, Kevin N., John Odling-Smee, and Marcus W. Feldman. Cultural Niche Construction and Human Evolution. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 14.1 (2001): 22-33. Martin, Andrew. For the Dogs Has a Whole New Meaning. nytimes.com, New York Times, 4 June 2011. Web. 4 June 2011. Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. The Dog Who Couldnt Stop Loving: How Dogs Have Captured Our Hearts for Thousands of Years. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. McHugh, Susan. Rev. essay. Queer (and Animal) Theories. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15.1: 2009: 153-69. Miklsi, dm. Dog: Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Mller, Anders Pape. Interactions between Interactions: Predator-Prey, Parasite-Host, and Mutualistic Interactions. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1133 (2008): 180-86. Nordlund, Marcus. Consilient Literary Interpretation. Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002): 312-33. Rohman, Carrie. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. Serpell, James. In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Smuts, Barbara. Between Species: Science and Subjectivity. Configurations 14.1-2 (2006): 115-26. Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall. The Hidden Life of Dogs. 1993. Boston: Mariner, 2010. Thompson, John N. Rev. of Beauty and the Beast: The Coevolution of Plants and Animals, by Susan Grant. BioScience 35.9 (1985): 594-95. Thomson, James. When Is It Mutualism? The American Naturalist 162.4 (2003): S1-S9. Thurston, Mary Elizabeth. The Lost History of the Canine Race: Our 15,000-Year Love Affair with Dogs. Kansas City: Andrews, 1996. Vermeij, Geerat J. The Evolutionary Interaction Among Species: Selection, Escalation, and Coevolution. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 25 (1994): 219-36. Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage. 1998. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: OUP, 1977. Woolf, Virginia. Flush. 1933. New York: Harcourt, 1983. . Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. New York: Harcourt, 1953.

FROM SPANIEL CLUB TO ANIMALOUS SOCIETY: VIRGINIA WOOLFS FLUSH by Derek Ryan
n The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) Donna Haraway alludes to A Room of Ones Own (1929) when arguing that categorically unfixed dogswhich we might call mongrels, random bred dogs, mixed breeds, or just plain dogsneed A Category of Ones Own: Woolf understood what happens when the impure stroll over the lawns of the properly registered (88). Although Woolfs most detailed portrayal of a dog, in her fictional biography Flush, happens to be of a cocker spaniel, my paper will explore some of the ways in which this text complicates the relationship between the properly registered and unregistered, and negotiates the contested, sometimes contradictory, spaces shared by humans and animals. Over the past fifteen years or so Flush has garnered more critical attention than had previously been the case, and some of the earliest, most insightful examples include Susan Squiers reading of Flush as a stand-in for the woman writer (124), Ruth Vanitas claim that Flushs relationship with Barrett Browning works as a metaphor for the socially created gap between members of the same gender (254), and Pamela Caughies argument that Woolfs novel works as an allegory of canon formation and canonical value (146). But more recently critics such as Craig Smith, Dan Wylie and Jeanne Dubino (see her paper included in this volume) have turned their focus to questions concerning animality in Woolfs text. As Smith warns, it is important to move away from allegorical readings which can often betray an anthropocentric bias, where Woolfs fictional biography is accepted as a serious object of study only to the extent that it may be represented as being not really about a dog (349). Taking the dog in this text seriously as well as the text itselftherefore worrying over, as Jane Goldman puts it, the dogginess of the dog (When Dogs Will Become Men 180)I am interested in the ways in which Woolfs modernist canine experiment anticipates and intervenes in the wider context of our own contemporary debates on the question of the animal in literary studies, philosophy and posthumanities. Ultimately, I want to claim that Flush details the ordinary experiences of a dog interacting with humans, but that the text can also be understood as a journey away from hierarchical, essentialist categorisations based on inclusion or exclusion, and towards a more open, entangled zone of human and animal. In the opening pages of Woolf s novel, the dogginess of the dog is defined by the exclusive (we might say properly registered) organisation of the Spaniel Club: By that august body it is plainly laid down what constitute the vices of a spaniel, and what constitute its virtues. Light eyes, for example, are undesirable; curled ears are still worse; to be born with a light nose or a topknot is nothing less than fatal. The merits of a spaniel are equally clearly defined. His head must be smooth, rising without a too-decided stoop from the muzzle; the skull must be comparatively rounded and well developed with plenty of room for brain power; the eyes must be full but not gozzled; the general expression must be one of intelligence and gentleness. (F 7)

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Membership of the Spaniel Club (established since 1885 as an offshoot of The Kennel Club, itself founded in 1873) depends on categorisation based on physiology. It is not only a question of who is a member and who is not; behind the humour and elegance of Woolf s prose is a matter of life itself: [t]he spaniel that exhibits these points is encouraged and bred from; the spaniel who persists in perpetuating topknots and light noses is cut off from the privileges and emoluments of his kind (7). Perhaps most telling, however, is the fact that standing at the top of this hierarchy, on only two legs, is always a human judge laying down the law, impos[ing] penalties and privileges which ensure that the law shall be obeyed (7). Indeed, Linden Peach has pointed out that the Spaniel Clubs focus on the pure bred takes on an added significance when we consider the publication history of Flushthis section of Woolf s text appeared in the first installment in the October 1933 issue of Atlantic Monthly alongside a review of Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf by Alice Hamilton (Peach 203-204). In contrast to this form of organisation, Harawayin both The Companion Species Manifesto and When Species Meet (2008)argues that it should never be a question of one species or Being having control over another, but rather multiple stories of cross-species entanglements: her preferred term, Companion Species, is less a category than a pointer to an ongoing becoming with (When Species Meet 16-17). As Susan McHugh explains, it is a term used to inscribe people, animals, places, and technologies in relations that at their best inspire an ongoing sense of curiosity and reciprocity (159). Claiming to be a creature (and philosopher) of the mud (When Species Meet 3; 28), Haraway is the selfstyled choreographer of a multipartner mud dance where [t]he partners do not precede their relating; all that is, is the fruit of becoming with: those are the mantras of companion species (16). Haraways mud philosophy is important for emphasising the multiple ways in which our lives todayin domestic settings and in a coevolutionary senseare bound up with those of dogs and other companion species, and also for shedding light on the specific ways in which animals are (mis)treated in our contemporary stories. The close domestic and co-evolutionary relationship between human and dog is emphasised by key moments in Woolf s novel where Flush and Miss Barrett meet eyeto-eye. Very briefly, the first example of their reciprocal gaze comes when Miss Mitford gives Flush to Miss Barrett and [f ]or the first time she looked him in the face. For the first time Flush looked at the lady lying on the sofa (18); later on we are told that Flushs large bright eyes shone in his new companions (27); and on one occasion it is actually Miss Barrett who refuses to meet Flushs eyes as he is chastised following his jealous attack on Mr Browning (46). Woolf s examples here of human-dog gaze in fact anticipate current scientific research. In The Secret Life of the Dog, a Horizons documentary first broadcast on the BBC on 6th January 2010, we see animal behaviour scientist Daniel Mills experiment into dog recognition of human emotions, which previous research has shown to be expressed asymmetrically so that when humans look at a face they have a left-gaze bias (i.e. they look at the right-hand side of the persons face). The findings are fascinating: while dogs look randomly at pictures of objects or of other dogs, they also display a left-gaze bias when looking at a human face. Later in the documentary, cognitive psychologist Juliane Kaminski conducts an experiment which shows that dogs are even attuned to the direction of the human gaze, something not achieved by our closest ancestor, the chimpanzee. Moreover, these skills are specifically developed through the

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coevolutionary stories of humans and dogs (dogs do not show these abilities with their own species, for example). In Woolfs novel, Flushs ability to respond to the human gaze is only denied by death. In the final paragraphs, as Miss Barrett responds to Flush jumping on the sofa and thrust[ing] his face into hers by recalling her sonnet Flush or Faunus, they seem to be connected by more than just their gaze (if you like, they are not just face-to-face but face-in-face) (105). As Haraway notes, we now know that the molecular record of humans and dogs contain traces of each other (Companion 31), and if this material, molecular intermingling is being emphasised in Woolfs text, then it is fitting that this should occurperhaps as a reminder of the importance of Flushs life on the shaping of his companionmoments before his demise. Woolf might not have been aware of todays advances in molecular biology, but it is as though she wants to emphasise that Flush should not be thought of as some symbolic canine figure that stands for all dogs, let alone as mere allegory for a strictly human concern. If he is any figure at all, he illustrates those of Haraway, where [f ]igures are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another (When Species Meet 4).1 Such nodes or knots also seem to be evident in a short unfinished sketch written by Woolf entitled The Dog: She attached herselfshe would not let me out of her sight. She became like a supplementary limba tail, something attached to my person. I never had to call her. I had great difficulty in detaching her (CSF 334-335) The fact that the closing lines of Flush echo the description used when Flush and Miss Barrett first looked at each other is also revealing. In the first example we read: Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? She might have beenall that; and hebut no. Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog (18-19). And in the final paragraph we read: Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, each, perhaps, completed what was dormant in the other. But she was woman; he was dog (105). It could of course be argued that these final comments reinforce the gulf between Flush and his human companion one last time, although as with the earlier passage the semi-colon appears to leave the possibility of boundary crossing open. More tellingly, however, this latter passage is different from the former in two important ways: firstly, the possibility that each completed what was dormant in the other is no longer followed by a question markalthough Woolf uses the word perhaps, she seems to be more certain of their cross-species connection by the end of the book; secondly, instead of the sharp, But no. Between them lay the widest gulf, the conjunction Woolf uses at the end of the novel is far softer. In this instance the but may not be in forceful contradiction to the statement preceding it, but might simply present the anomaly that Woolf s text has illuminated: here is a human and a cocker spaniel whose lives are intertwined beyond language but they belong to different species (we might also note that this latter passage does not reinforce the statement concerning who could speak and who was dumb). As we read that Miss Barrett looked at Flush again and that he did not look at her we are aware that this must not be due to an incapacity of his species for response or an abyssal gulf between human and dog but rather because [h]e had been alive; he was now dead. That was all (106). The very fact there is an expectation that Flush will return his owners gaze emphasises their inter-species connection, the becoming with of companion species.

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Haraways emphasis on molecular differences (Companion Species 5) and becoming with has echoes of Deleuze and Guattaris concept of becoming-animal, which I will briefly define for the purposes of this paper as the shared event of becoming different, of becoming entangled with the other in a creative line of escape from traditional ontological categories of human and animal (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 35-36). It should be noted that in When Species Meet, and despite acknowledging the influence of Deleuzian assemblages on her thought (314), Haraway is herself emphatic in her dislike of Deleuze and Guattaris becoming-animal: I want to explain why writing in which I had hoped to find an ally for the tasks of companion species instead made me come as close as I get to announcing, Ladies and Gentlemen, behold the enemy! (27). But although Haraway has taken issue with Deleuze and Guattaris workshe is specifically concerned by what she considers the failure on their part to account for the everyday, mundane, and real lives of animalsI would argue that a combination of her focus on domestic and coevolutionary stories and Deleuze and Guattaris disruption of human-centred relations is important when considering the question of the animal in Woolf s text.2 As Matthew Calarco notes in Zoographies (2008), which calls for the rejection of human chauvinism (35), Deleuze and Guattari provide a rare example in Western philosophy of a nonanthropocentric treatment of the animal. In contrast to Haraways accusation that they lack a curiosity for the animal (When Species Meet 27), for Calarco they demonstrate a fascination for the animal and other nonhuman perspectives that are at work in becoming-animal; for them, it is this fascination that motivates revolutionary literature and progressive discourses on animalsa fascination for something outside or other than the human and dominant perspectives (and this outside might well lie within human beings, for example, in an inhuman space at the very heart of what we call human) (42-43). The point then is not that Deleuze and Guattari are incurious as Haraway has charged, but that they are more than curious. Their real fascination is not limited to the animal in what they call its molar (that is, unified and fixed) form but rather the molecular changes and intensive involvement of species. It is in this sense that fascination sparks becoming, where [i]n the experience of becoming, when one is fascinated by something before oneself, when one contemplates something before oneself, one is among it, within it, together in a zone of proximity (Lawlor 176). In Flush we might say that this type of fascination actually occurs within a domestic setting, evident, as discussed above, in the human/animal gaze shared by Flush and Miss Barrett. As Leonard Lawlor notes, it is this gaze from the singular animalthat places the animal within me: one in the other. (176) Turning to Deleuze and Guattari can help to expand upon and complicate the domestic, material-semiotic entanglements between Woolf s canine protagonist and his human companions. In A Thousand Plateaus they outline three ways in which we can distinguish animalsthe first two anthropomorphic and a third which challenges anthropocentric conceptualisations. First, there are the Oedipal animalsthat is my cat, my dog. Importantly it is here, in their criticism of the ways in which this view of animals draws us into a narcissistic contemplation, that Deleuze and Guattari make the provocative comment which Haraway finds particularly distasteful: anyone who like likes cats or dogs is a fool (265). This is indeed a startling statement (!), but taking this comment out of context, Haraway risks giving the impression that Deleuze and Guattari are cruelly dismissive of animals, when in fact they are exposing the

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ways in which animals have been reduced by humans to mere psychoanalytic facades with a daddy, a mommy, a little brother behind them; they are attempting to challenge and complicate our conceptualisation of human/animal relations (265). In Deleuze and Guattaris model, the second kinds of animals are State animalsthose with characteristics or attributes that fit them into divine myths. Finally, there are the more nomadic pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a becoming (265). This third way of approaching the animal is to take into account their own capacity for world-making rather than assimilating them into an anthropocentric arrangement. The emphasis here is on moving away from individuated subjectivity (of humans or animals) and towards affect and movement of collectively emergent, interwoven agencies. In order to explore the full extent of Woolf s fascination for the animal in Flush, I would argue that it is important not to abandon Deleuze and Guattari as the enemy, but to take on board their concerns about Oedipal and symbolic animals, and to ask whether this third kind of animalthe one that provides the line of flight from anthropocentrismis located in Woolf s novel. After all, cannot any animal be treated in all three ways?Even the cat, even the dog (265-266). Even, we might add, Flush. Although Flush spends most of his time in a Victorian domestic setting, and although he is compared by Barrett Browning to the Greek god Pan (F 27; Barrett Browning 188), he ultimately contradicts rather than conforms to the model of an Oedipal or State animal. Instead of settling into the domestic order or mythological associations, Flush plays a central role in Woolf s reimagining of the earthly space shared by humans and animals, where hierarchies are flattened and species boundaries blurred. Take, for example, the description of how the previous domestic order had created a gulf fuelled by hatred between Flush and his human owners, likened to an iron bar corroding and festering and killing all natural life beneath it (49). After the cutting of sharp knives and painful surgery, the iron has been excised and what results is a kind of material-semiotic alliance between Flush and Miss Barrett, the fleshly reconceptualisation of human/dog relations: Now the blood ran once more; the nerves shot and tingled; flesh formed; Nature rejoiced, as in spring. Flush heard the birds sing again; he felt the leaves growing on the trees; as he lay on the sofa at Miss Barretts feet, glory and delight coursed through his veins. He was with them, not against them, now; their hopes, their wishes, their desires were his (49). Whilst this passage could be read as an example of anthropomorphism, of human appropriation of the dog, Woolf s use of free indirect discourse encompasses a more collective, connected arrangement. Indeed, Flushs singularisation is here intermingled with the birds and trees, as well as a pair of human feetwhich had earlier signalled the so-called gulf and hierarchical order as he sat on the rug at Miss Barretts feet (18). But rather than simply being another example of where dogs, as Haraway puts it, are [p]artners in the crime of human evolution (Companion Species 5), Flush moves towards Deleuzian becoming which prefers the term involution and which is not so much about descent and filiation as it is about alliance and transveral communications: to involve, they clarify in A Thousand Plateaus, is to form a block that runs its own line between the terms in play and beneath assignable relations (263). The alliance formed between Miss Barrett and Flush forms a shared becoming-other that involves human and animal at the same time as working between these terms and beneath species characteristics.

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From this point in the novel onwards, even at moments when the human/animal divide appears to be re-inscribed, the potential for lines of flight from the anthropocentric order is emphasised. For example, the traumatic incident when Flush is captured and taken to Whitechapel leads to a discussion of Wimpole street and its dangers, and Miss Barretts resistance to the dominant viewpoint that they should not save Flush: For her it was madness. So they told her. Her brothers, her sisters, all came round her threatening her, dissuading herBut she stood her ground. At last they realised the extent of her folly. Whatever the risk might be they must give way to her (F 66). The dognapping of Flush throws doubts upon the solidity even of Wimpole street itself, undermining its apparent solidity and security as the hub of Victorian civilisation (51). Woolf ironically uses the moment where the human most obviously and cruelly exerts its power over the animal in order to illuminate human failings; that there is no natural, fixed order of things. After Flush is led out into the open air and returned to Wimpole Street, it is a setting that now exposes the myth of itself as the safe and untouchable haven of civilisation: The old gods of the bedroomthe bookcase, the wardrobe, the bustsseemed to have lost their substance. This room was no longer the whole world; it was only a shelter (67). We are told that everything was different and that [e]verything in the room seemed to be aware of change (69). Miss Barrett and Flush are closer now having somehow found a line of flight from the illusion of human superiority: They had been parted; now they were together. Indeed they had never been so much akin. Every start she gave, every movement she made, passed through him too (68). This all leads to a more literal fleeing, as Flush and his companion escape to Italy leaving tyrants and dog-stealers behind them. Both Flush and Miss Barrett had changed (75), and Flush had revised his code accordingly so that this new conception of canine society (and note the mixing of canine and society, of nature and culture), is one where dogs are more liberated: Where was must now? Where were chains now? Where were park-keepers and truncheons? Gone, with the dog-stealers and Kennel Clubs and Spaniel Clubs of a corrupt aristocracy! (77). We learn that Flush was the friend of all the world now. All dogs were his brothers. He had no need of a chain in this new world; he had no need of protection (77). This reads like an earlier canine version of Woolf s famous statement in Three Guineas concerning womens role as members of an Outsiders Society of having no country and wanting no country: As a woman my country is the whole world (TG 313). Ultimately, Flush too seems to fit better with an Outsiders Society as opposed to the Spaniel Club; it may well be true that on one level Flush acts as an allegory for, as Woolf puts it in A Room of Ones Own, the dogs chance women writers have been given in patriarchal culture (AROO 141), but I would also like to suggest that Flush offers a specifically nonanthropocentric vision of such an Outsiders Societywhat I term in my title an Animalous Society. In her excellent article on Flush, Anna Snaith has commented that it is a text whose supposed anomalousness has often caused it to be read out of contextor not to be read at all (615). Arguing that this novel is not so anomalous after all, Snaiths reading makes an important and convincing case for taking the text seriously as part of Woolf s anti-fascist writing of the 1930s (632). Focusing more directly on the question of the animal, however, I am suggesting that it is precisely the anomalous status of Woolf s canine protagonist that enables us to explore a more fluid and nonanthropocentric

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relation between species. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattaris definition of the anomalous has much in common with their understanding of an Outsiderthe anomalous is a phenomenon of bordering that is distinct from the abnormal which can be defined only in terms of characteristics, specific or generic (269). We are therefore reminded of the opening to Woolf s novel, when Woolf lays out the etymology of the word Spaniel, dog of Hispania which derives from the Basque word espana, signifying an edge or boundary (5).4 My neologismAnimalous Societyimplies that the anomalous and animal in Woolf s text are coextensive; Flush, as a dog who would meet with the approval of the Spaniel Club (10) but also becoming with, and becoming-animal-with, his human companions, should not be seen as simply an exceptional individual within the confines of his role as the family animal or pet (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 269), but as transforming human/animal relations and becoming nomadic even within his domestic arena. Taking account of the anomalous in Flush is not then a question of the abnormal and rejected or normal and included, nor is it about anomalies within a group; instead it is the creation of gaps in the divide, and the invitation to trespass those divides, between inside and outside, culture and nature, registered and unregistered. Notes
1. 2. For an example of such knotted human and nonhuman figures in Between the Acts (1941) see Goldman, When Dogs Will Become Men (186). Rosi Braidotti has suggested that what is shared between Haraway and Deleuze is a deep alliance in presenting theories which are materialist and neo-literal, and therefore not limited to the textual and resolutely not metaphorical: Haraway shares with Deleuze two key features: serious neo-foundational materialism on the one hand and a rigorous theory of relationality on the other (200). Later in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari allude to Woolf s thin dogwhich she actually takes from Katherine Mansfields journal (E4 447; see also Goldman, Ce chien 53-54)to exemplify the symbiotic relations formed between the different elements that combine in an event or haecceity: Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be read without a pause: the animal-stalksat-five-oclock [] Five oclock is this animal! This animal is this place! The thin dog is running down the road, this dog is the road, cries Virginia Woolf. That is how we need to feel (290). For more on Flush and the origin of Spaniels see Dubino 2011.

3.

4.

Works Cited
Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology. Theory Culture Society 23 (2006): 197-208. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. Flush or Faunus. 1850. Selected Poems. Ed. Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor. Ontario: Broadview, 2009. Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1991. Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. . A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004. Dubino, Jeanne. Evolution, History, and Flush; or, The Origin of Spaniels. Virginia Woolf and the Natural World: Selected Papers from the Twentieth International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2011. 143-150.

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Goldman, Jane. Ce chien est moi: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog. Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007): 49-86. .When Dogs Will Become Men: Melancholia, Canine Allegories, and Theriocephalous Figures in Woolf s Urban Contact Zones. Woolf and the City: Selected Papers from the Nineteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Elizabeth F Evans and Sarah E. Cornish. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2010. 180-188. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003. . When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. McHugh, Susan. Queer (and) Animal Theories. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15 (2009): 153169. Peach, Linden. Editing Flush and Woolf s Editing in Flush. Ed. Eleanor McNees and Sara Veglahn. Woolf Editing/Editing Woolf: Selected Papers from the Eighteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2009. 201-205. Smith, Craig. Across the Widest Gulf: Nonhuman Subjectivity in Virginia Woolf s Flush. Twentieth Century Literature 48:3 (2002): 348-361. Snaith, Anna. Of Fanciers, Footnotes, and Fascism: Virginia Woolf s Flush. Modern Fiction Studies 48:3 (2002): 614-636. Squier, Susan Merrill. Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1985. Vanita, Ruth. Love Unspeakable: The Uses of Allusion in Flush. Themes and Variations: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Vera Neverow-Turk and Mark Hussey. New York: Pace UP, 1993: 248-257. Woolf, Virginia. The Dog. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (2nd Edition). Ed. Susan Dick. London: Harcourt, 1989. 334-335. . Flush. 1933. Ed. Kate Flint. Oxford: OUP, 1998. . A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas. 1929; 1938. Oxford: OUP, 1998. . The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Andrew McNeillie (vols. 1-4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5-6). London: The Hogarth Press, 1986-2011. Wylie, Dan. The Anthropomorphic Ethic: Fiction and the Animal Mind in Virginia Woolf s Flush and Barbara Gowdys The White Bone. Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 9:2 (2002): 115-131.

ECOLOGY, IDENTITY AND ESCHATOLOGY: CROSSING THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY IN WOOLF by Sam Wiseman
The real Hardy countryis that border country so many of us have been living in: between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and an experience of change. (Williams, The Country and the City 197)

owerfully drawn to both rural and urban environments, Virginia Woolf is in many ways the quintessential peripatetic English modernist. Her thoughtful analyses of the psychic impacts of places reveal ideas about the country and the city that challenge common assumptions, such as the idea that the urban necessarily represents culture and enclosure, while the rural is the home of a bucolic, idealized Nature. She suggests that the cosmopolitan, transient dynamics of modernity provoke a crisis of English national identity, problematizing notions of authenticity and belonging, exclusion and borders. In this paper, I will argue that for Woolf, the crisis engendered by this artificial urban-rural dualism should be viewed not as a symptom of a perniciously fragmented and alienated modern consciousness, but rather as indicative of an emerging broader understanding of our relationship with the environment and nonhuman animals. In exploring these ideas, Woolf employs eschatological imagery: the ultimate destruction of human civilization, she suggests, is a possibility that perpetually haunts modernity. Yet what is ultimately gestured towards is not so much a post-human world, as one in which the boundaries between human and nonhuman are challenged.

I
Woolf repeatedly voices an insistent craving for a specific sense of wildness in her letters and diaries;1 she is drawn to the transgressive possibilities of urban life, and aligns it with a sense of escaping cultural boundaries more commonly associated with rural wilderness. An essay like Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1927) implicitly challenges the notion that the rural environment provides a sense of freedom which the urban cannot; or, to put the point more broadly, that rural and urban spaces stimulate different clusters of emotions which do not overlap or mingle. We should note, as Hermione Lee remarks, that her urban novels are arguably the most pastoral city novels ever written (421); and, as Lawrence Buell states, that Mrs Dalloway might be classed as a rare example of what he calls urban bioregional imagination (86). Conversely, Woolf s final novel Between the Acts (1941), an eccentric and playful account of a rural English pageant set shortly before the Second World War, challenges associations of the countryside with tameness and reclusiveness. Instead, as Helen Southworth notes, the novel locates a strange and savage quality within the English countryside and village life (206). The latter, for Woolf, cannot be unproblematically understood as a haven from a supposedly claustrophobic and restraining urban world. Woolf s response to the crisis of national identity provoked by modernisms cosmopolitan character is thus

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to encourage a focus on how cosmopolitanism filters our understandings of the English environment, and to challenge existing conceptualizations that locate Englishness exclusively within the countryside. What ties Woolf s analyses of place together is her resolute determination to transgress artificial boundaries, be they ontological or literal. Southworth argues that her conception of the rural world in Between the Acts derives, in part, from [t]he presence of a nomadic, foreign figure at the centre of the work, Miss La Trobe (206). Moreover, notes Southworth, several of the central characters of Between the Acts are also associated with a kind of nomadism, most prominently Mrs Swithin, Isa Oliver, and William Dodge. Woolf identifies the rural landscape of England not as an organized, controlled space which can be understood as a mesh of private property relations and collections of rooted, regional attachments, but rather as a zone open to constant exploration and reassessment. The region of Between the Acts is, significantly, indeterminatewe are told that it is land merely, no land in particularbut in its dynamism and movement, its refusal to accept borders both literal and metaphorical, it chimes with Raymond Williams Hardy country. Woolf s novel intuitively identifies this border country, and suggests it is key to a new understanding of the relationship between English landscape and identity. The socio-cultural crises of modernity, and the impending threat of war, provoke the need for this re-examination. Joanna Tapp Pierce has noted that Woolf can be aligned with female contemporaries such as Elizabeth Bowen and Sylvia Townsend Warner in her recognition of the radical liminal potential of spaces that cannot be easily understood in terms of an oversimplified city/country binary. This kind of liminal potential is evident in the setting of Between the Acts, insofar as its inhabitants cannot be reduced to either rural or urban dwellers, and particularly given the emphasis on nomadic transgression of borders. Woolf draws our attention to the affinities and interconnections that exist between the rural and urban spheres. In doing so, she anticipates the work of cultural theorists like Williams, who argues that rural social structures can be traced to the same essential drives as those associated with cities and modernity: the expansion of capitalist property relations (Country 50). Woolf attempts to reclaim the urban and rural environments from reductive understandings, and illuminate the complexity of their relation. Thus, in Between the Acts, the unexpected arrival at Pointz Hall of Mrs Manresa and a companion reminds Isa, Lucy and Bartholomew that the rural world is not a separate social universe to that of the city: Utterly impossible was it, even in the heart of the country, to be alone? That was the shock.If it was painful, it was essential. There must be society. Coming out of the library it was painful, but pleasant to run slap into Mrs Manresa and an unknown young man with tow-coloured hair and a twisted face. No escape was possible; meeting was inevitable. Uninvited, unexpected, droppers-in, lured off the high road by the very same instinct that caused the sheep and the cows to desire propinquity, they had come (34). Far from the countryside offering a refuge from the constraints of society and culture, Woolf emphasizes their inescapable presence there. Indeed, she suggests, social interactions seem to derive from the same kind of natural logic, the very same instinct, that underlies animal behaviour. The inclination to socialize emerges as one of the various ways in which behavioural and experiential similarities between human and nonhuman animals undermine notions of their supposed absolute ontological separateness in

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the novel. If human social activity stems, in some ways, from the same kinds of instincts or inclinations as animal behaviour, then any clear separation between culture and nature is undermined.2 As Jed Esty notes, Woolf describes forms of culture so rooted in the local ecology that they ring in echoes with the singing birds and the lowing cows (102). The complex character of rural life is also brought out by Woolf s use of the ambiguous phrase the heart of the country, which could either refer to Pointz Halls literal distance from the city, or suggest that the region of the novel symbolizes a kind of idealized Englishness, the heart of England itself. Esty argues that in Between the Acts Woolf seems interested in trying to reclaim English traditionfrom an imperial Britishness that had appropriated the national past (90). The novel therefore represents an attempt to draw attention to the pre-war crisis of English national identity, challenging existing patriotic tropes, and gestures towards possible new ways of understanding that identity.

II
It is in Woolf s urban writings that her critique of a reductive, dualistic understanding of the relation between countryside and city, and her challenge to the drive to impose boundaries upon either realm, is most thorough and penetrating. In this respect Woolf can be aligned with more general modernist trends, evident in Lawrence and Joyce (among others), which associate the urban experience with a kind of wildness and vitality. This constitutes the appropriation of tropes previously associated with the rural. Hence, as Miroslav Beker argues, in Mrs Dalloway (1925) London has a somewhat similar effect on Clarissa Dalloway that nature had on Wordsworth. For Clarissa, London has a profound meaning, a fascination that is not fully explicable in rational terms, amounting to a mystical communion with the locale (376). This kind of experience of the city as a wild or liminal zone is perhaps most effectively explored in Street Haunting. Here, sensations and language typically associated with organicism and the natural emerge in a nomadic drive around nighttime London: How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darknesshigh among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow lightwindows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low starslamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is only a London square (178). As Rebecca Solnit points out, the tone of this essay indicates a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude an observers state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened (186). It also explores, in different senses, the experience of transgression, since cities make walking into true travel: danger, exile, discovery, transformation, wrap all around ones home and come right up to the doorstep (188). As a woman, Woolf consciously challenges the accepted behavioural boundaries of her society in her nighttime wanderings.3 Her social transgression stimulates and mirrors the experience of wildness, the discovery within the urban of sensations and phenomena normally associated with the rural. Through a close attentiveness to the phenomenological experience of urban walking, and a conscious interrogation of the ways in which culture tends towards the enclosure and regulation of urban experience, Woolf reveals the permeability of the supposed urban-rural boundary. In the novels, urban experience often functions to undermine a culturally-constructed sense of self. Insofar as it works to defamiliarize us, forces us to attend anew to our engagements with the physical world, Woolf suggests that it may in fact do so more

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effectively than rural life. Hence the often-quoted passage towards the end of Orlando (1928), which highlights the ways in which the quintessentially modern experience of driving through a city challenges the unity of the self: After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have existed at the present moment (212). Williams draws upon this passage to illustrate a continuing tendency within literature to separate urban from rural experience, since it closes with Orlando entering the countryside, at which her mind regained the illusion of holding things within itself (212). As Williams reads the passage, the discontinuity and atomism of the city are experienced as a form of perception, one which raises problems of identity that are characteristically resolved on arrival in the country (Country 241). Woolf s point, however, is surely not so much that the problems are resolvedsince they reflect an inescapable truth about the nature of human personalitybut merely that rural experience makes it easier to ignore them. Her returning sensation of her mind holding things within itself is, we are told, an illusion. What the passage therefore suggests is that what Williams calls metropolitan perception facilitates a more sophisticated understanding of the fragmentary, interdependent character of self. We might see projects like Between the Acts, works of cosmopolitan modernists engaging in what Jed Esty calls the nativist turn in the interwar period, as a series of attempts to apply such insights to the English landscape. As Solnit notes, Street Haunting, like Orlando, is also concerned with the problem of the confining oppression of ones own identity, and identifies urban walking as a means of escaping this (187). Woolf explores the psychic effects of being surrounded by so many different consciousnesses: Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men? (187). We find here the striking and unexpected usage of natural imagery to describe a quintessentially urban experience, and the suggestion that that experience promotes a sense of animality, of our fellow men as wild beasts. Both examples imply that urban experience cannot be easily disentangled from rural. Moreover, they suggest that modernity, by stimulating new ways of understanding our relation to the world and others, and by challenging the notion of the bounded and narrowly human self, is conducive to a renewed attentiveness to those experiences and landscapes commonly considered natural. This can be most clearly brought out with recourse to Williams point that advanced capitalism leads to relations between humans and the world that are extremely active, diverse, self-conscious, and in effect continuous (Ideas of Nature 83). What this suggests is that the emergence of the kinds of urban experience that are evident in Woolf s work reflects a specific potential of modernity, to reveal the actual interrelation of human and nonhuman matter. Woolf s emphasis on the nomadic transgression of walking, with its refusal to acknowledge artificially imposed boundaries, is central to this. Not only do we thus become inescapably aware of the ways in which the inanimate world influences our

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activity; we also come to see previously occluded affinities with nonhuman animals, since the notion of a distinctively human autonomy that is somehow separate from the physical influence of the external world is undermined. The modernist cosmopolitan experience therefore stimulates a more sophisticated understanding of the character of materiality, as well as its interrelation with human activity. Such an understanding is of value whether applied to urban or rural landscapes. Woolf hints at this kind of intuition in her explorations of animality and fragmentation within the urban context, and recognizes that such experiences imply a challenge to the assertion of borders both within and between the urban and rural worlds. Woolf s sense of the city as a wild, liminal space, one that promotes a sense of animality and diminishes awareness of regulated cultural boundaries, is linked to her explorations of prehistory and barbarism. In the modern city, the purported apex of Western culture, Woolf finds herself drawn towards imaginative engagement with worlds in which human civilization does not yet exist. This interest in reimagining the urban landscape as a site of the prehistoric and primitive is explored most thoroughly in Between the Acts. Early in the text, we learn that Lucy Swithin is reading H.G. Wells An Outline of History: [She] had spent the hours between three and five thinking of rhododendron forests in Piccadilly; when the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all one; populated, she understood, by elephant-bodied, sealnecked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters; the iguanadon, the mammoth, and the mastodon; from whom presumably, she thought, jerking the window open, we descend. It took her five seconds in actual time, in mind time ever so much longer, to separate Grace herself, with blue china on a tray, from the leather-covered grunting monster who was about, as the door opened, to demolish a whole tree in the green steaming undergrowth of the primeval forest. (8) The contemplative, playful tone here is characteristic of the novel, which tentatively examines the contingency and precariousness of Western civilization without offering unambiguous judgements on its value. The apparent closeness of the prehistoric world Lucy imagines implies a paradox: that it is precisely when civilization and progress most confidently assert themselves that their fragility and contingency become most apparent. Woolf highlights the absurd hubris of the idea that by constructing cities we build eternally impregnable citadels. The setting of Between the Acts is overshadowed by the imminent onset of the Second World War; as Hilary Newman argues, this partly explains Woolf s suggestion that all people retain something of their primitive ancestors, which could at any time erupt to submerge civilization and reduce humanity to a state of chaos and a resurgence of barbarism (23). The novels position on this possibility is ambiguous, but such passages can be said to perform a similar function to the explorations of animality found throughout the novel: that is, they do not call for an abandonment of human culture, but rather for a renewed and broader understanding of it, one that acknowledges our animality and evolutionary history. As the novel closes, Woolf evokes the notion that Western civilization masks a latent barbarism once again. At the days end, the married couple Giles and Isa find themselves

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alone together: Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night.The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke. (197) The reference to Conrads Heart of Darkness evokes the threat of a descent into nihilistic chaos that hangs over much of the novel, as does the recurrent imagery of prehistoric humanity. These themes are linked to animality, the dog fox and the vixen. However, as Southworth notes, we should not read this as a simple metaphor for a clash between civilization on the one hand, and the apocalyptic threat of the coming war on the other (211). Woolf identifies a latent violence underlying domestic life, but suggests that this needs to be acknowledged rather than attacked. As war threatens, it becomes more important than ever to develop a fuller conception of humanity and its relationship with the world: to recognize our ontological connections to nonhuman animals, and the interdependence of culture and the nonhuman world. Crucial to the development of such recognition, Woolf suggests, is language. With the last words of the novel, [t]hey spoke, we sense that verbal communication is key to the negotiation of the savage landscape that Giles and Isa confront, both domestically and nationally. These insights underpin Woolf s exploration of the possibility of communication, verbal and otherwise, between the human and nonhuman. In Woolf s fiction we therefore find a playful reappropriation of eschatological imagery. This, she suggests, can contribute to the development of a broader understanding of the human. Ultimately, these crises of modernity might represent opportunities to develop a more sustainable mode of being in the world, one which challenges an overly simplistic and dualistic view of the relationship between English culture and environment. Notes
1. 2. 3. For an insightful recent discussion of wildness in Woolf s writing see Allen 65-84. Using Donna Haraways terms, we might call this crossing of nature and culture naturecultures (Haraway 16). For more on Woolf and walking see Rachel Bowlbys classic essay Walking, Women and Writing (191-219).

Works Cited
Allen, Judith. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Beker, Miroslav. London as a Principle of Structure in Mrs Dalloway. Modern Fiction Studies 18.3 (Autumn 1972): 375385. Bowlby, Rachel. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

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Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Oxford: Princeton UP, 2004. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996. Newman, Hilary. Continuity and Destruction in Between the Acts. Virginia Woolf Bulletin 3 (January 2000): 2125. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso, 2006. Southworth, Helen. Virginia Woolf s Wild England: George Borrow, Autoethnography, and Between the Acts. Studies in the Novel 39.2 (Summer 2007): 196215. Tapp Pierce, Joanna. Placing Modernism: The Fictional Ecologies of Virginia Woolf, Winifred Holtby, and Elizabeth Bowen. Ph.D. thesis: University of South Carolina, 2000. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. . Ideas of Nature. Culture and Materialism. London: Verso, 2005. 6785. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. . Orlando. London: Penguin, 1993. . Street Haunting: A London Adventure. Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 177-187.

PLEASE HELP ME! VIRGINIA WOOLF, VIOLA TREE, AND THE HOGARTH PRESS1 by Diane F. Gillespie
n the turbulent mid-1960s, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote a personal cry for Help!, the title song for both movie and sound-track album. The Beatles, suddenly famous, describe a life changed in oh so many ways. Their way of dealing with lost self-confidence and a need for affirmation was to sing rhyming stanzas to an upbeat tempo. If they had written a line like Help me if you can during the 1930s, an advice column called Can I Help you? in Londons Sunday Dispatch2 might have echoed reassuringly. For eight years, hundreds of people dealt with their social insecurity by writing letters to its author, Viola Tree (1884-1938). In the spring of 1937, Tree brought the Woolfs a manuscript that quoted or referred to several letters from her column and bore the same title. Virginia, although she continued to read certain submissions, had been less involved with everyday work at the Hogarth Press (Willis 369-70). She pitched in, however, after their managers sudden death left them short-handed (Marder 224). Along with Leonard, therefore, she had a hands-on relationship with Can I Help You? until its publication in the fall of 1937. During this time of escalating totalitarian sentiment on the continent and her nephew Julian Bells death in Spain in July of 1937, however, Virginia Woolf was contemplating help and advice on a larger scale. She was drafting her own Can I Help You? book of letters and replies, published in 1938 as Three Guineas. A number of Woolf scholars have treated overlapping topics related to social behavior.3 Closest to my topic, however, is an insightful 2008 article by David Dwan who discusses manners, especially in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), in the context of philosophical skepticism. In the face of meaningless flux and incoherent identities, he says, social rituals are usefulso long as they are recognized as fiction and do not harden into dogma (Dwan 261, 263). Viola Trees Can I Help You? offers a parallel context for Woolf s challenges to conventional values and rules of etiquette, one that also affirms manners as an evolving art form helpful, at best, in fostering harmonious human relationships in lives well lived.

I. her vulgarity is not vulgar V. Woolf

Viola Tree was the eldest of three daughters of famous actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853-1917) and actress Helen Maud Tree (1858-1937).4 For a time, Viola pursued an operatic career, but she was known primarily as a stage actress. Effervescent and multi-faceted, Tree intrigued Virginia Woolf. 5 Their largely business relationship supports new research, like Helen Southworths recent essay collection, that emphasizes the involvement of Hogarth Press in a variety of modernist cultural discussions. Viola Trees Can I Help You? reflects a personal experience of social change, or, as her father wrote in a 1913 essay, of a time when the barbed wire fences separating classes are being relegated

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to the limbo of the human scrap-heap (H. B. Tree 4). Like Virginia, Viola was the daughter of a prominent, educated man. As such, her declarations about modern and democratic impulses in society were tempered by her awareness of pressures to conform to a traditional feminine role. Also like Virginia, Violas view of conventional social behavior was an evolving mixture of qualified respect and spirited resistance. That the Woolfs should offer a self-help book on manners by a stage celebrity6 has not escaped criticism. It is an easy genre to mock, and there are some, then and now, who judge a publication entirely by its appearance or author. Did the Hogarth Press imprint on such a book violate both professional and personal standards, as some have implied? It is true that, in 1924, Virginia Woolf had penned a satirical review of the Nonesuch Presss Weekend Book, a prettily printed My Father and I in Richard II. little collection of poetry and games and songs and Very Tired After a Dress-Rehearsal from Castles in the Air: A Story of My recipes and quips and cranks, suitable, she says, to Singing Days (1926). Photo by F.W. hand to ones hostess in return for a candlestick (E3 Burford. 414). Yet, as J. H. Willis also notes, the Hogarth Press went ahead and published, presumably without blushing or laughing (379), what seems to be its own pretty little book, elegantly illustrated by Trees daughter Virginia Parsons, and subtitled Your MannersMenusAmusementsFriendsCharadesMake-Ups TravelCallingChildrenLove Affairs.7 Willis attributes this implied publishing faux pas to Trees being an old friend whose memoir, Castles in the Air: A Story of My Singing Days, the Woolfs had published in 1926 (369). On that earlier occasion, Vita SackvilleWest, a relatively new Hogarth author herself,8 had reprimanded Virginia in a letter: And oh, dear, idolized Virginia that you are, how could you publish Viola? It makes me vomit. I dont like you to sell your soul (Letters 126).9

Title page and frontispiece by Virginia Parsons for Viola Trees Can I Help You? (1937).

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Whether Vita was jealous, teasing, or genuinely dyspeptic, Virginia fired back a seemingly contradictory defense of author and book, one that also helps to explain the later publication of Trees Can I Help You?. You are utterly wrong about Viola, Virginia wrote. After pointing out that memoirs arent poems, she added, Dont you see her vulgarity is not vulgar, her irreticence is not unashamed: an aromashe aims at that: life: fact: not the thing we go for, she added tactfully, but I cant make you understand: try reading as if you were catching a swarm of bees; not hunting down one dart[-]like dragon fly (L3 268). Virginia also assumed that the aristocratic Vita, however unconventional herself, was attacking Viola personally. Although Vita did not use the word vulgar, it was a common criticism of women who displayed themselves publicly on-stage. In Can I Help You?, in fact, Viola remembers a dressing-room visit from Vita, with Harold Nicolson, after a performance. We dont know what makes you so good, Vita said on that occasion, your pausesor your knees. Viola archly makes the best of it, That was lovely, puzzling praise, she writes (Can 166). Remembering how, in her youth, a stage career was thought a deterrent to marriage for the socially ambitious (Can 11), Viola quotes the society hostess who said to her openly, You cant float about on a wire as Ariel with no petticoats and appear at a ball half an hour later in white satin (Can 22).10 According to social historians, vulgar was the criticism most feared by the rising middle class (Wildeblood 39), hence multiple editions of hefty etiquette bibles by authorities like Emily Post in America and Lady Troubridge in England.11 Vulgarity was not just common or crude behavior; it was also inappropriate flaunting of wealth, fashionable dress, or social connections (Wildeblood 39-40). Tree may have been pretentious, but she was too complex and self-aware for simple either-or judgments. In her person and in her writing, she reflected long-standing ideals, if not of modesty, at least of honest self-criticism and consideration for others (Wildeblood 40). She also had wit; common sense intelligence; sensitivity and kindness; and the ability to live intensely, learn from, and describe her experiences. Some of Viola Trees rich aroma emerges in a sketch Virginia wrote in 1926 after Viola visited to consult about her memoir: She is a flamboyant creature, much of an actress much abused by the Waleys & Marjories;12 but rather taking to me. She has, Virginia continues, the great egotismwhich any bodily display, I think, produces, and she easily reverts to the topic of her own charms.she runs on, in the best of clothes, easy & familiar, but, Woolf adds, reserved too; with the wiles & warinesses of a woman of the world, half sordid half splendid, not quite at her ease with us, yet glad of a room where she can tell her stories, of listeners to whom she is new & strange. Even though she will run on by the hour, Woolf adds, Tree is very watchful not to bore. Finally, her charm disguises the fact that she is a good business woman of considerable acuteness (D3 86, emphases mine).13 The General Strike of 1926 slowed sales of Trees memoir, yet one reviewer called it delightful, with the occasional gift of tart epigram (Birrell 212). The major reservation concerned quotations from candid letters she wrote to her fianc, Alan Parsons.14 Most reviewers conclude, however, that if she doesnt care about people reading the letters (New Statesman 171), and her fianc doesnt, why should anybody else? (Saturday Review 159). The TLS reviewer thinks the book may be indiscreet, but it is honourably exempt from any of the faults of a section of the public who, rightly or wrongly, think their intimate affairs of acute interest to everyone else (314, emphasis mine). In other words, Trees voluble lack of reserve is disarming because, as Woolf says with her double negative, it is not unashamed (L3 268).15

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II. Am I a Snob? V. Woolf

A decade later, in early December 1936, Virginia read her neither entirely vulgar nor unashamed essay Am I a Snob? to the Memoir Club (D5 26 n1). Here she focuses, not on her youthful tea-table training or the social failures that frustrated her conventional step-brother (MOB 150, 154-7), but on her adult forays into society. Among many types of snobbery, she concludes that her own is the wish to impress by always flourishing a title or an honour inother peoples faces (MOB 206). She is, she admits, a coronet snob, a lit up drawing room snob, and a social festivity snob (MOB 210).16 Aristocratic hostesses invite her to their parties because she is a well known writer. This notice feeds her vanity, but she remains anxious about how she will appear and comport herself, not as a writer, but as a woman (MOB 208; 211-12).17 Woolf s self-mocking analysis of her own pretentions, and candor about her social insecurities certainly prepared her to appreciate Viola Trees Can I Help You? when she thrust (Virginias word) her manuscript upon the Woolfs a few months later (L6 111). In the course of considerable business-like discussion in the correspondence (now at the University of Reading), the Woolfs suggested cuts but encouraged Trees amusing stories and unabashed personal comments. They also accepted her suggestion of an arguably pretentious but effective marketing strategy. They not only turned Trees uninhibited name-dropping into an index of selected names, but even included a boxed excerpt on the draft order form.18 Tree begins Can I Help You? by defending herself against two potential criticisms: 1) that she is a snob and 2) that she is no authority on manners. Her defense is not uncritical. Tree describes her coming out in society as a young, marriageable woman under appraisal by parents of marriageable men. She wonders if it would have been better had she not dipped into social life, dinner parties, time-wasting luncheons, extravagant clothes, opera boxes since, she writes, all the young mens mother[s] looked down their noses at me; and that made me a little dissatisfied with thecloistered devotion to duty of the stage. It also made me, she adds, what unworldly people have often called snobbish (Can 1112). She defines her snobbery as a love of Lords and Ladies, not for their titles, but for what they have to give and for their beautiful manners and beautiful manors reflecting generations of traditionthat everybodyseeks unconsciously to imitate (Can 12).19 Tree suggests that pleasing behavior, conventional or more democratic, can benefit all social classes, increase beauty in life, and foster confidence, fair play, and kindness both on social occasions and in the home. Although she loves compliments on her own best manners (Can 14) and on, for example, her posture in contrast to that of the modern girl who is backed like a camel, or indeed like a whale (Can 185), she identifies with humblish people (Can 86). As Woolf might say, Trees pride is not unhumble. She admits that her family considers her rude and tactless, a decline in manners she attributes first to a busy stage career that gave her no leisure, no method and a terrifying optimism, and then to marriage, motherhood, and limited finances (Can 15, 23-4). Still, she insists she can give advice on etiquette because she was nicely brought up by parents who were born hosts (Can 1617; 21-2); because, for five decades she has mixed with all worlds, and loved them all (Can 18; 24-5) and because, for eight years, she has penned her advice column (Can 25). Viola Tree has produced not just an advice book but also another memoir, a buzz of personal observations of social mores from before and after her singing career. She confides

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in her reader, italicizes for emphasis, and expresses opinions on everything from the general awfulness of bridesmaids dresses (Can 129) to the common sense of eating hot food when served rather than waiting for a whole table to begin (Can 34-5). Tree also creates entertaining examples of ineffective and effective invitations, announcements, and speeches, as well as humorous little dramatic scenes in the present tense. Yet, in spite of all the headings, the book seems loosely constructed because, as Tree explains, digression is the apple of mine eye (Can 28, cf 25). Two chapters exemplify the tone of Can I Help You?. Manners to Children emphasizes parents behavior, not (as is more usual) childrens. Parsons pretty, but lifeless illustration, Children at Ease with Dog, reinforces her mothers point that children should have petsTree even includes a sub-section called Some Instances of Bad Manners to Dogs (Can 101)but it does not communicate the lively humor of her advice or honesty about her own lapses (Can 91-3). Above all, she says, oddly in contrast to the bored-looking children in the illustration, childhood should be reChildren at Ease with Dog by Virginia membered as a happy time (Can 99-100). In the final chapter, A Lovers Good-Bye, Parsons for Viola Trees Can I Help You? Tree says that both women and men must have the courage and good manners necessary to make clean breaks with ill-suited people (Can 247-8). Although she advises lovers not to feel the difference in class since barriers are breaking every day, she creates a story about the two people in the picture, a traveling salesman and a rich, spoiled schoolgirl who were obviously too many miles apart (Can 248, 252). Trees conclusion to this chapter applies to the whole book: good manners or fine behavior are meant to avoid giving pain to others (Can 252).

III. She could transmit something into words. V. Woolf

Viola Tree, with her stage career and life writing, put on the body Shakespeares sister has so A Lovers Good-Bye by Virginia Paroften laid down (AROO 118). Then, in November sons for Viola Trees Can I Help You? of 1938, a year following the publication of Can I Help You?, Tree died suddenly of pleurisy. Noting in her final diary sketch that Viola was two years younger, Virginia Woolf recalls the quality of her skin: like an apricot; a few amber coloured hairs. Eyes blistered with paint underneath. A huge Goddess woman, who was also an old drudge;.Last time I saw hershe was in her abundant expansive mood. I never reached any other; yet always liked

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her. Met her perhaps once a year, about her books. Virginia now recalls tea in Woburn Sq. with Viola: the butter was wrapped in a newspaper. And there was an Italian double bed in the drawing room. She was instinctive; & had the charm of good actress manners; & their Bohemianism, & sentimentality. But I think was a sterling spontaneous mother & daughter; not ambitious; a great hand at life; I suppose harassed for money; & extravagant; & very bold; & courageousa maker of picturesque surroundings. So strong & large, that she should have lived to be 80. Viola, Virginia adds, could transmit something into words (D5 187). We can imagine Virginia Woolf reading Can I Help You? and relating it both to her own public and private experiences and to those of her fictional characters.20 As she was helping with Can I Help You?, however, Woolf was researching and writing Three Guineas, her own advice book, published by the Hogarth Press in the year Viola Tree died. Three Guineas is about private and public behavior, about not giving pain to others, on domestic, national, and international scales. Woolf createsand links to each otherletters requesting help to prevent war, to rebuild a womens college, and to enable women to enter the professions.21 Without making exaggerated claims for Trees Can I Help You?, I think it appealed to Woolf in part because she valued candid glimpses of womens lives, and in part because, as she had insisted in A Room of Ones Own, what happens in a drawing-room is just as important as what happens on a battle-field (77). Also, Trees book anticipates the sort of education Woolf says in Three Guineas is needed to teach everyday ways of peace to a competitive society sliding again towards war (TG 33). The draft order form quotes reviewers who highlight Trees personality, calling her a helpful, wise, witty, kind, and amusing darling. It is Harold Nicolson, however, who says Can I Help You? is not so much about etiquette as it is an illustration of the best way to live. 22 If Tree realized that some of her flights of fancy may cause the elect to laugh in their sleeves (Can 12), Woolf realized that, in Three Guineas, she risked both laughter and derision (e.g. L6 229; 239).23 One of her fancies is an experimental college, new college, poor college that would help to prevent war by including arts that can be taught cheaply and practiced by poor people (TG 33-34) and by using books and paintings that are new and always changing (TG 34). Instead of the arts of dominatingof ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital, its teaching would include the everyday arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other peoples lives and minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them (TG 34). These two Hogarth Press publications, Viola Trees Can I Help You? and Virginia Woolf s Three Guineas, are, on the surface, an odd pairing. Although she does not grapple intellectually with the kinds of large issues Woolf raises, Tree demystifies and undermines hierarchical rituals with her personal, humorous touch. We can imagine that the good livers and good thinkers Woolf sought to teach in her imaginary college (TG 33-4) would welcome Trees Can I Help You?. It is a reassuring, common-sense, and helpful book on the arts of everyday behavior, in and beyond the home, by a complex woman Woolf considered a great hand at life (D5 187). Notes
1. My thanks to David Higham Associates, Jean Rose of Random House Group, and Nancy Fulford for

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2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

access to the Hogarth Press papers in Special Collections at the University of Reading Library; and to Trevor Bond and Jeff Kuure of Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections (MASC) at the Washington State University (WSU) Libraries where Leonard and Virginia Woolf s personal library is housed. Although I have been unable to locate copyright information for F. W. Burford, I wish especially to thank Georgia Tennant, Jo Tennant, and Silvy McQuiston for permission to reproduce their mothers illustrations for Viola Trees book. Founded as the Weekly Dispatch in 1801, it became the popular Sunday Dispatch in 1928; it stopped publication in 1961. Among them are studies of Woolf s treatments of class distinctions (e.g., Zwerdling, Rosenfeld, Adolph, Johnston, and Fernald); country or aristocratic houses and their occupants (e.g., Schroder and Rudikoff); and social rituals (e.g., Simpson and Minow-Pinkney). Viola Tree was educated at the Academy of Dramatic Art and the Royal College of Music. The other well-known Tree daughter was Iris (1897-1968), a poet, actress, and artists model. Max Beerbohm (18721956), essayist and caricaturist, was their uncle. In 1920, Viola contributed to Max Beerbohms edition of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Trees memoirs. She also managed theatres, directed and wrote plays, and published on various topics in newspapers and for Vogue. She had several minor film roles in the 1920s and 1930s. The copy remaining in the Woolf s library (MASC, WSU) has Travellers copy penciled in on the cover above the title. Even those who know the Hogarth Press well are surprised by Adventures in Investing by Securitas (1936); Diet and High Blood Pressure, by Dr. I. Harris (1937); and Viola Trees Can I Help You? (Porter 7). The Hogarth Presss two detective novels by C. H. B. Kitchin (1929; 1934) initially seemed a similar anomaly (Gillespie, Virginia). The Presss Religion category in catalogues of the 1920s and 1930s also at first seemed uncharacteristic (Gillespie, Woolfs). Trees 1926 book is among the Woolfs in MASC at WSU, as are Sackville-Wests Seducers in Ecuador (1924) and Passenger to Teheran (1926). For Virginias other comments on, and contacts with, Viola Tree, see L3: 143, 245, 251, 318; SackvilleWest, Letters 122-3; Sackville-West, Vita and Harold 147. Tree played Ariel in Shakespeares The Tempest in 1904. In 1937, Posts large Etiquette appeared in a revised edition after twenty-five reprintings of the 1922 edition by Funk & Wagnalls. Tree herself directs readers to Troubridges Book of Etiquette: The Complete Standard Work of Reference on Social Usage, also much reprinted after its initial 1913 publication. Arthur Waley (1889-1966) published translations of Japanese and Chinese texts. Marjorie Thomson or Joad (c. 1900-1931) worked for the Hogarth Press from 1923 to 1925. In the Press correspondence (University of Reading) about Trees memoir, Castles in the Air, Leonard writes the letters but consistently summarizes and defers to Virginias advice. Viola Tree had married drama critic Alan Parsons (1889-1933) in 1912. One of two sons, David Tree (1915-2009), followed in the family theatrical tradition. Their daughter, Virginia (1917-2003), who studied at the Slade and illustrated Can I Help You?, married into the nobility. As an example of self-awareness, Tree notes, If I have a good quality, it is not being ashamed of making a fool of myself, and there is ample evidence of it in this story (Castles 12-13). Beerbohm Tree offers a whole list of kinds of snobbery (20). Minow-Pinkney provides a recent discussion of Woolf s ambivalence about the famous social hostesses of the day (233; 236). Hogarth Papers (University of Reading). In Between the Acts, Miss LaTrobes megaphone echoes Trees juxtaposition of manor and manner (187). Woolf is most interested in her characters silent reactions to social expectations. Tree, for example, notes in a footnote that second helpings are not really the highest good manners, but admits that she herself is most guilty (Can 210). Like Mrs. Ramsay, Tree would have forgiven Mr. Carmichael, silently condemned by Mr. Ramsay for a second helping of soup in To the Lighthouse. Variations of the word help recur, as Woolf insists that educated mens daughters can helpto prevent war (TG 11) only by describing the world as they see it (e.g. TG 58). Hogarth Papers (University of Reading). Vita Sackville-West charged Woolf with misleading arguments (L6 243); Q. D. Leavis charged her with dangerous assumptions,preposterous claims andnasty attitudes. I thought I should raise their hackles, poor old strumpets, Woolf writes of the Cambridge ladies (L6 271 and n1).

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Works Cited
Adolph, Andrea. Luncheon at The Leaning Tower: Consumption and Class in Virginia Woolf s Between the Acts. Womens Studies 34 (2005): 439-59. Birrell, Francis. Review of Viola Trees Castles in the Air. Nation and Athenaeum 39, 29 May 1926. 212. Dwan, David. Woolf, Scepticism and Manners. Textual Practice 22.2 (2008): 249-68. Fernald, Anne E. Class Distinctions. Virginia Woolf Miscellany 42 (Spring 1994): 3. Gillespie, Diane F. Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and the Detective Novel. The South Carolina Review 35.2 (Spring 2003): 36-48. . Woolfs in Sheeps Clothing: The Hogarth Press and Religion. Leonard & Virginia Woolf: The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. Ed. Helen Southworth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. 74-99. Johnston, Georgia. Class Performance in Between the Acts: Audiences for Miss La Trobe and Mrs. Manresa. Woolf Studies Annual 3 (1997): 61-75. Marder, Herbert. The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf s Last Years. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1989. Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and Entertaining. The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Ed. Maggie Humm. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. 227-44. Porter, David. Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press: Riding a Great Horse. London: Cecil Woolf, 2004. Review of Viola Trees Castles in the Air. TLS, 29 April 1926. 314. . Saturday Review of Literature 3, 2 October 1926. 159. . New Statesman 27, 29 May 1926. 171. Rosenfeld, Natania. Links Into Fences: The Subtext of Class Division in Mrs. Dalloway. LIT 9 (2001): 139-60. Rudikoff, Sonya. Ancestral Houses: Virginia Woolf and the Aristocracy. Palo Alto, CA: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1999. Sackville-West, Vita. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: William Morrow, 1985. . Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1992. Schroder, Leena Korre. The Lovely Wreckage of the Past: Virginia Woolf and the English Country House. English 55 (Autumn 2006): 255-80. Shaffer, Brian W. Civilization in Bloomsbury: Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway and Bells Theory of Civilization.Journal of Modern Literature 29. 1 (Summer 1994): 73-87. Simpson, Kathryn. Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Southworth, Helen, ed. Leonard & Virginia Woolf: The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm. Our Betters: A Medley of Considered Indiscretions. Thoughts and After-Thoughts. London: Cassell and Co., 1913. 3-35. Tree, Viola. Can I Help You? Your MannersMenusAmusementsFriendsCharacesMake-UpsTravel CallingChildrenLove Affairs. London: Hogarth Press, 1937. . Castles in the Air: A Story of My Singing Days. London: Hogarth Press; New York: George H. Doran, 1926. Wildeblood, Joan and Peter Brinson. The Polite World: A Guide to English Manners and Deportment from the Thirteenth to the Nineteenth Century. London: OUP, 1965. Willis, J. H. Jr. Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41. Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia, 1992. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. 1941. San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969. . Collected Essays. New York and London: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967. . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984. . The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Andrew McNeillie (vols. 1-4) and Stuart N. Clark (vols. 5-6). London: The Hogarth Press, 1986-2010. . The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-1980. . Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. 2nd ed. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanivich, 1985. . A Room of Ones Own. 1929. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957. . Three Guineas. 1938. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966. Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1986.

AM I A SNOB? WELL, SORT OF: SOCIALISM, ADVOCACY, AND DISGUST IN WOOLFS ECONOMIC WRITING by Madelyn Detloff
his paper is dedicated to a childhood friend, Maria Fleuette de Guzman, who died unexpectedly June 2 at the age of 45. Although we grew up with very similar abilities and similar life beginnings, her path diverged from mine, minutely at first, but with each divergent path opening up different opportunities and leading to significantly different lives, class statuses, respect accorded to us, and bodily health by the time we both turned 45 last summer. Theorists of complexity call such dramatically different outcomes despite only minute differences in initial conditions the butterfly effect after the discovery by Edward Lorenz that minute divergences in initial weather conditions can lead to drastic differences in the weather as it unfoldsa butterfly flapping its wings in China, the saying goes, can cause a hurricane in Miami days later (Mlodinow 194). The butterfly effect on a lifetime means that a chance encounter with a mentor, or a future partner, or a cop at the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time, can precipitate a headwind, or a tailwind, or a hurricane that changes the course of a life if we examine it in hindsight. Hindsight, as Leonard Mlodinow argues in The Drunkards Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, tricks us into imagining portents when there are at the moment of an events occurrence, only probabilities (196). In 1965, no one could have predicted that the life trajectory of my friend as it would appear in hindsight to her survivors in 2011. Clearly ones life path is not completely subject to the random accident of birth or the frivolous whims of chance. Our actions and decisions do have consequences, as I am fond of reiterating to my students. If I finish college (or dont), if I get married (or dont), if I join the army (or dont)certain options open up to me as a result of those actions, and other options close. But the train of causality indicated by that series of if-then situations is not completely in our controlnot fully protected from contingency by our will, our talent, or our hard work: touch on any of the above ifs and hundreds of little baby ifs seem to scurry out from under it like a spider sac bursting open: if I can afford college, if I can get into college, if am not forbidden entry to college because of my citizenship status, or (if I am male in the U.S.) I consent to register for the selective service, or (if I am female in Woolf s time) I find a university willing to confer degrees upon women, if I remain healthy, if the economy doesnt collapse, if ad infinitum. There are a lot more ifs involved in the marriage and army scenarios, ones survivability in either situation foremost among them, but perhaps we should leave that discussion for the pub tonight. As Mlodinow suggests in his discussion of the impact of randomness on our lives, we are predisposed to see our experiences through the lens of causality rather than chance, because causality aligns with a sense of deservingness and our need to find life rational as well as purposeful: We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation. Thats why, although there is sometimes little difference in ability between a wildly successful

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person and one who is not as successful, there is usually a big difference in how they are viewed (212). There, but for the accident of chance, go I. But apparently that secularized version of the clich is hard to swallow. Mlodinow explains that we tend to preserve our sense of deservingness by projecting it onto victims of misfortune, as if victims must have brought misfortune upon themselves. Mlodinow cites the work of social psychologist Melvin J. Lerner to illustrate his point. In 1966, Lerner and C. H. Simmons conducted a study of Observers Reactions to the Innocent Victim, where college students were recruited to participate in a supposed study of learning methods. One person in the group (who was really a plant working for the researchers) was chosen to be the learner or, in the studys design, the victim of undeserved cruelty. The study participants were told that she was to receive electric shocks for each answer she got wrong. Lerner and Simmons found that, although at first outraged by the treatment the victim apparently received, the observers soon began to disparage the victim, as if she somehow deserved the painful shocks she was apparently receiving. Thirty years later Lerner and Leonard Montada revisited the findings of the study describing it as arising out of: efforts to explain why scientifically trained university students insisted on condemning poverty stricken victims as lazy and no good while denying the evidence of their victimization by overwhelming economic changes. The explanation offered for that seemingly motivated resistance was that people, for the sake of their security and ability to plan for the future, need to believe they live in an essentially just world where they can get what they deserve, at least in the long run. It was further reasoned that being confronted with innocent victims of undeserved suffering poses a threat to this fundamental belief, and as a consequence, people naturally develop and employ ways of defending it. This may involve acting to eliminate injustices. But failing that, by blaming, rejecting, or avoiding the victim or having faith that the victim will eventually be appropriately compensated, people are able to maintain their confidence in the justness of the world in which they must live and work for their future security. (1) The belief in a just world, in other words, can actually perpetuate injustice and suffering by rationalizing it. But, you may say, what do variances in the weather, or belief in a just world, or the divergent life trajectories of you and your childhood friend, have to do with Woolf, or her socialism, or her snobbery? Let me explain In 1928 Woolf wrote one of the most irritating lines in literary criticism: For genius like Shakespeares is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born to-day among the working classes (AROO 48). If you have ever taught A Room of Ones Own in a room with any students who hail from the working classes, you are no doubt well aware of the lines irritating effects: irritating because of the seemingly flippant eruption of Woolfs own class bias in the text, but also irritating because those fighting words get under our skin, if we are reading A Room of Ones Own attentively. What are the material conditions that allow creativity to flourish and realize itself as a fully formed cultural production? What are the effects of intellectual

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malnourishment among those who do not have the material advantages of those who can afford to study, not to mention dine, at Oxbridge? (AROO 57). And these are questions that still should get under our skin in these days of ever more corporatized and privatized education. That irritating contradictory Woolf who displays simultaneously class bias and an acute understanding of the links between ideology, education, and material wherewithal, appears in her later work as well. On the intellectual level, Woolf is often very precise about the links between money, power, and social value. In Three Guineas, for example, she exposes the hypocrisy of a capitalist State that correlates the salary a person commands with his social worth while refusing to acknowledge the unpaid labor performed by women: Is the work of a mother, of a wife, of a daughter, worth nothing to the nation in solid cash?It seems incredible, yet it seems undeniable. Among all those offices there is no such office as a mothers; among all those salaries there is no such salary as a mothers. The work of an archbishop is worth 15,000 a year to the State; the work of a judge is worth 5,000 a year; the work of a permanent secretary is worth 3,000 a year; the work of an army captain, of a sea captain, of a sergeant of dragoons, of a policeman, of a postmanall these works are worth paying out of the taxes, but wives and mothers and daughters who work all day and every day, without whose work the State would collapse and fall to pieces, without whose work your sons, sir, would cease to exist, are paid nothing whatever. Can it be possible? (TG 54) Analyzing the atmosphere (we might call it ideology) that distorts masculinist societys estimation of the value of womens labor, Woolf is quick to point out its irrationality, describing it as an odor, an aroma, a flavor: atmosphere is one one of the most powerful, partly because it is one of the most impalpable, of the enemies with which the daughters of educated men have to fight (TG 52). Describing the impalpable atmosphere so viscerally, Woolf implies that the undervaluing of womens labor has much more to do with affect than it has to do with reasoned judgment. Womens presence in the workplace seems to disgust and offend men the word Mrs. is described as a contaminated word; and obscene word that is rank and stink[s] in the nostrils of Whitehall (TG 52). While many of us have commented on the affect of shame in Woolf s life and work, less has been said of how what Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank call shames sister affect disgustoperates in her writing. Notable exceptions are Alison Lights study of Woolf s relationship with her servants, which analyzes at length the feelings of disgust Woolf associates with close proximity with the working classes or with the help, especially her cook, Nellie Boxall, and Maren Linetts analysis of Woolf s anti-Semitism as evidenced by the Jew in the Bathtub scene in The Years. (Kathryn Simpson, in her essay in this volume, and Leena Kore Schrder also link Woolf s anti-Semitism to abjection, which is similar to disgust, although more of a psychoanalytic term than an affect theory term, and for purposes of this discussion I want to keep them separate.) Woolf also expresses disgust in reaction to a journalist who encroaches on her privacy, calling him a bug down from London to come & steal in & take notes (D5 73). Together with the palpable disgust that Woolf displays in her writing towards her servants, or towards the Jew in the bathtub in The Years, Woolf s eruptions of disgust seem to be

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precipitated by real or imagined encroachments of privacy. The Jew is a neighbor whose ablutions can be heard through the thin walls of Sarahs rented room. Nellie, as Light notes, would be in close proximity with Woolf because the duties of her job as a domestic necessitated a kind of encroachment on privacy: Yes, survivals like old Sophy, could be eulogized or patronized, embodying those older connections from which one had safely and guiltily distanced oneself. Alternately, the housemaid might be a harbinger, the conventional symbol, sweeping away the mess of the past. Yet those actual young women in ones kitchen, younger than their mistress, with their own unruly interiors, there in the flesh and doing the dirty work, they were far more troubling. One would never really have a room of ones own whilst they were in and out. (83 italics in original) If shame makes, according to Sedgwick, a double movement toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality, exerting a kind of contagious/repulsive force on those who witness or experience shame, then disgust is a turning away, a refusal to identify or relate (Sedgwick 37). Ben Highmore, in his reading of George Orwells Road to Wigan Pier, describes how the pedagogy of disgust constructs a schism between the working classes and the upper classes: It is the pedagogy of disgust that is such an elemental figure in Orwells work and provides a more effective class investment than the mere ideological beliefs that are usually associated with social class: It may not greatly matter if the average middle-class person is brought up to believe that the working classes are ignorant, lazy, drunken, boorish, and dishonest; it is when he is brought up to believe that they are dirty that the harm is done (130). Could it be possible that Woolf, who had such illuminating insights about how the British educational system produced violence prone, possession loving, competition driven, woman distaining subjects, could have been blind to the pedagogy of disgust and its enforcement of class division? Perhaps. Probably. However, Woolf s own work suggests that she had some self-awareness about her elitist inconsistencies. When she asked, Am I a snob? in her memoir club speech of Dec. 1, 1936, she was poking fun of her propensity to admire the social rank and apparent lack of self-consciousness of the aristocracy: The snob is a flutter-brained, hare-brained creature so little satisfied with his or her own standing that in order to consolidate it he or she is always flourishing a title or an honour in other peoples faces so that they may believe, and help him to believe what he does not really believethat he is somehow a person of importance. This is a symptom that I recognize in my own case. (MOB 206) On the one hand, Woolfs self-ironization helps her to situate herself in relation to the arbitrariness (indeed the falsity) of claims of class privilege. The snob is not a person of importance, although s/he attempts, foolishly, to impress people into thinking that s/he is. And the coroneted person to whom the snob grovels is not, according to the evidence supplied in Woolfs essay, worthy of admiration. The possession of a coronet is completely a matter of accident of birth, uncoupled from deservingness. Lady Sybil Colefax, simply put, behaves badly and gets away with it because she is a rich woman from an aristocratic family. In this

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sense, Woolf rejects the belief in a just world, which would encourage one to rationalize inequity by maintaining that the poor deserve to be poor, the colonized deserve to be colonized, the rich and privileged deserve to be privileged. Other explanations need to be proffered in order to understand gross injustices, which may explain Woolfs socialism, her feminism, her anti-imperialism. That is, Woolf at least attempts to locate her own privilegein her very specific self-positioning in Three Guineas as a part of the educated class that can expect maids to cook dinner and wash up after dinner (TG 4); or (as Paula Maggio and Alison Light both note) in Woolfs conscious self-positioning in her preface to Margaret Llewelyn Davies collection of working womens stories, Life as We have Known It (Maggio; Light 20304). In that preface, Woolf describes herself as a spectator, however benevolent, to the narratives of the working class women of the Cooperative Guild: If every reform they demand was granted this very instant, it would not touch one hair of my comfortable capitalistic head. Hence my interest is merely altruistic. It is thin spread and moon coloured. There is no life blood or urgency about it. However hard I clap my hands or stamp my feet there is a hollowness in the sound which betrays me. I am a benevolent spectator (xix). Woolf marks her distance from working class women not from an affective motive, but rather from what we might call an ethical one that refuses to rationalize the inequities that leave her comfortable capitalistic head untouched by the struggle of the women of the Cooperative Guild. To be untouched is not necessarily to be unmoved. In fact, recognizing ones good fortune not to be so touched is an admission that all things are not equal or fair. While this may not be wholly satisfying, it at least accounts for Woolf s apparent contradictoriness her elitism as well as her fierce advocacy for victims of unjust systems. The world is not just. We must work to make it so. Admitting that we dont always get what we deserve is a small, but consequential part of that work. Works Cited
Highmore, Ben. Bitter After Taste. Melissa Gregg; Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 2010: 118-137. Kore-Schrder, Leena. Tales of Abjection and Miscegenation: Virginia Woolf s and Leonard Woolf s Jewish Stories. Twentieth-Century Literature 49. 3 (2003): 298-327. Lerner, Melvin J. and Simmons, C. H. Observers Reaction to the Innocent Victim: Compassion or Rejection? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4.2 (1966). Light, Alison. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Linett, Maren. The Jew in the Bath: Imperiled Imagination in Woolf s The Years. Modern Fiction Studies 48.2 (2002): 341-359. Maggio, Paula. What does Virginia say about working class women? Blogging Woolf. Feb. 27, 2009. http:// bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/workingclass/. Mlodinow, Leonard. The Drunkards Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. Montada, Leo and Lerner, Melvin J. (eds.). Responses to Victimization and Belief in a Just World. New York: Plenum Press, 1998. Sedgwick, Eve, and Adam Frank, Eds. Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Thompkins Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Woolf, Virginia, Am I a Snob. Moments of Being. 2nd edition. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979-1985. . Introductory Letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies. Life as We Have Known It. Ed. Margaret Llewelyn Davies. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975. . Three Guineas. 1938. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966.

COME BUY, COME BUY: WOOLFS CONTRADICTORY RELATIONSHIP TO THE MARKETPLACE by Kathryn Simpson
arlier views of Woolf as an elitist author detached from the workings of the literary marketplace have been challenged and complicated more recently by a critical focus on Woolf s engagement with the commercial world.1 Far from being wary of being sullied by contact with the market, Woolf is now recognised as an artist intent on marketing her wares: as a writer and publisher she is seen to manipulate, exploit and, as Jennifer Wicke argues, shape the market and our understanding of it (Mrs Dalloway 5). However, this active engagement with the market is in tension with, and contradicted by, the strong distaste for popularity and commercial success which remained a significant factor influencing Woolf s publishing decisions and her fictional representations of money-making success. One of Woolf s most controversial storiesThe Duchess and the Jeweller (published in Harpers Bazaar in 1938)proves a rich site for exploring these contradictions, especially given Woolf s position in this particular historical moment of the late 1930s as a writer at the peak of her fame but increasingly critical of the commercial world.2 Always ambivalent about making money from her writing, by the late 1930s Woolf s more typically critical and contradictory attitude to the literary marketplace had become more antagonistic and her hatred of what, in Three Guineas, she called intellectual harlotry (TG 114) had become increasingly fierce. Whist she struck out (in essays, such as Reviewing 1939) against the increasing commercialisation of literature and the commodification of art, however, she continued to utilise her business acumen in her negotiations over fees paid for her fiction throughout the 1930s. The Duchess and the Jeweller was a story for which, taking Vanessa Bells advice, she insisted on being paid in advance (L6 157, 159, 191). Many critics have examined Woolf s anti-Jewish prejudice in this story and elsewhere in relation to what Hermione Lee calls the habitual, half-conscious anti-Semitism of her circle (680). However the troubling anti-Semitism of The Duchess and the Jeweller is framed and analysed, there is no question that Oliver Bacon embodies a number of negative Jewish stereotypes: his insatiable greed, social climbing, conspicuous consumption and success in the commercial world as a jeweller, alongside his physical attributes of an elephantine nose and swaying gait serve as intractable bodily markers that work to mitigate gentile fears of assimilation and passing. What becomes clear however is that, as Maren Tova Linett remarks, Jewish characters in modernist works are not ordinary, or simply stereotyped, European Jews, but instead are saturated with meaning (2). It seems that Woolf s offensive depiction of her Jewish jeweller speaks not only of her revulsion at the commercial world he so successfully epitomises, but also of her own powerfully felt unease about her own role in this world. As Karen Leick remarks, Woolf s anti-Semitic characterisations of Jews consistently appear in works where she was most consciously concerned with her mainstream reception and the income she might earn as a result of her success (161). This is particularly pertinent in the late 1930s context in which Woolf

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was revising and publishing her story, a context in which, as Three Guineas makes clear, she perceived monstrous forces at work with an intensified capitalist ethos provoking insatiable desires to possess, to acquire and to control. Money is both the material manifestation and symbolic representation of this destructive greed, enslaving those who acquire it, corrupting creative and intellectual life, and impoverishing spiritual and moral values. However, Oliver Bacons optimistic and opportunistic entrepreneurialism also resonates with John Maynard Keyness endorsement of animal spirits, the emotional aspect of economic decision-making that he saw as necessary to keep the economy buoyant. In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), Keynes celebrates such impetus, claiming that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectationanimal spirits [are] a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction [] if the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die (161-2). Such animal spirits are characterised by a nave optimism and confidence, which puts aside the thought of ultimate lossas a healthy man puts aside the expectation of death (Keynes 162). Whilst Keynes is keen to make the point that not all aspects of the economy depend on waves of irrational psychology, he also stresses that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance (162-3). Such optimism is also contagious, boosting consumer confidence as well as spurring on further investment. A falling back on sentiment and chance are clearly pertinent to explaining the decision Oliver makes to accept what he is certain are false pearls in the bargain he strikes with the Duchess. His nave optimism and putting aside of potential losses are also key to the speculative investment he makes in the Duchesss pearls and her daughter. However, the infectiousness of such optimism means that, as Tony Lawson and Hashem Pesaran argue, [t]he individual is subject to the emotion of the herd (51). Although this is desirable for Keynes theory, for Woolf, who was reading Freuds theories of the group around this time, the idea of the herd resonates powerfully with the rise of German fascism. In her story, the jewellers economic animal spirits are not depicted as positively confident and energetic but are, rather, atavistic, bestial and abject as Oliver is said to snuff[ed] for another truffle, a blacker, a bigger further off and snort[s] and neigh[s] (CSF 249, 250). Keynes may himself have characterised Olivers animal spirits in this way given his own anti-Semitic attitudes often focused on what he perceived as the Jewish love of compound interest (qtd. in Reder 836). Woolf also referred to Keynes as dear old Hitler in her diary in the mid 1930s in what Hermione Lee sees as part of a resistance to fear, shame, anger and helplessness in the face of Nazi threat expressed though the minute form of jokes, word-play, inventiveness, but which may also have a more critical import (D5 163; Lee 727). Amongst the many animals Oliver is likened to, his long pointed nails used to rip his letters open and his anticipation of being alone in the woods to seduce the innocent Diana when out riding (a fantasy future which alludes perhaps to Little Red Riding Hood) carry wolfish overtones. Woolf s anti-Semitic bestiary can be seen to speak of both her wariness about the wolfish greed of the commercial world and her own Woolfishly greedy part in it.

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As Leena Kore Schrder argues, money, filthy lucre, knows no boundaries, insinuating itself indiscriminately into high and low, infiltrating the furthest reaches of legitimate and criminal transaction, infecting every social process and institution (304). Money is the agent of disturbance, undermining the demarcations of self and other and making clear that what is held to be foreign to the self is actually within us. The desire for money was not foreign to Woolf or Keynes, but, refusing to acknowledge this, greed is expelled and projected onto the Jewish foreigner and, obviously, plays a central role in anti-Semitic stereotypes and prejudice. However, as Schrder also argues, Woolf s story promises miscegenation and the seeping of one identity into another, proliferating ambiguities at every level. Whilst the anti-Semitism of Woolf s story puts her on the inside of a powerful cultural circle, there are many instances of the disturbance and, indeed, dissolution of boundaries at work which multiply and complicate the contradictions and paradoxes of this story. These contradictions resonate with Woolf s assumption of an outsider identity as a feminist and pacifist in relation to the powerful forces at work in her own social circle and the wider society. To tease out Woolf s insider/outsider position I return to Woolf s de-Jewing of her central character via the change of his Hebraic names to a decidedly unkosher and ostensibly English sounding Oliver Bacon. Oliver is already a border-crossing name in Woolf s fiction, appearing as it does in several of her narratives. Looking back to The Voyage Out, Oliver was the name given to a bottle of crme de menthe, a gift exchanged between Miss Allen and her close woman friend which acted as a talisman to ensure their safe adventuring and the continuation of their erotically suggestive bond. The name also, perhaps more obviously, looks forward to Isa Oliver in Between the Acts, the thwarted poet who, married to a banker on the stock exchange, secretly writes her poetry in a book bound like an account book.3 Oliver then is a name evoking contradictionat once signaling deviance and conformity, homoerotic potential and the constraints of marriage, and also pointing to a connection between writing and moneymaking. In The Voyage Out, Rachels feverish nightmares are haunted by sexually predatory goblin men (perhaps recalling Christina Rosettis Goblin Market4) and her death invites harsh criticism of the symbolic exchange of women as objects. The situation in The Duchess and the Jeweller is less clear-cut and it is a woman, the Duchess, whose greed and illicit behaviour present a match for Olivers avarice and outsider status. The Duchesss uncontrollable greed and perhaps other insatiable desires are articulated via her gambling addiction and this lack of control leads her to take the role of an active and independent agent in a male-dominated sphere. In this she is a transgressive woman: she is both a member of the social elite to which Oliver Bacon craves access and also a deviant border crosser, trespassing on male territory, confessing secrets and dealing illicitly with the jeweller. In her interview with Oliver she uses her excessively elaborate dress and her over-blown and self-consciously performed femininity to charm and persuade him to buy the pearls he is certain are fakes. The display of her wares is both abject and suggestively sexual: she carries the pearls in a long wash-leather pouch which looked like a lean yellow ferret and they emerge in an unnatural birth from a slit in the ferrets bellylike the eggs of some heavenly bird (CSF 251-2, 252). They roll down the slopes of the vast mountain sides that fell between her knees into one narrow valleyThere they lay in the glow of the peach-blossom taffeta. Ten pearls (CSF 252).

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It would seem that the pearls, nestled here in the silky swathes of peach-blossom taffeta are suggestively clitoral and, in keeping with her transgressive behaviour, the Duchess seems to offer both her own and then her daughter, Dianas, sexual favours as part of the bargain she is trying to strike. Indeed, she allows Oliver to stretch[ed] out and t[ake] one of the pearls between finger and thumb. It was round, it was lustrous (CSF 252). That is, he takes the pearl from between her legs. The pearls are said to come from the Appleby cincture, a cincture being a girdle or belt often associated with ecclesiastical clothing, and so concerned with modest dress and covering up. Yet pearls, as we see in the Duchesss performance here, are also part of a sexual displaya contradiction compounded when in answer to Olivers question, How much? the Duchess covered the pearls with her hand (CSF 252).5 The Duchesss fear of her husbands discovery of her gambling, debts and secrets shared with the jeweller is articulated tellingly in an image that speaks of castration of this deviant, phallic woman: the Duke, straight as a poker would cut her off, shut her up down there (CSF 252). Whilst to be cut off is a common phrase to describe being disinherited and removed from economic security and/ or disempowered, to be shutup down there is more unusual, suggesting sexual stifling and imprisonmentliteral and/or metaphoricalbut indicating that the Duchesss illicit dealings are tantamount to criminal acts. However, such a powerful threat does not prohibit the Duchesss avarice and she continues to bargain, forcing through her business proposal20,000 for her fake pearls and the promise of her daughter, Diana, a virginal prize too tempting for Oliver to resist, confirming as it would, his access to the upper echelons of society he most covets. In this transaction he seeks to gain cultural as well as monetary capitalthough the fact that the pearls are rotten at the core may throw a question on the symbolic worth of Diana herself (CSF 253). The filthy lucre then highlights and disrupts the marked boundaries between the Duchess, daughter of a hundred earls and the jeweller from a dark alley in Whitechapel, disturbing assumptions about their relative social positions and making clear the contradictions at the heart of their bond: They were friends, yet enemies; he was master, she was mistress; each cheated the other, each needed the other, each feared the other (CSF 251, 248). In an earlier draft of the story they were also conspirators6 and in the published version the Duchess, with her own false pearls and her plumage, seems to take on the identity of the crowds of Jewesses, beautiful women, with their false pearls, with their false hair that Woolf was forced to remove in order that her story be accepted for publication (Dick 315).7 This slippage of identity in which the Duchess becomes symbolically Jewish (her voice transplanting that of Olivers memory of his mother saying Olivers name), resonates for Woolf herself. Just as Oliver in the story is metaphorically wolfish, there are many biographical instances of Woolf s feeling of being symbolically Jewish too, notably from the mid-1930s. As Leick has suggested, Woolf s marriage to Leonard gave her an accidently Jewish identity, putting her into a precarious outsiders category (172). Woolf s letter to Violet Dickinson outlining the journey she and Leonard are to make through Germany in 1935 suggests that because Leonards nose is so long and hooked, we rather suspect that we shall be flayed alive (L5 385). This horrifically prescient image signals her recognition that as Leonards wife she too would be treated like a Jew. As Britain entered the war, this

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became a fact as both she and Leonard were on the Gestapo Arrest List. Other instances, too, indicate a degree of acceptance of this outsider identity, notably Woolf s response to the destitute young Jewish woman whom she found on her doorstep in March 1936. The woman assumed that Woolf and Leonard were brother and sister and so both Jewish, and Woolf s diary does not record that she corrected this detail (D5 19).8 Lara Trubowitz argues that Woolf s depiction of Oliver draws on the details of Woolf s Jewish acquaintances, notably the Jewish aristocrat, Victor Rothschild, and that she transposes details of Rothschilds home and lifestyle into her story. Trubowitz remarks on the similarity of Woolf s description of Rothschilds library in her diary with its steel bookcase packed with first editions, each sealed in a red morocco case and Olivers steel safes filled with jewels each covered by a pad of deep crimson velvet (D4 228; CSF 250; Trubowitz 291). Although Trubowitz does not explore this point, what seems significant is that in this transposition jewels are synonymous with books, and both are commodities for conspicuous display and investment. This transposition of books and the luxuriously opulent jewels of Olivers hoard not only suggests Woolf s anxiety about the place of books in the marketplace, but also her conflicted feelings about her own role in creating niche markets in which books are not valued and appreciated for their own sake but are prized as modernist investments (as Lawrence Rainey argues). As Leick claims about Woolf s representation of Jews in The Years, the presence of Jews not only reveals, but also causes or is a catalyst for the new and changing marketplace that England has become, implicitly threatening the old order (168). Woolf s successful modernist marketing practices have a similar result, as Wicke, Gordon and others have argued. Further, just as Oliver prostitutes his talent as a skilled jeweller able to recognise a fake but betraying his professional practice in order to satisfy his greedy desires and achieve his social ambition, so too does Woolf, as she seeks to make money and consolidate her reputation on the literary market. The publication history of this story itself clearly resonates with these concerns: Woolf wrote her story for money, adjusted it to suit her customer, and sold out to the fashionable Harpers Bazaar creating a story for ready consumption as a commodity.9 Like Oliver Bacon, she is aware of her own complicity in prostituting her talent and dealing in false pearls and so shoring up a social, political and economic system she finds increasingly despicable and inhuman. That said, the actual amount Woolf made from this story is less than half she was originally offered: in July 1937 Jacques Chambrun offered her $1000 for a story but, following the objection to Woolf s representation of her Jewish character, this amount reduced to $960 in total for The Duchess and the Jeweller plus The Shooting Party (D5 137, n6). Does this mean that she, like Oliver, made a bad deal (her customer in effect getting two for the price of one)? Her diary suggests that she is aware that she anticipated being cheated, as (allegedly) is the Duchess, by a sharper: Woolf accuses Chambrun of being a cheat in racist terms, referring to him as that maroon coloured sharper whom she thinks will somehow wriggle out of the deal (D5 112, 113). Although in a letter to Vanessa Bell she plans to be hard as flint in her dealings with him and is resolved not to put pen to paper without a cheque, her diary indicates that she had begun work on this story over a month before she wrote this to Bell (L6 173, 177; D5 107). It could also be that this reduction in profit reduces her feeling of complicity with commercial practices and so mitigates her anxiety about this commercial transaction (as might her gift of money to Vanessaher due on the storyfor helping

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Woolf to negotiate the payment for her story (L6 191). There is an irony, if not a contradiction, at work in this: if Woolf s anti-Semitic representations of greedy Jews convey her anxiety about making money from her writing, in this case her offensive depiction worked to reduce her profit and, presumably, her anxiety. Woolf s stereotypical representation of Jewish identity seems to resonate with Woolf s personal and political position at this point as well. Like the stereotypical Jew, Woolf feels that she cannot fully assimilate into her contemporary society and context: in her diary she records, Im fundamentally, I think, an outsider (D5 189). She feels she can no longer pass as English when to be English means to be belligerent, patriotic, and adhering to what in Three Guineas she called unreal symbols of pride, patriotism, honour, and loyalty to corrupt institutions (TG 92-6). In her diary in November 1938 she states, How widely I feel outside it all and notes that the publication of Three Guineas had queered the pitch, created or made visible her altered position in terms of her public reputation and her private relations (D5 188-9). Although Oliver and Woolf recognise the revolutionary potential of the materials at their disposalOlivers hoard of diamonds are Gunpowder! enough to blow up Mayfair, and Woolf s hoard of newspaper cuttings and other evidence are enough to blow up St Pauls (CSF 292; D4 77)10 neither achieve this potential. Olivers desires override this disruptive impetus, and Woolf fears that, although her words potentially threaten the social order, war will be inevitable, as the description of Olivers gems[t]ears and [h]earts bloodseems to suggest (CSF 250). At several points in the story, Oliver is said to have dismantled himself, the symbols of his success seemingly instantly stripped away. Each time this is followed by his recounting of his narrative of success and acquisition of the commodities and possessions that shore up the public identity he creates for himself. Not masking her feeling of dismantling so convincingly, Woolf expresses increasing uncertainty about her identity as a writer and as part of Bloomsbury more and more she doubts the efficacy of her words to confirm her pacifist and feminist identity when continually writing against the current which she finds difficult [to] entirely disregard (D5 189). Like Isa Oliver, Woolf may feel her writing is an escape from the real world Isas poetry hidden in an account book making clear that the economic is the real world. But Woolf does directly address the economic reality in Three Guineas and more obliquely in The Duchess and the Jeweller in her attempt to use her influence as a woman and as a writer to abolish the inhumanity, the beastliness, the horror, the folly of war and to attack the money motive and lust for power epitomised by Hitlers increasing power and the question this provokes of [w]hatll he gobble next (TG 96; D5 173). In The Duchess and the Jeweller Woolf utilises the most clichd and derogatory of Jewish stereotypes to reveal not only her own anxiety about her negotiation of the literary marketplace and money-making success, but a fear of a more general complicity in the gobbling greed she saw as insidiously pervading Britain, most notably in the madness of the money motive of all those with power and wealth. In Three Guineas Woolf argued that we are all the figure of the fascist dictator and that fascism is alive and thriving in imperialist, patriarchal Britain;11 in The Duchess and the Jeweller she argues that we are all playing the Jew greedily addicted to money and prepared to enter into risky gambles to increase our hoard, whatever the cost.

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Notes
1. 2. For example see Wicke, Delany, Garrity, Hankins, Caughie, Abbott, Willison, et al, Gordon, and Dubino. Laura Mara Lojo Rodrguez persuasively explores these similar tensions and contradictions in her reading of this story in relation to British Aestheticism. 3. Phyllis Lassner and Trubowitz also note this. 4. This poem in itself is the epitome of irresolvable contradiction (is it a cautionary tale against lust or an immoral story endorsing fleshly delights?) as well as a commodity par excellence, saleable as it is, on multiple and diverse marketsfrom the late Victorian production of illustrated gift editions, to the twentieth editions for children and adults, including its reproduction in Playboy. See Lorraine Janzen Kooistra for further discussion. 5. Kate Henderson also comments on the sexual undercurrent of this interaction and Olivers action of taking a pearl (60). 6. Trubowitz also makes reference to this revision (281). 7. Schrder also comments on this in relation to the miscegenation in Woolf s story (310). 8. Schrder similarly discusses this diary entry (322). 9. Henderson argues similarly that Woolf s story fits neatly into the larger framework of consumption that Harpers Bazaar signifies (53). 10. Lassner and Trubowitz also note this connection. 11. As Woolf states, we cannot dissociate ourselves from that figure [of the fascist dictator], but are ourselves that figure (TG 163).

Works Cited
Abbott, Reginald. What Miss Kilmans Petticoat Means: Virginia Woolf, Shopping, and Spectacle. Modern Fiction Studies 38.1 (Spring 1992): 193 214. Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1991. Delany, Paul. Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Dubino, Jeanne, ed. Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Garrity, Jane. Selling Culture to the Civilized: Bloomsbury, British Vogue, and the Marketing of National Identity. Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999): 29-58. ___. Virginia Woolf, Intellectual Harlotry, and 1920s British Vogue. Virginia Woolf and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Pamela Caughie. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000. 185 218. Gordon, Elizabeth Willson. How Should One Sell a Book? Production Methods, Material Objects and Marketing at the Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf s Bloomsbury, Volume 2. Ed. Lisa Shahriari and Gina Potts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 107-123. Hankins, Leslie Kathleen. Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin Selling Out(Siders). Virginia Woolf and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Pamela Caughie. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000. 3 35. Henderson, Kate. Fashioning Anti-Semitism: Virginia Woolf s The Duchess and the Jeweller and the Readers of Harpers Bazaar. Journal of the Short Story in English 50 (2008): 49-65. Hoberman, Ruth. Collecting, Shopping and Reading: Virginia Woolf s Stories about Objects. Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf s Short Fiction. Ed. Kathryn N. Benzel and Hoberman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 81-98. Janzen Kooistra, Lorraine. Modern Markets for Goblin Market. Victorian Poetry 32. 3-4. (1994): 249-277. Lawson, Tony and Pesaran, Hashem, eds. Keynes Economics: Methodological Issues. London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996. Leick, Karen. Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein: Commerce, Bestsellers and the Jew. Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace. Ed. Jeanne Dubino. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Linett, Maren Tova. Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. Keynes, John Maynard. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 7: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. 1936. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1973. Lassner, Phyllis. The Milk of Our Mothers Kindness has Ceased to Flow: Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, and

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the Representation of the Jew. Between Race and Culture: Representations of the Jew in English and American Literature. Ed. Bryan Cheyette. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. 129-144. Rainey, Lawrence. The Cultural Economy of Modernism. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed Michael Levenson. Cambridge: CUP, 1999. 33-69. Reder, Melvin W. The Anti-Semitism of Some Eminent Economists. History of Political Economy 32.4, (2000). 833-856. Rodrguez, Laura Mara Lojo. Contradiction and Ambivalence: Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetic Experience in The Duchess and the Jeweller. Journal of English Studies 3 (2001-2): 115-129. Schrder, Leene Kore. Tales of Abjection and Miscegenation: Virginia Woolf s and Leonard Woolf s Jewish Stories. Twentieth-Century Literature 49.3 (Fall 2003). 298-327. Trubowitz, Lara. Concealing Leonards Nose: Virginia Woolf, Modernist Antisemitism and The Duchess and the Jeweller. Twentieth-Century Literature 54.3 (2008), 273-298. Wicke, Jennifer. Mrs Dalloway goes to Market: Woolf, Keynes, and Modern Markets. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 28.1 (Fall 1994): 5-23. ___. Coterie Consumption: Bloomsbury, Keynes, and Modernism as Marketing. Marketing Modernisms: Self Promotion, Canonization and Rereading. Ed. Kevin J.H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. 109-32. Willison, Ian, Warwick Gould and Warren Chernaik, eds. Modernist Writers and the Marketplace. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Woolf, Virginia. The Duchess and the Jeweller. 1938. Virginia Woolf: the Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Triad Grafton Books, 1991. 248-53. . Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979-1985. . Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975-1980.

VIRGINIA WOOLF AND DECEMBER 1910: THE QUESTION OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION by Makiko Minow-Pinkney

oolf asked in her diary as she revised the manuscript of Mrs Dalloway (1925) on 13 December 1924: But is it unreal?At issue here is the contradiction between reality and modernist fiction brought to the fore a year and half earlier in Arnold Bennetts critique of the characters of Jacobs Room (1922). His criticism had already prompted Woolfs essay Character in Fiction, in which she famously asserts, on or about December 1910 human character changed (E3 421). Instead of exploring the personal factors which explain why Woolf alighted on that specific date, I want to look here at the wider context of her 1910 statement, going beyond the bounds of Bloomsbury itself in quest of what Woolf calls, in an earlier version of Character in Fiction, a vaguer force at worka force which is sometimes called the Spirit of the Age or the Tendency of the age (E3 504). It is generally accepted that the Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London played its part in Woolf s theory of character change in late 1910. But I want in this essay to venture out into what may initially appear quite unrelated directions; so my question is: to what extent can we regard Henry Parker Mannings compendium, The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained: A Collection of Essays Selected from Those Submitted in the Scientific Americans Prize Competition, which was itself published in 1910, as being a factor in Woolf s mischievous theory of character and cultural transition? Is the mathematical theory of four dimensions the absent term or missing link in our scholarly reconstruction of her thinking about the mutation of character in the year 1910? Since her questions in the Character in Fiction essayBut I ask, myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality? (E3 426)are central to her statement of cultural metamorphosis, I would like here to offer a model of a modernist artist who posed similar questions and for whom mathematics played a major role in his most radical aesthetic thinking. Leo Stein recalls a gathering of avantgarde artists at his home in Paris around 1908-09: There was a friend of the Montmartre crowd, interested in mathematics, who talked about infinities and fourth dimensions, Picasso began to have opinions on what was and what was not real (Stein 75-76). Stein is here referring to the birth of Picassos new ideas about reality which led him towards cubism, whose origins remain even today a matter of much debate. The mathematical friend Stein mentions in his reminiscence was an insurance actuary Maurice Princet. Whether he really introduced four-dimensional geometry to Picasso is not entirely clear; for the artist himself later denied it. The prominent mathematicians who advocated non-Euclidean geometry and higher dimensions in France in that period were Henri Poincar and Esprit Jouffret. However, Jean Metzinger, whose significance as a theoretician for the cubist movement has recently become more evident to us, recalled that he himself had learnt the new geometries under Princets tutelage in 1910 (A Cubism Reader 235). And that crucial Woolfian year 1910 is indeed central here. For Picasso painted the Portrait of Ambroise Vollard in the spring of that year, his Seated Woman with a Book possibly in the summer, and the Portrait of Henry Kahnweiler in the autumn. Some cubist works were

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accepted by the Salon dAutomne in October-November 1910, and more cubist paintings appeared at the Salon des Indpendants, followed by the first general exhibition of cubism at the Indpendants in May 1911, which caused a considerable stir among the broader public. Meantime, Henry Mannings The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained was published in New York. Cubism and fourth-dimensional theory are deeply imbricated with each other. Some contemporary commentators themselves made the connection, such as the American modernist painter Max Weber in an article on The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View in July 1910 (Camera Work 25); and this relationship is above all what Linda Hendersons volume The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art endeavours to establish, meticulously documenting the widespread presence of the now somewhat forgotten concept of the fourth dimension in cultural circles around the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. By demonstrating the similarity between Picassos Portrait of Ambroise Vollard and a textbook illustration of four dimensions by the geometer Esprit Jouffret, Henderson proposes that Picassos new-found inspiration was indeed four-dimensional geometry, and that this constitutes the missing link which explains his radical change of style from Les Demoiselles dAvignon of 1907 which was still in part pursuing nineteenth-century aesthetic goals. The artist and critic Tony Robbin argues that Picasso made another radical conceptual breakthrough with the portrait of Henry Kahnweiler by fully engaging with four-dimensional geometry and that this brought cubism to its full realisation (Robbin 30). But who, then, taught him the geometry of four dimensions? Admitting that there is no firm proof, Robbin argues that it was probably Alice Derain, Princets mistress and subsequently his wife, (and Picassos one-time lover), and his friend Max Jacob, a writer and four-dimensions enthusiast, who visited him in Cadaqus, Spain, in the summer of 1910. The woman of Seated Woman with a Book is, arguably, Alice Derain, and the book itself may be Jouffrets treatise on the fourth dimension. In this startling interpretation of Tony Robbins, Picasso thus graciously thanks Alice for her help and company in his search for the fourth dimension (37). As is well known, radically new hypotheses as to the nature of matter were advanced and many related new discoveries were made around the turn of the century: electromagnetic waves, Rntgens rays, the electron, radium, and subatomic structure. These theories and discoveries which, taken as a whole, made matter seem less solid, porous, even empty, certainly fascinated the wider public; and the fourth spatial dimension was another startling concept that captured the popular imagination between 1880 and 1905. Indeed, according to Henderson, by 1910 it had become a widespread preoccupation among intellectuals, artists and the general public in America and Europe. Henderson asserts that it is the nineteenth-century field of n-dimensional geometry and the concept of a possible fourth spatial dimension that emerged from it in the 1870s that proved crucial to the imagination of twentieth-century artists (The Image 133). My contention is that to recognise this mathematical notion as the intellectual context around 1910 from which modernist art and literature emerged would enrich our understanding not only of Woolf herself but of modernism in general. I am therefore inclined to regard this particular mathematical theory as a necessary background to Woolf s December 1910 remark, and would argue that in the paintings of the Post-Impressionist Exhibition of that year she found something like the fourth dimension in the practical state (to borrow Louis Althussers phrase), i.e., actually embodied in brushstrokes on canvas, whether or not she

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knew of the actual mathematical theorising about it. For the poet and avant-garde theorist Guillaume Apollinaire, four-dimensionallyinspired cubist art meant the final defeat of Impressionism; it metamorphosed that nineteenth-century movement and all the paintings that reacted to it into twentieth-century Modernism. From dissatisfaction with the visual realism of Impressionism, from doubts about the validity of observing and recording an object accurately, what Roger Fry called Post-Impressionism emerged around 1880; but this was of course only one symptom of the wider intellectual crisis of the period. A similar realisation of the inadequacy of human sense-perception began to undercut the foundations of positivism, and scientific method itself started to shift in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Instead of observation, creativity would become the key principle of scientific endeavour. The emphasis would soon be not on experience but on imagination and the formulation of hypotheses. Parallels in the literary field are evident enough in the development from Realisms passive mirroring of external reality to Modernisms creation of forms to present reality actively. The fin-desicle also saw the Symbolist movement, mysticism, occultism, spiritualism and a renewed interest in German Idealism, all of which articulated dissatisfaction with dominant social ideologies and culminated in an impassioned desire for secret meanings occluded from utilitarian everyday life. The notion of the fourth dimension was part of this general intellectual trend to look for hidden truths beyond the visible surface, and it could thus be regarded as a phenomenon in science parallel to the Symbolist movement in literature. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century as disparate individual ideas of mere mathematical curiosity, four-dimensional geometry had advanced rapidly in the second half of the century to become a serious possibility as a description of reality. In the AngloAmerican world it was Charles Howard Hinton who was the most prominent advocate of four-dimensional hyperspace philosophy and the great populariser of the concept. H.G. Wells encountered the notion while attending the Royal College of Science in London between 1884 and 1887, and used the idea in his stories thereby contributing to its diffusion in the wider world; the success of The Time Machine in 1895 encouraged the popular idea of time as the fourth dimension. In France, Poincar and Jouffret energictically advocated the concept, encouraging the belief that the fourth dimension makes a global synthesis of knowledge possible. Interest spread widely both in the scientific community and the general public. Henry Mannings book, The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained, boasted of 245 entries on the topic submitted to his journal, The Scientific American, from all over the world. Charles Hintons The Fourth Dimension was published in 1904 and was reprinted in London five times. This mathematical concept then combined variously with elements in mysticism, theosophy, and occultism in the United States, England and Europe. Linda Henderson even claims that the fascination with the idea had grown so widespread by 1910 that it became almost a household word (The Fourth Dimension 45), and that it served as a realm where people would locate utopian answers to the conundrums which contemporary science failed to address, such as the Platonic Ideal, the Kantian Ding an sich and even Heaven itself, to the point, ultimately, where it functioned as a justification for anything and everything new in the era. When the solar eclipse of 1919 proved Einsteins relativity theories to be valid, the abstract mathematical idea of four dimensions became accepted as the objective reality of physics; and Einsteins theory of a space-time continuum, with time as the fourth

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dimension, took over from the earlier geometrical notion of four dimensions in the public mind. Soon the spatial concept of the fourth dimension disappeared from mainstream cultural memory and went underground, surviving in non-mathematical cultures such as science-fiction writing and mystical literature. Even cubism came to be erroneously ascribed to Einsteins theory, though in fact Einstein was not known to painters in France in the first decade of the twentieth century. There seems to be no explicit mention of the term fourth dimension by Virginia Woolf. However, the relevance of this mathematical notion to her work may be defended partly by her lively curiosity about the ideas, images and vocabularies of physics (Whitworth 127), and also by the surprising number of mathematicians of one kind or another in her novels: Mr Bentley in Mrs Dalloway reflects on Einstein and speculates on mathematics as the sky-writing aeroplane flies overhead; Andrew in To the Lighthouse (1927) has a gift for mathematics so exceptional that even the philosopher Mr Ramsay is deeply impressed by it; Bernard refers to a mathematicians certainty when he questions the grounds of his own being in the holograph of The Waves. But the most pertinent character for my argument here is Katharine Hilbery, the heroine of Night and Day (1919), who longs to be free of her banal middle-class social duties so that she can pursue her mathematical interests. Katherines passion for mathematics is caught up in issues of gender form the start: in her mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature (42), and she prefers the unwomanly nature of the science, its exactitude and the star-like impersonality of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose (42) to which her exceptionally literary family is devoted. Mathematics represents to her a complete emancipation from her present surroundings (42), and thus from the socially prescribed role of the middle-class woman. As we know, Vanessa Bell is the model for the heroine (L2 109), and Katherines antipathy to her familys propensity for phrase-making and the pursuit of emotional exactitude originates from Vanessas silent personality and the non-verbal occupation of painting. Given the fact that Vanessas painting is replaced in the novel by Katherines mathematics, it would appear that the two activities are firmly associated with each other in Woolf s mind. Despite Katherines own initial belief that mathematics and poetry are antithetical, the novel ultimately suggests their underlying shared nature; for both represent a visionary power which frees one from the banality of the social world. In Ralphs reverie, both activities are envisioned as belonging to another world where an ideal is created and shared, a vision flung out in advance of our actual circumstances (512). Mathematics is antithetical only to the kind of literature valued by Katherines father or William Rodney, the function of which is to pour soothing balm over the raw ugliness of human affairs and to provide a form which moulds passion into the sanctioned civilisation (525). Katherines problem (which is also the theme of the novel, as indicated by its title) is how to connect the world of impersonal numbers and wild visions which she can only inhabit secretly at night with her day-time domestic life of overseeing human affairs laden with feelings and emotions; namely, how to connect poetry and prose (mathematics and poetry being perceived as belonging to the same side by the novel if not by the heroine). One cannot help speculating what Katherine herself might make of the notion of the fourth dimension, that unfathomable space where higher reality exists and into which she would be able to step smoothly, erect, without essential change (356), from her daily three-dimensional surroundings. How to connect night and day, the visionary world of

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poetry/mathematics and the mundane world of prose, was also Woolf s own problem as a novelist at the time. From this pressing concern Woolf s modernist aesthetics were to be developed in the years that followed; though Night and Day is not itself a modernist novel, it already contains some typical Woolfian notions such as poetry, impersonal relationships, and the image of life as a globe, all of which become utopian aspirations for the contemporary novel in Woolf s later aesthetic thinking. I therefore propose that by making her heroine a mathematician Woolf has herself given us a strong pointer towards the relevance of the intersection of higher-dimensional mathematics and European avantgarde art in the emergence of her own modernism. In Modern Fiction Woolf calls on the novelist to look within and record a myriad impressions and the incessant shower of innumerable atoms (CE2 106) as they fall and shape themselves. This may make her seem an Impressionist of sorts. However, we should remember that attending to the intimate and the immediate is only one half of the aim of her work. For in all her writing a countervailing desire for true reality and the truth figure repeatedly too; it is, in fact, often just such an epistemological quest for absolute knowledge of the object that motivates both the individual Woolfian text and her writing process itself. Or in Ann Banfields succinct words, Woolf s fiction is an implicit theory of modern knowledge (52). Impressionist technique is necessary only as a method, just as Post-Impressionist painters themselves used Impressionist techniques only insofar as they were locally useful for their more global aesthetic aims. A powerful epistemological urge towards the impersonal and the permanent is also then, albeit paradoxically, a central goal of Woolf s work and modernism in general. For as she affirms later in A Sketch of the Past, behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern (MOB 72). Woolf s phrase here emphasizes the universal structure behind everyday phenomena and thus points in the same direction as Metzingers striking account of Czanne in 1910: Czanne showed us forms living in the reality of light (A Cubism Reader 76). Such paradoxical duality or contradiction, or in Woolfian parlance granite and rainbow, has been at the very heart of modern art since Charles Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern Life defined its task as being a synthesis of contradictory elements, of modernitys transient immediacy and arts eternal universality; and this challenging task continued to be an aesthetic goal for cubist painters. Metzinger praises Picassos resolution of duality in his 1910 review of the Salon dAutomne: the painter has synthesized intelligence and feelings, tactile perception with visual perceptions, and has demonstrated the eternal forms existing behind phenomena as had first been revealed by Czanne. It was, in Metzingers view, by way of free, mobile perspective that Picasso had overcome the dualism and illuminated the object without denying it, thus making it the sensorial and living equivalent of an idea, the total image (A Cubism Reader 76). Woolfs modernist ambition is also to impart to character in the novel a total image from such a free, mobile perspective, thereby setting the character in her higher relation to the world (E3 433, emphasis added), so that Mrs Brown would suggest a complete view of human life< a whole universe > (E3 509) and synthesize [m] yriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas and all sorts of different scenes (E3 425). Or let us take Woolf s famous image of life as a luminous halo or semi-transparent envelope in Modern Fiction. She rejects the series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged, an image which would more easily fit a linear, one-point-perspectival system of representation. Her new, more complex image is both spatial (a halo or an envelope) and

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temporal (from the beginningto the end) and thus would be better dealt with by four-dimensional representation than by conventional three-dimensional means. Existing narrative methods thus become inadequate, making the call for a radical new style and language which can convey a new vision of life urgent. Woolf had to hand the examples of H.G. Wellss fourth dimension-based short stories such as The Remarkable Case of Davidsons Eyes (1895) and The Plattner Story (1896) to see just how limited this rich notion can be when it is treated purely as a matter of literary theme or content; it can clearly only prove aesthetically fruitful when it is a transforming principle of literary form instead. Since Wells fails to go beyond a rudimentary treatment of the mere content of this mathematical concept, he is not surprisingly condemned by Woolf as a materialist. The fourth dimension had been interpreted as a liberating agent by most of its proponents. Hinton believed that with enlarged imaginative powers gained by the practice of visualising the four-dimensional cubes which he called tesseracts, individuals would gain access to true reality. In his review of Hintons book The Fourth Dimension, Bertrand Russell agreed on this point: speculation on the fourth dimension would stimulate the imagination, and free the intellect from the shackles of the actual. Russell believes that emancipation from the real world is vital for complete intellectual liberty; a mind should be able to think as easily of the non-existent as of the existent (Russell 574). One can thus imagine the headily liberating effect of the idea of the fourth dimension, which offered the possibility of discarding anything which had been established as fact and reality. From its perspective, no lawssocial, cultural or aestheticof the so-called real world are fixed or absolute, nor are any models of relationship between genders or generations. There is a certain resonance between Russells remark and Woolf s later expressed beliefs on facts, truth and the non-existent. It would certainly be interesting to know whether he discussed the Hinton book with Virginia Stephen over lunch in London on 12 March 1905, just five months after the publication of his review, or perhaps at one of Ottoline Morrells parties which they both attended at Garsington. By the time Woolf was writing Character in Fiction in 1924, Einsteins theories had been accepted as the objective description of physical reality rather than a purely abstract mathematical theory or fantasy; and his idea of a space-time continuum, which is itself a four-dimensional, non-Euclidian structure, was sweeping away the earlier spatial understanding of the fourth dimension. It would not be surprising if Woolf had retrospectively recognised the first expression of such an epochal shift in the understanding of the fundamentals of our world in the 1910 exhibition. This change in the perception of reality and a radical desire to start fresh, to break away from the conventional moulds of perception, were the common feature of the artists gathered together as Post-Impressionists, who were in fact too diverse to be adequately defined by any single term as Fry himself was well aware (Vision and Design 81). Such painters challenged the dominant conventions of linear one-point perspective and the chiaroscuro modelling techniques which had reigned since the Renaissance to represent reality as three-dimensional and with the human at its centre. Though cubism was not itself represented at the London exhibition, we might regard it as the final aesthetic destination to which the paintings exhibited, particularly those of Czanne, were tending. For Gleizes and Metzinger argue in Du Cubisme, that Anyone who understands Czanne has an inkling of cubism, since between the two there is only difference in intensity (A Cubism Reader 420).

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The importance of Frys 1910 exhibition for Woolf at the time might simply have been the ambience of excitement and hopefulness, giving her much needed confidence in embarking upon her own aesthetic journey. The essential significance of the exhibition, in both artistic and social terms, was indeed in its emancipatory effect; for [t]he PostImpressionist revolution was, as Clive Bell later recalled, to liberate the creative powers of all those young and youngish artists who possessed any powers worth liberating (Old Friends 77). Linda Henderson argues that both non-Euclidian geometry and the fourth dimension were primarily a symbol of liberation for artists (The Fourth Dimension 339); so if British artists and above all Woolf herself did not possess the vocabulary of the fourth dimension, they arguably did not need it, for they had the 1910 exhibition itself, those startling Post-Impressionist canvases which pointed inexorably forward to cubism. The notion of the fourth dimension became so attractive because it amalgamated two cultural dominants at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century: science and the transcendence of surface reality. It gave the Zeitgeist, which was deeply dissatisfied with the materialistic world, a concrete and scientific form in which to express its utopian desire for higher truths. It came to stand, in Apollinaires words, for the aspirations and premonitions of many young artists (14); it was, to borrow Woolf s words, a vaguer force at work directing the Tendency of the Age. Nothing more than historical interest may be attached to it, Apollinaire writes, but then adds that, none the less, this utopian expression should be analyzed and explained (14). If this concept of a higher, unseen fourth dimension of space is indeed, as Linda Henderson claims, [o]ne of the most important stimuli for the imaginations of Modernist artists in the twentieth century (The Images 131), it is because the concept expressed symbolically what the Zeitgeist most desired. Or as Tony Robbin puts it: in 1910, Picasso became the champion of a new culture that was told by science that the essence of things lay in structures that skin hid. Picassos private use of the fourth dimensionspoke to so many, then and now, because it accomplished a goal of the whole culture.Cubism was no vacuous formal improvisation; it rocked Western painting because it offered a new way of seeing space that was considered to be truer to life. Picasso used the technical drawing of four-dimensional geometry to show his audience the reality they knew existed but could not otherwise see. (40) Whether or not the terminology of the fourth dimension was actually used by any particular group, it is from this wider spirit of the epoch, this pervasive utopian desire, that modernist art emerged. We should recall here that towards the end of 1910, that crucial period which Woolf designated later as the moment when human character changed, Virginia Stephen, as she then was, resumed the writing of her very first novel Melymbrosia with renewed enthusiasm and with a new resolution to become a novelist after a prolonged break due to illness. The novels heroine, Rachel, is a young woman who strongly believes in Spirits and the presence of the things that arent there; therefore she wages war against the people who believe in what they see (38). (The heroine of this earlier version of The Voyage Out (1915) is thus already fighting the war in which Woolf would later herself take sides against the materialism of the Edwardians.) On the publication of Orlando in 1928, one contemporary reviewer noted the aptness

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of the concept of the fourth dimension in relation to it. Cleveland Chase pointed out in the New York Times that Woolf used an ancient literary form, allegory, to express her very modern fourth-dimensional concepts, and described the novel as an application to writing of the Einstein theory of relativity (21 Oct. 1928: 7). For Chase the fourth dimension is relativity theory, and both are mainly to do with the element of time, which he takes to be Woolf s preoccupation in Orlando. As I have already noted, after 1920 Einsteins theory turned the term fourth dimension into a synonym for the space-time continuum; and the impact of Einsteinian theory on the modernism of the 1920s and 1930s has been well discussed in previous scholarship. But I have been arguing that the geometrical fourth dimension long preceded this Einsteinian interpretation of the term; and that it was this spatial fourth dimension, or at least the cultural desire symbolised by that concept, which formatively contributed to the emergence of early modernism, generating its utopian and even euphoric impulses. This mathematical vision, I suggest, underpins both Woolf s own fictional innovations and her theory of character change in December 1910. Works Cited
Apollinaire, Guillaume. The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditation. 1913. New York: George Wittenborn, Inc., 1962. Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: CUP, 2000. Bell, Clive. Old Friends. Roger Fry: Anecdotes, for the use of a future biographer, illustrating certain peculiarities of the late Roger Fry. 1937. London: Cecil Woolf, 1997. Chase, Cleveland. Rev. of Orlando by Virginia Woolf. New York Times 21 October 1928. 7. Fry, Roger. Vision & Design. Ed. J.B. Bullen. London: OUP, 1981. Gleizes, Albert and Jean Metzinger. Du Cubisme (1912) in A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 19061914. Eds. Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2008: 417-35. Henderson, Linda Dalrymple Henderson. The Fourth Dimension and Non- Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1983. . The Image and Imagination of the Fourth Dimension in Twentieth- Century Art and Culture. Configurations 17 (2009):131-60. Manning, Henry P. Ed. The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained. New York: Munn & Company. Inc., 1910. (Electronic Text Centre, U of Virginia Library). Metzinger, Jean. Note sur la peinture, Pan (October-November 1910). A Cubism Reader. Eds. Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2008: 49-52. Robbin, Tony. Shadows of Reality: The Fourth dimension in Reality, Cubism, and Modern Thought. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2006. Russell, Bertrand. New Books. Rev. of The Fourth Dimension by Charles Howard Hinton. Mind. Vol. XIII. 1904: 573-74. Stein, Leo. Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose. New York: Crown, 1947. Weber, Max. The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View. Camera Work, 31 July 1910: 25. Whitworth, Michael. Einsteins Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Oxford: OUP, 2001. Woolf, Virginia. Modern Fiction. Collected Essays. Vol. 2. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966. . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2. 1920-1924. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1978. . A Sketch of the Past. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: The Hogarth Press, 1978. . Character in Fiction. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3. 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1987. . Character in Fiction (a transcript of Woolf s draft paper, delivered to the Heretics Society). The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1987. . Night and Day. Oxford: OUP, 1992. . Melymrosia. Ed. with Intro. Louise DeSalvo. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2002.

VIRGINIA WOOLF ON MATHEMATICS: SIGNIFYING OPPOSITION by Jocelyn Rodal

Books, so people say, are an infallible guide to character. Thus we might be worse occupied than in examining the works of Shakespeare, the plays of Ben JonsonMrs Aphra Behns Lyrics (JRHD 159). irginia Woolf penned these words in an early handwritten draft of Jacobs Room (1922), later removing them from the final novel. Dry and slightly sarcastic, at once understated and perversely exaggerated, these lines contemplate literature coolly, sitting at the bottom of a page that is covered in scratch marks and deletions. If we flip over the leaf of the holograph, we come upon something very different: 50 2 53 280[]50 = 14,000 (160). Here, Woolf calculated a word count on the back of her writing.1 The reflection is odd: buried amid Woolf s first experimental novel, opposite a page that muses about the value of literature, we find a blank sheet scratched with arithmetic. These marks are literally, physically reversed: rectoliterature; versomathematics. Across her long writing career, Virginia Woolf depicted mathematics as the contrary of literature, constructing an ongoing opposition between literary ambiguity and mathematical consistency. Her novels reflect on mathematics as though drawn to that which is most different from themselves, and by considering what writing is not, Woolf further pins down what writing really is. Like a shadow that illuminates the self in perfect negative, Woolf s negative depictions of mathematics illuminate the prominent contradictions and ambiguities of her own writing. In the process, Woolf develops a play of opposites which represents rivalries that are inherent in communication generally, fundamental to the division between written symbols and the world they describe. Woolfs simultaneous communication of oppositions within single, common terms ultimately enables a newfound generality. Just before Jacobs Room, Woolf s second novel featured a protagonist who was an aspiring mathematician. In Night and Day (1919), Katharine Hilbery would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose (42). Katharines love of mathematics does not exist in and of itself; instead it is repeatedly, reliably juxtaposed with her dislike of literature, and as Katharine moves toward mathematics and maturity, her desires exist only in oppositional struggle with the arts. Katharine has a heritage to contend with. Her deceased grandfather was a magnificent poet, and her blossoming selfhood is circumscribed by his fame as well as by the exclusively literary attitudes of her prominent Victorian family. Here in the shadow of great poetry, mathematicslike the stray calculations scattered across the backs of pages in Woolf s draftsis an interloper, positioned as an intellectual and physical reversal. Woolf tells us explicitly, in [Katharines] mind mathematics were directly opposed to literature (42).2 The title, Night and Day, describes the divide between practical, mathematical, modern Katharine and her dreamy, literary, Victorian mother. It also more specifically refers to Katharines repressed mathematical longings:

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[S]he would rather have confessed her wildest dreams of hurricane and prairie than the fact that, upstairs, alone in her room, she rose early in the morning or sat up late at night towork at mathematics. No force on earth would have made her confess that. Her actions when thus engaged were furtive and secretive, like those of some nocturnal animal. Steps had only to sound on the staircase, and she slipped her paper between the leaves of a great Greek dictionary which she had purloined from her fathers room for this purpose. It was only at night, indeed, that she felt secure enough from surprise to concentrate her mind to the utmost. (42, ellipsis original) Mathematics is the pursuit of the night, literature that of the day, and the two are poles apart. But this opposition is complicated, like that of a shadow or doppelganger: shadows cannot exist without light, and day would have no name if it were not followed by night. The enduring link between mathematics and literature becomes apparent as Katharine chooses to hide her mathematical dreams textually, deferring them with ellipsis (sat up late at night towork at mathematics) and burying them, quite literally, inside the dictionary. Here written language conceals mathematics, but it also guards mathematics. Moreover, these particular letters communicate mathematics. Higher level mathematics employs letters far more than numerals, and it employs the Greek alphabet especially. Katharine deliberately steals a Greek dictionary to hide and hold her studies, and just as mathematics repurposes Greek letters for its own uses, Katharine is repurposing both lexicon and language. As written pages, Woolf complicatedly pairs literature and mathematics. Night and Days description of Katharines secret studies bears undeniable resemblance to Woolf s later description of Jane Austens efforts in A Room of Ones Own (1929), where we learn that Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper, careful that her occupation should not be suspected (67)exactly as Katharine hides her work under the leaves of a dictionary at the first sound of steps outside. In addition to the secrecy of composition, both descriptions emphasize the physical pages involved, which can be covered to mask their content, or flipped over to alternate between language and calculation. With this parallel in working form, Katharine becomes a twentieth-century heir to Austen. Katharine just exercises her own type of written expression. Night and Day repeatedly metonymizes mathematics with its form, the sacred pages of symbols and figures that Katharine dreams about and endows with great beauty (477). How visibly books of algebraic symbols, pages all speckled with dots and dashes and twisted bars, came before her eyes (314). She cast her mind alternately towards forest paths and starry blossoms, and towards pages of neatly written mathematical signs (224). Emphasizing the visual and tangible aspects of marks on paper, Woolf describes maths written form rather than its intellectual content, and Katharine treasures and romanticizes the material manifestations of her study. This representation emphasizes the written signs that are common to mathematics particularly, but it also defamiliarizes written language generally, using the foreign marks of mathematics to call attention to the intrinsic strangeness of all written symbols. In fact, written sheets exist as strange artifacts throughout Night and Day, because Katharine lives in a house overcrowded with piles of dusty, valuable manuscripts left behind by her famous grandfather. She is his involuntary archivist, examining handwriting, framing

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fragments, and forever handling innumerable pages without caring what they signify. Thus, as marked pages, mathematics parallels literature in Night and Day. Woolf aligns the disciplines by emphasizing their common form, and in the process she raises the paradoxical possibility that mathematics is another kind of writing. The double reversal that occurs herefrom literature to its opposite and then onward to the realization that these opposites are alignedcreates a contradictory collision of extremes that can be hard to follow. In Night and Day mathematics is at once a metaphor for literature and a paradigm for everything that literature is not. This paradoxical relation is not unique to Woolf s second novel; it is characteristic of parallels and oppositions that are fundamental to the fields of writing and mathematics themselves, and mathematicians have investigated this relationship as well. Katharine Hilbery has a doppelganger in history. David Hilbert, his surname identical to Katharines in all but the final letter, was possibly the single most important mathematician working during Woolf s lifetime. When he died in 1943, Nature remarked that there can be few mathematicians nowadays whose work does not in some way derive from that of Hilbert (Taussky 182). Hilbert worked during an explosive time, because in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mathematics went through enormous transformations. The field became dramatically more abstract and apparently remote from the empirical world. Subfields became multifarious and diverse in their outlooks and assumptions. Mathematicians questioned and reexamined the foundational assumptions of their discipline, worrying that matters which had been taken for granted were much more complicated than previously assumed, even as if the structure of mathematics might have been built upon sand. Several histories of mathematics have specifically described this period as modern or modernist, highlighting parallels with modern art and culture.3 David Hilbert was at the very center of high modernism in mathematics. His books and publications were exemplary of the inventiveness, formality, and axiomatic method that characterized his period. The powerful generality, diversity, and prescience of his work made it difficult for conservative mathematicians to deny the watershed moment that mathematics was undergoing. And, also active as a speaker, teacher, and philosopher, Hilbert always vehemently defended recent innovations from detractors who sought to dismiss modern mathematics as too strange or out of touch with reality. To support modernist mathematics, in the 1920s Hilbert developed a philosophy that called attention to signs and symbols in the field, arguing that such written marks not only communicate but can actually embody the foundations of mathematics itself. This perspective, termed formalism in the philosophy of mathematics,4 holds that the form of mathematics (its written signs and the grammars that govern relations between them) is all that is necessary to ground the consistency of mathematics. As a methodology it devotes particular attention to the syntax, rather than the semantics, of mathematics; that is, it directs attention to the relationships between mathematical signs, because the meaning of these signs can be regarded as indeterminate. Mathematics does have form and content, syntax and semantics. When Woolf calculated word counts on the backs of her drafting pages, she wrote down numbers in a column and then followed a series of arithmetic rules to determine a productwe can see from the scratch marks. The rules are the same regardless of the particular numbers, and at no point would they have required Woolf to hold at once in her mind the entire

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magnitude and meaning of the large numbers involved. In this way, written multiplication engages with mathematical form (written signs), and syntax (established relational rules), but not semantics (the sense and significance of the written numbers). In this sense, mathematics has a great deal in common with language, and it can be conceived and practiced in a manner that emphasizes form, or content, or a combination of the two. Hilberts formalism operated at a high level, far beyond the scope of calculation. Hilbert argued that attention to mathematical form couldfar from emptying mathematics of its contentultimately enable a more effective and multiple engagement with mathematical meaning. He considered formal mathematical proof (representable as a variable) a worthy subject for mathematical investigation, thus reversing the typical conception of form and content in mathematics and allowing form to very literally become content. The resulting subfield, metamathematics, prompted mathematics to turn inward. Much like language used to characterize language, Hilbert used mathematics to analyze mathematics. In the process, mathematics had to be conceived as an ordered languageabsolutely consistent, but with nonspecific meanings. In Night and Day, Woolf addresses literature in a meta-representational manner by writing about mathematics, a relative unknown, which itself eventually points toward writing. Here mathematicsfrequently referred to as form but hardly ever endowed with any evident contentoperates like an algebraic variable, because it can be shuffled whole from page to page even as its meaning remains unknown. Maths undecidedness in Night and Day enables Woolf to more generally and ambiguously examine the simultaneous rupture and continuity that exists between Katharines modern expression and that of her literary ancestors: in mathematics Woolf constructs a symbol that forestalls its own meaning yet remains intelligible via an anchored formal position. The analytic interspace which developswherein readers understand the relationships between symbols before they understand the meanings of those symbolsallows Night and Day to very broadly consider the links between different varieties of expression.5 This meta-representational system is very much like Hilberts formalism. As Katharine struggles to express herself in a new form, she repeats the struggle that Woolf herself faced as she strove toward modern literature that still remained unrealized. Night and Day depicts the struggle to speak in a strange and unknown language about things that are not yet known themselves. Where meaning is so indefinite, the relations between formal symbols gain prominencereaders become acutely aware that they are interpreting those pages all speckled with dots and dashes and twisted bars (314). Woolf s representations of order and number parallel and refigure Hilberts philosophy of mathematics.6 Katharine Hilberys absorption in mathematical signs as central but nonspecific signification is one key case, but related attention to mathematics as writing and relation appears elsewhere in Woolf s work. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Mr. Ramsays alphabet exemplifies formalist mathematics: if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q (33). Mr. Ramsay steps, in order, from A to B and onwards up to Q. He is counting. But whereas if he did so with numerals his position would have a particular denotation, by choosing letters Mr. Ramsay evades the exact in favor of the general, reducing his count to relation and order. These

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letters are algebraic variables,7 and like variables, their meaning is open-ended.8 Woolf explicitly tells us that Mr. Ramsays choice of this particular letter is arbitrary: he had reached, say, the letter Q. Indeed, his thought process demonstrates that the signifiers may just as well be any other ordered sequence, such as the keyboard of a piano which he considers first. As under Hilberts mathematics, there is a particular sign and a rigorous order, but a flexible, nonspecific meaning. From here, Mr. Ramsay marches deeper into the ordered relations of mathematical formalism: But after Q? What comes next?If Q then is QRThen R (34). This process is exclusively relational, based on order and not meaning. In a sense, this purely formalist approach does lead him to his goal, because Mr. Ramsay knows that R follows Q, and despite his claims later that he cannot reach R, in this passage, he technically does: If QThen R (34). In fact, Mr. Ramsay never fails with letters, orders, or relations, but the moment that he tries to step outside of his mathematically formalist system: R is thenwhat is R? A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people sayinghe was a failurethat R was beyond him. He would never reach R (34). Mr. Ramsay does not struggle to step from Q to R, he only struggles to understand what R is. He cannot explain the relationship between his mathematical system and the outside world. And while elsewhere in To the Lighthouse Lily Briscoe struggles with two opposite forces; Mr. Ramsay and the picture (193), here we see once more how mathematics and art remain opposed in Woolf s writing: they may both be languages, but we do not know how to translate between them. Some feared that Hilberts formalist philosophy would reduce mathematics to meaningless rules.9 Mr. Ramsays alphabet is a case in point, because it misses out on everything that is vital in life; readers have frequently seen the alphabet passage as a satire of the failings of logical thought. But, unlike Mr. Ramsay, Hilbert resisted this sort of reductive formalism. Instead, by focusing on signs and relations and sidestepping direct reference, Hilbert preserved mathematical generality: the capacity of a theorem to retain meaning in multiple contexts and applications. 10 Turning back to our own terms, we could call this ambiguity: the capacity of language to retain meaning under multiple interpretations. Here, the advantage of Mr. Ramsays alphabet system rematerializes, because although Mr. Ramsay fails to see its implications, Woolf enables P, Q, and R to evoke many further words. Scholars have frequently observed that R can stand for Ramsay and reality, among several other possibilities.11 In turn, Hilbert was famous for his ability to endow mathematical descriptions with multiple meanings. He reconstructed all of classical geometry using traditional terms but absolutely flexible semantics, expanding the field into a general study of the patterns of the universe. He asserted that the work was meant to be so totally, beautifully ambiguous that one could say at all timesinstead of points, straight lines, and planestables, chairs, and beer mugs (Reid 57). This assertion recalls Andrew Ramsays instruction to Lily Briscoe: she may as well Think of a kitchen table when youre not there (23). But here, the choice of a table is emphatically, deliberately random. It does have associations in history,12 but the important pointfor Hilbert and for Lilyis to find one form, one sign, that can ambiguously indicate other objects in the real world without ever reductively pointing to any one of them. And although Hilbert and Lily both very specifically hone in on their chosen sign, building the formalist system

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of relations that is both his mathematics and her painting, they simultaneously remember the power of ambiguity. Even if readers cannot directly translate between these alternate systems of signs and relations on paper, they come together in their formal similarities and their common modes of meaning. In the process, meaning itself emerges from commonality, becoming not merely indeterminate but fully and affirmatively multiple; the refusal of reference generates interdisciplinary meaning. Woolf used generality and formal relation to bring together the most disparate fields. In our own studies of written meaning, we would be well served to examine the role of ambiguity in other disciplines. Notes
1 Such word counts crop up frequently in Woolf s drafts. Here, the margin of the opposite page presents two more calculations, complicating the opposition (JRHD 159); while Woolf usually calculated word counts on her blank verso pages, she sometimes did so in the margins of recto pages. She kept careful track of her writing process quantitatively as well as qualitatively, and the boundary between such self-evaluations is both prominent and hazy. Woolf depicts mathematics negatively in several novels. In Jacobs Room, Woolf links mathematical exactitude with militarism and male domination, and in To the Lighthouse, a discussion of square roots leads Mrs. Ramsay to contemplate the masculine intelligence (106). In The Waves, Rhodas struggle with arithmetic leads her to envision herself as The other, [that] painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert (21); in her imagination, the harsh lines of numerals written on a blackboard swell into walls forcing her outside of society. In Mrs Dalloway, proportion is Sir William Bradshaws primary justification for the cruel regulation of societys outsiders, and Woolf highlights the terms mathematical meanings by emphasizing the divisions that Bradshaw produces: slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion (102). See Herbert Mehrtens, Modernism vs. Counter-modernism and Moderne, Sprache, Mathematik; Jeremy Gray, Platos Ghost and Modern Mathematics as a Cultural Pheonomenon; and Moritz Epple, An Unusual Career between Cultural and Mathematical Modernism. Mathematical formalism has a long history, with antecedents reaching back to Gottfried Leibnizs work on the infinitesimal and George Berkeleys explanations of arithmetic. It was most influentially developed by Hilbert in the 1920s. An extreme mathematical formalist would assert that numbers are fundamentally written signs, and that mathematics is only the study of consistent rules for manipulating such signs; more moderate formalists, including Hilbert, instead assert that numbers should be regarded as if they are only signs, arguing that although matters of meaning (such as scientific application or intuitive sense) may be very real, they are not necessary to support the basis of mathematics. The multiplicity of mathematical formalism is underlined by the fact that Hilberts movement itself went through identifiably different stages: see Mancosu, The Adventure of Reason, 125-58. In Modern Novels and Vagueness, Megan Quigley has argued that Night and Day investigates vagueness with its use of language and symbolism. She further quotes Woolf claiming that I cant manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalized waydirectly Im told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me (123). However, Quigley identifies Katharines mathematics as contrary to this theme of symbolic ambiguity, assuming that meaning in mathematics is static (119). The flaw in this argument reveals itself in the particular mathematics that Quigley herself quotes from the novel (A plus B minus C equals xyz [120]), which consists almost entirely of variablessymbols that mathematics employs particularly for their ability to stand for the unknown, existing among multiple possibilities. Mathematically speaking, if Katharine were describing a static value with A plus B minus C, she would not have described it in terms of variables. It is unclear whether Woolf knew of Hilberts work (his name does not appear in her letters or diaries) but she likely would have heard of him. Certainly, during Woolf s lifetime Hilbert was about as famous as it is possible for mathematicians to be, and they shared several friends and colleagues in common, including Bertrand Russell, Frank Ramsey, and G. H. Hardy. Yet even if Woolf never did read of Hilberts work,

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10 11 12

more subtle and various influences remain likely. Jeremy Gray and Herbert Mehrtens have demonstrated that modern mathematics participated in the broader societal sweep of modernism, suggesting intellectual cross-pollinations that sometimes remain difficult to pin down even when their results are clear. Sandra Donaldson and Ann Banfield have both noted that P, Q, and R also appear as variables in symbolic logic, but they have overlooked the general dominance that these particular letters possess in the field (Donaldson 331, Banfield 189-90). Mathematical variables are open-ended in particular ways. They are more flexible than literary symbols in the sense that they frequently hold a literally infinite range of possible values or meanings, unlimited by association or context. However, they remain pinned down in the sense that their bounds are stark and that any particular meaning, once selected, must remain constant and thus iterable. In this sense, linguists compare variables to pronouns. That is, she is a flexible term that can stand in for an infinite number of subject positions, but it remains bounded (it must refer to a female) as well as iterable (within any single well-understood phrase, she should always indicate the same female). Hilberts philosophy of mathematics was controversial, itself a direct response to a reactionary movement led by L. E. J. Brouwer, who maintained that any mathematics lacking clear intuitive sense should be dismissed. The debate between Hilbert and Brouwer eventually developed vitriolic intensity, leading Albert Einstein to resign his post at the Annalen in protest of what he called a frog-and-mouse battle (see Paolo Mancosu, Brouwer to Hilbert 3 or Constance Reid 187). In a mathematical context, generality is one of the highest aims of research and proof. It carries no connotations of vagueness. For particularly rich examples, see Elizabeth Abel 55-7 and Christine Froula 149, 167-73. Ann Banfield has elaborated on these associations at length in The Phantom Table.

Works Cited
Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism. New York: CUP, 2000. Donaldson, Sandra M. Where does Q Leave Mr. Ramsay? Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature 11 (1992): 329-36. Epple, Moritz. An Unusual Career between Cultural and Mathematical Modernism. Jews and Sciences in German Contexts. Ed. Ulrich Charpa and Ute Deichmann. Tbingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2007. Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Gray, Jeremy. Platos Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. . Modern Mathematics as a Cultural Phenomenon. The Architecture of Modern Mathematics. Ed. J. Ferreirs and J. J. Gray. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Mancosu, Paolo. The Adventure of Reason: Interplay between Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Logic, 1900-1940. New York: OUP, 2010. . Ed. From Brouwer to Hilbert: The Debate on the Foundations of Mathematics in the 1920s. New York: OUP, 1998. Mehrtens, Herbert. Modernism vs. Counter-modernism, Nationalism vs. Internationalism: Style and Politics in Mathematics 1900-1950. LEurope Mathmatique: Histoires, Mythes, Identits. Ed. Catherine Goldstein, Jeremy Gray, and Jim Ritter. Paris: Maison des sciences de lhomme, 1996. . Moderne, Sprache, Mathematik: Eine Geschichte des Streits um die Grundlagen der Disziplin und des Subjekts formaler Systeme. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990. Quigley, Megan M. Modern Novels and Vagueness. Modernism/Modernity 15 (2008): 101-29. Reid, Constance. Hilbert. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996. Taussky, Olga. Prof. David Hilbert. Obituary. Nature 152 (1943): 182-3. Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. San Diego: Harcourt, 1978. . To the Lighthouse. San Diego: Harcourt, 1981. . Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt, 1981. . A Room of Ones Own. New York: Harcourt, 1989. . Virginia Woolf s Jacobs Room: The Holograph Draft. Transcribed and Ed. Edward L. Bishop. New York: Pace UP, 1998 . Night and Day. New York: OUP, 2000.

A BRIEF NOTE IN THE MARGIN: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND ANNOTATING by Amanda Golden
irginia Woolf maintained a contradictory relationship to academic institutions. Readers and critics are familiar with her childhood freedom to read throughout her fathers library and her arguments for womens education in A Room of Ones Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).1 As H. J. Jackson has observed in Marginalia (2002), writing in books is a technique that students have learned in school. While Woolf rarely annotated her personal library, this paper illustrates the ways that academic institutions informed her responses to marginalia. As Woolf put it in her 1923 diary, her usual strategy was reading with pen & notebook (D2 259).2 Hermione Lee has argued that Woolf hardly ever marked her books, and was satirical about people who did (406).3 Instead, as Lee puts it, Woolf s reading notebooks were her system of annotation (406). In addition, Diane Gillespie has noted in her introduction to the catalogue of Leonard and Virginia Woolf s library at Washington State University that Woolf inscribed some of her books [with]light marks in the margins or handwritten genealogies of characters. Leonard [Woolf ], on the other hand, kept indices in the back or marked passages in many books he read (xviii). The three-page manuscript to which Lee is referring is in Woolf s Monks House Papers at the University of Sussex.4 In this sketch, Woolf proposes that a student of character will keep his attention alert upon all [instances of ] such [a] practiceso common of writingobservations in the margins of books.5 It is significant that Woolf selects a student, as annotating is a student practice. Several different types of academic and institutional contexts informed Woolf s composition of Writing in the Margin on May 22nd of what was probably 1906. The previous year, Woolf had been selecting letters and completing a note about her father, the Cambridge scholar who had annotated his personal library, for Frederic Maitlands Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906) (PA 219).6 It was also in 1905 that, as Beth Rigel Daugherty, Melba Cuddy Keane, Quentin Bell, and other scholars have noted, Woolf began teaching at Morley College (PA 217). After visiting Madge Vaughn and her husband, headmaster of the Giggleswick School, in Yorkshire in April of 1906,7 Woolf also commented on Madges annotating when returning her collection of Gustave Flaubert and George Sands correspondence, I wanted to endorse, and add to, your pencil marks, whole passages seemed to start up as though writ in old ink. They penetrate so far and sum up as much that is universal as well as individual, and they say things that almost cant be said (PA 301; L2 229).8 In this instance, Woolf might have felt obligated to acknowledge Madges annotations. Woolf s reference to old ink is also striking in its ambiguity and suggestion of earlier reading practices.9 In her final statement that Madges remarks articulate things that almost cant be said, Woolf may also be implying that Madge should not have written them in the margins. Whether or not this is the case, Woolf s sentiments anticipate the efficiency and precision that will characterize her later descriptions of annotating.

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In Writing in the Margin, Woolf characterizes annotating as a spontaneous, anonymous expression oftemperament[. The] value alter[s] precisely because it is evidently not to be restrained & not to be acknowledged.10 She stresses an annotators insistence: this anonymous commentator must scrawl his Oor hisBeautiful upon thesheet, as though the author received the man upon his flesh.11 Woolf s conclusion summarizes the functions of annotating: to utter protest, or approval, or question or correct or in any way assault the book with a pencil, you must agree that the love of annotating books is one of the most permanent & rigorous pastimes in the human mind.12 Woolf s imagination of an annotation as if it were a readers inscription on an authors flesh is more violent than her later characterization of readers as reviewers, and her reference to flesh also recalls her desire to reach her Morley College students. As Beth Rigel Daugherty points out, in Woolf s essay entitled Reviewing (1939), the dialogue between reviewer and authorgrows out of an authors genuine desire to be told why [the reviewer] likes or dislikes his work and a reviewers genuine desire to tell them why I either like or dislike their work (Reading 27). Melba Cuddy-Keane has noted Woolf s desire to engage her students when she asks in her Report on Teaching at Morley College, I do not know how many of the phantoms that passed through that dreary school room left any image of themselves upon the women; I used to ask myself how is it possible to make them feel the flesh & blood in these shadows? So thin is the present to them; must not the past remain a spectre always. Of course it was not possible in the way I took to make them know anything accurately (Cuddy-Keane 83; Bell 203).13 Accuracy becomes an ambition to which Woolf and Edward Pargiter in The Years (1937) aspire in their annotating and translating of Greek. Annotating, for Woolf and Edward, is an attempt to translate the untranslatable.14 Woolf had formal training in Greek, studying with Clara Pater and completing Intermediate and Advanced courses at Kings College, London, as Christine Kenyon Jones and Anna Snaith have recently illustrated (Jones and Snaith 6-7).15 Diane Gillespie has observed that in Woolf s library at Washington State, her copy of Agamemnon [contains] English words she had pencilled in over the Greek (xvii).16 Two editions of Agamemnon including Woolf s annotations remain in her library. In addition to these volumes, Woolf compiled a fragile, cardboard Agamemnon reading notebook that is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.17 Woolf s copy opens with her translations on the left hand side of the page in blue ink and the segment of Greek text that she has pasted at the top of the right hand side of the page. Woolf underlined briefly and commented in light black ink above the Greek letters. As Brenda Silver notes, Woolf wrote in her 1922 diary that she was making a complete edition, text, translation, & notes of my ownmostly copied from Verrall; but carefully gone into by me (D2 215).18 Neither of the copies of Agamemnon in Woolf s personal library were A. W. Verralls translations and she may have cut up a copy of this translation to make her edition. A pile of cut pieces of paper still remains between the pages of Woolf s reading notebook in the Berg Collection and is visible on the microfilm. Woolf s text reads as if she was correcting Agamemnon; she may have been crossing out commas, drawing in parentheses, and adding in Greek words for a future Hogarth Press edition. Within a month after her previous reference to her Aeschylus edition in her diary, Woolf s desire for precision in her Greek translation is also present in a letter to R.

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C. Trevelyan: I want to discuss your Aeschylus with youI give way about the spelling of quire. Nor should I yield to Logan. If he thinks Earlham a masterpiece, he is not to be trusted about the letter K (L2 601-2). Translating for Woolf enables her attention to language within the institutional structures that informs her sense of a complete edition. Communicating with Trevelyan, she is acting as an academic from outside of academia, and able to articulate what she sees as fidelity to the text, history, and genre of Greek translating with which she is engaging. In her Agamemnon notebook, Woolf demonstrates techniques that are integral to the history of annotating as an institutional practice. Woolf s sense of the formality of translating as a genre may be in response to her academic training in Greek. While in her reading notebooks, as Lee has explained, Woolf drew margins and listed page numbers in them, unlike the readers that she critiqued in Writing in the Margin, Woolf also may have been more inclined to annotate a text she created herself, rather than in a book that she did not own or that someone else might read (406).19 In her Agamemnon notebook, Woolf added notes in the margins of the Greek text that resemble marginal glosses and below the text, akin to footnotes, translations on the left hand side of the page, and corrections to the Greek text itself. Marginal commentary, as Anthony Grafton has demonstrated, evolved from the marginal gloss and the footnote (30).20 As Lawrence Lipking explains, marginal glosses contained definitions and explications (612). The genre of marginalia differs from the marginal gloss in its informality. Lipking defines marginalia as traces left in a bookwayward in their very nature; they spring up spontaneously around a text unaware of their presence (612). Aspects of marginal glosses and marginalia can also be present, he argues, in the same note (Lipking 650). Marginalia is a flexible genre and it is significant that both Lipking and Woolf characterize it as spontaneous. The genre of translating provided Woolf with the opportunity for impersonal commentary. While her comments would have reflected her linguistic predilections, they would not have expressed the personal sentiments that marginalia in other types of texts often contain. Woolf subsequently concludes On Not Knowing Greek (1925), approximately three years after working on Agamemnon, [i]n spite of the labour and the difficulty it is this that draws us back and back to the Greeks; the stable, the permanent, the original human being is to be found there (CR1 27). Woolf here underscores the effort involved in attempting to reach an essence beyond the surface of the skin, which for her included constructing and inscribing her Agamemnon notebook. 21 In her later novels, To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), Mr. Ramsay and Bernard both envision different forms of annotating, without writing in the margins of books. Mr. Ramsay imagines scraps of paper on which one scribbles notes in the rush of reading (TTL 37). Unlike Leslie Stephens tendency to annotate his reading, Mr. Ramsay here is writing on pieces of paper, as Woolf herself did, and the description recalls the annotators speed in Writing in the Margin (Lee 406). While she was writing To the Lighthouse, as Jane De Gay has noted, Woolf would have also returned to the image of herself behind her parents as they read, which is in Leslie Stephens photograph album at Smith College.22 Unlike Mr. Ramsay, Bernard in The Waves gestures toward more conventional forms of marginalia. He proposes, let us turn over these scenes as children turn over the pages of a picture-bookI will add, for your amusement, a comment in the margin (TW 241). He also characterizes mental notes as making marks in the margin of my mind (189).

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The year after she completed The Waves, Woolf returned to her fathers annotating in her essay, Leslie Stephen (1932). As Woolf recounts, he left behind such remarks as, Conceited dunce, that [as she explains] he was wont to scribble impatiently in the margin.23 Noel Annan has described Stephens gift of Victorian concentration.scribbling marginalia, he would seem to idle through a book. Then, taking up a pen and lying almost recumbenthe would complete an article of six thousand words often at a sitting. It is one of my weaknesses, he wrote, that I cannot work slowly; I must, if I work at all, work at high pressure (51). There is also a resemblance between the speed of this process and, as Julia Briggs cites, Woolf s account that The Years was written at a greater gallop than any of my books. Indeed, much of it had been written in a state of intoxicating exhilaration, in which Woolf felt free to define my attitude with a vigour & certainty I have never known before (Briggs 289).24 The Years presents a detailed image of late-nineteenth century annotating in an academic context. In the first segment of the novel depicting 1880, Woolf envisioned Edward Pargiter at Oxford annotating his Greek text, rapt with excitement as he prepares to translate: He read; and made a note; then he read again.He caught phrase after phrase exactly, firmly, more exactly, he noted, making a brief note in the margin, than the night before. Little negligible words now revealed shades of meaning, which altered the meaning. He made another note; that was the meaning. His own dexterity in catching the phrase plumb in the middle gave him a thrill of excitement. There it was, clean and entire. But he must be precise; exact; even his little scribbled notes must be clear as print (TY 47). Woolf here captures the proximity of Edwards note taking to his thought process. The speed of this passage, with its short, punctuated passage also mirrors his experience of thinking, writing, and returning to his text. In Edwards desire to affix meaning to his page, his strategy also resembles forms of marginal glosses. Woolf s fictional rendering of his response here is closer to the act of reading than the notes in Edwards text that would remain. She also employs the word scribblingas she had to describe both Mr. Ramsays attempt to respond to his reading and her fathers annotatingto capture the speed with which Edward desires to articulate his interpretation, yet with less irreverence than in her description of her fathers annotating. The development of Woolf s description of Edwards annotating above suggests that she initially depicted practices closer to her own responses in her reading notebooks and translations of Greek in her books. Building toward the previous scene in The Years involved imagining the role of annotating in an academic context. In an earlier version of the novel, published as The Pargiters, the narrator observed that Edward had the makings of a real scholar in him, his tutor had once said. A real scholarthe highest type of mind conceivable (63).25 In another passage, Edward takes notes, but compared with the scene in The Years, his erasable inscriptions in a different segment of the text demonstrates greater hesitancy: The actual text therefore presented no difficulties to him, though each time he read it, he questioned certain readings, & pencilled comments & queries of his own on the blank page which was bound in with the text (64). Also missing from this passage is the deliberation and accomplishment in Edwards translating in The Years. Edwards annotating also suggests the techniques readers have brought to Woolf s novels, particularly those that preceded The Years. Isolating Woolf s engagement with annotating practices allows readers and scholars to understand further the complexity of her

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relationship to academic institutions. While, in many ways, Woolf remained distant from academia, its conventions informed her own and others writing and reading practices in ways that she addressed throughout her oeuvre. As Woolf s rendering of annotating practices in her fiction illustrates, creative thought and institutional practice are intertwined in a fashion that remain at the core of modernism to the present. Notes
1. I am grateful for a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Poetics from the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University that enabled me to complete this essay. I would also like to thank Beth Rigel Daugherty, Diane Gillespie, Emily Dalgarno, Karen V. Kukil, Brian M. Reed, Terry Kidner, Anita Helle, Emily James, Catherine Paul, Wayne Chapman, and Gillian Groszweski. Woolf s diary entry is dated 28 July, 1923. See also Sparks regarding Woolf s library. See Golden. Woolf Monks House Papers Reel 2: Writing in the Margin. At top 22nd [?] May. The date on the next manuscript is 6th July 1906. Scan sent from University of Sussex library in an email of 4/6/11. See also Woolf, PA 214. See also Bell 93 regarding the Gigglewick School. Letter in July of 1906. I thank Anita Helle for returning my attention to old ink. Some words in Woolf s handwriting are unclear and I have included the following potential variations: value alter [valuable?]to be restrained [refrained?]. Woolf s handwriting suggests the following ambiguous word: the author received the [?]. Woolf s handwriting suggests the following potential variations and points of ambiguity: you [?] must agree that the love [lure?] of annotating books is one of the most permanent and rigorous pastimes [?] in the human mind. Daugherty brought to my attention Woolf s Report on Teaching at Morley College in Bells biography. See also Sylvia Plaths observation in the Unabridged Journals regarding what writing enables one to reach (286). Jones and Snaith observe that between 1897 and 1901 Woolf and Vanessa Bell attended Kings College (2). See also Bell, Annan, and Cuddy-Keane regarding Woolf s teaching at Morley College, 23 and On Not Knowing Greek, 138. Email of 3 /25/11 from Diane Gillespie to the author citing the Short-Title Catalog of Virginia and Leonard Woolf s library and Brenda R. Silver in Virginia Woolf s Reading Notebooks page 125 regarding Woolf s second diary volume and the location of Woolf s Agamemnon notebook in the Berg Collection. This copy is also on the microfilm of Woolf s Berg Collection Reading Notebooks. Email of 3/24/11 from Emily Dalgarno to the author citing Silvers dating of Woolf s translation and her diary volume. See also Daughertys descriptions of Woolf s reading notebooks in Reading 33. See also Whittier-Ferguson. Ronald Schuchard emphasized the role of humanity in a critics work in his lecture The man who suffers and the mind which creates in The Waste Land, at the T.S. Eliot International Summer School. In Eliots Dark Angel, he also argues that the charge of the biographical criticis to explore the ways in which art and personality, art and consciousness are indissolubly linked (22). De Gay, Leslie Stephens Photograph Album. Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College. <http://www. smith.edu/library/libs/rarebook/exhibitions/stephen/38h.htm> Accessed 14 June, 2011. Karen V. Kukil brought De Gays study and this photograph to my attention. Woolf, Leslie Stephen, 70-1. Woolf D4, 30 Sept. 1934, p. 245; 31 Dec. 1932, p. 135 (qtd. in Briggs, 480 n75). In the place of the scene depicting annotating, in The Pargiters, Woolf described Edwards one bookcase, [however,] between the fireplace and the window, was [fu] tidily arranged with rows of old books,Pope, Dryden, Addison, Johnson & so on, which he had bought almost as much as for the subdued ripple of brown & gold that their backs made as for their contents. His [work] <text> books, his note books, his shabby dictionaries [& textbooks] were concealed beneath a curtain on the lower shelves (59).

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

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Works Cited
Annan, Noel. Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian. New York: Random House, 1984. Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. 1972. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974. Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. New York: Harcourt Brace, 2005. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. Daugherty, Beth Rigel. Learning Virginia Woolf: Of Leslie, Libraries, and Letters. Virginia Woolf and Communities: Selected Papers from the Eighth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jeanette McVicker and Laura Davis. New York: Pace UP, 1999. . Reading, Taking Notes, and Writing: Virginia Woolf s Reviewing Practice. Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace. Ed. Jeanne Dubino. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 27-42. De Gay, Jane. Virginia Woolf s Novels and the Literary Past. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006. Gillespie, Diane. Introduction. The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short-Title Catalog. Eds. Julia King and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic. Pullman: Washington State UP, 2003. Golden, Amanda. Virginia Woolf s Marginalia Manuscript. Woolf Studies Annual 18 (2012). Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Random House, 1996. Lipking, Lawrence. The Marginal Gloss. Critical Inquiry 3.4 (Summer 1977): 609-655. Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. Jones, Christine Kenyon and Anna Snaith. Tilting at Universities: Woolf at Kings College London. Woolf Studies Annual 16 (2010):1-44. Maitland, Frederic William and Virginia Woolf. The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth and Co., 1906. Nabu Public Domain Reprints. Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. New York: Random House, 2000. Schuchard, Ronald. Eliots Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. . The man who suffers and the mind which creates in The Waste Land. T. S. Eliot International Summer School. University of London School for Advanced Studies. London, UK. July 2011. Silver, Brenda R. Virginia Woolf s Reading Notebooks. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1983. Sparks, Elisa Kay. Leonard and Virginias London Library: Mapping Londons Tides, Streams and Statues. Virginia Woolf s Bloomsbury: Volume 1 Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice. Ed. Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Whittier-Ferguson, John. Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Woolf, Virginia. Agamemnon Reading Notebook. Berg Collection. New York Public Library. New York, NY. . Agamemnon Reading Notebook. Reel 13, Reading Notebooks. The Virginia Woolf Manuscripts from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications International, 1993. . A Room of Ones Own. 1929. Ed. Susan Gubar. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005. .The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979-1985. . Leslie Stephen. The Captains Death Bed and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950. .The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975-1980. . On Not Knowing Greek. The Common Reader: First Series Annotated Edition. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 1925. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984. . A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. 1990. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992. . The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977. . Three Guineas. 1938. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1966. . To the Lighthouse. 1927. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. . The Waves. 1931. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959. . Writing in the Margin. University of Sussex Library. Sussex, UK. SxMs18/2/A/A.23/C. . The Years. 1939. Ed. Eleanor McNees. New York: Harcourt Inc., 2008. Woolf, Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Writing in the Margin. Monks House Papers Reel 2. The Virginia Woolf Manuscripts from the Monks House Papers at the University of Sussex. University of Sussex; British Library. Brighton, Sussex, England: Harvester Microform. Woodbridge, CT: Distributed by Research Publications, 1985.

OBSERVE, OBSERVE PERPETUALLY, MONTAIGNE, VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE PATRON AU DEDANS. by Gill Lowe
his paper will consider the figure of the patron au dedans or invisible censor within in Woolf s writing. It will show that Woolf s interrogatory practice may be seen as both internal soliloquy and as dialogical; she is in constant debate with the invisible presences (MOB 92) who constantly check and verify the writing self. I will propose that, in a sketch written for the Hyde Park Gate News, the thirteen year old Virginia was experimenting with the dialectical processes inherent in composition: writing and reading; creating and editing; producing and marketing. Creation is a contradictory process. A distinguished novelist once told me that teaching her insatiable creative writing students was like breastfeeding twenty-four babies. Their voracity led to some musing as we considered a Kleinian good breast-bad breast model for this analogy. Teachers know the contradictions implicit in the task. We support and praise but, concurrently, we have the contrary task of being critical; we have to censure and check. Throughout her memoirs, diaries and letters there is a sense of Woolf perpetually observing the workings of her own mind; conversing with her self about composition and the editing process. She distinguishes a spectator in me whoremained observant, note taking for some future revision (MOB 155). Woolf knows that a degree of autonomy has been achieved when one is able to step back to better observe ones self. In her 1924 essay Montaigne, she writes: The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent (E4 73). As Judith Allen demonstrates in Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language (2010), both Montaigne and Woolf were intensely interested in what ensues when one brings ones self, in all its mystery and mutability, to meet another self (17). The crucial instruction in Woolf s Montaigne to Observe yourself (E4 74) has, by the end of the essay, become more urgent. Observe yourself is substituted by Observe her and the imperative is repeated four more times, finishing with Observe, observe perpetually. Woolf personifies the soul in an inner room as she broods over the fire (E4 72). The self and the soul are not unified; we watch the soul with absorbed interest, it becomes an enthralling spectacle (E4 78). For Woolf, Montaignes success came by means of perpetual experiment and observation (E4 78). In the same essay Woolf considers the concept of readership and how the patron au dedans may be our best appraiser: One writes for a very few people, who understand. Certainly, seek the Divine guidance by all means, but meanwhile there is, for those who live a private life, another monitor, an invisible censor within, un patron au dedans, whose blame is much more to be dreaded than any other because he knows the truth; nor is there anything sweeter than the chime of his approval. This is the judge to whom we must submit; this is the censor who will help us achieve that order which is the grace of a well-born soul (E4 75).1

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Her essay considers the contradictions involved in creation; a person must be encouraged to explore and experiment but there needs to be some internal balance. She writes: This freedom, then, which is the essence of our being, has to be controlled (E4 75). Woolf understands that encountering internal conflict facilitates the creative act. Experts on creativity would concur. As Derek Attridge writes in The Singularity of Literature (2004): The very term experiment paradoxically combines the notions of a controlled, repeatable physical process and the unpredictable trying-out of new procedures (20). The Montaigne essay was originally published in the Times Literary Supplement of January 1924 to review a recent publication of Charles Cottons translation of the Essays of Montaigne.2 A month later, Woolf began to draft The Patron and the Crocus.3 Caroline Pollentier makes an interesting point about Woolf s decision to use the original French expression in her review, rather than Cottons translation of the word patron. Pollentier writes: patron signifies pattern and thus relates to a private order within the self, that is, a moral idea of withdrawal and self-knowledge. By quoting the text in French rather than providing us with Cottons unequivocal translation (a pattern within ourselves),4 Woolf added another meaning to the original text, giving Montaignes early modern ethics of privacy a modern twist (77). Woolf uses her own translation, an invisible censor within so she may raise the issue of readership and its relationship to patronage. She signifies the idea of an internal order or pattern, like Cotton, but, additionally, her translation of patron suggests synonyms of power such as master, host, superior, boss, employer, chief, or governor. Pollentier suggests that in The Patron and the Crocus Woolf shows the influence of the audience in the production of art, by figuring the patron as an internalized agent of pressure on the author (77). Woolf is clearly aware of the market when she refers, in The Patron and the Crocus, to how a book may be received: For a book is always written for somebody to read, and since the patron is not merely the paymaster, but also in a very subtle and insidious way the instigator and inspirer of what is written, it is of the utmost importance that he should be a desirable man (E4 212). Woolf was acutely sensitive about her readership. She used both internal and external voices to help her compose, arrange, order and find a pattern from an inchoate mass of ideas.5 She was alert to the criticism of her readers, especially those whom she admired.6 On 7th August 1939, she breaks off from the mornings [sic] grind of revising: I have been thinking about Censors. How visionary figures admonish us. Thats clear in an MS Im reading. If I say this So & So will think me sentimental. If thatwill think me Bourgeois. All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle of invisible censors (D5 229). Virginia Woolf heard voices in her head and, most of the time, they were not speaking Greek. Sometimes these voices belonged to members of her family and sometimes the voice was another part of her self, asking questions, reassessing, censoring, checking and re-checking. She understood that she could receive conflicting and inconsistent advice from these voices.7 Woolf welcomed the idea of a fine critic who could set standards but, in An Essay in Criticism, she stigmatises the arrogance of these insignificant fellow creatures [who] have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves we for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible (E4 450). She worries that one who believes reviews will begin to doubt and conceal his own

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sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics decrees (E4 450). Woolf despises this kind of authority: the right to judge, to command and to compel compliance. She prefers the idea of a two-way dialogue leading to consensual agreement. Although the patron is perceived as an agent of pressure, for Woolf the concept must embrace the idea of affirmative collaboration. She began to write as a small child but her life as a paid, professional writer only began in December of 1904, after her father had died. On the 28th November 1928, the ninety-sixth anniversary of Leslie Stephens birth, she recognises that her success depended on his death; only one of them could thrive: His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing; no books;- inconceivable (D3 208). The importance of the two meanings of inconceivable can be inferred here; she is impelled to eliminate those who conceived her before she can create for herself. A few lines later she admits she is still influenced by him: I hear his voice (D3 208). After Julias death, A finger seemed laid on ones lips (MOB 104). To break what she calls this stifling silence she tries to smother and suppress her mothers hidden presence. The gagging does not work though; the daughter acknowledges her mothers posthumous authority: I could hear her voice (92). To be able to speak again she, famously, had to do battle with her ghost (157). In the Hyde Park Gate News of Monday 8th April 1895, Virginia Stephen dramatises the figure of a writing woman. It is the last existing piece before childrens journals stop, interrupted, as in To the Lighthouse, by a mothers death. If, in The Patron and the Crocus, we replace he with she, we can see that, although thirty years apart, these two texts can be related. The Editor in the sketch is analogous to the patron who will cajole the best out of the writers brain and bring to birth the most varied and vigorous progeny of which he is capable (E4 212). This patron/ midwife/ editor assists with the birth of the writers offspring. This figure may be seen both as a separate person and part of the writer herself. In the sketch the Author is trying to write but is blocked. The door opens and a cold draught of wind (HPGN 200) causes the Authors hair to rise in protest; her whole demeanour changes, her lines deepen and her under lip protruded. She seems about to be angry as another woman intrudes on the writers musings (200). This is the Authors Editor, at first presented as a vaguely intimidating and contrary figure; she advanced into the room, as if about to attack. We are told by the child-writer that [t]he Editor was not an ordinary person. She knew her Author very well (201). The Author is aware that she is dependent on her Editor. They work best as a duo rather than when duelling. The Editor gets the best from her Author when she is a pleasant patron rather than a confrontational critic. Previously I have suggested that this figure can be seen as a projection of Virginias sister, Vanessa, who was Editor of the Hyde Park Gate News. Much has already been written about the close personal and artistic alliance between Vanessa and Virginia. In The Sisters Arts Diane Gillespie points out that, [i]n spite of all they shared, a dualistic structure inevitably dominates discussions of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, in part because each woman caricatured the other as opposite (5). Gillespie suggests that it is convenient for the narrative of biographers or critics to set up the sisters relationship as a series of dualities: to think of the virginal, barren woman versus the sensual, maternal one; the

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domestically inept versus the practical and competent; the dependent versus the independent; the conversationalist versus the silent listener; the mentally unstable versus the sane (5). Perhaps the expedience of this convention led me to read Vanessa as the motherly judge of the susceptible aspiring writer in the sketch. We are used to considering Vanessa as a surrogate for those invisible presences (MOB 92) who, though dead, still powerfully influenced Woolf. It is possible to see the Editor figure as an alter ego for Vanessa. We can read the sketch as an exploration of intersubjectivity; Virginia and Vanessa as two distinct figures in relation to each other but, in this paper, I want to suggest that this is a self-referential piece, that the Editor can be seen as another version of the Author, herself. Clearly, these two interpretations do not have to be mutually exclusive; they can, creatively, exist together. I wish to suggest that both the Author and the Editor can be seen as two selves: the prospective young writer and the self-critical patron au dedans. In The Patron and the Crocus Woolf recognises that a patron must effaceor assert himself as his writers require; that he is bound to them by a more than maternal tie; that they are twins indeed, one dying if the other dies, one flourishing if the other flourishes; that the fate of literature depends on their happy alliance (E4 215). This suggests that the receiver of Virginias work, whether her own self or an external figure, fulfils more than a quasi-maternal role in relation to the writing figure. Stating that the patron and the writer are twins indeed implies co-dependency. There may be some competitive connection but they need also to be able to co-operate if their joint venture is to flourish. The juvenile sketch also shows these tensions: Virginia intentionally shows the sometimes effacing, sometimes asserting, editing self, in apposition to the writing self. There are two extant manuscripts of the Hyde Park Gate News for 14th December 1891. The fair copy in Vanessas hand uses the word Editor but, in the second rougher version, Editor is crossed through and, in Virginias writing Author is pencilled above. This suggests that the young Virginia was debating with herself these differing, but complementary, roles. Six months later, Adrian had decided to set up the Talland Gazette in competition with his siblings publication. An article in the Hyde Park Gates News on Monday June 27th 1892 (Volume II, No. 24) speaks disparagingly about his ambition to function as both author and editor. He has been strongly advised to give up writing by himself but to join with this respectable journal (HPGN 75). The writer, presumably Virginia, chooses to use the depersonalised but united we in a curt dismissal of his attempts. Katerina Koutsantoni, writing not about this example but about the use of we in Woolf s The Common Reader essays, expresses its effect succinctly: By using collective attribution inclusively, the author asserts her own expertise but offers her views as shared, commonly held ones, strategically coating them in a cloak of solidarity (80). By using we the tyro reviewer employs what Koutsantoni terms collective authority: We have not yet had time to look over The Talland Gazette with a view to criticism. We hope that Master Adrian Stephen will take the advice of his parent and give up The Talland Gazette altogether (HPGN 75). The Stephen children sought to write in obscurity by preserving anonymity or using personae, but, simultaneously, sought praise and public recognition. They were already aware of the power of an audience but knew how to evade individual responsibility for

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what they had written. Nina Skrbic refers to the juvenilia as responding to a particular impulse to thwart the official censor (xv). The sketch enacts a fictional discourse between Editor and Author. The young Virginia employs theatrical devices; this is literally scene making (MOB 145). It is arguable that this is a heuristic piece, a practical experiment to discover what it might mean to be a professional writer. Dramatising this encounter is a safe way of exploring the relationship between writing and reading; the seller and the marketplace. The sketch performs an encounter between two coolly oppositional selves. This is a double act: a dialogic interaction between a guileless writing self and a more demanding other-than-self. The Editor is a detached inspector but also self-interestedly supportive: she wants to profit from publishing the Authors poems. The Author is seen as reliant; she seeks advice but is relatively passive. Author and Editor are set up in dialogue so Virginia can better interrogate the way the two roles interact, first in tension with each other but finally in co-operation. Virginia recognises, even in this early project, the obligation of a writer to keep a separation between the spontaneity of creation and the rigour of editing. We can discern Woolf s habitual wry tone; the piece should not be taken entirely seriously.8 It begins with a stage direction: Scenea bare room, and on a black box sits a lank female, her fingers clutch her pen, which she dips from time to time in her ink pot and then absently rubs upon her dress (HPGN 199). The writer is depicted as inert and abstracted as she limply looks out on the indifferent and darkening world outside. The window is a trope to show the separation between interior and exterior states. This is the outlook from Leslies library. Hyde Park is to the north and the street which led nowhere (MOB 126) to the south. The depiction is not, however, entirely negative. Virginia was allowed access to her fathers books but the woman here is allowed more than a readers pass. She is inside the cage (MOB 123) of the patriarchal space but the window is open to the world outside. There is a possibility that her interiority may be allowed to be made public. Pathetic fallacy is surely being mocked here. The writer wishes to be poetical (HPGN 199) but Nature is not consoling: the gaunt poplar waves its arms without empathy; she sees gloomy silhouettes of bleak trees to the north; the sun dives for cover behind a black cloud. The church rears itself in the distance as if it were antagonistic to the figures need for divine inspiration. Funereal wreaths of smoke rise monotonously from Dickensian chimney tops. There seems to be a sardonic vein of humour in the sketch: an ironic elegy for childhood plays out to the mournful soundtrack of Auld Lang Syne (HPGN 199). The calendar tells us authoritatively that the sun will set at 6.42; it may be autumn. Time is running out but the Author has written nothing. The Author is a caricature. She has an unattractive most disagreeable expression which becomes cartoonish as the piece progresses. Her nose, illuminated by the setting sun, is shiny and she has few hairs (200). She has been commissioned to write poetry but this task is not suited to her time of life or to her temperament: Poetry she considered to be an indelicate exhibition of your innards (200). Her silence can be seen as petulant rather than powerful. Woolf reprises this figure, but with a more serious purpose, in another scene for her celebrated 1931 talk, Professions for Women. She discloses that she is speaking autobiographically: I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot (E6 482). Confronted

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by the creeping phantom of the maternal Angel in the House, the Author has to fling her ink pot at her, in self-defence. Finally, she turned upon her and caught her by the throat. Dramatically, we are told: She died hard (E6 481). Both tableaux conceptualise the contradictions inherent in the writing process and set in opposition pertinent dualities: subjectivity/impersonality; public/private; liberation/control and authority/autonomy. In Professions for Women listeners are told that for that young woman to be herself, she had to rid herself of falsehood (E6 481). Both Virginia Stephen and Virginia Woolf had, recurrently, to remove unwelcome voyeurs; to eradicate the critical voices inhibiting the writing craft; to listen instead to the patron au dedans. In her diary for Saturday March 8th 1941, Woolf returns to the imperative Observe perpetually. The ambiguously encouraging tone, combined with her tentative use of the word hope, are retrospectively poignant, given that they are recorded at the very end of her life. No: I intend no introspection. I mark Henry Jamess sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the oncoming of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope (D5 357-8).9 Notes
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Juliet Dusinberre points out that Montaigne was the first single-author essay in the first volume of The Common Reader (219). See Dusinberre (237) for more textual detail about the William Carew Hazlitt edition. Published in The Nation and Athenaeum in April 1924. Both essays were collected in The Common Reader, published in 1925. Caroline Pollentier is here citing from Montaigne IV, 204. See Woolf s persistence in trying to find order from what is yet unstructured in Sketch of the Past: behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern (MOB 85) and There is a pattern hidden behind the cotton wool (MOB 85-6). Woolf also interprets silence as criticism. She writes about Lytton Strachey: I have felt his silence disapproving; have moderated my folly under it (D3 208). See The Artist and Politics (M 232) where crying and conflicting voices are heard in his studio by the artist. As Alex Zwerdling states A certain analytic distance had in fact always been a strong element in Woolf s nature, and some form of irony had characterised her writing as early as the Hyde Park Gate News (182). It is not clear here exactly which words are being ascribed to Henry James. Anne Olivier Bells footnote to the 8th March diary entry makes reference to Desmond MacCarthys Portraits (155). A consideration of that original essay may suggest a significant connection between the two writers and their response to the despondency mentioned by Woolf on this day. In his portrait of James, MacCarthy writes about a time when he was with the writer, sauntering along a dusty road which crosses the Romney marshes. He had been describing to me the spiral of depression which a recent nervous illness had compelled him to step after step, night after night, day after day, to descend. MacCarthy refers to the arid rejection of life and meaningless yet frantic agitation he had been compelled to traverse! (155). Henry James speaks again and intriguingly he begins with the word that has been the focus of this Glasgow Woolf conference But, and he suddenly stood still, but it has been goodand here he took off his hat, baring his great head in the moonlightfor my genius. Then, putting on his hat again, he added, Never cease to watch whatever happens to you (155).

6. 7. 8. 9.

Works Cited
Allen, Judith. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

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Dusinberre, Juliet. Virginia Woolf and Montaigne. Textual Practice 5 (1991): 219-241. Gillespie, Diane Filby. The Sisters Arts: the Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Syracuse and New York: Syracuse UP, 1991. Koutsantoni, Katerina. Virginia Woolf s Common Reader. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. MacCarthy, Desmond. Portraits I. London and New York: Putnam, 1931. Montaigne, Michel de. Essays of Montaigne. 5 vols. Trans. Charles Cotton. London: The Navarre Society, 1923. Pollentier, Caroline. Montaignes Patron au-Dedans and Virginia Woolf s Conception of the Modern Patron. Notes and Queries (March 2008): 76-78. Skrbic, Nina. Wild Outbursts of Freedom: Reading Virginia Woolf s Short Fiction. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. The Artist and Politics. The Moment and Other Essays. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 19791985. _____, Montaigne. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4 1925-1928. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1994. _____, The Patron and the Crocus. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4 1925-1928. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1994. _____, A Sketch of the Past. Moments of Being. Ed. Hermione Lee. London: Pimlico, 2002. _____, Hyde Park Gate News, the Stephen Family Newspaper. Ed. Gill Lowe. London: Hesperus Press, 2005. _____, Professions for Women. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6 1933-1941. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. London: The Hogarth Press, 2011. Zwerdling, Alex. Mastering the Memoir: Woolf and the Family Legacy. Modernism/Modernity 10:1 (2003): 165-188.

WHOS BEHIND THE CURTAIN? VIRGINIA WOOLF, NURSE LUGTONS GOLDEN THIMBLE, AND THE ANXIETY OF AUTHORSHIP by Kristin Czarnecki

ublished by the Hogarth Press in 1966 with pictures by Duncan Grant, Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble is one of two childrens stories Virginia Woolf wrote. It was discovered in 1963 by Wallace Hildick, who found it in the manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway, which had recently been acquired by the British Museum. It was in the second of the three large Dalloway manuscript notebooks amid pages depicting Septimus Warren Smiths final scene, when he hurls himself out the window at the approach of Dr. Holmes, intent on separating him from his wife, Rezia. Just moments before, Septimus had been helping Rezia sew a hat, adding felt and flowers and laughing with his wife in a lovely and all too rare moment of lucidity. The childrens story is short, just a couple of pages, about an old nurse, or governess, who is asleep as the story begins, having dozed off while sewing a curtain with an animal pattern on it. As she sleeps, the animals spring to life; in fact a whole village appears. As soon as Nurse Lugton begins to stir, however, the animals flee in terror, and by the time she wakes up, they have resumed their frozen, lifeless stance. Writing of his discovery in the Times Literary Supplement in 1965, Hildick speculates about the storys origins. Perhaps it provided a respite for Woolf from working out the scenes of madness and suicide in Mrs. Dalloway. He wonders if the list of animals written on the reverse side of the page indicates a potential reworking of, or alternate to, the Dalloway scenes set in Regents Parkas the park is not far from the Zoo, and among these scenes is one of Peter Walsh dozing next to an old nurse busily knitting (Hildick). Ultimately, Hildick feels certain of the storys provenance: In a diary entry of September 7, 1924, Woolf writes of a delightful afternoon spent with her young niece, Ann, one of Adrians daughters, leading Hildick to conclude that Woolf wrote the story specifically for her niece, a theory corroborated by Leonard Woolf, who had not seen the story before Hildick presented it to him. In fact Leonard gave it its title, Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble, for as Hildick explains in the TLS, Virginia had not titled it: the original pages had simply The at the top. Furthermore, Genevive Sanchis Morgan, who has devoted significant attention to the story, believes that because it concerns a woman sewing, and was found in the Dalloway manuscript with scenes of Rezia sewing, it extols womens unique creative powers above all. I see something else at play, however, apart from an affectionate gesture towards a niece or the unequivocal celebration of womens creative arts. I see Woolf s anxieties about authorship, for Nurse Lugton is not just a benevolent old governess but also an ogress who terrifies the creatures in her toils (CSF 161). Its animals free to roam only when their captor sleeps, the story reflects concerns raised by Woolf throughout her works regarding pressures unique to female writers. The storys shifting titles and audience reception also afford such a reading as well as insights into persistent stereotypes of Woolf in contemporary culture.

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In The Hostess and the Seamstress: Virginia Woolf s Creation of a Domestic Modernism, Genevive Sanchis Morgan argues that Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble serves as a microcosm for Mrs. Dalloway and marks Woolf s discovery of her own distinct voice (95). She finds the story in accord with the numerous scenes in Woolf of nurseries, domestic spaces, and womens imaginative lives. Morgan also identifies the storys modernist characteristicsits rejection of plot and resistance to closure (96)and sees the story balancing the details of the domestic realm with the rigors of a modernist aesthetic (97). Moreover, the picture of Nurse Lugton sewing in a private domestic space illustrates [as does A Room of Ones Own] how exclusion from regular public experience does not stunt the female artists growth or invalidate her vision (98). She believes Woolf deliberately placed the story amid scenes of Rezia sewing and goes on to link Nurse Lugton with Clarissas imaginative, anti-patriarchal domesticity in Mrs. Dalloway. While I would not refute Morgans claims, I believe that, as with so many of Woolf s works, there may be more to the story. My first encounter with the story was the 1991 Harcourt picture book titled Nurse Lugtons Curtain, with watercolor illustrations by Julie Vivas. In the story, we see a lively parade of animals tramping through grass and puddles and are told, Over them burnt Nurse Lugtons golden thimble like a sun (CSF 160). The zebras, giraffes, ostriches, tigers, mandrills, marmots, penguins, and pelicans drinking from the lake was, Woolf writes, Reallya beautiful sight (CSF 160), and throughout it all, Nurse Lugton slept; Nurse Lugton saw nothing at all (CSF 161). Yet, the narrative says, the people of this land, called Millamarchmantopolis, pitied the animals, for it was well known that even the smallest monkey was enchanted. For a great ogress had them in her toilsand the great ogress was called Lugton (CSF 161). She towers over them, Woolf writes, with a face like the side of a mountain and chasms for her eyes and hair and nose and teeth. And every animal which strayed into her territories she froze alive (CSF 161). They find release only when she sleeps; when she wakes, they flee back into position. The story is rich in its implications for authorship. To begin, we may consider the woman sewing as the woman writing. If the sewer is the author, then the curtain is her text, meaning the needle is her pen, signifying agency and power when used in tandem with the thimble. Indeed, the story tells us that Nurse Lugtons thimble is the animals life source. Yet the woman bringing the curtain to life is the same one causing its paralysis. Furthermore, a thimble covers, conceals, and protects, but from what, exactly, does it offer protection when used with an implement of inscription? That question changes when we consider the storys title in the Harcourt picture book as well as in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf: Nurse Lugtons Curtain, a renaming that displaces needle/pen for curtain/text, effacing the writer in focusing not on the creative process but on the finished product. Nevertheless, a curtain, too, may be considered a covering, protecting or perhaps hiding the author. Above all, I wondered what to make of Woolf s casting of the female creator as monstera concept she abhorred and wrote against throughout her life. Is she substituting for an anxiety of influencewhat [Gilbert and Gubar] have called an anxiety of authorship, an anxiety built from complex and often only barely conscious fears of that authority which seems to the female artist to be by definition inappropriate to her sex (51)? The story certainly seems to manifest one of Woolf s perennial concerns: the risk an author runs of compromising her text

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by imbuing within it her personal feelings or biasesthe crux of Woolf s criticism in A Room of Ones Own of Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre.1 Seminal essays by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes yield insights into the concept of authorship I believe Woolf expresses in her story. In What is an Author? Foucault laments the ascendance of the author over the text throughout much of Western history. We recount the lives of authors rather than of [the] heroes they write about, he states (890). We become consumed with the authors persona, and we do not tolerate literary anonymity (894). In The Art of Fiction, Woolf similarly laments the disproportionate amount of attention paid to novelists rather than their words, noting, while the painter, the musician, and the poet come in for their share of criticism, the novelist goes unscathed. His character will be discussed; his morality, it may be his genealogy, will be examined; but his writing will go scot-free (CE2, 55). Several years earlier, in 1924, she had written with glee in her diary of a letter she received from Ka Arnold-Forster expressing her dislike for one of Woolf s pieces in the Criterion. At once I feel refreshed, Woolf says. I become anonymous (D2 248). She was thrilled that Ka was willing to criticize the piece rather than give it false praise because its author was a friend of hers. As Foucault argues, In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writingthe work of the pen or the needlenor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears (890). Foucault then likens writing to a sacrifice akin to deatha voluntary effacement of oneself. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing (891). Rather than have her author figure die, Woolf has her sleep in Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble; only when her persona is dormant or absent can her creation exist. In her essay in praise of sleep, Anne Carson says she finds supreme consolation in coming at life from the sleep side (20), and she appreciates Woolf s use of sleep as a means of glimpsing events as if from underneath (23). She describes the Time Passes section of To the Lighthouse as the novelfall[ing] asleep for twenty-five pages in the middle (22)exploring silence, motionless furniture, and moonlight gliding on floorboards (23) as shocking events drift by, bracketed, failing to cause a stir. Woolf offers us, through sleep, she writes, a glimpse of a kind of emptiness that interests her. It is the emptiness of things before we make use of them, a glimpse of reality prior to its efficacy (24). With an image that seems apt for Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble, Carson says, Woolf likes to finger the border between nothing and something. Sleepers are ideal agents of this work (24). No doubt Nurse Lugton fingers the border of the sewing in her lap before falling asleep. With her self-consciousness at bay and her subconscious imaginings rising to the surfacefor as Woolf would write a few years later in A Room of Ones Own, it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top (AROO 31)she engenders a space free of constraints she might otherwise impose. When she awakens, her creation falls subject to her egoism, inevitable when the author consciously injects her will into the text. Nevertheless, Foucault says, we perpetuate the cult of the author, sifting through rough drafts, manuscripts, marginalia, deleted passages, workbooks, personal noteseven laundry lists, he writes, because [m]odern literary criticismstill defines the author the same way: the author provides the basis for explaining not only the presence of certain

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events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications. The author also serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts (895). Clearly Foucault offers food for thought for those of us gathered at a conference on contradictory Woolf. He also recognizes the danger in conceiving of the author as genius, as transcendent dispenser of wisdom, for the author then becomes an ideological figure, a necessary and constraining figure who impedes the free circulation of fiction (900, 899). Viewed through this lens, Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble not only reflects the necessity of the disappeared author for the emergence of true creative expression but also points to Septimus rather than Rezia as its source: Septimus driven to his death by an authority figure whose role is to regulate errant citizens. No wonder Nurse Lugtons huge watchful eye paralyzes the creatures in the valley below. In The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes too finds that writing begins the moment the author enters into his own death (253), but while Foucault believes the writer inevitably disappears into the text, Barthes considers this disappearance an act of willthe modern scriptors conscious rejection of the belief that she deliberately calls forth the words on the page. Woolf expresses a similar sentiment in How it Strikes a Contemporary, written in April 1923, in which she attributes our love of the classics, and their lasting impact, to those authors conscious relinquishing of the cramp and confinement of personality (CE2 159). Woolf finds Jane Austen adept at this, for the little grain of experience [she] selected, believed in, and set outside herself, could be put precisely in its place, and she was free to make itinto that complete statement which is literature (CE2 159). The contemporary writer, on the other hand, will only tell us what it is that happens to himself (CE2 159). Writing in her diary two months later, she asks herself, Have I the power of conveying true reality? Or do I write essays about myself? (D2 249) Writing is about language, not authors, according to Barthes, and languageceaselessly calls into question all origins (256), for the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture, and the writers only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the othersand so on indefinitely (256). Linking a text to a specific Author (capital A) is an act of tyranny imposing limits on the text, an act Barthes associates closely with the critic: when the Author has been found, the text is explainedvictory to the critic, he writes (256). Interestingly, Barthes uses sewing imagery to suggest how readers ought to approach a text. Rather than try to decipher what we readto pierce beneath the surface for a secret or ultimate meaning, we must appreciate the multiplicity of writing and seek to disentangle it, following the structure like run[ning]the thread of a stocking (256). Barthess word pierce conjures up Mr. Ramsays verbal assaults on his wife in To the Lighthousehis authoritative voice stabbing at her, insisting on his truth, while she, preferring chance or inconclusiveness, sits knitting a stocking. The flash of her needles here deflects the fatal sterility of the male [which] plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare (TTL 40). Woolf s sewers and knitters emerge as Barthess modern scriptors: anti-authoritarian figures open to the multiplicity of language. The same may be said of children, who often communicate in language of their own that heeds no rules. Elizabeth Goodenough believes Woolf s fiction celebrates the consciousness of children: in their wonder and certainty, she writes, they embody the purest kind of integrity a character can achieve (184). That they rarely speak does not

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mean Woolf denies them a voice; rather she calls attention to the interior being of children (185), in keeping with her modernist, feminist aesthetics. In addition, Goodenough finds Woolf working in a distinctly Romantic vein, not only exploring the inner world of children but also attending to animals in many of her works, further elucidating Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble, in which animals, not people, are under Lugtons spell. In fact, Michelle Levy considers the story an object lesson in respecting animals and the dangers to human beings of anthropocentricity (148). Awake, Nurse Lugton fears the animal world. Even a little black beetle made her jump (CSF 161), and as we know she condemns the animals to lifelessness as she sews (Levy 148). Only in the dream world, Levy observes, do humans and animals interact peaceably, and this alone is worthy of our attention and emulation (148). Goodenough traces the many depictions of children and childhood throughout Woolf s works. The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and Jacobs Room are all studies of young people approaching adulthood (189), she reminds us, and in Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa envisions herself a child, throwing bread to the ducks (Woolf qtd. in Goodenough 196). In To the Lighthouse, the visionary intensities of the child are associated with the fierce struggle of the artist to create (197), while in The Waves, the process of maturationis inherently destructive to creativity (199). Katrien Vloeberghs concurs, stating, In modernist literary texts, the poetical appeal to the creation of a new language is repeatedly connected to child figurations, for example with the fragmentary babbling of monosyllabic words in Virginia Woolf s The Waves (300). Bernard in particular would reject structured speech for a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing(192) (Woolf qtd. in Vloeberghs 300, emphasis added). Goodenough even says the death of Jacob Flanders may be seen as an ironic victory, for the hero escapes adulthood (200), an idea which points again toward the possibility that Septimuss leap out the windowand preservation of his dignity, as Clarissa sees itmay have inspired Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble. In an essay called High Modernism for the Lowest: Childrens Books by Woolf, Joyce and Greene, Hope Howell Hodgkins presents an entirely different take on Woolf and children based solely on Nurse Lugtons Curtain. She sees the story as further evidence of modernist elitism. This childrens story is not for children at all, she says, citing high modern writers coolness toward childhood (358) and antinarrative bias (361), not to mention the religious seriousness with which [Woolf ] regards her fiction (358). Furthermore, in Hodgkinss view, the story contains little excitement and has a bland effect (361). James Joyces illustrated childrens book, The Cat and the Devil, receives similar criticism, for Hodgkins cannot conceive of such writers finding anything of value in writing about or for children. Indeed [t]heir novels for adults, she says of Joyce and Woolf, are notoriously complex, appealing to a small, elite readership (359). She also notes twice that children have no surrogates to sympathize with in Nurse Lugtons Curtain (361), for children are nowhere to be found in the storyneither in Millamarchmantopolis nor in Nurse Lugtons nursery. Hodgkins does view Nurse Lugton as an alter-ego for Woolf and an image of the creative female unconscious (361) but one that suggests a fear of its author, that of the artist who wants to avoid confronting the creative process lest its products die in their amber (361). As I am arguing, however, Woolf confronts the creative process head-on in her story to demonstrate the means by which creativity might occur

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and thrive. For Hodgkins, however, Nurse Lugtons Curtain stands as Woolf s affirmation that the modern author is most productive in solitudethat is, without children (362). Turning from literary creation to procreation, or Woolf s lack thereof, Hodgkins focuses on the author rather than the text, closing down meaning. Wendy Lesser displays a similar stance in her 1991 New York Times review of Nurse Lugtons Curtain, called A Drape of Ones Own. She begins by saying she read the story to a five year-old child, who said when it was over, It has nice pictures, I like the words, and its a good story (qtd. in Lesser). For its intended audience, then, Lesser writes, the story would seem to be a success. That seems beside the point, however, as her review goes on to reify a well known, unflattering portrait of the author. The publishers age guideline says 7 and up, Lesser writes, and for those of us on the higher end of that scale, [the story] may remind us all too strongly of what is least likable about the author, including forced whimsy, self-congratulatory imagery, and overtones of class snobbery. Julie Vivass illustrations are not right, either, she complains, for they conjure up a wild, free space for animals at odds with Woolf s prissiness. If nothing else, she concludes, the story might serve as a lesson for children in advanced punctuation, for it contains a lot of semi-colons. Lesser concedes that her (pseudo) knowledge of Woolf tainted her response to the story and surmises, the less you know about the author, the more youll like this particular book. Lesser, like Hodgkins, pulls back the curtain and seeks her preconceived notion of the author behind it. Given such visceral responses to the author, it appears that whoever changed the storys title may have been on to something. Shifting from thimble to curtain draws attention away from the creator and on to the creation. The curtain, then, does not protect or hide the author; it blankets the reader with what is most important: the text. Nevertheless I love reading about Woolf s life and have amassed biographies, drafts, deleted sections, and juveniliaand if someday someone discovers a laundry list, I will read that, too. Moreover, Jane Lilienfeld is among critics noting Woolf s contradictory narrative impulses (123). She writes in her essay on Woolf and narrative theory of Woolf s insistence on discarding the damned egotistical self (D2, 14) (qtd. in Lilienfeld 123) from her work and simultaneous advancement of a feminist, socialist, pacifist agenda (Jane Marcus qtd. in Lilienfeld 123). Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble, however, and much of Woolf s writing, reminds us to focus above all on the words, which do not spring consciously from the isolated mind. Rather, as Woolf asserts again and again, the human mind and literary creations are networks, spider-webs, fishing lines feeling the random tug of ideas, and an incessant shower of innumerable atoms falling upon us to comprise Monday or Tuesday (CE2 106). Disregarding the author, letting her sleep while we read, we enter more fully into the life on the page. Note
1. See 68-69 in Chapter Four of A Room of Ones Own.

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, 2nd ed. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2000. 253-257.

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Carson, Anne. Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep). Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera. New York: Vintage, 2006. 17-40. Foucault, Michel. What is an Author? The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 889-900. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Goodenough, Elizabeth. We Havent the Words: The Silence of Children in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994. 184-201. Hildick, Wallace. Virginia Woolf for Children? Times Literary Supplement 17 June 1965. Hodgkins, Hope Howell. High Modernism for the Lowest: Childrens Books by Woolf, Joyce, and Greene. Childrens Literature Association Quarterly 32.4 (2007): 353-367. Lesser, Wendy. A Drape of Ones Own. New York Times 19 May 1991. Levy, Michelle. Virginia Woolf s Shorter Fictional Explorations of the External World: closely unitedimmensely divided. Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf s Short Fiction. Ed. Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth Hoberman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 139-155. Lilienfeld, Jane. Must Novels Be Like This? Virginia Woolf as Narrative Theorist. Virginia Woolf: Texts and Contexts: Selected Papers from the Fifth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Beth Rigel Daugherty and Eileen Barrett. New York: Pace UP, 1996. 123-128. Morgan, Genevive Sanchis. The Hostess and the Seamstress: Virginia Woolf s Creation of a Domestic Modernism. Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-readings. Ed. Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. 90-104. Vloeberghs, Katrien. Figurations of Childhood in Modernist Texts. Modernism, 2 vols. Ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007. 291-305. Woolf, Virginia. Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966. . The Art of Fiction. Collected Essays, Volume 2. New York: Harcourt, 1967. 51-56. ____. How it Strikes a Contemporary. Collected Essays, Volume 2. New York: Harcourt, 1967.153-161. ____. Modern Fiction. Collected Essays, Volume 2. New York: Harcourt, 1967. 103-110. . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1977 1984. ____. Nurse Lugtons Curtain. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. Orlando: Harvest, 1989. 160-161. ____. Nurse Lugtons Curtain. New York: Harcourt, 1991. ____. A Room of Ones Own. New York: Harcourt, 2005. ____. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, 2005.

VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE RUSSIAN OXYMORON by Claire Davison

he oxymoron is that intriguing, self-reflexive figure which sets two apparently contradictory qualities side-by-side and leaves them to gently collide together. It allows no dialectical resolution. Nor can any grammatical coordinator be inserted to ease the tension between the terms. And, but or yet inserted into the nominal cluster would help an oxymoron make sense, but would at the same time annul it. And let me add, by way of a tangent, that as Nevill Forbes teaches us in his Russian Grammar, there are not one but two buts in Russian, marking slight and stronger antithesis.1 Virginia Woolf s 1925 essay A Russian Point of View (E4 181-190) seemingly flaunts contradictions or ambivalence, in terms of subject as well as authorial stance, creating an underlying tension that remains unresolved to the end. The title promises to reveal what a Russian point of view is, only to offer points of view on the Russians. And whose points of view? For all the essays foregrounded subjectivity and its inscription in the present tense, the opening pages do not just draw on Woolf s own publications on Russian literature since 1917 but interweave her own recycled ideas with an intriguing mish-mash of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russian voices, indirectly echoing John Murry, Percy Lubbock, Maxim Gorky, Peter Kropotkin, Melchior De Vog, Maurice Baring, Nikolai Brodsky and Arthur Clutton-Brock to quote but the most striking.2 It compares translated Russian to language bereft of style or people bereft of clothes, claims which can only intrigue coming from an author who not only signed translations, but who in other writing posits clothes as the most unstable of signifiers,3 that can disguise or obscure the large and permanent things. 4 The essays closing tangent retreats to the gentle comforts of home, although so many Woolf essays welcome a little estrangement in time or space to escape from domesticity (Phases of Fiction being the most striking example), not to mention that as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world(TG 125). Little wonder that by the end of the essay, when Tolstoy turns his telescope on us (a very different Russian point of view), it inspires a sense of bewilderment. These intriguing fillips might make more sense, however, if read in the light of a disconcerting note at the end of her unpublished Tchekov on Pope: not that we wish to throw a stone at [all the books of all the Russians]; only at the view of them that prevails over here (Rubenstein 185).5 My feeling is that A Russian Point of View might be that stone, or at least one half of it. Now to Russia, Russian literature, Dostoevsky and The Possessed, all of which in Woolf s era were the paragons of ambiguity. For Baring, Russia was the land of paradoxes (Baring xi), and for Gorky a nation divided by two souls (Graham 391). Dostoevsky, most Russian of Russians, is the epitome of modernist ambivalence; as Andr Gide says, Je ne connais pas dcrivain plus riche en contradictions et inconsquences que Dostoevski; Nietzsche dirait en antagonismes (67). The Possessed (whose title means the opposite)6 inspired Woolf to comment in her reading notes, How violent these contrasting

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effects are!The delicious absence in foreign writers of all boundaries (Rubenstein 166), while its ostentatiously masked chronicler admits to being unable to explain the coexistence of contraries in his tale. As for the largely absent protagonist Stavrogin, he changed destiny as the novel was composed; initially intended to represent the great sinner confessing an unspeakable crime, he becomes a cynically reluctant nihilist. The recovered chapters, meanwhile, uncovered in Soviet archives in 1921 and first published in England in 1922 in a translation by Virginia Woolf and Samuel Koteliansky, flaunt ambiguity at work. Stavrogins confession is formal contradiction in itself, leaving a perplexing deficit in the expurgated version, yet adding too much to the finished text. It shows Stavrogin in dialogue with himself as an externalised other (the saintly Tikhon); it also stages confession alongside the impossibility of confession. Woolf s involvement as a translator can only extend contradiction into critical discourse. She can hardly have translated, having only the roughest of insights into Russian, yet Koteliansky is only ever credited with rendering a rough version in his allegedly unreliable English.7 So what exactly did translation amount to and how can it be related to Woolf s own work? My conviction is that translating as an activity as well as a concept produced an essential and revealing dynamics in Woolf s creative work as much as in her critical reflections on language, translation and the meaning of meaning.8 It is a conviction I wish to illustrate and justify here through a close reading of the collaborative translation of Stavrogins Confession.9 By examining revealing passages from their work, alongside the Russian original and later translations, I shall argue that the Woolf-Koteliansky achievement deserves recognition as a strikingly avant-garde translation.10 A first example below (Stavrogins depiction of his devils) offers rich insight into compositional arrangement, verbal emphasis, and lexical choice: And suddenly he related, in the shortest and most abrupt manner so that certain words could hardly be understood, that he was subject, especially at nights, to a kind of hallucination, that he sometimes saw or felt near him a spiteful being, mocking and rational, in various forms and in various characters, but it is always one and the same and I always fly into a rage. (Woolf & Koteliansky 20) The Russian texts reads: , ax, , , , , , - , , (768). A word-for-word rendering gives this: And suddenly he, and yet in the shortest and most abrupt words, so that it was sometimes hard even to understand, related, that he was subject, especially at

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night, to some sort of hallucination, that he sometimes saw or felt beside him some spiteful being, mocking and rational, with various faces, and various characters, but it is always one and the same, and [yet] I always get angry. What strikes in the Woolf & Koteliansky translation is the minute attention to the source text: word order (except where comprehension might be endangered, as in separation of the subject he and verb related), repetitions, superlatives, interruptions of the syntactic flow and punctuation. The effect is not only to produce a very literal translation, but also one that is comparable to the source text in terms of imitative harmony: agitation, breathlessness or stumbling emphasis. The narrator or chroniclers role is kept to an absolute minimum, rarely enhancing or smoothing over the rough edges of the source, something that later translations, concerned with producing more readable, fluid or lexically rich prose in keeping with standard criteria for judging good translation, tended to do. Examples are italicised11 in the extracts below: And suddenly, in words so brief and disconnected as to be somewhat obscure, he began to speak of how he suffered, especially at night, from certain strange hallucinations; how he sometimes saw or felt close beside him an evil being, derisive and rational: it shows different faces and assumes different characters, and yet is always the same and always infuriates me (Yarmolinsky 696) And suddenly he told him, although rather briefly and abruptly, so that some of what he was saying was difficult to understand, that he was subject, especially at nights, to some kind of hallucinations, that he sometimes saw or felt beside him the presence of some kind of malignant creature, mocking and rational, in all sorts of guises and in different characters, but it is the same and it always makes me angry. (Magarshack 676) The small detail of whether or not to privilege synonyms to avoid repetition seen here with the adjective (different) proves essential as the text develops, as the three examples below confirm. Woolf and Koteliansky follow Dostoevskys lead scrupulously in terms of repetition, preferring insistence or obsession rather than stylistic elegance. Later English translations, and (in the first two examples) the 1922 French translation, privilege lexical and expressive variety in keeping with conventional style expectations: Example 1. But I soon noticed that she was not in the least afraid of me but was perhaps rather delirious. But she was not delirious either (Woolf & Koteliansky 36). , , , , . (783). But very soon I noticed that she was not afraid of me at all, and that she was perhaps delirious. But that was not the case (Yarmolinsky 710).

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Mais non! Ce ntait pas du tout du dlire! (De Schloezer 34) Example 2. Very loudly a van entered the courtyard below. Very loudly (and for some time before) a tailor, sitting at his window in the corner of the courtyard, sang a song. (Woolf & Koteliansky 37) - . ( ) , . (783) A cart rumbled noisily into the courtyard. In the corner of the courtyard a tailor at his window had been singing a loud song for some time. (Yarmolinsky 711) A cart of some kind drove noisily into the courtyard below. A workman, a tailor perhaps, was singing very loudly at a window in one corner of the courtyard (and had been doing so for some time). (Katz 768) Un camion pntra avec grand bruit dans la cour. Un apprenti tailleur chantait pleine gorge (depuis longtemps dj) prs de sa fentre, dans un coin de la cour. (De Schloezer 36) Example 3. I stood on tiptoe [ ] and began looking through the chink. At that moment, standing on tiptoe [ ], I remembered that, when I sat by the window and looked at the little red spider and fell into a trance, I had been thinking of how I should stand on tiptoe [ ] and peer through this very chink. (Woolf & Koteliansky 38) I stood on tiptoe and looked through a crack high up. At the very moment when I was rising on the tips of my toes I recalled that when I was sitting by the window, looking at the little red spider, and was about to doze off, I had thought of how I would lift myself on my toes so that my eye would be on a level with that crack. (Yarmolinsky 711) Another interesting feature of their translation is its scrupulous attention to tiny textual details: the spider that Stavrogin observes as he waits to see if Matryoshka will return is described as a tiny reddish spider (Woolf & Koteliansky 37) ( , 783) the suffix -ish capturing the Russian diminutive which is doubtless motivated by the need to avoid the positive connotations of the adjective red a detail that all subsequent translations have omitted. Similarly as the example below shows, the encounter with the child Matryoshka when Stavrogin returns to the house is rendered so as to preserve fine details in terms of repetition, precision and even contradiction: And suddenly she raised her tiny fist [ ] and began threatening from where she stood.On her face was such despair []

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as was unendurable to see on a childs face [ ]. She shook her tiny fist [ ] at me all the while threateningly, and nodded her head reproachfully. (Woolf & Koteliansky 36) Again, a comparison with other translations confirms that Koteliansky and Woolf steer clear of any affective connotations that may overstate Stavrogins depiction of the girl. The Yarmolinsky translation for example prefers the more endearing her little fist and then uses classic sentimental clich to refer to the child: And suddenly she raised her little fist at me and began to threaten me from where I stood.Her face betrayed such despair as was intolerable to see in a creature so small. She kept on threatening me with her little fist and shaking her head in reproach. (Yarmolinsky 710) The French translation equally opts for a sentimental representation of childhood: Son visage exprimait un dsespoir pnible voir dans un tre si petit. (De Schloezer 35) Woolf and Koteliansky are also the only translators not to have resolved the striking ambiguity in the text created by the verbal choice nodded her head. All later translations resort to the more morally logical choice shaking her headshe is after all accusing the man who is confessing to having raped her. The Russian text, however, uses the verb , from the verb , meaning to nod assent. In other words they leave Stavrogins text to unsettle, or to reflect the utterers own ambiguity. Another interesting lexical detail is their translation of the metaphor when Stavrogin abruptly decides to marry Lebydakins sister as a form of flamboyant self-imposed penance: About that time, altogether for no definite reason, I took it into my head to cripple my life, but in as disgusting a way as possible. (Woolf & Koteliansky 39) The Russian verb indeed means to cripple, thus prefiguring his decision to wreck his life with the crippled simpleton. The detail is smoothed over in other translations: Cest alors que lide me vint mais sans motif aucunde gcher ma vie de la faon la plus bte possible. (De Schloezer 41) It was at that time, but not for any particular reason, that I took it into my head to ruin my life somehow or other, but only in as disgusting a way as possible. (Magarshack 693) Such minor details accumulate over the pages, inevitably playing a decisive role in the connotative tissue of the text. They are what Edward in The Years describes when translating Greek as little negligible words which revealed shades of meaning which altered

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the meaning (TY 48). In contemporary translation theory, they do not simply mark individual choices in terms of form, but essential nodes (what the French philosopher Pierre Cadiot refers to as the profiling and thematising of meaning), where form itself is semantic. A telling example is that of grammatical subject or object, or whether verbs are used passively or actively, thus constructing an implicit textual network in which the speaking voice constructs or dismantles its own agency (a point I shall return to). Here too, Koteliansky and Woolf s choices show a marked tendency to follow textual leads to the letter, preferring syntax which in conventional terms might be deemed slightly awkward to create a voice that sounds most like Stavrogin in Russian, and trying to put the accent where it lay in Russia. A telling example is the syntactic arrangement chosen to foreground the notion of the childs despair in the extract above. The Russian word is cited by the French-Russian expert De Voge as an example of Russian untranslatability, expressing, as he claims, the ecstasy of suffering and a rebellion against the actual (De Vog 287). Certainly all translators concur on the choice of despair as the only approximate rendering. But beyond the words immediate semantics, its syntactic inscription in the sentence is paramount. The Russian text has the key noun as the grammatical subject of the sentence, delayed by a prepositional clause to enhance the semantic and rhetorical emphasis on the word: , (783). (On her face was such despair) While Woolf and Koteliansky maintain this sentence structure, with despair as the delayed and heightened subject (On her face was such despair as was unendurable to see on a childs face), later translations opt for alternative wording that reduces the grammatical, semantic and dramatic impact. In the first two cases, despair becomes the grammatical object, while face becomes the focal noun; in the third case, the use of the identifying structure (there is / there are) particularises the noun, reducing its conceptual or abstract resonance: Her face betrayed such despair as was intolerable to see in a creature so small. (Yarmolinsky 710) Her face was full of such despair which was quite unbearable to see on the face of a child. (Magarshack 691) There was despair in her face, such as was impossible to see on the face of a child. (Katz 467) The effect as it builds up in the Woolf & Koteliansky version is to create an atmosphere of necessary strangeness, flooding the page with associations.12 Stavrogin, they seem to imply, should not and cannot be domesticated here for life in Cranford; indeed in Russian too he is undomesticated. Conventional translation theory still dominant in the early twentieth century held that good translated prose should sound as if it had been spoken by an Englishman, as a contemporary review in The Times makes clear:

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It is generally held that an English translation ought above all to be English, and that the translator, having ascertained the meaning of his original, should be guided by the laws of his own language in expressing it.13 In fact the old Dryden principle of making Englishmen of foreign authors still holds strong to this day. In the introduction to the latest translation to date of Demons, Pevear, the co-translator, claims to have favoured natural English equivalents for the richly unnatural language of the original thereby creating a sense of thisness.14 Yet by choice or by instinct Koteliansky and Woolf steer clear of domesticating strategies, leaving the original foreignness to trouble the textual surfaces in English. Voicing and double voicing, those key features of Dostoevskys texts which dominated late-twentieth-century criticism of his oeuvre and were first traced in detail in early Soviet scholarship, indeed feature largely in Koteliansky and Woolf s translation, while they are very noticeably absent from all pre-1960s English and French translations (suggesting more polyphonic translations followed the discovery of Bakhtin, Voloshinov and Grossmans stylistic approaches first becoming available in the West). Not only is Stavrogin given a faltering voice (what Deleuze would call a stuttering voice) with telling stylistic tremors, but so too does the voice of Tikhon, the saintly bishop and confessor, shift from the poised to the stumbling as he attempts to define unseemly or inelegant crime. His confusion reveals his own profound moral ambivalence, a key feature in Dostoevskys aesthetic and moral vision. The conversation between the two men does not just pit evil against saintliness, but dramatises the tensions within both men, making the sinner saintly, while the saint himself is tainted with sin: Crimes, whatever they be, the more blood, the more horror in them, the more imposing they are, so to say, more picturesque. But there are crimes shameful, disgraceful, past all horror, they are, so to say, almost inelegant Tikhon did not finish. (Woolf & Koteliansky 49) , , , , , , ; , , , , . (796) Tikhons struggle to find the appropriate words, his inelegant speech and his syncopated, misleading syntax are therefore essential metaphoric, structural signifiers. Later translations favour rhetorical control and fluidity which cancel out the bishops own struggle with the attraction of evil: En general, quel que soit le crime, plus il y a de sang, plus il y a dhorreur, plus grand est leffet, plus il est pittoresque, pourrait-on dire. Mais il y a des crimes honteux, ignomineux, quoi lhorreur meme ne peut sattacher, qui sont par trop inlgants(De Schloezer 54)

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Crimes, no matter what they are, are the more imposing, the more picturesque, so to speak, the more blood, the more horror there is; but there are truly shameful, disgraceful crimes which are not redeemed by horror Tihon did not finish his sentence. (Yarmolinsky 726) Crimes, whatever their nature, are more impressive, more, as it were, picturesque, the more blood and the more horror. But there are crimes that are shameful and disgraceful quite apart from the horrors, crimes that are, as it were, a little too inelegant Tikhon stopped short. (Magarshack 702) The way duality functions in Dostoevsky has been amply charted out in modern scholarship; I am not pointing to Dostoevskys poetics here, but to the way later critical insights are already being intuitively inscribed into one early translation. Similarly, the now classic traits of polyphonic narration, intertwining the voices of author, chronicler and character (in Bakhtins terms) surface in the Woolf & Koteliansky translation, where later, more fluent, renderings enforce narrative authority at the expense of other voices that shift and perplex: And now it suddenly seemed to him something absolutely different: that Tikhon already know why he had come, that he was already warned (although nobody in the whole world could know the reason), and that if he did not speak first, it was because he was sparing his feelings, was afraid of his humiliation. (Woolf & Koteliansky 18) Here it is the confused agency of the verb to seem (it suddenly seemed to him, exactly as in Russian - ), making Stavrogin not the thinker or origin of the impression but the passive recipient of intuitions coming to him irrespective of his own volition, that is essential. All later translations grant Stavrogin far more control (grammatical and existential) over his own mental landscape: And now suddenly another notion occurred to him. (Yarmolinsky 694) Then all of a sudden something quite different occurred to him. (Magarshack 674) He suddenly felt that Tikhon already knew. (Katz 452) He imagined somehow that Tikhon already knew. (Pevear & Volokhonsky 683) Similarly, the intricate interweaving of two identities within the focalised passage, creating doubts over who is thinking and who being thought about, remains startlingly ambivalent in the Woolf & Koteliansky translation (he and his referring alternately to one or the other man even within the same clause). Later translators tend to resolve such ambiguity by resorting to the pluperfect tense and constructed subordinate or coordinated clauses or by avoiding the repeated pronoun: namely that Tihon already knew why he had come, that he had already been forewarned (although no one in the world could have known the reason) and that if

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he had not spoken first, it was in order to spare him, it was for fear of humiliating him. (Yarmolinsky 694) he felt that Tikhon already knew why he had come, that he had already been forewarned about it (though no one in the whole world could have known the reason) and if he did not speak first, it was because he was sorry for him and fearful of his humiliation. (Magarshack 674) He suddenly felt that Tikhon already knew why he had come, that hed been forewarned (even though no one in the whole world could have known the reason), and that if Tikhon hadnt spoken first, it was merely to spare him and to avoid humiliating him. (Katz 452) Such moments recall the unthought thinking that Derrida would later explore in Parages, qui dsarticule toute logique de contradiction, apprehending desire before it is named in language (152). Similar examples of dialogic translating, maintaining the free indirect discourse of the protagonist, rather than assimilating indirect utterance into the narrators more authoritative voice, can be seen for example in the passage when Stavrogin takes a last look at the flat after Matryoshas suicide: Suddenly I took out my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since she went out of the room. The conjecture was assuming the shape of a probability. But I determined to wait precisely fifteen minutes more. It also crossed my mind that perhaps she had come back, and that perhaps I had not heard her. But that was impossible: there was a dead silence, and I could hear the hum of every small fly. Suddenly my heart began bounding [?] again. I looked at my watch; it was three minutes short of the quarter. I sat them out, though my heart beat so as to hurt me. Then I got up, put on my hat, buttoned my overcoat, and looked round the roomhad I left any trace of my visit? (Woolf & Koteliansky 38) Again, the rather breathless tone of the narration, the abrupt, disarticulated clauses and the apparent lack of a narrators stylistic intermediacy (as in clauses containing perhaps, the lexical banality of the expressions, and the syntactic immediacy as if a voice were recording thoughts directly, including a direct question at the end) reinforces the idea that the voice is Stavrogins own. The difference becomes striking when the passage is compared to the other translations: Suddenly I whipped out my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since she went out of the room. My guess was assuming the aspect of reality. But I decided to wait for exactly another quarter of an hour. It had also crossed my mind that she might have returned and that I might have failed to hear her. But that was impossible: there was dead silence and I could hear the whirr of every midge. Suddenly my heart started pounding again. I took out my watch; there were three minutes to go; I sat them out, though my heart was pounding painfully. Then I got up, put

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on my hat, buttoned my overcoat and looked round the room to make sure that I had left no trace of my presence there. (Magarshack 692) Suddenly I grabbed my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since shed gone out. Suddenly I grabbed my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since shed gone out. My hypothesis reached the stage of probability (Katz 469) Then I got up, covered myself with my hat, buttoned my coat and glanced round the room to make sure everything was in place and there were no signs that I had come. (Pevear & Volokhonsky 700) There remains the intriguing question of the verb bounding in the Woolf & Koteliansky translation: why bound rather than pound? Of course, the manuscripts, incomplete as they are, may reveal that this was a type-setters oversight, that equally escaped the vigilant eye of the proof reader. It could be an example of Kotelianskys imperfect mastery of English making him muddle the two plosive phonemes [b] and [p]. But it might also reveal a fine example of what Lawrence Venuti calls foreignising translation, maintaining the harsh beat of the Russian verb (), while intensifying the semantics of the verb in English: a bounding heart would after all suggest thrill and anticipation, rather than the panic and terror conventionally associated with pounding. What I am underlining is a sharp tension between the rather facile suggestion in A Russian Point of View that ultimately the Russians cant be translated, and the glaringly contradictory proof in Stavrogins Confession that not only the vulgar facts and features of the text, but also its heft and hold can be exquisitely rendered in English. The mistake, of course, is to engage dialectically in the contradiction; the contradictory pulse comes not from the act of translation but from within the text itself that both desires and resists translation, the very site, in Derridas terms where the intraduisible and the traductible (the untranslatable and the traducible) come into contact. Koteliansky and Woolf s translation stops short of an elegant, canonical translation, enabling the Russian text to resist full assimilation, or to linger on as an intertextual music. The notion that a text has a rhythm of its own, which can yet be woven into a translation as the site where two languages, cultures and mindsets rub, has surfaced in translation studies only in the past decade.15 It posits the orality and rhythm of the text in translation as the site of its ethical performance, perceiving difference and respecting it. One final example offers a superb illustration of this rhythmic, musical rendering, in keeping with the pulse and impulse of the Russian text: Wild and confused were these revelations, as if indeed they came from a madman. And yet Nikolai Vsevolodovich spoke with such strange frankness, never seen in him before, with such simplicity, quite unnatural to him, that it seemed as if suddenly and unexpectedly his former self had completely disappeared. (Woolf & Koteliansky 21) .

Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron

, , , , , , . (768) Bizarres et confuses taient ces rvlations qui paraissaient vraiment tre le fait dun dment. Mais Nikola Vsivolodovitch parlait en meme temps avec une franchise si extraordinaire, avec une sincrit si trangre son caractre quil semblait que lhomme ancien avait compltement et subitement disparu en lui. (De Schloezer 653-4)

239

These disclosures were wild and incoherent, and really seemed to come from a madman. And yet Nikolai Vsyevolodovitch spoke with such strange, unaccustomed frankness, with a candour so entirely foreign to him that is seemed as though his former self had suddenly and unexpectedly disappeared. (Yarmolinsky 696) These revelations were wild and confused and really seemed to come from a madman. But at the same time Stavrogin spoke with such strange frankness, never seen in him before, with such simple heartedness, which was so out of character as far as he was concerned, that one could not help feeling that his former self had suddenly and quite unaccountably disappeared. (Magarshack 676) These revelations of his were wild and incoherent and indeed seemed to come from an insane person. All the same, Nikolai Vsevolodovich spoke with so strange a candour, such as had never been observed in him before, and with such completely uncharacteristic sincerity that it seemed as if his former self had suddenly and unexpectedly vanished once and for all. (Katz 455) The later translations are equally precise in semantic terms, but not until the most recent translation does the Russian music begin to resurface again: These revelations were wild and incoherent, and indeed came as if from a crazy man. But, for all that, Nikolai Vsevolodovich spoke with such strange sincerity, never before seen in him, with such simple-heartedness, completely unlike him, that it seemed the former man, suddenly and inadvertently, had vanished in him completely. (Pevear & Volokhonsky 680) And from this musical, ethical perspective, the question of who actually translated suddenly becomes immaterial. Koteliansky and Woolf s (for the times) unconventional, dialogic rendering of the texts own multiple layers of utterance, prior to any academic charting of dialogism, could only have come about at the meeting point where two specialist non-specialiststhe acutely intense Russian migr, and the acutely sensitive English authorgained access within a cross-lingual act to each others other side of language. The translation is not resolved in one direction or the other, but takes place between boundaries, at the very site where contradiction, in the non-agonistic, contrapuntal sense, begins, where two languages gently collide, and the differences between them resist resolution.

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We are left with discourse that is agitated internally, undecided, two-faced, double voiced, double accented. They thus achieve what I have called an avant-garde translation, an oxymoron if ever there was one. In conventional terms, translation is bound to be derivative, ancillary. The avant-garde translation marks an aporia in the eras critical discourse or aesthetic codes, anticipating, however instinctively or unconsciously, narrative, stylistic or formal challenges to doctrine or doxa that are yet to be charted. In the present case, their translation anticipates not only our heightened stylistic and critical understanding of textual polyphony, but it also largely predates the critical appreciation of stylistic barrenness that Barthes would call languages degr zero, inspired by Camuss own textual explorations of Dostoevsky that work their way into lEtranger. Little wonder that Woolf should fall short of a precise definition of the Russian point of view. Like Benjamin, she takes language seriously enough to know that sometimes meaning can only be approached tangentially, fleetingly. And the tangent is, after all, the closest that a geometrical figure can get to the oxymoron, as the circle and the line, the finite and the infinite, gently collide, andbutyet must then separate. Notes
1. 2. First published in 1916, Nevill Forbes Russian Grammar remained a reference in Russian language studies throughout the twentieth century. The echoes reveal common but not necessarily compatible aesthetic and critical appreciations of Russian literature in the early twentieth century, particularly in terms of Chekhovs art of lingering incompletion, Dostoevskys whirlpool passions and Tolstoys infallible eye. See for example: Murrys Dostoyevsky, 31-32; Baring 56-7 and 101; Lubbock 269; Kropotkin 185-186; Graham 391; De Vog 230-4; Clutton-Brock 289; Brodsky 95. The point is developed by Natalya Reinhold in A Railway Accident (237-48). The paradigm of clothes and nakedness and their shifting connotations is used by Baring to explore Dostoevskys characters (Baring 133), while Dostoevsky uses the story of the swine and the naked madman (from the Gospel of Luke) as the epigraph to The Possessed. In Murrys words, At first, Stavrogin was to have been the man clothed and in his right mind, while the devils, entering into Verhovensky, Kirillov and Shatov, drive them down the steep into the sea. (Dostoevsky Possessed 702) See Woolf s 1917 review The Russian View: And yet, in spite of its formlessness and flatness, she produces an effect of spirituality. It is as if she had tried to light a lamp behind her characters, making them transparent rather than solid, letting the large and permanent things show through the details of dress and body (E2 342). First published in appendix form in Roberta Rubensteins Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View (175-191). As recent translators preference for the more literal title Devils, or Demons implies, the Russian title means those possessing, rather than those possessed. Early English translations were doubtless influenced by the French title, Les Possds, which was commonly read in Britain before Mrs Garnetts translation was published. Intriguingly, in the manuscripts of their translation of the missing chapters, Woolf and Koteliansky use the title The Possessed, but then strike it out. For the question of whether Woolf can actually be deemed a translator, rather than a copy-editor, see Rubenstein (8-10), Reinhold (Russian Voyage Out 11), and Laura Marcus (Introduction, Translations from the Russian xiv). For a fuller insight into Kotelianskys language skills and the regrettable critical tendency to insist on his eccentric or faltering English, see Claire Davisons Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky and British Modernism. Translation and Literature 20.3 (Nov. 2011): 334-347. For Woolf s exploration of translation as a leading metaphor in her fiction, see Dalgarno. As Reinhold observes, Obviously, our knowledge of the Russian theme in Virginia Woolf s work shall not be complete without a comparative study of the Russian source texts and her co-translations. (A Railway Accident 243).

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

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10. My approach is therefore one of comparative translation, and does not extend to the drafts and revisions made by the translators during the translation process. A certain number of the Woolf & Koteliansky manuscripts have been preserved, as Furman revealed in 2006, and are available in the Maj Ewing collection at UCLA. These provide a slightly different and entirely fascinating perspective, as proved by Rebecca Beasleys paper Woolf s Translations at the Glasgow conference. 11. All italics in the quoted texts are mine. Italics will systematically point to target-oriented, hypertextual translation strategies. I will use bold text to foreground stylistic details in the source text and related sourceoriented features in the translations. 12. I am slightly misquoting Woolf s notion at the end of A Perfect Language: With the best will in the world the translators are bound to stamp their individuality or that of their age upon the text. Our minds are so full of echoes that a single word such as aweary will flood a whole page for an English reader with the wrong associations. (E2 118) The idea, however, is being expressed to back up her conviction that some knowledge of the language is a possession not to be done without, which she certainly attempted to apply to Russian as well. The effect of a rush of associations, though no longer seen in terms of wrong or right, is now an essential criterion in assessing what Barbara Folkart calls the valency of translation. 13. The quote is from a contemporary review of Nadine Jarintsovs Russian Poets and Poems, which proposes translations that go against such criteria: Mme Jarintsov thinks it of capital importance to reproduce these peculiarities of her originals. The reviewer is unconvinced (Duff 367). 14. In all fairness, it must be underlined that this claim appears in stark contradiction with Pevears argument one paragraph earlier: The terms smooth and natural are used almost automatically in praise of what are thought to be good translations. Their appropriateness is not self-evident. Dostoevskys prose is all about movement and life, it has great forward momentum, but there is nothing smooth about it. A smooth translation of Dostoevsky would be what Paul Valery called a rsum that annuls resonance and form. (xxxi) In fact, this most recent translation is certainly the starkest and most uncannily evocative of the Russian textual movement, evincing a translation strategy which most closely recalls that of Woolf & Koteliansky. 15. Notion largely explored by the French philosopher and critic Henri Meschonnic, whose works are unfortunately little known in the English-speaking world on account of their being rarely available in translation.

Works Cited
Baring, Maurice. Landmarks in Russian Literature. 1910. London: Methuen, 1960. Brodsky, Nikolai. The Unfulfilled Idea. Trans. V. Woolf and S.S.Koteliansky. Translations from the Russian, 1922-23. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. Southport: Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, 2006. 95-107. Clutton-Brock, Arthur. Leo Tolstoy. TLS 10 September 1908. 289. Dalgarno, Emily. Virginia Woolf: Translation and Iterability. Yearbook of English Studies 36.1 (2006): 145156. De Vog, Melchior. Le Roman Russe. Paris: Plon, 1897. Derrida, Jacques. Parages. 1986. Revised edition. Paris: Galile, 2003. Dostoevsky, F.M. Besi (). 1871. Saint-Petersburg: Azbuka-Classica, 2005. . Stavrogins Confession and The Plan of The Life of a Great Sinner. Tr. S. S. Koteliansky and V. Woolf. Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1922. . La Confession de Stavroguine. Trans. Boris de Schloezer. Nouvelle Revue Franais 19 (June 1922): 647665; (July 1922): (30-57). . The Possessed. Trans. Constance Garnett, with foreword and translation of the suppressed chapter At Tihons by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. New York: The Modern Library, 1936. . The Possessed. Trans. David Magarshack. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953. . Devils. Trans. Michael R. Katz. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1992. . Demons. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage, 1994. Duff, James. The Problems of Translation. TLS, 2 August 1917. 367. Folkart, Barbara, A Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2007. Forbes, Nevill. Russian Grammar. 1916. Third edition, revised and enlarged by J. C. Dumbreck. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1983. Furman, Yelena. Translating Dostoievskii, Writing a Novel of Owns One: The Place of Stavrogins Confession in the Creation of Mrs Dalloway. Modern Languages Review I04 (2009): 1081-1097. Gide, Andr. Dostoevski: articles et causeries. 1922. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Graham, Stephen. The Position of Maxim Gorky. TLS, 17 August 1916. 391.

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Kropotkin, Peter. Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature. (First edition: Russian Literature, 1905). New York: Knopf, 1915. Lubbock, Percy. Dostoevsky. The Times 4 July 1912. 269. Merezhkovsky, Dmitry. Tolstoy as Man and Artist, with an essay on Dostoevsky. London: Constable, 1902. Meschonnic, Henri. Ethique et politique du traduire. Lagrasse: Verdier, 2008. Murry, John Middleton. Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Critical Study. London: Secker, 1916. . Dostoevsky Possessed. TLS, 2 November 1922. 702. Reinhold, Natalya. Woolf s Russian Voyage Out. Woolf Studies Annual 9 (2003): 9-11. . A Railway Accident: Virginia Woolf translates Tolstoy. Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace UP, 2005. 237-48. Rubenstein, Roberta. Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Woolf, Virginia & S. S. Koteliansky. Translations from the Russian, 1922-23. Ed. Stuart N. Clarke. Introduction by Laura Marcus. Southport: Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, 2006. Woolf, Virginia. The Years. 1937. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. 1992. . The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N.Clarke. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986-2011. . Three Guineas. 1938. London: The Hogarth Press, 1986.

A DIALOGUEABOUT THIS BEAUTY AND TRUTH: JORGE LUIS BORGESS TRANSLATION OF VIRGINIA WOOLFS ORLANDO by Rebecca DeWald
Tan compleja es la realidad, tan fragmentaria y tan simplificada la historia, que un observador omnisciente podra redactar un nmero indefinido, y casi infinito, de biografas de un hombre, que destacan hechos independientes y de las que tendramos que leer muchas antes de comprender que el protagonista es el mismo. (Borges, Vathek 107)1 Oh! if only I could write! she cried (for she had the odd conceit of those who write that words written are shared). She had no ink; and but little paper. But she made ink from berries and wine; and finding a few margins and blank spaces in the manuscript of The Oak Tree, managed, by writing a kind of shorthand to describe the scenery in a long, blank verse poem, and to carry on a dialogue with herself about this Beauty and Truth concisely enough. (O 92)

rgentinian writer and polyglot Jorge Luis Borgeshe spoke several European languages, as well as Old Norsetranslated Virginia Woolf s Orlando (1928) in 1937, nine years after its initial publication in the UK. Published on the initiative of Victoria Ocampo in her publishing house Sur in Buenos Aires, Borgess translation was very popular in Spanish-speaking countries,2 to the extent that it was not re-translated until 1993 (Leone 223). However, the text has been interpreted as being contrary to what Woolf might have had in mind: feminist readings of Borgess text have often focused on passages where the Spanish version does not fully cater for a feminist perspective, or even contradicts it. I am going to recast this debate in order to investigate whether Borgess translation of Orlando posed (or still poses) a threat to feminist readings of Woolfs text. I will describe some differences between the English and Spanish language system which might trigger problems in translation, and analyse how Borgess solutions have been and can be interpreted. Further, I would like to return to feminist criticism, in the form of feminist Translation Studies, in order to examine how this enables a reading of the translated Orlando which is based on the presumed equality (rather than a hierarchy) of the original text and its translation.

Part I: Linguistic Difficulties and the Translator under Attack

There has been a tendency in criticism to interpret every change Borges made in his translation in terms of a feminist/anti-feminist dichotomy. Clara Malraux, who translated A Room of Ones Own into French, thinks that she was only able to translate Woolf because she was herself a woman (Ayuso 242, n2). Although this particular distinction is not the most common one used to critique Borgess translation, feminist readings are often grounded on

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the assumption that Borges uses his masculine stance abusively, to alter the text. Mnica G. Ayuso, for example, writes that in Borgess Orlando, [h]is presence is more clearly felt in the rendering of gender.In his handling of gender he adopts a critical masculine presence which sabotages the text (249). Leah Leone uses similar terms in her argument that Borges neutralizes or even sabotages the text, to the extent that the Spanish version, unlike the English one, cannot be regarded as a fundamental text for feminist and queer studies (224). One difficulty lies in Spanish grammar. For example, the possessive pronoun in Spanish does not distinguish between gender, that is his and her are equally rendered by su. Another difference is that the personal pronoun is generally omitted in Spanish sentences. A literal translation of he has would be l tiene, but is often rendered as simply tiene. Tiene, then, can also mean she has (from ella tiene which becomes tiene). In these instances, the language is capable of allowing gender ambiguity if desired. Leone is at times frustrated with Borgess use of this peculiarity of the Spanish language, and argues that the Argentine writer followed an agenda which did not agree with that of Woolf (in the way she perceives it). Arguments can however be made in favour of Borgess use of the facilities provided by the Spanish language, as well as against it. One example is the following famous passage which both Ayuso and Leone use to underline their points: we have no choice left but confess he was a woman (O 87). This reads in Spanish: Debemos confesarlo: era una mujer (Borges, Orlando 84).3 Leone argues that by shortening the first half of the sentence, the surprise effect of the English version is lost in the translation (230). He and woman create a friction in the sentence, an apparent contradiction, which might shock the reader. By omitting he, the impact on the reader disappears. A counter-argument, however, can be formulated as follows: The passage continues with a description of how little Orlandos new sex affects him, as if nothing major had changed. We must confess instead of the more flourished We have no choice left but confess creates an almost scientific neutrality: these are the facts, there is no doubt about them or any leeway for interpretation. Borgess translation stresses the interpretation that a sex change is not particularly remarkable. The biographers explanation Orlando had become a woman there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been (O 87, my emphasis) is followed by the use of the pronoun their (which then needs the clarification that his will have to be substituted for her, he for she from this point onwards) and is rendered as follows: Orlando se haba transformado en una mujer intil negarlo. Pero, en todo lo dems, Orlando era el mismo (Borges, Orlando 84; my emphasis).4 Just as Woolf, Borges keeps a woman (una mujer) in the first sentence, and a masculine designation (he had been; el mismo) in the second sentence. Ayuso takes issue with the following sentence: The change in sex, though it altered their future did nothing whatever to alter their identity (O 87) and the use of the plural pronoun their which Borges renders as singular su: El cambio de sexo modificaba su porvenir, no su identidad (Orlando 84). Borges thus, she says, nails the masculine much faster (248). This interpretation, however, assumes su is a masculine pronoun only, whereas it is both the masculine and the feminine pronoun, as shown above. By using it, Borges acknowledges the ambiguity of Orlandos gender, but does not make an issue of it. The interwoven usage of the ambiguous su, initiates a subtle development which allows for a less static gender determination.

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Ayuso claims that [w]hen Borges translates literally and accurately, his voice is that of a purveyor of high culture responsible for transmitting, as transparently as he can, the ideas he received and so greatly admired. In this instance he positioned himself vis--vis Woolf s text almost as an absence (249). Both this remark, and the one previously cited, are clearly generalizations: even Leone admits many instances in which Borges translates gender in a gender-neutral fashion. Borges is being criticized not only as a male translatoras a man making use of a womans textbut as male translator: as translator who does more than simply offer an objective rendition of the foreign language text, who oversteps his responsibilities. In short, whenever Borges translated literally or fluently, he did a good job. Borges, like every translator, has to face criticism for not producing what Lawrence Venuti calls a fluent translation, which gives the illusion of a source text, not a translation. The translators task is to remain invisible.5 The essential problem of the criticism of Borgess text is that it is paradoxical. Critics tend to criticise Borges, the translator of Orlando, for intervening too much in the text. Simultaneously, he is treated as if he were an author whose texts were factual accounts expressing his personal opinion. This latter claim is particularly ironic, given that Borges, the great master of illusion, would be quite capable of inventing an alter ego, and would not necessarily express his personal opinion in a text. The second problem with a biographical reading of his translation is that Borges did everything possible to obscure the authorship of the translation of Orlando. He often claimed that it was actually his mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges, who had translated Orlando, or had at least contributed to it (Ayuso 245). Consequent speculation, such as by Gargategli Brusa, has gone as far as to attribute both texts to Jorge Luiss father, Jorge Guillermo Borges (qtd. in Willson 159). More arguments suggest that Borges did not hijack Orlando to disseminate an antifeminist message. If he had wanted to publicise such a message, he could have resorted to a more direct means, such as a critical essay, or a book review of Orlando. The latter, in particular, would have been easy for Borges to publish, as at the time he earned his living writing film and literature criticism.6 He also maintained good connections with the (mainly male) literary and publishing circles in Argentina and Spain. It is true that Borges did not develop a great esteem for Woolf s Orlando until later. What he seems to have liked about the book might not coincide with contemporary readers first impressions: He was particularly taken by its musicality, which he finds both in the prose and in the composition of a limited number of themes that return and combine. Orlando, he says, combines Magic, bitterness, and happiness (Borges, Capsule 174). This suggests that Borgess interest in Orlando may not have been centred on its feminist, gender-crossing aspects. However, these two approaches are not necessarily exclusive. Borges chose to stress different themes in the text, themes that differ from a purely feminist reading.

Part II: Feminist Translation Studies A Dialogue between Male and Female
An alternative feminist analysis of Borgess Orlando can be pursued in a different context, that of feminist translation studies. In the introduction to Gender in Translation, Sherry Simon points out the gendered discourse of translation: The hierarchical

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authority of the original over the reproduction is linked with imagery of masculine and feminine; the original is considered the strong generative male, the translation the weaker and derivative female (Simon 1). In other words, a translation is supposed to be the weak, humble and docile derivative of the strong and procreative original text. In the same way, the vocabulary used to describe the good translator (invisible, transparent) and the bad translator (the one who alters, changes, intervenes, imposes) reflects this dichotomy. Ayusos accusation of Borges abusing his masculine stance in translating Orlando is a case in point (see further above). Borges transforms the text although a translator is not supposed to do that if s/he wants to remain invisible and that is what turns him or her into a masculine translator. The quotation could also be interpreted as Woolf s Orlando, as the original, being a masculine text, Borgess Orlando, the translation, a feminine one. The subject of the text itselfOrlandos ambiguous gender identitythough, makes it clear that there cannot be a clear dichotomy between the two. Simon thinks it is this dichotomy between male and female which is connected with a hierarchy between source text and translation and that needs to be questioned. Feminist translation studies, then, focus on neither one of the gendered poles, but rather concentrate on the writing project (Simon 2), thus avoiding the divide between masculine and feminine. There cannot be fidelity to either of the poles, either source text or target text, but only to the process of translation. As Efran Kristal remarks, Borgess goal in translating was to create not a definitive version, but a convincing work of literature (87). This is based on his belief that any translation (or, indeed, any text) is only ever a rewriting (Arrojo 31). In Kristals words: In summary, for Borges a translation is not the transfer of a text from one language to another. It is a transformation of a text into another (32). Borges realizes that a text changes over time, and that there is no possibility of creating a timeless work. In light of this, it might be possible to suggest that he was more devoted to the process of translation than its outcome. This also implies that the text should be regarded as independent of its author, or at least that the focus should be on the text rather than the authors motives in its production. Is it then possible to speak of a feminist translation in form which might not qualify as a feminist translation in content? Following Simons approach, such a text can be achieved if we can regard original and translation as equals. And equality between the two is what feminist translation theory and Borgess approach to translation have in common. This stancethe assumed equality between the two text genresenables a dialogue between the two.7 The publishing context of Borgess Orlando, for example, was completely different from that of its English original in the UK in 1928: literature and politics in Argentina were still mainly male dominated and the emancipatory movement was not as advanced in Argentina as it was in the UK. All these circumstances had an influence on the books reception. If it did not become a foundational text for feminists in South America, Borgess Orlando did, however, achieve something else. Orlando was the first of Woolf s novels to be translated into Spanish (only preceded by the Time Passes section from To the Lighthouse, Lzaro Lafuente 1) and the first one to appear in Latin America. It therefore created a first impression of the author for Latin American readers which considerably differed from the one English readers may have had at this point (Willson 17). One consequence of this is that Woolf is regarded by many Latin American Studies scholars to have paved

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the way for Magical Realism, and the immensely popular Boom literature. Gabriel Garca Mrquez, maybe the best known writer of the Boom generation, admitted that Woolf s Orlando was a major influence on his work, particularly on his most well-known book, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Leone 223). Borgess Orlando triggered a development which became an entire movement in Latin America and, in turn, triggered a school of criticism which can now serve again to reinterpret Woolf s text from a different angle.8 It is a mutually enriching dialogue. Borgess perception of a dialogue best describes the collaboration involved: Dialogue for me is not a form of polemics, of monologue or magisterial dogmatism, but of shared investigation (qtd. in Bradford 48). A translation as a dialogue between source text and target text, between author and translator, is a joint project in which both texts and both writers participate in order to discover new aspects in both texts.9

Part III: Context and Conclusion

This dialogue, then, would not be possible without the translation. Sergio Waisman asks provocatively: Does the translator not, in a way, actually create what is original about the source textby deciding which elements of the source merit an attempt at faithful reproduction, however such a thing is defined? (56-57). The translator becomes visibleand should be visible in order to enable a dialogue, not just between author and translator, or between texts, but also between text and context. The following passage exemplifies this idea: So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was visible in Orlando, which is to be found if the reader will look at page 101, even in her face (O 120, my emphasis). No images are included in the Spanish version; Borges therefore renders the passage as follows: A fuerza de usar faldas por tanto tiempo, ya un cierto cambio era visible en Orlando; un cambio hasta de cara, como lo puede comprobar el lector en la galera de retratos (Orlando 112; my emphasis).10 Instead of referring back to a different part of the text, Borges imagines a new reality, one in which portraits of Orlando exist in a gallery outside the book. This adds to the confusion between fictionality and reality by incorporating context into the text. Like the reference to a potentially existing gallery outside the book, the change of Woolf s intradiegetic narratorone who is placed in the plotto an extradiegetic narrator in Borgess textone outside the fictional environmentcontributes to the confusion between fact and fiction.11 The effect produced is that of a classic narrative: a story told by someone to someone else. It also conforms to the pattern of Chinese boxes: a text within a meta-text within a meta-meta-text, and so on. The borders of the text become vague. This appears to be part of his method to make the narrator appear more like a biographer, to contrast her/his rational syntax with the account of Orlandos emotions. It adds to the illusion of the biography and dissimulates the fictionality of the text, just to point at the inherently fantastical nature of a subject who lives over 300 years and who changes from man to woman. Arguments can be made for Borgess Orlando being both a gender-disruptive and a non-gender-disruptive text, and this may well have been the translators intention. Borges created a slippery text which crosses borders: borders of gender (through his use of the ambiguous su throughout, as one example); borders between author and translator (Borges

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the translator offers his interpretation, stresses his points of interest); borders between original and translation (in creating a dialogue between the two); and borders between text and context (by continuously referring to the outside of the text). Discussing Borgess attitude to Babel, the presumed origin of translation through the creation of multiple languages, Waisman says: Borges does not consider Babel to represent a loss. Multiplicity and difference are not a disaster for Borges, but a field of potentiality (Waisman 44). A dispersal into linguistic disunity, just like in translation, occurs in one of the most beautiful scenes in Orlando: and Orlando, standing there, cried out Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine! and he answered her Orlando! and the words went dashing and circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher, further and further, faster and faster they circled, till they crashed and fell in a shower of fragments to the ground; and she went in (O 171). Orlando and Shelmerdine used to share their own, particular language. When Shelmerdine leaves, the language disperses into mere fragments. The Spanish (literal) rendition of fell in a shower of fragments is se estrellaron hechas trizas (Borges, Orlando 154)a mere coincidence which implies the beauty of the stars (estrellas) and the splendour of this new dispersal of meaning which contains potential rather than loss. Notes
1. Reality is so complex, so fragmentary, while history is simplified to the extent that an omniscient observer could edit as many as infinite biographies of one man, all recounting independent facts, and we would need to read a substantial number of them to realize that the protagonist was one and the same (my translation). 2. Both Orlando and the preceding A Room of Ones Own in Borgess version became standard texts for Spanish-speaking readers (Ayuso 242). 3. debemos/we must (from nosotros debemos) confesarlo/ confess it era/ (he or she) was una mujer/ a woman 4. Orlando has turned into a woman unnecessary to deny it. But in all other aspects Orlando was the same (My translation and emphasis). 5. A translated textis judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writers personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the original (Venuti 1). 6. Incidentally, this also explains why he was so familiar with Woolf s work. Borges contributed regularly to Sur (Ayuso 241), and made a living from publishing in El Hogar (Ayuso 243). 7. The dialogue I have in mind is based on Julia Kristevas notion of intertextuality which posits that a text is always linked to other sources. Michael Payne thinks that for Kristeva no text is just itself, that all are dialogical even when they do not explicitly allude to any others (178). Texts, in Kristevas terms, include multiple origins, written and oral, text and context. 8. See, for example Channing who argues that Magical Realism disrupts modern realist narrative expectations, destabilizes normative oppositions, blurs and transgresses boundaries, is an act of subversion, and most importantly, I believe, creates a space for diversity (11). 9. What both texts also have in common, and what is stressed even more by the reception of the Spanish text, is the question and the impossibility of biographical writing (Leone 233). 10. After having worn skirts for such a long time, a certain change was visible in Orlando; a change in her/his face, as the reader can verify in the portrait gallery (My translation). 11. Patricia Willson argues, supported by Leone, that the use of an extradiegetic narrator serves to undo the effect of a psychological novel which Borges disliked (Leone 227).

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Works Cited
Arrojo, Rosemary. Translation, Transference, and the Attraction to Otherness: Borges, Menard, Whitman. Diacritics 34.3/4 (2004): 31-53. Ayuso, Mnica G. The Unlike[ly] Other: Borges and Woolf. Woolf Studies Annual 10 (2004): 241-51. Bradford, Matas Serra. Red Herrings and Other Distractions: Borges in Conversation. PN Review 194.36.6 (2010): 47-51. Borges, Jorge Luis. Sobre el Vathek de William Beckford. Obras Completas II. Ed. Carlos V. Fras. Buenos Aires: Emec, 1974. 107-10. . Capsule Biographies: Virginia Woolf. Trans. Esther Allen. Selected Non-Fictions. Ed. Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. 173-174. Channing, Jill. Magical Realism and Gender Variability in Orlando. Virginia Woolf Miscellany 67 (2005): 11-13. Kristal, Efran. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002. Lzaro Lafuente, Luis Alberto. The First Translation of Virginia Woolf s Time Passes Facts, Mysteries and Conjectures. The Grove 10 (2003): 71-83. Web. 10 Aug 2011. <http://dspace.uah.es/dspace/bitstream/ handle/10017/6895/First%20Spanish.pdf?sequence=1> Leone, Leah. La novela cautiva: Borges y la traduccin de Orlando. Variaciones Borges 25 (2008): 223-236. Payne, Michael. Reading Theory: An Introduction to Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993. Salomone, Alicia. Virginia Woolf en los Testimonios de Victoria Ocampo: Tensiones entre Feminismo y Colonialismo. Revista Chilena de Literatura 69 (2006): 69-87. Simon, Sherry. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translators Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Waisman, Sergio Gabriel. Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2005. Willson, Patricia. La Constelacin del Sur: Traductores y Traducciones en la Literatura Argentina del Siglo XX. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores Argentina, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. 1928. London: Vintage Books, 2004. . Orlando. Traduccin de Jorge Luis Borges. Trans. Jorge Luis Borges. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1968.

AS I SPIN ALONG THE ROADS I REMODEL MY LIFE: TRAVEL FILMS PROJECTED INTO THE SHAPE OF ORLANDO by Leslie Kathleen Hankins
I want more than ever to travel with you; it seems to me now the height of my desire, and I get into despair wondering how it can ever be realized. Can it, do you think? (Vita to Virginia, January 29 1927, Letters of Vita 165) The cinemas ability to bring to us in our plush-covered seats a second-hand experience of travel is one of its saving, if not artistic, graces (Anon, Vogue, November 1924, 100)

irginia Woolf enjoyed not only travel writing, but also travel film; her fiction bears traces of her pilgrimages to picture palaces for travel adventures. One of Woolf s first diary comments about filmfrom January 15, 1915describes a barge floating through Baghdad (D1, 18-19). Woolf s fascination with travel was not hers alone. As travel took off in post-World War I Britain, it filled the glossy Nation and Athenaeum Travel Supplement (Summer 1925),1 Hogarth Press travel books by Vita Sackville-West, and travel advertisements and articles in Vogue. The armchair traveler who sits comfortably in a cushy armchair by the fire or by the window reading of travelers exploitsor perhaps planning her ownis a familiar image in Woolf s work. Yet, because new windows for travel fantasies opened up in the 1920s, the comfortable chair by the library window was replaced, or at least supplemented, by yet another comfortable chair before a very modern type of window: the plush seat in the modern picture palace. Travel shorts, along with other actualities filled British film programmes in the early decades of the twentieth century; Woolf writes of her pleasure in such films as real films (as opposed to adaptations or film dramas) in the holograph drafts of her 1926 article on cinema.2 Cinastes delighted in travel films; modernist poet, H. D., in her poems Projector and Projector II: Chang in Close Up in 1927 celebrates the way cinema can provide the travel experience to those who cannot travel: vision returns and with new vision fresh hope to the impotent; tired feet that never knew a hill-slope tread fabulous mountain sides; [] waves sparkle and delight the weary eyes

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that never saw the sun fall in the sea nor the bright Pleaiads rise. (H. D. Projector 50-1) Picture palaces, trade shows and the London Film Society screened such travel films as Captain Angus Buchanans Crossing the Great Sahara (1924), Adrian Brunels travelogue burlesque, Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924), Merian Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, and Marguerite Harrisons epic 1925 film, Grass, and portions of Claude Friese-Greenes experimental colour travel film, The Open Road (1924-5), to name just a few.3 In Early November 1924, an article Travel Films in Vogue appeared alongside a half page advertisement for Bean Cars; though the language and ideas mesh well with Iris Barrys other work, this piece is unsigned. Travel Films refers to Nanook, the Wonderful London series, Cannibals of the Southern Seas, Crossing the Sahara, Trailing African Wild Animals, The Lost Tribe, Climbing Mount Everest, and Mountains of the Moonas well as Wembley, the film about the British Empire exhibit. Anticipating the opportunity to screen Climbing Mount Everest, forthcoming at the Scala, the author claims that such travel films provide an experience that is real: Our sedentary journey will be remote from reality, but even so, for all those of a grave and curious nature (the nature, that is, that makes great lovers of travel-pieces) this unique film should provide not only sensations but a real experience (Early November Vogue 1924, 100). The writer puts it succinctly: The cinemas ability to bring to us in our plush-covered seats a second-hand experience of travel is one of its saving, if not artistic, graces (100). In a section heralding THE PLEASURES OF FILM TRAVEL the Vogue author further explains that a spectator has the time, or the vantage point, to absorb these film travels more fully than it is possible to absorb experiences of actual travel: The cinema somehow abstracts views of lakes and mountains, rivers and villages; it gives one bodily ease, and so the eye is free to absorb to its utmost, as it cannot before those lakes and mountains themselves. Can Wembley come properly into question? In any case, how much more of the Exhibition one saw on that convenient film than after even several visits there in person! It is the same with all ones travelsthey come up fresh and enriched when the motion picture spreads them before one again. And then, returning to our ideal travel film, how infinitely pleasanter, save for the very intrepid, to go Crossing the Sahara in the cinema than in the flesh (100). In The Cinema in 1926 Woolf concurs, as she analyses the curious effect of watching films of actuality: the brain sees at once that they have taken on a quality which does not belong to the simple photograph of real life [] From this point of vantage, as we watch the antics of our kind, we have time to feel pity and amusement, to generalize, to endow one man with the attributes of the race. Watching the boat sail and the wave break, we have time to open our minds wide to beauty and register on top of it the queer sensationthis beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether we behold it or not (E4 592). Travel films transported cinema spectators on epic adventures akin to Orlandos

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adventures in Constantinople or among the gypsies. Crossing the Great Sahara of Angus Buchanans epic journey from 1922-3 (with cinematography by T. A. Glover) played in London for three months at the beginning of 1924. That film and the travel film genre it represents inspired the first of the burlesques of filmmaker Adrian Brunel, who (with his assistant Lionel Rich) made Crossing the Great Sagrada (1924), a romping mockumentary playing with stock footage, droll intertitles, editing mismatches and witty surprises. In the Late September 1924 issue of Vogue, a short article by Iris Barry, The Autumn Cinema, encourages the young satiric British producer to produce more of his witty films, like his brilliant skit on travel films, Crossing the Great Sagrada, [which] made all Wardour Street weak with astonished merriment when it was shown privately (78). Brunels burlesque travel films provide rich links to Woolf s mock-biography/mock-travelogue novel, Orlando. His burlesque deflates the high style or epic grandeur of the title cards of the conventional silent documentaries, and plays tricks on the viewer that anticipate Orlandos mock biographer and trickster passages. Along with the black and white travel shorts and burlesques in picture palaces, Woolf also had access to at least one acclaimed experiment in color travel film on March 25, 1924, at the Holburn Empire; she reviews this in a paragraph in N&A on April 5, 1924: I was given the opportunity to see a demonstration of a new colour film process by Mr Friese-Greene. The inventors results probably compare favourably with other colour films, but they are very uneven in merit. The quiet-coloured scenes of English country are much the most successful; anything like a bright colour tends immediately to produce an oleographic effect. That is, of course, not peculiar to Mr Friese-Greenes process. It almost looks as if natures brighter colours which harmonise pleasingly when seen in three dimensions acquire an unpleasantly garish quality when represented in two (E3 403-4). The audience at the University of Glasgow Contradictory Woolf conference screened some of Friese-Greenes experiments, selected segments of The Open Road described in the British Film Institute booklet accompanying the dvd: The journey, from Lands End to John OGroats and back to London, was made in a Vauxhall D type. The travelogue format provided the ideal way to profile the colour process because the natural world was more of a challenge than the contrived studio set. Iconic landmarks would be instantly recognizable to the audience. The car sets out from Lands End and the first startling image is that of the artist Lamorna Birch at work in Lamorna Cove. St. Michaels Mount and St Ives follow before arriving at Plymouth. The journey continues through South Devon depicting picture postcard villages and seaside resorts: Exmoor with a hunt in progress, Wells Cathedral, and the beach at Weston-super-Mare. In Cardiff we see the city centre from the top of a tram, a student rag and the Docks (2-3). Such a cinematic motor tour fits the 1920s rage for the motorcar; motor travel was posh, adventurous and omnipresent, featured in popular publications, in advertisements, and on the front and back covers of Vogue. A modernist woman driver and an ultra-modern car

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Poster for The Open Road film by Friese-Greene, courtesy of the British Film Institute, Stills, Posters and Designs Department.

grace Lepapes January 1925 Vogue cover, for example. Friese-Greenes road trips with color film were well received in trade shows; The Open Road, filmed in 1924-5 (the segments Woolf saw were prototypes) was intended to be shown in serial format as shorts in picture palaces;4 Although it was made for theatre exhibition, the first nine episodes of The Open Road were first presented at trade shows in November 1925 and billed as A Wonderful Series of Short Productions taken during a motor tour, by the new all British Friese-Greene Natural Colour Process (8). Recently, the British Film Institute, with the support of the Eric Anker-Petersen Trust, restored the film and released it as a region 2 DVD.5

Projected into the shape of Orlando

My God, Virginia, if ever I was thrilled and terrified it is at the prospect of being projected into the shape of Orlando. (Vita to Virginia October 11, 1927: Letters of Vita 238) In addition to the pioneering color film segments, which I argue stayed in her mind, Woolf saw other travel films in the 1920s; a letter from Vita Sackville-West from February

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19, 1927 reminds her of the time they screened the 1925 film Grass together in the summer of 1926: For a whole fortnight I shant be able to write to you or to anybody, while we are camping. You remember when I dragged you to see the film called Grass? (Letters of Vita 173).6 Vita suggests in her February letter to Virginia that she will be replicating the film, Grass, in her travels and in her introduction to Twelve Days recounting that adventure, Vita pens this cinematic image: I look back as through a telescope, and see, in the little bright circle of the glass, moving flocks and ruined cities (Twelve Days 10). Woolf had many reasons to associate Vita with the travel film Grass, and with cinema in general, so it is not surprising that when Virginia penned her mock-biography of Vita, it should contain cinematic references. And, such references do help explain some odd moments in the text. I have often found the scenery shifts in Orlandowhen she witnesses England from Persia and Persia from Englanda bit baffling, but I supposed that if one were going to accept change in genders and sexes and across centuries, one ought not quibble about a few quirky projections of scenery. However, such vignettes do reward closer study. Has Nature, as Still by Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack from the narrator slyly suggests, played her a trick or the film, GRASS. Courtesy of Milestone worked a miracle? Or are they perhaps trick films? Film and Video. I suggest that within Orlando Woolf produces and projects her own travel films, while referencing such travel films such as Grass and The Open Roadand perhaps winking in the direction of Brunel. In the most striking example, Orlando appears to screen travel films of England while she is in Turkey: So she was thinking, one fine morning on the slopes of Mount Athos, when minding her goats. And then Nature, in whom she trusted, either played her a trick or worked a miracleagain, opinions differ too much for it to be possible to say which. Orlando was gazing rather disconsolately at the steep hill-side in front of her. It was now midsummer, and if we must compare the landscape to anything it would have been to a dry bone; to a sheeps skeleton; to a gigantic skull picked white by a thousand vultures. The heat was intense and the little fig-tree under which Orlando lay only served to print patterns of fig-leaves upon her light burnous. Suddenly, a shadow, though there was nothing to cast a shadow,7 appeared on the bald mountain-side opposite. It deepened quickly and soon a green hollow showed where there had been barren rock before. As she looked, the hollow deepened and widened, and a great park-like space opened in the flank of the hill. Within, she could see an undulating and grassy lawn; she could see oak trees dotted here and there; she could see the thrushes hopping among the branches. She could see the deer stepping delicately from shade to shade, and could even hear the hum

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of insects and the gentle sighs and shivers of a summers day in England. After she had gazed entranced for some time, snow began falling; soon the whole landscape was covered and marked with violet shades instead of yellow sunlight. Now she saw heavy carts coming along the roads, laden with tree trunks, which they were taking, she knew, to be sawn for firewood; and then there appeared the roofs and belfries and towers and courtyards of her own home. The snow was falling steadily, and she could now hear the slither and flop which it made as it slid down the roof and fell to the ground. The smoke went up from a thousand chimneys. All was so clear and minute that she could see a daw pecking for worms in the snow. Then, gradually, the violet shadows deepened and closed over the carts and the lawns and the great house itself. All was swallowed up. Now there was nothing left of the grassy hollow, and instead of the green lawns was only the blazing hill-side which a thousand vultures seemed to have picked bare. At this, she burst into a passion of tears, and striding back to the gipsies camp, told them that she must sail for England the very next day (O 110-2). These imaginary film clips call to mind the prototypes of The Open Road projected onto a bare mountainside of the Bakhtiari Mountains from the film Grass. In Orlando, I argue, these cinematic passages pay homage to the films Grass and The Open Road. But why? Considering Woolfs turf battles with cinema, and her contradictory, feisty attitude towards that medium, would she be likely to choose to simply replicate film within her prose? That, I doubt. Rather, within Orlando, Woolfs fictional films craft a new medium of her own, adding in sound and color, 3-D immersion and spatial and temporal fantasiesas seasons change, and films appear and disappear projected in outdoor performance spaces. She does not simply borrow from film; she re-directs it; outperforming film, her momentary asSuddenly, a shadow, though there was nothing to sembly of colour, sound, movement sug- cast a shadow, appeared on the bald mountain-side gests that here is a scene waiting a new art to opposite. It deepened quickly and soon a green holbe transfixed (The Cinema N&A 595). low showed where there had been barren rock before. As she looked, the hollow deepened and widSo far, so good. But, so what? Are these ened, and a great park-like space opened in the flank cinema-surpassing passages merely evidence of the hill. of Woolf upstaging cinema with her own spectaculars? Or, do they have a more subtle function in the text? The novel, dedicated to Vita, is, as I have argued before, full of messages and lesson plans for her:8 Woolf s film clips may prove no exception. One can read Woolfs magic words and screens as cinematic

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equivalents of Vitas love letter within a letter, opening to a secret sharing. As Virginia and Vita used their love letters and Passenger to Teheran as coded shared texts, Virginia uses films to unite them. Readers may delve into Woolfs strategic move if we examine how her travel films function in the narrative, on the surface, and tunneling beneath. Virginia toys in Orlando with gratifying Vitas travel lust through magic movies and hints of motorcar trips, witnessing, for example, her admiration of Vitas prowess as a driver. The text invites more travel trips, motor or movie, using narrative travel film passages; references to The Open Road may signal an invitation to a road trip with Vita, for example. The cinematic projections through time and space in Orlando also alleviate some of the anxieties and miseries of travel separation. The travel talk that filled their love letters testifies to the woe caused by Vitas travels. Vitas letters are filled with invitations to Virginia, expressing a desire to travel abroad with her; such invitations may have been Vitas method of coping with the longing of separation. Flattered as she may have been by Vitas wishes to have her travel to Persia, or to a camp on the Bakhtiari trek, Virginia rarely encourages such extravagant desires, using instead a different strategy, crafting replies that echo a title card in The Open Road: Why travel abroad?: Ive just been buying cigarettes in the Tottenham Court roadrivers of silver, breasted by plumes of gold: omnibus and shops equally beautifulWhy go to Persia when the T. Ct. Rd. is like that? (March 15, 1927 L3 347) Damn you Vita, why do you insist upon taking the world by the scruff of its neck and shaking it? Why these great and gallant ways? being so adventurous and athletic and Spartan? So we lose a fortnights friendship (L3 347). Perhaps Virginia responds here to Vitas earlier invitation (penned while Virginia was writing To the Lighthouse): Is it all west coast of Scotland? I think I had better take you there, in the blue motor (April 17, 1926 Letters of Vita 122). Though the two did finally take a trip to France together, the real gift of traveland cure for separationVirginia gives Vita is in her fiction, Orlando. Using film clip portals, Orlando gives the gift of travel without the pangs of separation, with instant gratification instead of long deferred reunions. Through her projection of travel film clips, Woolf magically speeds up the travel process in a way that satisfies the desire of separated lovers for instant reunion. She fulfills Vitas wishes to be wafted at times to Persia, but creates a way to travel without leaving each another. Revisiting Woolfs essay on the cinema provides some clues about Woolf s inspiration for her cinematic travel strategy in Orlando. Phrases stand out: No fantasy could be too far-fetched or insubstantial (E4 595); The past could be unrolled, distances could be annihilated (E4 352); And those terrible dislocations which are inevitable when Tolstoy has to pass from the story of Anna to the story of Levin could be bridged by some device of scenery (E4 352). The essay suggests that cinema has potential, but Woolf, in Orlando, creates projections even more magical than those she imagines for film futures. She makes moving pictures: pictures that move one emotionally, or pictures that move one spatially and temporally. If in Mrs. Dalloway Woolf crafted tunnels behind her characters to bring in the past as she had need of it, by installments, in Orlando she crafts tunnels between author and subjectVirginia and Vitaprojecting inviting cine-portals. Orlandos magic screens in the mountainside invite the spectator into an interactive space that transports them. These portals, annihilating distances and forming a bridge from some device of scenery, connect

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Vita in Persia and Virginia in England. Not surprising, given the fantasy setting of the novel, the screen opening in the bare mountainside conjures up the opening in the bare rock in the tale of Aladdinwhen Aladdin rubs the magic lamp and says the magic words. Perhaps because Vita so often tried to lure Virginia to travel, Orlando grants that wish, but with a twist, projecting fantasy films of instant transport. The rhetorical trick of providing a fantasy in lieu of reality is one Woolf employs in her essays regularly; a striking example is the conclusion to the essay Woolf penned November 29-30, 1928, Flying Over London, in which, after a lengthy description of a flight over London, the narrator undercuts all that: As a matter of fact, the flight had not begun; for when Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood stooped and made the engine roar, he had found a defect of some sort in the machine, and raising his head, he had said very sheepishly, Fraid its no go today. So we had not flown after all (210 CDB). But, to be contradictoryas the conference theme invites and demandsreaders do fly in Woolf s essay Flying Over London, just as in Orlando readers travel and stay at home too. Woolf uses travelactual, imaginary, or cinematicto inspire far-reaching flights of fancy for her fiction, love, and life: As I spin along the roads I remodel my life (April 24, 1931, L4 321) Notes
1. That armchair traveler is apparent in Vanessa Bells cover for the N&A Travel Supplement of 1925 with a globe, book and view out a window to a cathedral. Let us imagine, since facts are hard to come by, that it is a library window looking out at St Pauls, from which the armchair traveler is planning a trip. For a black and white photograph of the cover, see the Virginia Woolf Bulletin Issue No. 35, September 2010, p.19, and the discussion in Notes and Queries by Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke, 16-18. I discuss the actualities in more depthand Woolf s response to them in her holograph drafts of The Moviesin An Archive in the City. Brunels travel burlesque was shown at the London Film Society on Sunday April 10, 1927; the programme notes, this is an abbreviated edition of the first of Mr. Brunels burlesques. Mr. Brunel played all the parts and the picture was therefore made at a cost of 90 (Amberg 59). The programme dates the film as 1923 and allots ten minutes for the shortened version. Another of Brunels relevant burlesques is his droll short, Cut it Out (1925) which targets British film censorship; his treatment of the censors is particularly intriguing in light of Woolfs scathing send up in print of the Three Ladies, mock muses advocating censorship in Orlando. Thanks to Stuart N. Clarke, who alerted the Virginia Woolf listserve to the release of the films on dvd by the BFI. An additional film on the dvd is of note for Woolf studies; Claude Friese-Greenes Across England in an Aeroplane, (1919-20) is a short aerial tour of the West Country tinted images show well-known holiday resorts [and] the famous Cornish Riviera Express travelling along the coastline (11). www.bfi.org.uk. The BFI restored version contains 65 minutes of digitally restored highlights; the informative booklet notes: The Open Road is Claude Friese-Greenes pioneering film travelogue, shot between 1924 and 1926. The film is a series of 26 episodes, taking the form of a journey through Britain by car, from Lands End to John OGroats, with a final episode shot in London in August 1926 (8). The fabulous crew at Milestone Film restored the film, and released it on dvd as Grass: A Nations Battle for Life in 1992 as part of the Milestone Collection. At their website, www.milestonefilms.com, they post a wealth of material about the film, including press kits with archival treasures, including the script of the title cards of Grass. Merian Cooper wrote a book about the filming of Grass, published in 1925. Milestone has also restored and re-released Chang, the film named in the subtitle of H. D.s Projector II poem. It is telling that this passage echoes Woolf s shadow references in The Cinema. See Hankins 1997.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

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Works Cited
Amberg, George. The Film Society Programmes 1925-1939. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Close Up: A Magazine Devoted to the Art of Films (1927-33). Ed. Kenneth Macpherson & Bryher, 1927-1933, Volumes 1-10, Arno Series of Contemporary Art. New York: Arno Press, 1971. DeSalvo, Louise and Mitchell Leaska, eds. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. New York. William Morrow Quill Press New York 1985. H. D. Projector (a poem). 1927. Close Up. 1:1. July 1927: 46-51. (reprinted (2007) Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Illinois UP, 2007. 848-851. Hankins, Leslie K. An Archive in the City: True Pictures and Animated News Films of Suffragettes in the Holographs of Virginia Woolf s The Movies in the Berg Collection. Woolf and the City: Selected Papers of the Nineteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Elizabeth Evans and Sarah Cornish. Clemson: Clemson U Digital P. 2010: 173-177. . Virginia Woolf s The Cinema Essay: Sneak Previews of the Holograph Pre-Texts through Post-Publication Revisions. Woolf Studies Annual 15 (2009), 135-175. . Cinastes and Modernists: Writing about Film in 1920s London, Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Illinois UP, 2007. 809-858. . Orlando: A Precipice Marked V Between A Miracle of Discretion and Lovemaking Unbelievable: Indiscretions Incredible. Lesbian Readings of Virginia Woolf. Eds. Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. New York: New York UP, 1997. 180-202. Sackville-West, Vita. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: William Morrow, 1985. . Passenger to Teheran. London: Hogarth Press, 1926. . Twelve Days. London: Hogarth Press, 1928. Travel Films Early November 1924 Vogue (London): 100. Woolf, Virginia. The Cinema. The Nation and Athenaeum. 3 July 1926. 381 383. . The Cinema. The Arts (New York). June 1926. 314-16. Rpt. McNeillie, ed. E4. 348-54. . The Cinema/The Movies and Reality. Rpt McNeillie, ed. E4. 591-95. . The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. A. McNeillie (vols. 1-4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5-6), London: Hogarth Press, 1986-2011. . The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press, 1975-1980. . Orlando: A Biography. 1928. Ed. Maria DiBattista. San Diego, Harcourt 2006.

Filmography
Across England in an Aeroplane (UK, 1919-20, silent). Dir. Claude Friese-Greene. Bonus on the DVD The Open Road. BFI Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness. Dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. (1927), 1992 Milestone Film & Video. Crossing the Great Sagrada. Dir. Adrian Brunel. (1925) The British Avant-Garde in the Twenties: Close Up and the Film Society. G.B. 1924-1936. PAL video. Black and white. Silent and sound. 82 m. [12 page insert/ booklet, essay by Michael OPray] n.d. Grass: A Nations Battle for Life. Produced and directed by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoesack. and Marguerite Harrison. 1925 Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. Artwork and Summary: 1992 Milestone Film & Video. Image Entertainment MCMXCIX 71 minutes. The Open Road: A cinematic postcard of Britain in the 1920s. Dir. Claude Friese-Greene. 1924-5. 64 minutes. Restoration British Film Institute. N.d. [16 page booklet included]

Websites
Milestone films: http://www.milestonefilms.com/movie.php/grass/ Press kits Milestone film: http://milestonefilms.com/presskits.php Press kit for Grass: http://milestonefilms.com/pdf/grassPK.pdf BFI on The Open Road: http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/openroad/

TRAVESTY IN WOOLF AND PROUST by John Coyle

here is what might be called a Proustian moment in Chapter 7 of Jacobs Room (1922), but it is not really a Proustian moment, more a travesty of one. An image on which the famous madeleine episode depends is dismissed as a faddish distraction for dinner parties. Here is Proust: And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character and form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swanns park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (Swanns Way 51)

In describing how the whole of the Combray of the narrators childhood emerges from a cup of tea, Proust deploys a conceit whose success depends on a flirtation with the bathetic and grotesque. Disproportion and the possibility of comic deflation are never far away when Proust is in this mood, especially in metaphors of transformation and creation. After writing his first prose poem about the steeples of Martinville the young Marcel clucks like a hen who has laid an egg, the work as a whole is compared to a boeuf en daube and to a dress as well as to a cathedral, and time, in the final sentence of Le Temps Retrouv, has us teetering on the stilts of the years. Stiltedness is courted frequently, deliberately, in both the overarticulated syntax and overelaborated imagery of Prousts metaphorical flights. Woolf s invocation of the paper flowers is sardonic, even a little condescending, the elaborated lyricism of Proust undone by briskness: About this time a firm of merchants having dealings with the East put on the market little paper flowers which opened on touching water. As it was the custom also to use finger-bowls at the end of dinner, the new discovery was found of excellent service. In these sheltered lakes the little flowers swam and slid; surmounted smooth slippery waves, and sometimes foundered and lay like pebbles on the glass floor. Their fortunes were watched by eyes intent and lovely. It is surely a great discovery that leads to the union of hearts and foundation of homes. The paper flowers did no less. (JR 68) What for Proust was a sacramental moment becomes a mere conversation piece, Prousts metaphor, like the novel itself for Woolf at the time, relegated to the order of gossip. I say

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at the time since Woolf had not yet read Proust. She finished the first draft of Jacobs Room on 4th November 1921, and on 21st January 1922 she mentions to E.M. Forster that she is still to take the plunge: Everyone is reading Proust. I sit silent and hear their reports. It seems to be a tremendous experience, but Im shivering on the brink, and waiting to be submerged with a horrid notion that I shall go down and down and perhaps never come up again (L2 499). Everyone is reading Proust. Everyone else, that is. The metaphor of submersion, a troubling one, is maintained in a letter to Roger Fry, Saturday 6th May 1922, where Woolf proposes to sink herself in Proust: I have the most violent cold in the whole parish. Prousts fat volume comes in very handy. Last night I started on vol 2 [A lombre des jeunes filles en fleur] of him (the novel) and propose to sink myself in it all day. Scott Moncrieff wants me to say a few words in an album of admiration. Will you collaborate? If so, I will: not otherwise (L2 525). The editors of Woolf s letters gloss volume 2 as A lombre des jeunes filles en fleur, but Woolf will have been in fact reading the second volume of Swanns Way in Scott Moncrieffs translation. A lombre did not appear until 1924. The letter continues in a fascinating passage which evokes a tone of eroticised panic under the spell of Prousts writing, especially at the level of the sentence as she conflates the desire for expression with the idea of writing as erotic experience: Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly see out the sentence. Oh, if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procurestheres something sexual in itthat I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I cant write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me; it becomes an obsession (L2 525). She is so stimulated and saturated that she must give up reading and pick up the pen. The parenthesis theres something sexual about it comes across as a modest acknowledgement of the force of surrounding words: titillates, desire, cry, vibration, saturation, intensification, procures, sexual, feel, seize, stimulates, nerves. It is all summed up in the phrase the nerves of language; she feels she can write like that, but she is also passing on the pen, writing so that the reader might feel similarly. On the 3rd of October 1922, she is writing again to Fry of her great adventure being Proust, gasping with both amazement and a sense of pleasure which she insists again is physical. (Ulysses, at the time, gets shorter shrift.) My great adventure is really Proust. Wellwhat remains to be written after that? Im only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escapedand made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physicallike sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses; to which I bind myself like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finishedmy martyrdom is over. I hope to sell it for 4.10. (L2 565-66) By April 1925 Woolf is confessing in her diary to being embedded, blending images of sex and submersion. She continues:

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Since I wrote, which is these last months, Jacques Raverat has died; after longing to die; & he sent me a letter about Mrs Dalloway which gave me one of the happiest days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterflys bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me & make me out of temper with every sentence of my own. (D3 7) The phrase as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterflys bloom presents a formulation which, by combining enduring hardness and materiality on the one hand (catgut which never comes from cats, by the waycontinues to be useful and create beauty long beyond the lifespan of the creature which provided it) with a sense of the evanescent and immaterial on the other, gives a pre-echo of what was to become for Woolf a summative phrase, granite and rainbowgranite being fact and rainbows being the shifts of personality and consciousness. There is a difference, though, in that the catgut and the butterflys bloom belong in the sphere of the animal. Granite and Rainbow (1958) is of course the title of a posthumous collection of essays, the term featuring in one of those essays, The New Biography (1927), and also in Orlando (1928) written two years after the diary entry on Proust. The opposition operates along temporal co-ordinates as well, with the enduring weighed against the fleeting in an insistence on capturing both simultaneously, and Woolf and Proust share a fascination with the multiple forms of duration, both in a Bergsonian sense, about consciousness and time, and in a narratological sense, as in Grard Genettes study of Proust, where duration features as one of the aspects of narrative time. Proust combines the sweep of decades with the miniaturised analysis of an instant, and in his most celebrated sections like Combray employs what Genette call the pseudo-iterative, describing what is said to have happened repeatedly over a series of spring holidays with a level of detail which would be more appropriate to a single event. This is one of the challenges which Proust sets Woolf. When Harold Nicolson met Proust in 1919, at two dinners associated with the Paris Peace Conference, their conversation turned on two topics. One was homosexuality. Nicolson noted in his diary We discuss inversion. Whether it is a matter of glands or nerves. He says it is a matter of habit. I say, surely not. He says, Nothat was silly of mewhat I meant was that it was a matter of delicacy. He is not, Nicolson records, very intelligent on the subject (224-25). Which subject? Intelligence or habit? Either way, this is a bit rich, even for the Ritz. The other topic of conversation, at an earlier dinner, an equally swell affair, was time, and the relation of time both in terms of historical event and of everyday routine. When Nicolson responds to Prousts request to tell him how the committees work, he starts off by saying Well we usually meet at 10, there are secretaries behind. Non, non, says Proust: nallez pas trop vitedont go too quickly. You arrive at the Quai dOrsay. You climb the stairs. You go into the room. And then. So, continues Nicholson, I tell him everything. The sham cordiality of it all; the handshakes, the maps: the rustle of papers: the tea in the next room: the macaroons. He listens enthralled, interrupting from time to time. Mais prcisez, mon cher monsieur, nallez pas

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trop vite (224-25). Nicolson was a serious diplomat engaged with the drawing of new European boundaries and writing copious and detailed memoranda about the momentous events of his time. He was equally assiduous as a writer who produced biographies of Verlaine, Swinburne, Byron and Tennyson. To be told to slow down thus, that his detail was insufficient, would have been disconcerting. This takes us, via two unusually intimate degrees of separation, from Proust back to Virginia Woolf and the writing of Orlando in 1927, a year when one of the big hits was a song called Ive Danced with a Man, Whos Danced with a Girl, Whos Danced with the Prince of Wales. Elizabeth Shore, in Virginia Woolf, Proust and Orlando rightly points out that many of Woolf s supposedly Proustian traitsthe idea of character as something multiple and indefinite, the shared use of metaphor and imagepredate her reading of Proust. Shore does say, however, that moments of Proustian recollection are more likely to be found in Orlando, a novel which is itself much preoccupied with questions of time. In Orlando, Woolf combines the sweep of centuries with moments of pause. The artificialities of calendar and clock are evoked, then pointedly suspended. When Orlando pauses to summon his thoughts and material, Time freezes like the ice on the river, becoming itself something solid, if transiently so, yet the headlong, giddy rapidity of Woolf s prose is somehow freed, unabated. Even the reading of Proust is suspended as Woolf flits over the surface like a skimming stone. As the anxiety of influence may also be an anxiety of impotence, the fear that what one is writing is no more than a travesty, in Proust the apprenticeship of the young writer is stalled by various parodies of what his work might become. Such is the nature of the pastiche of the Goncourt Journal in Time Regained, while in A lombre des jeunes filles en fleur the diplomat M. de Norpois advises Marcel to put aside his prose poem in homage to Bergotte and follow the example of a young acquaintance of his, who has recently produced two volumes, one The Sense of the Infinite on the Shores of Lake Victoria and a short treatise, less weighty but written with a lively, not to say cutting pen, on the Repeating Rifle in the Bulgarian Army which put him quite in a class by himself (Within a Budding Grove 488-89). Orlando transforms a similar anxiety into a flight, as Woolf put it, into comedy, into travesty of the respected forms of biography and history. Woolf s anxiety is repaired by the headlong ease and light-heartedness of a masquerade. It is also an exercise in travesti, in the original French sense of the word, and Proust and Woolf show themselves to be equally interested in both senses, the slow intensities in Proust being compensated for by a series of quick-change acts, as games are played with identity and sexuality as well as with time and duration. The young girls in blossom are, at first sight, splendidly boyish. The epistemology of the closet, the dynamics of sexual orientation, always tend towards a transformation of male to female: the male the chrysalid stage and the female the new. I will end with two scenes of writing. First, in Orlando, and in the pause between fingering the quill and the plunge of quill into inkhorn, we read the following passage, a deliberation about unwieldy sentences, granite and rainbow, memory, sewing and seamstresses: As this pause was of extreme significance in his history, more so, indeed, than many acts which bring men to their knees and make rivers run with blood, it behoves us to ask why he paused; and to reply, after due reflection, that it was for some such reason as this. Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon

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us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butchers face and the butcher a poets; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon; Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer Yes; if we are truthful we say No; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within usa piece of a policemans trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandras wedding veilbut has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights. (O 59) There is no evidence that Proust read Woolf, but he would have enjoyed the juxtaposition of a policemans trousers with Queen Alexandras wedding veil. Shore, in the article previously cited, compares the invocation of memory as seamstress with an earlier passage where the shuttle of the years weaves threads between seemingly independent memories, but misses a crucial passage towards the end of Time Regained, in which Prousts narrator also dwells on which metaphor is best for the composition of his resolved work. The image is of dressmaking rather than tapestry, reminding the reader that the novel she is about to finish is not just a cathedral of art but also a grandly comic costume drama: Andfor at every moment the metaphor uppermost in my mind changed as I began to represent to myself more and more clearly and in a more material shape the task upon which I was about to embarkI thought that at my big deal table, under the eyes of Franoise, who like all unpretentious people who live at close quarters with us would have a certain insight into the nature of my laboursI should work beside her and in a way even as she would have worked herself (or at least as she had worked in the past, for now, with the onset of old age, she had almost lost her sight) and, pinning here and there an extra page, I should construct my book, I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress. Whenever I had not all my paperies near me, as Franoise called them, and just the one I needed was missing, Franoise would understand how this upset me, she who always said that she could not sew if she had not the right size of thread and the proper buttons. (Time Regained 1090)

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Works Cited
Nicolson, Harord. Peacemaking, 1919. London: Constable, 1945 Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. 3 vols. Trans. C. K. Scott- Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Shore, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf, Proust and Orlando. Comparative Literature 31.3 (Summer1979): 232-245. Woolf, Virginia. Jacobs Room. 1922. Oxford: Published for the Shakespeare Head Press by Blackwell, 2004. . Orlando: a Biography. 1928. Oxford: Published for the Shakespeare Head Press by Blackwell, 1998. . The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975-1980. . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984.

WOOLF, YEATS, AND THE MAKING OF SPILT MILK by Wayne K. Chapman

ven as the great poet that Virginia Woolf discerned and studied in what she called legendary encounters at Lady Ottoline Morrells beginning in late 1930 (D3 329-32; L4 250, 253), W. B. Yeatss occultly philosophic Dove or Swan section of A Vision (1925), might have been playfully mocked in Orlando, insofar as the history of art and the story of women and fiction coalesce in the progress of a Zeitgeist inspired by Vita Sackville-West and her family history. If this is an example of contradictory behavior, Yeats was almost as reluctant to read the novel as he was to undertake, in multiple encounters, Joyces Ulysses, much preferring to either of those works Lawrences Women in Love. He wrote to his wife, late in 1932, that he found the latter a beautiful enigmatic book. I feel in sympathy with him as I do not with Virginia Woolf (CL Intelex 5774). At first, Woolf found Yeats difficult to understand. But, at another party at Lady Ottolines, he flattered her by acknowledging that he was writing about her later novel The Waves, which, with Joyces Ulysses and Pounds Cantos, suggested to him a deluge of [mental and physical] experience breaking over us and within us (qtd. in D4 n255). Hermione Lee devotes three pages, in her life of Woolf (574-7), to the first encounter as an illustration of Woolfs mixing together contradictions in the accounts she made in her diary and letters. Lee draws on the testimony of Lady Ottoline and Walter de la Mare, but not on Yeats, for some reason. Thus I will present the evidence of Yeatss unpublished correspondence, particularly a letter to his wife of 8 November 1930, and drafts of the poem he wrote inside the back cover of his rather heavy travel book, Johann Erdmanns A History of Philosophy, trans. Williston Hough, vol. 2: Modern Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1924).1 As Yeats said, Spilt Milk was the upshot of my talks and a metaphor of Lady Ottolines, in spite of Virginias exaggerated recollection of her own share of the conversation. So in a way, this paper is as much about this mutual friend as it is about Woolf and Yeats. Briefly considered at this point is an unpublished fragment by Woolf on Ottoline Morrell (Berg TS M55), in which the atmosphere of Lady Ottolines gatherings at Garsington, no less than their hostess, comes alive in remembrance: When one remembers indeed that drawing room full of people, the pale yellows and pinks of the brocades, the Italian chairs, the Persian rugs, the embroideries, the tassels, the scent, the pomegranate[s,] the pugs, the pot pourri, and how one would be swept from the big room and the crowd to a little room alone with Ottoline, where one was [pl]ied with questions about life.There were quarrels and intrigues. Ottoline may have been a Medusa; but she was not a passive Medusa. She had a great gift for pulling <drawing> people under. Even Middleton Murry[,] it is said[,] was pulled down by her among the cauliflowers <vegetables> at Garsington.2 The fragment describes the lustre and illusion that had tinged the Bloomsbury Group before World War I, and the Garsington gatherings, Woolf wrote, to exclaim rap[sodi]cally,

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were exciting because the whole place was full of lustre and illusion. Yeats maintained an extensive correspondence with Ottoline Morrell from 1911 until her death in 1938. Woolf s metaphor of the Medusa, pulling or drawing people under, compares with the figure in Yeatss poem The Mermaid, in which A mermaid found a swimming lad, / Picked him for her own, / Pressed her body to his body, / Laughed; and plunging down / Forgot in cruel happiness / That even lovers drown (CP 222). The poem refers to Olivia Shakespear, to whom Yeats lost his virginity in 1896, but Yeats and his much younger English wife, George, who were fond of Lady Ottoline and she fond of us, believing her as good as she is kind & gracious, wonder[ed] how so many slanders ha[d] been spread about her (CL Intelex 4082) and prized the gossip they took away from her parties, which they frequented as residents of Oxford in the early 1920s. After one such, for example, Yeats gossiped to his wife about Mr. and Mrs. Bertram Russell and a Miss Baker, known as the sky bride [possibly shy bride] because she ran away twice from the church door (CL Intelex 4219); hence, Ottoline, Yeats, and the other guests discussed whirlpools, which became Yeatss shorthand for a person (usually a woman) who causes such trouble for oneself that others are drawn into it. The term denoted a human whirlpool as well as a person who is drawn under a whirlpools spell. Lady Ottoline, like Lady Gerald (Dorothy) Wellesley, later the Duchess of Wellingtonwhom the Woolfs consulted on poetry at the Hogarth Press despite Leonards general dislikinghad become one of Yeatss rich women, whom Auden glibly derided in his famous elegy, along with Yeats himself and the Irish weather. As for Virginia Woolf, who first met Yeats in 1908 although he could not remember the occasion, she began reading him with heightened interest once the transitional stage of his style had been reached in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919; see L2 352). In April 1928, she pronounced in the New York Herald Tribune, among her winter reading of nothing which made a very deep impression, that The Tower, then only recently published, contains [Yeatss] best, deepest and most imaginative work, the exception for which alone the winter was memorable (E4 542-3). The next week, she reviewed the book in the Nation & Athenaeum, edited by Leonard, repeating her verdict that years seem to have dried up the Celtic mist, to have braced the nerves and sharpened the senses of this particular poet, so that he reverses the usual order and is a better poet in his age than in his youth (E4 545). There was no condescension, as there had been when the young Joyce met Yeats for the first time and declared that the meeting had occurred too late in the poets life to do his poetry any good. Woolf, instead, admired how Yeatss verse runs so nervously, so idiomatically like some one talking, the lines all grown together with meaning, massive, and incapable of disintegration.The poems are difficult, not through obscurity of language, but because the thought lies deep and turns strangely (E4 545). And so it seems that with a kind of giddiness she entered in her diary, on 8 November 1930, as a worshipful school girl3 might: I pressed his hand when we said goodbye with some emotion: thinking This is to press a famous hand: It was Yeats, at Ottolines last night. He was born in 1865 so that he is now a man of 65& I am 48: & thus he has a right to be so much more vital, supple, high charged & altogether seasoned & generous. I was very much impressed by all this in action. (D3 329)

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At the same time, her enthusiasm for the poet seems little tempered when she wrote to her sister: I went to Ottolines yesterday, and must unsay my abuse, as there I found Yeats, whom I think (naturally, wrongly) our only living poetperhaps a great poet: anyhow a good poet; and there was also [Walter] de la Mare.Being now almost incapable of discretion I said all the wrong things about poetry and we had a long discourse.I agreed with many of Yeatss views; and he is surprisingly sensible. He has grown tremendously thick, and is rather magnificent looking; in fact seeing how seldom one meets interesting peoplethis was a great success. (L4 250) Yet in less than a week, Woolf would burlesque the scene, playing down Yeatss sensibility and feigning little interest in the content of Yeatss and de la Mares side of the conversation: over my head it wentfor what do I know of the inner meaning of dreams.And thendreams and dreams; and then stories of Irish life in brogue; and then the souls attitude to art (L4 253). And hence the talk became more and more rapt until Lady Ottoline raised, with a sepulchral effect, her black ear trumpet to hear, confessing her deafness to essentially all of what had been said in an epiphany (for Virginia) of all I admire her for (L4 253-4). This characterization is a contradiction and the point of Woolf biographer Hermione Lee. In contrast, Woolf s diary account of the same conversation seems scrupulous to record as many of the details as possible. She cites there de la Mares dream stories, and she recalls the gist of Yeatss vehement interpretations of them from what she surmised to be the complete psychology of A Vision, which he was then revising and of which she thought herself woefully ignorant. And so on to dreaming states, & soul states; as others talk of Beaverbrook & free tradeas if matters of common knowledge (D3 329). They spoke of pictures, painters, and poemsa good deal on the works of Milton before turning to modern poetry: Yeats said that we, de la M. & himself, wrote thumbnail poems only because we are at the end of an era.Most of emotion is outside their scope (D3 330). On this assertion Woolf said that she had made an interjection: All left to the novelists I saidbut how crude & jaunty my own theories were beside his: indeed I got a tremendous sense of the intricacy of the art; also of its meaning, its seriousness, its importance, which wholly engrosses this large active minded immensely vitalised man. Wherever one cut him, with a little question, he poured, spurted fountains of ideas. (D3 330) Woolf does not say, as Lady Ottoline notes in her diary, that on the whole she was very silent & didnt say much and seemed rather to shrivel & have the wind taken out of her sails, due to certain limitations derived from living always amongst intellectuals (qtd. in Lee 576). Nor is there a shred of resentment, as in de la Mares account of the meeting, at playing second fiddle to Yeats: This is Yeats: I must remember every word (qtd. in Lee 577), he wrote. Woolf seems to have struck the latter attitude in her letter to Ethel Smyth, when she reported the epiphany of the ear trumpet, the dramatic conclusion not

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mentioned in Woolf s diary. She says in the letter that shed cried out, in the midst of all the poetry, Heavens Ottoline, are you deaf? (L4 253). Like the story of Rashmon, this tale of the encounters bears another witness: Yeats himself. For, when he came to visit Ottoline on 7 November 1930, it was after stopping at John Masefields little theatre, where, he said, he sat through a long eulogy on my work & myselfvery embarrassing& then five girls with beautiful voices recited my lyrics for three quarters of an hour. I do not think the whole audience could hear but to me it was strangely overwhelming; in this letter of November 8th to his wife, he added: Yesterday I met De la M[a]re & Virginia Wo[o]lf at Lady Ottolines and here is the upshot of my talk and a metaphor of Lady Ottolines (CL Intelex 5404). Then he quoted without title the quatrain published as Spilk Milk in Words for Music Perhaps (1932). Without knowing the personal context, one might generalize to give the poem a universal reference, natural enough when reading it beside the Arnoldian eprigram Nineteenth Century and After in the Collected Poems (240). But in Yeatss letter, the pronoun We epitomizes four individuals: he, Ottoline Morrell, Walter de la Mare, and Virginia Woolf. We had such thought; That such deeds have done, Must ramble onthinned out Like milk on a flat stone[.] Especially, the poem epitomizes Yeatss own sense of his side of a performance. Not to cry over spilt milk is an idiom that may have nothing to do with ear trumpets though perhaps with shared admiration for Ottoline Morrell that other people miss, as Woolf said, when confronted by her more obvious tortuousness and hypocrisy (L4 253-4). The version of the poem that Yeats sent his wife had two rehearsals and a later draft, all penned with pencil cancellations, inside the back cover of the second volume of Johann Erdmanns A History of Philosophy (1924). The volumes so-called Modern Philosophy featured Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others,4 not all of whom were of interest to him at that time. The image of milk thinning on a stonea flat stone for two drafts and the letter versionwas surely the metaphor (or simile) Yeats credited to Ottoline as it was the most stable element in the composition, residing in the last line as often happens in epigrams. The poems relation to Yeatss reading of modern philosophy, however defined, seems kindred to his early affection for aphorisms and pithy, enigmatic sayings and to the difficulty of trying to articulate a complete philosophy, or psychology, of his own as reflected in much of what he had said in response to de la Mares promptings. Virginia seems to have caught in her diary account the main idea as far as the constituents of we being the poets Yeats and de la Mare. The following transcription is based on work by David R. Clark in the Cornell manuscript series: We that had such settled thought Such All duties fixed & known Are poured & thinned, & [?dabbled] out Like milk on a flat stone

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We that had such thought That And such great deeds had done, Must ramble on But Ramble now thinned out Like milk on a flat stone Nov 1930 We that have so done & thought That We that have done & thought, That have thought & done, Must ramble & thin out Like milk spilt on a stone. (Yeats, Spilt Milk 268-9) The first and second versions make assertions about settled thought with puzzlingly indefinite references for the adjective such in line 1, compounded by such duties fixed & known and such great deeds had done in line 2, simplified to such deeds have done in the letter draft. Some progress is made between the first and second versions as passive construction (Are poured & thinned etc.) is discarded for active voice (Must ramble onthinned out). After judging the second draft sufficiently complete to deserve a dating (Nov. 1930), Yeats hit on a better way to begin the poem: We that have so done & thought / That[have thought & done]. The adverbial so (like such) is then dropped, creating the rhythmical effect of tedium in the repetition and transposition of the phrase done & thought: thought & done, in lines 1 and 2. Weunderstood from Woolf s account to be Yeats and de la Mare in their writing of thumbnail poems at the end of an era, but also Woolf and Lady Ottoline on the occasionMust ramble & thin out thought as well as work done with their talk Like spilt milk on a stone, dribbling and dabbling instead of pooling as the metaphor might have suggested. As the upshot of an experience, the self-evaluation of a talk viewed competitively as a performance for other performers, the poem says that for Yeats the experience was less impressive than being overwhelmed by the five beautiful voices that captivated him at Masefields theatre with his own lyrics, flattery and embarrassment aside. In time to come, Woolf would encounter Yeats more frequently at social gatherings, becoming accustomed to his enthusiasm for subject-matter unusual among Bloomsburyites, making him a curiosity as well as an interesting person to study. She was not mistaken about the vitality and suppleness of his intellect even if he seems to have become less interesting to her after that first close observation of 1930. The fact that she failed to read how the occasion struck him is extraordinary. But perhaps something is to be said for the avuncular poet behind the famous hand that bade her goodbye with emotionthat he should keep silent except to his wife. The story made good copy though not a great poem.

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Notes
1. 2. For permission to quote from these unpublished materials, I am grateful to A. P. Watt Ltd., on behalf of the W. B. Yeats Estate, and to the Trustees of the National Library of Ireland. Thanks to The Society of Authors, on behalf of the Virginia Woolf Estate, and to the New York Public Library (Lenox and Tilden Foundations). The transcription is my own and only partial, as indicated by ellipses. Strikethoughs and interpolations (standing in angle brackets) are Woolf s although editorial intrusions (in square brackets) are mine for the sake of reading. Later, Woolf found that Yeats had much the same effect on her niece, Angelica, whose twin passions in 1934 were Yeats and Lady Ottoline (L5 355). On Yeats, Woolf recalled for Ottolines amusement the following snippet of conversation: [Angelica--] Oh how I shall boast about it at school. [Woolf--] But what did he say[,] Angelica? [Angelica--] Oh I dont knowit was just wonderfulseeing them all (L5 357). OShea reports an inscription inside the front cover: (On development of Berkeleys thought / Herman Cohen) possibly by Yeats, who left interlineal scorings and marginal strokings on pp. 182-4 (on Leibnitzs notion of monads in relation to God), p. 188 (on Leibnitzs view of the Eucharist), p. 246 (on sensuous and rational motives of willing), and pp. 374-97 (on Kant and the Transcendental Aesthetic, the Transcendental Analytic and the Metaphysics of Nature, and the Transcendental Dialectic and Practical Philosophy).

3.

4.

Works Cited
Erdmann, Johann. A History of Philosophy. 3 vols. Volume 2: Modern Philosophy, Trans. Williston Hough. London: Allen and Unwin, 1924. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922. Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love. 1920. London: Martin Seeker, 1921. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage, 1997. OShea, Edward. A Descriptive Catalog of the W. B. Yeats Library. New York: Garland, 1985. Pound, Ezra. Draft of XXX Cantos. London: Faber and Faber, 1928. Woolf, Virginia. Autobiographical fragment on Lady Ottoline Morrell and Pre-World War I Bloomsbury. Typescript. M55. The Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library. [Cited in the text as Berg TS M55.] . The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1984. . The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4: 1925-1928. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1994. . The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-1980. . Orlando, A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1928. . The Waves. London: Hogarth Press, 1931. Yeats, W. B. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Gen. ed. John Kelly. Oxford: Oxford UP [Intelex Electronic Edition], 2002. [Cited as CL Intelex, followed by Accession number.] . The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 1997. [Cited in the text as CP.] . Spilt Milk. In Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems: Manuscript Materials. Ed. David R. Clark. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999. 268-9. . The Tower. London: Macmillan, 1928. . A Vision. 1937. London: Macmillan 1962. . A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon certain Doctrines attributed to Kusta Ben Luka. London: privately printed for subscribers only by T. Werner Laurie, 1925. . The Wild Swans at Coole. London: Macmillan: 1919.

FIGURES OF CONTRADICTION: VIRGINIA WOOLFS RHETORIC OF GENRES by Sara Sullam

ontradictory Woolf: I believe there is hardly a topic where Woolf s contradictions are more evident than in her relationship with poetry, with poets, with poetic forms. In fact, while adjectives such as poetic or lyrical are often resorted to when dealing with her literary output, Woolf never published a line of poetry. And even when she tried to write poetry, it was in a definitely contradictory spirit, evident, for instance, in the title of her poem Ode Written Partly in Proseon Seeing the Name of Cutbush Above a Butchers Shop in Pentonville. Furthermore, among the things she insists on not knowing, beside Greek and French, we find poetry: Woolf might have felt so confident as to give advice to a young poet, answering the question about poetry and its death (E5 308), but, at the same time, she did not hesitate to claim that [t]he lack of a sound university training has always made it impossible for me to distinguish between an iambic and a dactyl (E5 308). But, I may say, poetryand the same could be argued for Greek and Frenchplays a crucial role in Woolf s literary achievement. Woolf was well aware of the importance of literary genres: of course, they may be debunked, discarded; their boundaries may be blurred; but there they are, one has to deal with them. And Woolf did not refrain from her task: as a writer, she tried to realize a blend between prose and poetry; as a critic, she dedicated several essays to her understanding of literary genres; and, last but not least, the Hogarth Lectures on Literature series stands as a further confirmation of her interest in the notions of genres and subgenres. Those were very important not only for the sake of literature, but also, from the publishers point of view, for sales: this is evident, for example, in her diary entry on the launch of Orlando: Not a shop will buy save in 6es&12es. They say this is inevitable. No one wants biography. But it is a novel, says Miss Ritchie. But it is called a biography on the title page, they say. It will have to go in the biography shelf. I doubt therefore that we shall do more than cover expensesa high price for the fun of calling it a biography. And I was so sure it was going to be the one popular book!(D3 198). Even when she hired John Lehmann at the Pressthus endorsing and supporting young writers (W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood first and foremost)she did not fail to remark that [h]e [Isherwood] does the prose, A.[uden] the poetry (D5 59), thus assuring herself that both genres were being covered. In this essay I will focus on Woolf s critical understanding of genres, unravelling the rhetorical strategies she used to plead the cause of fiction. I will try to show how, while she starts using rhetoric and its tropes to tackle the contradiction between prose and poetry, Woolf finally elaborates a rhetorical notion of these two genres. In this claim I refer to Northrop Fryes notion of generic criticism, as formulated in the fourth essay of Anatomy of Criticism: The basis of generic criticism is in any case rhetorical, in the sense that the genre is determined by the conditions established between the poet and his public (246-47). The publication of the six-volume edition of Woolf s essays has invited a new reading of the writers understanding of genres; the chronological arrangement of the edition calls

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for a reconsideration of the relevance of poetry and literary genres in Woolf s artistic development. In fact, poetry, poems, poets and poetic forms populate Woolf s critical opus: while the young critic appears to be interested in poets letters, in finding what we may call the private voice of poetry, in the immediate aftermath of WWI, she begins asking herself why the young men who fought in the trenches resorted to an obsolete genre like poetry with its fixed form to convey their war experience, as we read in an early essay, These Are the Plans: Poetry is a much safer refuge than prose. A large number of the young men who left behind them enough verse to fill a little book before they were killed evidently wrote poetry because it allowed them to express their feelings without a sense of irreticence. This rhyme, this metre, these old poetical phrases, serve as a mask behind which the writer dares say something that he would blush to say with the inflection of everyday speech in prose (E3 73). I think irreticence is a keyword in Woolf s statement: not only because it is a Woolfian coin,1 but also because it introduces the opposition between silence and outspokenness, between being reticent and being irreticent (another adjective used mainly by Woolf, later on, in her Letter to a Young Poet, 1932). The same opposition, conveyed, as we will see shortly, by tropes of silence, is the same that structures Woolf s early critical discourse on prose and poetry. For it is with a reticentia that she begins to plead the cause of prose. In 1922, confident with the success of Jacobs Room, in an essay with the revealing title of English Prose (a review of Logan Pearsall Smiths A Treasury of English Prose) she goes as far as to express her wonder and amazement at the young mens persistence in writing poetry: For though English poetry was a fine old potentate but no, I dare not breathe a word against English Poetry. All I will venture is a sigh of wonder and amazement that when there is prose before us with its capacities and possibilities, its power to say new things, make new shapes, express new passions, young people should still be dancing to a barrel organ and choosing words because they rhyme (E1 171). Concluding Woolf s review, this statement is indeed in a relevant position; no surprise, therefore, that it may resort to a very effective rhetoric, one that demands attentive reading. Woolf starts off with a truncated utterance,2 which in rhetorical terms is defined as reticentia: [T]he omission of the expression of an idea, made known by breaking off a sentence already begun, sometimes also explicitly confirmed afterwards:reticentia has several motives, which may be divided into two groups. The first of these groups comprises only one motive: that of emotion, which is broken off by the reconsideration of the concrete situationThe second group is marked by the calculating (and so not directly emotive) interruption of the idea (Lausberg 394-5). Woolf s truncated utterance on poetry is very contradictory, since for is followed by the conjunction though, introducing a concessive clause, which creates a huge expectation in the reader. However, after the typical Woolfian forwhereby we would expect a declarative statement, something giving a turn to the argumentwe find a though, pulling the sentence backwards, creating even more expectation. An expectation that is, however, frustrated by Woolf s reticentia, which very well expresses the awe she still feels in 1922 in front of the fine old potentate. Prose and poetry are defined as two domains, two territories that, from now on, Woolf will define through a spatial metaphor: before her, the potentate, seems to overlook on a space of silence, represented by the dash, where Woolf the critic still fears to tread. The Queen that fiction isso reads the preceding sentenceseems to be helpless when faced with poetry. Feeling that she is running the

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risk of being irreticent, of surrendering to emotion, Woolfto use Heinrich Lausbergs wordsprefers to break off, to consider the concrete situation; in her case, English literature in 1922. Actually, her reticentia is just a way to downplay her stance on the question, which would otherwise sound overassertive. For after her truncated utterance, Woolf resorts to yet another trope, praeteritio, defined by Lausberg as the announcement of the intention to leave out certain things [which] implies the mentioning of these things (393). Contradictory Woolf, indeed, since praeteritio expresses the very essence of contradiction. Using both reticentia and praeteritio, Woolf proves a consummate rhetorician: as a matter of fact, the two figures are contiguous; both are figurae per detractionem, resorted to when the speaker deliberately wants to leave some things out. Even more significantly, both are related to silence (aposiopesis, the Greek word for reticentia, contains the word siopesis, coming from siopein, to be silent). Interrogating Woolf s alleged silences on poetry, one finds her voice in prose. With English Prose Woolf establishes her rhetorical dialectics: from now on speaking of poetry will mean speaking of prose and vice versa. Although she dare not breathe a word on English poetry, breathe she did, and repeatedly. Woolf s first ramble within the precincts of the fine old potentate happens in the company of Thomas De Quincey. Written in 1926, Impassioned Prose is a seminal essay for Woolf s relationship with poetry: as a matter of fact, when she was writing it, she addressed a cry of despair to Vita: and Im reading De Quincey, and Richardson, and again De Quinceyagain De Quincey, because Im in the middle of writing about him, and my God Vita, if you happen to know do wire whats the essential difference between prose and poetryIt cracks my poor brain to consider (L3 281). No more reticentiae or preteritio: this time the rhetorical figure opening Woolf s reflection on poetry and prose is a tautology, a trope that can be viewed as the opposite of contradiction. Poetry is poetry and prose is prose (E4 361): Woolf laments the poorness of such a statement, her whole essay is meant to debunk it, to contradict it; it is better to be reticent than to state the obvious. The dismay Woolf expresses to Vita actually conveys Virginias difficultyor better, the sense of challengein tackling a contradictory figure like De Quincey. Was he a poet? Was he a prose writer? Both, Woolf seems to suggest. He wrote both prose and poetry but he decided his vocation lay towards prose, and invented modes of impassioned prose, in which to express his most private visions. De Quincey thus becomes a key figure, one who challenged fixed definitions of genres: But happily there are in every age some writers who puzzle the critics, who refuse to go in with the herd. They stand obstinately across the boundary lines, and do a greater service by enlarging and fertilizing and influencing than by their actual achievement (E4 362). Once again, Woolf resorts to a spatial metaphor: De Quincey enlarged the notion of genres, he fertilized prose with poetry. In this sense, Woolf saw him as a precursor, as a model for the cross-fertilization between the two genres that she was practicing in her fiction writing, as someone who with only prose at his commandan instrument hedged about with restrictions, debased by a thousand common usesmade his way into precincts which are terribly difficult of approach (E4 367). In order to really debunk the easy tautology according to which prose is prose, and poetry is poetry, however, Woolf knows that she has to deal with a thorny issue, which haunted De Quinceys writing, that is, purple patches, periods so ornate and elaborate, that they break the flow of prose: A prose writer may dream dreams and see visions, but they cannot be allowed to lie scattered, single, solitary upon the page. So spaced out they

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die. For prose has neither the intensity nor the self sufficiency of poetryProse must be connected on this side and on that (E4 363-64). It is not surprising that Woolf should express such concerns at the same time when she was writing To the Lighthouse, looking for a prose form that could accommodate lodgeexpressiveness within the flow of prose. In September, that same year, she would write in her diary: I think I can spin out all their entrails this way; but it is hopelessly undramatic. It is all in oratio obliqua. Not quite all; for I have a few direct sentences (D3 106-7). Oratio obliqua: what is it if not free indirect style?3 This was Woolf s response to the purple patch: a form able to convey expressiveness (with all its markers) without interrupting the flow of prose.4 Woolf the critic is now confident enough to ransack the fine, old potentate, or at least to plan future rambles into the territories of poetry. The title of her 1927 essay on the subject is telling: Poetry, Fiction and the Future. Poetry, Fiction and the Future marks a turning point in Woolf s stance on literary genres, since it somehow represents a dialectic solution to the two previous essays. Woolf does not need to resort to any rhetorical device to make her point. It is in this essay that she moves from rhetoric, intended as device, to a rhetoric understanding of genres, as defined by Frye. In Poetry, Fiction and the Future, Woolf seems to take up the question raised in 1919: What does it mean to write poetry today? To which she adds: How should the critic consider poetry? Differently from 1922, though, Woolf is no more in wonder and amazement; in fact, she is confident enough to provide an explanation on the present state of things when she writes: For our generation and the generation that is coming the lyric cry of ecstasy or despair which is so intense, so personal and so limited, is not enough (E4 429). The problem, though, is not only the writers, but also the critics: in Poetry, Fiction and the Future Woolf tackles the issue from a functional perspective. Within the literary system of the modern age prose is going to take overhas, indeed, already taken oversome of the duties which were once discharged by poetry.That cannibal, the novel, which has devoured so many forms of art will by then have devoured even more (E4 434). Such reflections very well resonate with theories of the novel elaborated in those years or shortly after, most notoriously by Mikhail Bakhtin in his Epic and Novel, where we read: In an era when the novel reigns supreme, almost all of the remaining genres are to a greater or lesser extent novelized.In an environment where the novel is the dominant genre, the conventional languages of strictly canonical genres begin to sound in new ways (5-6). Prose and poetry, therefore, are no more two terms of a contradiction; there is no fixed, no essential difference between the two genres. What changes is the relationship that a writer has with his audience: the only possible answer to the question whats the essential difference between prose and poetry is therefore to be found in a rhetorical perspective, one addressing the historical development of the writer-reader relationship, and not in poetics. A confirmation of this is provided by Woolf s attention to what Frye would later define the radical of presentation, a notion lying at the backbone of his generic criticism: The basis of generic distinctions in literature appears to be the radical of presentation. Words may be acted in front of a spectator; they may be spoken in front of a listener; they may be sung or chanted; or they may be written for a reader (Frye 246-47). To the decisive statement we are going in the direction of prose (E4 435), Woolf added some crucial remarks as to the nature of future fiction: And it is possible that there will

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be among the so-called novels one which we shall scarcely know how to christen. It will be written in prose, but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose. It will be dramatic, yet not a play. It will be read, not acted (E4 435). Woolf s words also resonate with Flauberts famous letters to his lover Louise Colet:5 Jen conois pourtant un, moi, un style: un style qui serait beau, que quelquun fera quelque jour, dans dix ans, ou dans dix sicles, et qui serait rythm comme le vers, prcis comme le langage des sciences La prose est ne dhier, voil ce quil faut se dire. Le vers est la forme par excellence des littratures anciennes. Toutes les combinaisons prosodiques ont t faites, mais celles de la prose, tant sen faut (79). However, while the Flaubertian connection confirms Woolf s concerns for the aesthetic legitimation of prose (see Philippe), her preoccupation goes beyond aesthetics, in that the elaboration of a new form, in her view, is ultimately triggered by the reader, by the reading public. Such reflections would accompany Woolf until her death: in her last essaysAnon and The Readerher rhetorical understanding of genres finds further formulation, confirming Woolf s deep and acute understanding of the dynamics of the literary system, of the interaction between artists, their public and modes of cultural production. The figure of Anon, the poetic voice of English literature, is followed from its beginnings in oral popular poetry, through its encounter with the European tradition, to its transformation into the canonic voice of English literature, embodied by Elizabethan drama. There comes a moment, though, when the voice of Anon is silenced, whento use Woolf s wordshe is killed. This occurs with the invention of the printing press: It was the printing press that finally was to kill Anon. But it was the press also that preserved him. When in 1477 Caxton printed the twenty one books of the Morte DArthur he fixed the voice of Anon forever. (E6 583). This is when the reader comes into existence, therefore being a creation of the modes of literary production and establishing a rhetorical relationship with the artist, be him a poet, an essay writer or, later, a novelist: That theatre must be replaced by the theatre of the brain. The playwright is replaced by the man who writes a book. The audience is replaced by the reader (599).6 No wonder then, that for the author of the Common Reader, the definition of genres should beto use Fryes termsrhetorical. As a matter of fact, two years after Poetry, Fiction and the Future, Woolf wrote what she herself defined some theory about fiction (D3 50). Her theory would result in Phases of Fiction, originally intended as a volume of the Hogarth Lectures on Literature, ideally to be read in tandem with Herbert Reads Phases of English Poetry (1928). The long essay, though, was published in instalments on The Bookman but never became a volume. With Phases of Fiction Woolf openly formulates the rhetoric of genres that she has been elaborating in her previous essays. With the intention of tracing the development of fiction, Woolf deliberately chooses not to adopt a historical perspective; rather, she writes: very briefly and with inevitable simplifications, an attempt is made to show the mind at work upon a shelf full of novels and to watch it as it chooses and rejectsThere is no saying, for they change so much at different ages, that one appetite is better than another. The common reader is, moreover, suspicious of fixed labels and settled hierarchies (E5 84). Then, if not diachrony, what should guide the reader through the province of fiction? In her preparatory notes, Woolf writes I dont think its a matter of development but something to do with prose & poetry, in novels (D3 50). As a matter

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of fact, the sections into which the essay is divided go from the Truth Tellers, through The Romantics, The Character-Mongers and Comedians, to the Psychologists and the Satirists and the Fantastics, and, finallyand, I would say, not all all surprisinglyto the Poetsamong whom Woolf enrols George Meredtith, Thomas Hardy, Emily Bront and, needless to say, Marcel Proust. The transitions from one stage to another are triggered by a new need on the part of the reader. These needs, in their turn, are seen as influencing the development of fiction. And, in spite of claiming that the future lies in the direction of prosefor The Poets of the last section, after all, are novelists who cannibalized poetry, in the name of her dynamic view of literature, Woolf leaves the future open. Hers remains an indication of method, one against fixed definitions: for some reasons not here to be examined, fiction is the most hospitable of hosts;the novel, as we still call it with such parsimony of language, is clearly splitting apart into books which have nothing in common but this inadequate title.7And proseis still so youhful that we scarcely know what powers it may not hold concealed within it. Thus it is possible that the novel will come to differ as widely from the novel of Tolstoy and Jane Austen as the poetry of Browning and Byron differs from the poetry of Lydgate and Spenser. In time to comebut time to come lies far beyond our province. (E5 83-84) And it is with yet another reticentia that Woolf ends her theory. This time, however, the but following the dash only confirms Woolf s reticence. Actually, she has already said what she had to say. Prescriptive theories, though, are not her cup of tea; she does not want to run the risk to be irreticent. Prose is too vast a province to be enclosed and schematized in a single essay, be it also some theory about fiction. Its future, its definitions are open to be constantly negotiated. Notes
1. The OED dates the first occurrence of the term to 1919, with Woolf: 1919 V. WOOLF Night & Day xvi. 211 Rodney might begin to talk about his feelings, and irreticence is apt to be extremely painful. a1941 V. WOOLF Captains Death Bed (1950) 112 Those irreticences and hyperboles which the voice of the speaker corrects in talk. It is worth noting, moreover, that for the adjective irreticent the OED provides once again an example from Woolf: 1932 V. WOOLF Let. to Young Poet6 Therefore you could afford to be intimate, irreticent, indiscreet in the extreme. Even more interesting is the fact that the adjective is used in relationship to young poets. On Woolf s truncated utterances see also Ratcliffe, Caughie, and Bowlby. On free indirect style and poetry in Woolf see Sullam. Free indirect style makes it possible to assign expressive elementssuch as exclamations, and invocationsto a third person subject pronoun (and therefore to a third person point of view). For a thorough study of the subject see Banfield. From a diary entry we learn that Woolf was an avid reader of the French novelists correspondence: Really reading Flauberts letters I hear my own voice cry out Oh art! Patience. Find him consoling, admonishing. I must get this book quietly strongly daringly into shape (D5 25). The catalogue of Woolf s library lists the following titles: Flaubert, Gustave. Correspondance. Paris: Charpentier, 1905-07. 4 vols. Vols. 1 and 3 only. . Correspondance. dite par Caroline Commanville. Nouv. d. Paris: L. Conard, 1926-33. 9

2. 3. 4.

5.

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6.

7.

vols. VWpresentee, binder, annotations. LWinscriber (King & Miletic-Vejzovic, online version). For further discussion on Woolf and Flaubert see Sullam and Patey. In the opening chapter of Il patto narrativo (which, with its strong focus on Frye has been a source of inspiration for my reflections on Woolf and genre), Giovanna Rosa quotes the Russian formalist Jury Tynjanov, who in 1929 observes how during hard times, the reader is resorted to each time the literary word comes to a stillstand (35). Interestingly enough, in Anon [and] The Reader Woolf writes: in times of public crisis, the writer exclaims: I can write no more (E6 601); it is from such remarks, coupled with her concerned interest for the bafflement created by new media (A new art comes upon us so surprisingly that we sit silent, recognizing before we take the measure, E6 595), that her understanding of the readers role and function within the literary system originate. Prose, fiction, novel: these three terms would deserve an essay by themselves. Needless to say, their slippery definition did not escape Woolf s sensibility: once again Woolf resonates with Frye, who, in the introduction to the Anatomy of Criticism, writes: We have, as usual, no word for a work of prose fiction, so the word novel does duty for everything, and thereby loses its only real meaning as the name of a genre (13).

Works Cited
Bakhtin, Michail. Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel. 1938. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. 1981 Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 2006. 3-40. Banfield, Ann. Unspeakable Sentences. Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. London: Routledge, 1982. Bowlby, Rachel. The Dotted Line. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997. 137-148. Caughie, Pamela. Ellipses: Figuring the Feminisms in Three Guineas. Textualizing the Feminine. Ed. Shari Benstock. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1991. 123-62. Flaubert, Gustave, Correspondances. 4 vols. Ed. Jean Bruneau. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2000. Lausberg, Heinrich. Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Studies. 1960. Leiden; Boston; Koeln: Brill, 1998. Oxford English Dictionary. Web. Accessed 10 January 2012 <www.oed.com>. Patey, Caroline. Flauberts Ghosts: Thesageof Croisset and British Modernity.Cross-Channel: French Literature and British Culture. Ed. Andrew Radford. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Philippe, Gilles. Linvention de la prose. La Langue littraire: Une histoire de la prose en France de Gustave Flaubert Claude Simon. Ed. Gilles Philippe and Julien Piat. Paris: Fayard, 2009. 323-44 Ratcliffe, Krista. A Rhetoric of Textual Feminism: (Re)Reading the Emotional in Virginia Woolf s Three Guineas. Rhetoric Review 11.2 (Spring, 1993): 400-417. Rosa, Giovanna. Il patto narrativo: La fondazione della civilt romanzesca in Italia. Milano: il Saggiatore-Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, 2008 Sullam, Sara. In the direction of prose: Virginia Woolf and the Question of Poetry. Dissertation, Universit degli Studi di Milano, 2009. . It is all inoratio obliqua: appunti sulla ricezione inglese dellostyle indirect libre. Letteratura e letterature 4 (2010): 135-50. The Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Short-title Catalog. Compiled and edited by Julia King and Laila Miletic-Vejzovic; foreword by Laila Miletic-Vejzovic; introduction by Diane F. Gillespie. Web. Accessed 10 January 2012 <http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/OnlineBooks/woolflibrary/woolflibraryonline.htm>. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNellie. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 19771984. . The Essays of Virginia Woolf. 6 vols. Ed. A. McNeillie (vols. 1-4) and Stuart N. Clarke (vols. 5-6), London: Hogarth Press, 1986-2011. . The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1975-1980.

DO NOT FEED THE BIRDS: NIGHT AND DAY AND THE DEFENCE OF THE REALM ACT by Ian Blyth
or quite some time, it seems, critical orthodoxy has had it that Virginia Woolf s second novel, Night and Day (1919), has nothing to say about the events and experiences of the First World War.1 If the topic is raised, all too often the response has been to brush it aside, or to refer to Katherine Mansfields damning review in The Athenaeum on 21 November 1919, and especially her closing paragraph: We had thought that this world was vanished for ever, that it was impossible to find on the great ocean of literature a ship that was unaware of what has been happening. Yet here is Night and Day, fresh, new and exquisite, a novel in the tradition of the English novel. In the midst of our admiration it makes us feel old and chill: we had never thought to look upon its like again! (1227).2 Once this has been done, critical orthodoxy would have us move on: nothing to see here, et cetera. But then, being unaware of something and being uninterested in it are two very different things. Consider for instance Woolf s comment in March 1917 concerning contemporary novels about the conflict: we do not like the war in fiction, she wrote, explaining that this prejudice derived from the feeling that the vast events now shaping across the Channel are towering over us too closely and too tremendously to be worked into fiction without a painful jolt in the perspective (New Novels 104). And even if we accept that Woolf did not intend to write directly about the war in Night and Day, and the above suggests that she did not, there remains the possibility that her novel still bears the imprint of small but significant traces of the wara little admixture of the alien and external, as she described it in a leading article in The Times Literary Supplement on 10 April 1919 (Modern Novels 189). In a 1989 essay in the Journal of Modern Literature, for example, Helen Wussow used a Bakhtinian analysis of the language in the novel to suggest that Night and Day is about conflict, and that In the contentions involving her characters, Woolf not only reflects the hostilities of the First World War, but she also reworks our idea of war so that we perceive discord within dialogue (Wussow 71-2). It has also been suggested that the novels concluding chapter, which takes place during a June night (535), is set just before the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914.3 Indeed, the motif of lamplight which runs through chapter XXXIV (as it does to a lesser extent through the novel as a whole)The lamps were lit (528) is how it begins, Marys light is seen burning behind a thin yellow blind (532), and towards the close Katharine and Ralph look back at Katharines house, the friendly place, burning its lamps (535)might be compared in this context to the comments of the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey (Viscount Grey of Fallodon), in his account of 3 August 1914: It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking. My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words: The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time (ii.20). Greys memoirs were not published until 1925, of course, so it cannot be said that Woolf was alluding to his comments in Night and Day, but that does not stop us from taking note of the similarity in

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the imagery, and of its reoccurrence in Jacobs Room (1922), where The lamps of London uphold the dark as upon the points of burning bayonets (131). There is, clearly, more than one way to read writing about the First World War. With the above in mind, what I would like to look at here is the possibility that in the actions and interactions of the characters in the Night and Day we might see something of the war on the home front, as it was experienced by Woolf and other dissenting non-combatants. One of the key admixtures in this context, I would suggest, was the raft of emergency legislation introduced via the Defence of the Realm Act. The first Defence of the Realm Act was brought in on 7 August 1914, three days into the war; an amending act was added on 28 August, and on 27 November these two acts were brought together into the Defence of the Realm Consolidation Act, 1914this Consolidation act repealed the two earlier acts, and it is the act to which most historians are referring when they speak of the Defence of the Realm Act, or DORA for short (see Bone 1-2; Hansard).4 In essence, DORA established the terms under which the civil legal system would operate for the duration of the war. Its initial provisions were relatively brief, and limited in their scope: no-one was to lend assistance to or communicate with the enemy; the safety of the home forces was to be secured; the Army and Admiralty could gain access to or acquire private lands and waterways, and also avail themselves of some or all the output of any factory (or indeed the factory itself ) in which arms, ammunition, or warlike stores or equipment, or any articles required for the production thereof, are manufactured; and finally, both courts-martial and courts of summary jurisdiction (i.e. magistrates and sheriffs courts) were empowered to enforce these laws (see Defence 1-5). However, from the outset DORA also had a potentially much wider reach, as was made clear in its opening sentence: His Majesty in Council has power during the continuance of the present war to issue regulations for securing the public safety and the defence of the realm (Bone 2; Defence 1). In practice, this gave the government (via the Privy Council) an unprecedented degree of power, so much so that by the end of the conflict eighty-six Orders-in-Council had been issued under the auspices of DORA, bringing into law two hundred and sixty-one Defence of the Realm Regulations (Bone 3). These regulations ranged from familiar provisions, such as the imposition of the blackout (see Defence 77-9, 477-98), and numerous rules and orders concerning the production and rationing of the food supply (see esp. Defence 261325),5 to the more obscure. It became an offence, for example, If any personwithout lawful authority or excuse kills, wounds, molests, or takes any carrier or homing pigeon not belonging to him (93); and also, infamously, an order was issued to prohibit whistling or the making of any other loud noise for the purpose of summoning cabs between the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. within the administrative County of London (499; see also 80). The implications of all of this for civil liberties were profound. As the historian Andrew G. Bone notes, there had been no parallel in any previous national emergency. A string of notoriously oppressive laws had been enacted in the 1790s to counteract the influence of the British Jacobins. But neither the Pitt nor the later Ministries of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras had wielded a statutory power as sweeping and general as that conferred on the executive by DORA (5; see also 10-24). Tellingly, when the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, was advised in July 1915 that it might be desirable for parliament to confirm the legality of the Defence of the Realm Regulations,

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he decided against this on the grounds that there was some danger in suggesting that we have exceeded our powers (qtd in Bone 2). The early years of the war were of course a troubled time for Woolfit is unlikely, for instance, that she would have been aware in the summer of 1915 of the reaction to Clive Bells anti-war pamphlet, Peace at Once (burned by order of the Lord Mayor of London)but by early 1916 her health was returning and she was becoming occupied with the question of applications for exemption from military service for Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, David Garnett and others (as she would be again in October 1917, in the case of Leonard Woolf ); there were discussions of the rights and wrongs of conscientious objection; and towards the end of the year she was reading (although not enjoying) Bertrand Russells lectures on pacifism (see Lee 345-7; Spalding 147; Glendinning 200-3). These were all matters that were addressed in one or more of the rules and regulations of the Act. 1916 was also the year in which Woolf began writing Night and Day. This is significant, because in addition to the main narrative thread of a seemingly conventional drawingroom comedy, there are much darker currents running through the noveland not just in its conflict-ridden language. Consider, for example, all of the surveillance and subterfuge that takes place. Ralph Denham is an inveterate watcher of people. When he does so in his lunch-hour in Lincolns Inn Fields (163), or from the window of coaching inn in Lincoln (240-1)probably the White Hart on Bailgate, by the waythis seems innocent enough; but then what are we to make of his lurking, rather sinisterly, beneath the lamppost across the street from the Hilberys house in Cheyne Walk (439)? Katharine Hilberys movements, as well as those of her on/off fianc William Rodney, and her ingnue cousin Cassandra Otway, are also under observation from the equally tenacious, and if anything even more sinister, Aunt Celia. When Aunt Celia confronts Katharine in private (426) in the drawing-room about Cassandra and Rodney, and then, after Katharine has made her aunt leave and tells the newly arrived Rodney what has been happeningShe has been spying upon us, she said, following us about London, overhearing what people are saying (432)and subsequently goes on to reject Rodneys renewed proposal of marriage and to inform him Cassandra loves you more than I do (434), the much discussed Cassandra, we learn, has all this time been eavesdroppingor should that be spying?behind a curtain (426-35). Even Cassandras and Rodneys letters to each other, while not actually written in invisible ink (prohibited by Regulation 24a on 10 May 1916see Defence 96), nevertheless have a certain clandestine undercurrent to themor at least on Rodneys (and Katharines) part they do. Might we see in all of this some echoes of how it felt to be one of the suspect minority who did not support the war? The rigidity with which the rules and regulations of the upper-middle-class drawing-room were observed, and the manner in which the emergency powers of a supposedly democratic nation state were enforced, are not as dissimilar and as unconnected as might at first appear. Indeed, Woolf pursued a similar line of argument to this in the 1930s with Flush (1933) and The Years (1937) and so on. To continue with this theme of parallels with the 1930s, we might also observe that the three central characters in Night and Days mnage cinq are all, to some extent or other, outsiders: Mary Datchett, Ralph Denham and Katharine Hilbery, each in their own fashion, and each with varying degrees of success, cultivate a studied indifference to the conventions of family and social life; and they share with Peggy from The Years the desire that they might each somehow find a way of living differently (see TG 309-14;

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TY 371). (The other two other characters in this mnage, William Rodney and Cassandra Otway, while certainly eccentric, perhaps fall a little short of the mark for true outsider status.) Of course, we could argue that in the case of Night and Day this is simply a reflection of Woolf s experiences in the early years of Bloomsbury, a time when everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial (Old Bloomsbury [1921-2] 185). And yes, in part it is. But when viewed from the perspective of her work in the 1930s, it becomes apparent that there might also be another dimension to these aspects of her novel. Even if Mary, Ralph and Katharine cannot be said to be actively demonstrating how one might prevent war (cf. TG 153 and passim), their actions nevertheless appear to point towards the expression of some form of oblique protest against the war. Of the three main protagonists, Ralphs outsider status is arguably the most fully developed. He habitually takes his meals separately from the rest of his family, for instance (in the company of a tame and, apparently, decrepit pet rook, no lesssee 20-31; quote is from 21); and in chapter XVIII he talks of giving up his career to go and live in a cottage and write the history of the English village from Saxon days to the present time (see 228-35; quote is from 234)an act of renunciation as abstract and timeless as the sentiment admitted to by Woolf two decades later in Three Guineas (1938): still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a childs ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes (313). Ralph also has an interest in, and an affinity with, Londons sparrows. We get to see this in chapter XIII, when Mary encounters Ralph during his lunch hourin Lincolns Inn Fields, and she joins him as he feeds the sparrows their daily scattering of bread crumbs (163). Ralphs attempts to get [a sparrow] to settle on [his] arm are thwarted by A childbowling its hoop through the concourse of birds, and he complains that the gardens should be free of children so people like him can enjoy the company of sparrows and other birds in peace. Londons a fine place to live in, Mary concludes, ignoring Ralphs complaints. I believe I could sit and watch people all day long. I like my fellowcreatures (164-5). The focus here has shifted to people, not birds, but in the following chapter, when she remembers this scene, Marys thoughts keep turning back to Ralphs sparrows (see 170-1, 175-6). We see much later (in chapter XXXIII) that the thought of Ralphs pet rook assures Katharine of his capacityto alleviate [the sufferings of humanity] (507); Marys memory in chapter XIV of Ralph feeding the Lincolns Inn sparrows appears to also confirm his status as an early prototype of the outsider. We can reasonably accurately date the composition of this scene: the original manuscript draft of chapter XIII was written around November 1916, and aside from one or two differences which well come to shortly, it is fairly close to the published text.6 In the months that followed, Londons sparrows came under attack from much fiercer antagonists than boys with hoops. So-called Rat and Sparrow clubs were being revived across the country; and in January 1917 The Times carried articles and letters on the subject of Destructive Birds and The Sparrow Pest, in which sparrows were cast in the role of the enemy of agriculture.7 On 11 June 1917, the following report appeared:

Feeding Birds With Crusts

Mrs. Sophia G. Stuart, 76, of Knaphill, was at Woking on Saturday fined 2 for feeding sparrows with bread.

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A police sergeant said he found a quantity of bread cut into small pieces scattered at the front and back of Mrs. Stuarts house in Englefield-road and he collected half a pound of these pieces. When he spoke to the defendant she said she had fed the birds for years and would continue to do so. In her defence Mrs. Stuart said she was a member of all sorts of bird societies. All she did was to use the bottom crusts of the loaves, which were frequently unclean, and also crusts which she could not eat. Bread was not wasted if given to fellow creatures whether they went on two legs or four. The birds are my children, she added, and I have a dog which is my son, I have nothing else to love since my poor boy was killed in Mesopotamia. Mrs. Stuart had fallen foul of the Wheat, Rye and Rice (Restriction) Order, 1917, which had come into force on 20 April (replacing the Waste of Wheat Order, 1916); the order reserved these commodities for human food, and stated that No person shall waste or permit to be wasted any flour or other article [containing flour] (see DRM 278-9).8 Two pounds was a lot of money in 1917the equivalent of a months wages for a housemaid, for example.9 If Woolf had read this, it is likely to have struck her as an extremely harsh penalty for such a small act of kindnessan example of the arbitrary and pervasive brutality of war, perhaps. And theres the question: did Woolf read this report? The indicator is that expression fellow creatures. It is used by Mary in the published novel (as we have seen), but it does not appear in the manuscript, where Mary uses the expression fellow men instead (see M22). Why, and when, did Woolf change this sentence? The expression fellow-creatures also appears in The Voyage Out (1915) (199) and Jacobs Room (96), as well as in A Room of Ones Own (1929) (90). It occurs just the once in all four of these texts. Was this merely a stylistic tic which Woolf s first three novels (and A Room of Ones Own) had in common, we have to ask ourselves? Or, in the case of Night and Day, did Woolf read the above report in The Times, notice the similarities in the description of the case to the events described in her previously drafted chapter, and go back (possibly to the now lost typescript copy of her novel) and revise this crucial expression from fellow men to fellow-creatures? It is likely we will never know, but there is surely enough ambiguity to allow for either scenario; and when this is considered alongside the various other instances in which her novel appears to be making some sort of oblique reference to the war, it suggests that there may well be a good deal more to be said about Night and Day and the First World War than critical orthodoxy would have us believe. Notes
1. See, for example, Levenback 27 n. 13, 115. Night and Day is also not discussed in any great detail in Husseys Virginia Woolf and War, although in his opening chapter Hussey does highlight several links between the novel and war, especially those discussed in Wussowsee below, and Hussey, Living in a War Zone 8. See also Coroneos 198-9, 205. Audience question. Glasgow, 10 June 2011. Two more amending acts (one curbing the application of the Act in courts-martial, the other controlling the supply of munitions) were added in March 1915; a third amendment, relating to the Liquor Trade, was added in May 1915; these were followed, in December 1916, and March and June 1918 respectively, by another three separate but related acts: the Defence of the Realm (Acquisition of Land) Act, 1916; the

2. 3. 4.

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

Defence of the Realm (Food Profits) Act, 1918; and the Defence of the Realm (Beans, Peas and Pulse Orders) Act, 1918 (see Bone 1-2; Hansard). More regulations in this area were to follow, as Bone (3 n. 4) notes: With the publication of the sixth edition [of the DRM] in September 1918, the flood of orders relating to the supply and production of food and war material were hived off into 3 different volumes. Chapter XIII was not dated in the draft, but the opening page of chapter XII was dated 11 October, and chapter XIV was begun on 28 November 1916 (see M22). See A Correspondent on Destructive Birds; letters to the editor on this subject by Young, Kay Robinson, Tomlinson, Prickett, and J. E. B; Chamberlain on The Sparrow Pest; and a letter to the editor on this subject by Gill. See also the letters to the editor on the subject of Birds and Orchard Pests by Morley, Gillman, and Kershaw; plus Our Agricultural Correspondentespecially the two paragraphs headed The Sparrow Plague. Immediately above the report about Mrs. Stuart was another, Former London Mayor Fined 50, detailing the prosecution of John William Lorden, ex-mayor of Wandsworth, a contractor, and a director of the Aerated Bread Company, [who] was fined 50, with costs, for unlawfully using bread otherwise than as human food. Evidence was given that, on 18 May, three sacks of bread, weighing 2 cwt., were sent from Londonfor feeding poultry. Lordens defence counsel admitted that some of the bread was fit for human consumption. Cf. Vanessa Bell to Virginia Woolf, 24 September 1917: I want a house parlourmaid, but there is practically no parlour work. She need not wait at table, only bring in the courses when I ring. Otherwise it is all housemaids workwages I suppose about 24qtd in Lee 354-5.

Works Cited
A Correspondent. Destructive Birds: The Enemies to Crops. The Times. 18 January 1917. 11. Bell, Clive. Peace at Once. Manchester and London: National Labour Press, 1915. Bone, Andrew G. Beyond the Rule of Law: Aspects of the Defence of Realm Acts and Regulations, 19141918. Doctoral dissertation. McMaster University, 1994. <http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/1786> Chamberlain, G. H. The Sparrow Pest. The Times. 26 January 1917. 6. Coroneos, Con. Flies and Violets in Katherine Mansfield. Womens Fiction and the Great War. Ed. Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 197-218. Defence of the Realm Manual. 4th edn. London: HMSO, 31 May 1917. Feeding Birds with Crusts. The Times. 11 June 1917. 4. Former London Mayor Fined 50. The Times. 11 June 1917. 4. Gill, Wallace. Letter to the editor. The Times. 29 January 1917. 6. Gillman, Arthur N. Letter to the editor. The Times. 11 June 1917. 4. Glendinning, Victoria. Leonard Woolf: A Life. London: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Grey, Viscount of Fallodon. Twenty-Five Years 1892-1916. 2 vols. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925. Hansard. Sittings in the 1910s. <http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/sittings/1910s> Hussey, Mark. Living in a War Zone: An Introduction to Virginia Woolf as a War Novelist. Virginia Woolf and War. Ed. Hussey. 1-13 . ed. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality and Myth. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991. J. E. B. Letter to the editor. The Times. 26 January 1917. 11. Kay Robinson, E. Letter to the editor. The Times. 22 January 1917. 9. Kershaw, G. Bertram. Letter to the editor. The Times. 11 June 1917. 4. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996. Levenback, Karen L. Virginia Woolf and the Great War. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Mansfield, Katherine. A Ship Comes into the Harbour. The Athenaeum. 21 November 1919. 1227 Morley, Robert. Letter to the editor. The Times. 8 June 1917. 9. Our Agricultural Correspondent. Harvest Near. A Plea for Sparrow Pudding. Maximum Meat Prices. The Times. 23 July 1917. 3. Prickett, J. R. Letter to the editor. The Times. 24 January 1917. 7. Spalding, Frances. Vanessa Bell. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1983. Tomlinson, H. G. Letter to the editor. The Times. 23 January 1917. 6. Woolf, Virginia. Jacobs Room. (1922). Ed. Kate Flint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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. M22. [Night and day, Chapters 11-17] Holograph draft, dated Oct. 16, 1916-Jan. 5, 1917. 121 p.. The Virginia Woolf Manuscripts from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Microfilm, reel 6 (of 21 reels). Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications International, 1993. . Modern Novels. The Times Literary Supplement. 10 April 1919. 189-90. . New Novels. The Times Literary Supplement. 1 March 1917. 104. . Night and Day. (1919). Ed. Suzanne Raitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. . Old Bloomsbury. (1921-2). Moments of Being. 2nd edn. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1985. 181-201 . A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas. (1929 and 1938) Ed. Morag Shiach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. . The Voyage Out. (1915). Ed. Lorna Sage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. . The Years. (1937). Ed. Hermione Lee and Sue Asbee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Wussow, Helen. Conflict of Language in Virginia Woolf s Night and Day. Journal of Modern Literature 16:1 (Summer 1989). 61-73 Young, A. Letter to the editor. The Times. 20 January 1917. 9.

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APPROACHES TO WAR AND PEACE IN WOOLF: A CHAPTER ON THE FUTURE by Karen L. Levenback
ut, you may say that nearly twenty years after the publication of Mark Husseys collection Virginia Woolf and War and more than ten years after the publication of my own Virginia Woolf and the Great Warthere is little left to say on the contradictory topics of war and peace in regard to Virginia Woolf. Yet, interest in the topics continues to grow and is of international concern (as seen, for example, in Jane Goldman and Bryony Randalls forthcoming collection, Virginia Woolf in Context). Like Virginia Woolf, speaking of the Great War in the first decade after the Armistice, we can see, in the shadow of 9/11 and the second decade of the 21st century, that there has been [a] shift in the scalema[king] us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present (CE2 157). These words, taken from How It Strikes a Contemporary (1925), can clearly be applied to todays world, reflecting internationalism and the fluidity of boundaries that are now the currency of post-modernist/twenty-first-century criticism, and it is in the contemporary approaches to the war This poster was part of the National Student writings of Virginia Woolf herein assembled that Strike Against War on 13 April 1935, commemorating the day that the United States we confront both her cultural realities and our own. entered the Great War. Courtesy of The Drawn from Jane Woods edited collection, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolfs Writings Berkeley. (2010), this roundtable is composed of a representative from each of four distinct yet blurred lines of discussion.1 With the ubiquitous presence of war, in whatever context and according to whatever grotesquely varied definition, interest in the topic and its realities has burgeoned and its study accepted into the canon, not only in the English-speaking world, but internationally; a reality made the more apparent at academic conferences, in college classrooms, in published writings, in popular culture, and on the Internet. Technology not only underscores advances in the war machine, as Donna Haraway and Mark Hussey have made clear, but suggests the international connectiveness and reach of Woolf and her ideas. Consider the following Internet search results for Woolf and war: GOOGLE SCHOLAR SEARCH RESULTS 31,000 (1 Feb. 2009)42,000 (21 May 2011)[44,300 (30 July 2011)] 2 WORLDCAT SEARCH RESULTS 500 (1 Feb. 2009)1074 (21 May 2011)[1,151 (30 July 2011)]

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GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS 4,230,000 (1 June 2011)[4,820,000 (30 July 2011)] While the numerical value and signification of Internet search-frequency are problematic, having as much statistical value as we are willing to grant, they do suggest a continued growth in concern and engagement both within the scholarly community and outside, both before and after the conference dates. We no longer countenance Leonard Woolf s comment that his wife was the least political animalsince Aristotle invented the definition or Quentin Bells belief that Woolf s interest in the war was negligible, evidenced not only in published writings (including those of well-known scholars around the world3), but in course offerings and in the topics covered in this conferenceincluding two sessions on warin addition to this roundtable on the subject. Woolf is no longer seen as existing in an ahistorical dimension and we no longer have to argue that there is a place for noncombatants and particularly women in the history of war. We see the topic addressed in pedagogical approaches and Internet exchanges on the Woolf listserv and elsewhere.4 We see articles and books on the subject, including, most recently, The Theme of War and Peace in Virginia Woolf s Writings: Essays on Her Political Philosophy (2010), and before that anthologies and studies by Margaret Higonnet, Wayne Chapman and Janet Manson, and Allyson Booth. The time has now come for the interconnectiveness of Woolf, women, and war to be recognized as a viable standard for analysis and action in the twenty-first century. As I write in Virginia Woolf and the Great War, Our own historical moment suggests that a reading of Woolf must take to account not only how the context of war informs her life and her work, but also how her life and work inform our understanding of war. The blurring that was part of Woolf s project in the years between the wars has taken over our vision of the world today, now that war itself has been deconstructed in the media and its horror integrated into the pattern of our lives (158). The question is no longer if women in general and Woolf in particular can inform the discussion, but rather how far and in what terms. Using approaches that blur historical parameters, each individual on the panel gives voice respectively to explorations of image, trauma, pedagogy, and gendered politics. By isolating these four major approaches to Woolf s war writing, the panel eschews any effort to tell the whole story, while clearly pointing to both contemporary modes of seeing and those that may be applied in the future to a cultural history that recognizes the centrality of Woolf, women, and war. The first speaker, Stuart Clarke, represents Woolf, War and Image, linking meaning conveyed and tensions between aspects of image and the culture of war.5 Central to Clarkes contribution is the violence that anticipates, represents, and follows imaging of warand how Woolf informs the lived experience of both combatants and noncombatants obscured by the series of snapshots considered history. Deep concern with image is a starting point for Clarkes contribution, which suggests a deep appreciation of both visual rhetoric and the face of war. Moreover, an extraordinary, empathic response to the actual torture imposed and experienced in military action harkens back to Julia Briggss characterization of World War 1 as fought largely by civilians in uniform (93). Referencing the torture and killing of a woman in Chechnya by a former army officer in a

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Guardian article (Tom Parfitt) and Eileen Barretts findings that 90% of the casualties of wars in the 1990s were civilians, Clarke reaffirms his belief that [o]nce again, as so often, Virginia Woolf still has something relevant to say to us today (Wood 118). The second speaker, Lolly Ockerstrom, representing Woolf, War, and Trauma, addresses the growing attention paid to trauma as a contemporary approach to literary and war studies, as seem, for example, in the Suzette Henke and David Eberly collection Woolf and Trauma (2008) and before that in Laura Vickroys Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (2002).6 Identifying trauma not only as a physical wound, in its original denotation, but in its current understanding as a psychic disruption experienced by both combatants and civilians, and tracing experiences of trauma caused by death in war, Ockerstrom concentrates her commentary on Virginia Woolf and Vera Brittain (and more particularly on Three Guineas and Testament of Youth) in analyzing the complex relationship between cultural influences and intimate personal relations, to lead the way for todays students to critique state-sponsored violence. Appropriating Desmond Hardings Poetics of Trauma, Ockerstrom finds discursive trauma an apt descriptor for the works of Woolf and Brittain, particularly as they inform the experience of survival guilt and, in Tammy Clewells words, suggest a sustained effort to confront the legitimacy of war. The third speaker, Jane Wood, representing Vara Neverow (who had to leave the conference early), addresses War and Pedagogy by exploring methodologies employed in teaching Three Guineas in relation to war and sometimes in relation to other texts.7 Taking into account recent approaches to teaching like those encouraged by Woolf herself, as explored by Melba Cuddy- Keane in Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere (2003) and elsewhere, Neverow crosses borders between historical and literary analysis and honors Woolf s own sense of alternative pedagogy, bridging the gap between educational institutions and the public sphere, academic and common readers, students and teachers (Cuddy-Keane 86). Neverow approaches A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas as variations on the same theme, thus teaching the interconnections of gender oppression and endless war, the subtitle of her essay in Jane Woods collection. Comparing her own classroom experience with those of other teachers, Neverow offers practical strategies that situate Woolf s works in both historical and cultural contexts and through activities accessible to contemporary students, like searching Google for photos of the Spanish Civil War and coming to terms with what collateral damage actually denotes. Eileen Barrett, the fourth speaker, represents Woolf, War, and Gendered Politics and informs the antiwar argument of Three Guineas in a PowerPoint, mapping intersections of different lived experiences and demonstrating how readings of the text inform both the reality of war and opposition to it through the lens of its gendered constructs and models.8 Involving the implications of gendered politics in cultures that give rise to armed conflict and its combatant/civilian dichotomyBarretts presentation suggests the wide reach of the text (in Naomi Blacks words) to demonstrate the enduring relevance of Woolf s feminist critique of the connections between the educational, economic, and social institutions of patriarchy and the ongoing promulgation of international wars (1; qtd. in Wood 24). Barretts presentation informs global inequalities between men and women and the ongoing, international cultures of war and, like Woolf herself, uses facts from newspapers. Reflecting twenty-first-century tools that Woolf could not imagine, Barrett cites facts from the United Nations Millenium Development Goals; statistics and reports; open-source

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documents; photographs from outsiders groups in Ecuador, Bolivia, India, the Congo, Yemen, and Liberia; and, non-profit web sites of feminist and international organizations and groups. All is presented so as to encourage us to join Woolf and other internaOutsiders Education. Courtesy of RAWA.org. tional feminists in saying to our new generation of outsiders that We have done with war! We have done with tyranny! (TG, qtd. in Wood 38). Finally, my co-chair, Jane Wood, representing herself, opens the floor to comments and questions by reading from her Afterword and evoking the death of her brother:

Womens Peace Movement. Courtesy of Pewee S. Flomuku, former Liberian journalist.

The Three Guineas Fund. Courtesy of Catherine Muther, The Three Guineas Fund.

Woolf s belief, summed up in the closing pages of Three Guineas, is that in order to end war, one must begin imagining peace, but [y]ou have not asked us what peace is; you have asked us how to prevent war.9 Throughout these last few months of reading and editing the imaginative and perceptive articles that create this collection, and watching my brother become wish by spirit,10 I believe that Woolf s global, activist vision can speak to us not only about preventing traditional warfare, but also the pseudo warsthose on cancer, drugs, poverty. Truly, should one attack a body already riddled with cancer? Should we crack down on people who live in poverty? Woolf argues that we can best help you to prevent war not by joining your society but by remaining outside your society but in cooperation with its aim. It is my hope that this [roundtable] will add strong and gentle support to those who wish not only to prevent war, but to imagine and create peace.

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Notes
Taken from the PowerPoint presented as an introduction to this Plenary Roundtable, the current selected paper is also culled from my own A Chapter on the Future, which introduces Woods collection (1-20). 2. Bracketed statistics were compiled after the conference was over. 3. In addition to those already mentioned, see also Victoria Stewarts Womens Autobiography: War and Trauma (2003) and Vincent Sherrys book, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003) and his edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (2005). 4. Including, for example, essays published in Beth Rigal Daugherty and Mary Beth Pringles Approaches to Teaching To the Lighthouse (2001) and in Eileen Barrett and Ruth Saxtons Approaches to Teaching Mrs. Dalloway (2009). 5. Clarkes essay, Virginia Woolf in the Age of Aerial Bombardment, can be found on pages 101-119 in The Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf s Writings. 6. Lolly Ockerstroms essay, What else can a gnat on a blade of grass do?: Thinking of War, Writing of Peace, is published on pp. 195-210 in Woods collection. 7. Vara Neverows essay, The Echo Chambers of War in A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas: Teaching the Interconnections of Gender Oppression and Endless Warfare, is pub+lished on pp. 211-236 in Woods collection. 8. Eileen Barretts essay, The Value of Three Guineas in the Twenty-first Century, is published on pp. 23-38 in Woods collection. 9. The quotations from Woolf reproduced in this excerpt are taken from Three Guineas, p. 143. Woods excerpt can be found in Afterword, p. 278. 10. From e.e. cummings poem anyone lived in a pretty how town. 1.

Works Cited
Barrett, Eileen. The Value of Three Guineas in the Twenty-First Century. The Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf s Writings. Ed. Jane Wood. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2010. 23-38. Barrett, Eileen, and Ruth Saxton, eds. Approaches to Teaching Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Modern Language Association, 2010. Black, Naomi. Virginia Woolf as Feminist. New York: Cornell UP, 2001. Booth, Allyson. Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War. New York: OUP, 1996. Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. London: Allen Lane, 2005. Chapman, Wayne K., and Janet M. Manson, eds. Women in the Milieu of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. New York: Pace UP, 1998. Clarke, Stuart N. Virginia Woolf in the Age of Aerial Bombardment. The Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf s Writings. Ed. Jane Wood. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2010. 101-118. Clewell, Tammy. Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, The Great War, and Modernist Mourning. Modern Fiction Studies 50.1 (Spring 2004): 197-224. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: CUP, 2003. Daugherty, Beth Rigal, and Mary Beth Pringle, eds. Approaches to TeachingWoolf s To the Lighthouse. New York: Modern Language Association, 2001. Harding, Desmond. Bearing Witness: Heartbreak House and the Poetics of Trauma. The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006): 6-26. Henke, Suzette, and David Eberly, eds. Woolf and Trauma: Embodied Texts. New York: Pace UP, 2007. Higonnet, Margaret, ed. Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I. New York: Plume, 1999. Hussey, Mark, ed. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1991. Levenback, Karen. Introduction: A Chapter on the Future. The Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf s Writings. Edited by Jane Wood. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2010. 1-20. . Virginia Woolf and the Great War. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. Neverow, Vara. The Echo Chamber of War in A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas: Teaching the Interconnection of Gender Oppression and Endless Warfare. The Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf s Writings. Ed. Jane Wood. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2010. 211-236. Ockerstrom, Lolly. What else can a gnat on a blade of grass do?: Thinking of War, Writing of Peace. The

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Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf s Writings. Ed. Jane Wood. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2010. 195-208. Parfitt, Tom. Russian colonel who killed Chechen woman shot dead in Moscow: Chechnya militants suspected of revenge against Yuri Budanov, who tortured and strangled Eliza Kungayeva in 2000. Guardian, 10 June 2011. Web. Accessed 10 January 2012 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/10/russian-colonelmurdered-chechen-teenager-shot-dead-moscow>. Sherry, Vincent. The Great War and the Language of Modernism. New York: OUP, 2003. , ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War. New York: CUP, 2005. Stewart, Victoria. Womens Autobiography: War and Trauma. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Vickroy, Laura. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002. Wood, Jane M. Afterword. The Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf s War Writings: Essays on her Political Philosophy. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2010. 275-278. , ed. The Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf s Writings: Essays on her Political Philosophy. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2010. Woolf, Virginia. How it Strikes a Contemporary. Collected Essays, 2. Ed. Leonard Woolf. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. 153-161. . Three Guineas. 1938. Annotated and introduced by Jane Marcus. New York: Harcourt, 2006.

DUNCAN GRANT by Cecil Woolf

hen Jane asked me to say a few words at this Conference banquet, my first reaction was panic. Cold, blind, suffocating panicwhat to say without repeating myself? I scratched my head and tried to think of a connection between Bloomsbury and Scotland. Surely Leonard and Virginia had visited Scotland. They had travelled in France, Germany and Italy and elsewhere. I am grateful to my wife Jean [Moorcroft Wilson] for pointing out that brief and inauspicious visit they paid in 1938, when they drove up through England to Midlothian, stopping at Dryburgh in Berwickshire, to see Sir Walter Scotts grave. They were unlucky with the weather. It was early summer, June, but the winds raged. They drove on in stages to Loch Ness and the Isle of Skye, where they stayed three days, continuing their tour by Spean Bridge and Ben Nevis. At Oban, the torrential rain determined them to abandon Scotland. Not a feel-good story. I thought about the imaginary Hebridean lighthouse, in To the Lighthouse, but, no, that seemed too nebulous for this occasion. Then inspiration struck. Why had I not thought of the sole Scotsman in the Bloomsbury group; a member of old Bloomsbury the Bloomsbury of Brunswick Square and Fitzroy Squareand an artist who remained for more than two decades one of Britains most celebrated painters? Kenneth Clark linked his name with Matthew Smith, as artists who created their own world through the joy of the senses. Someone about whom Virginia Woolf seriously considered writing a biography. Dear, charming Duncan. Pat Rosenbaum remarked that one of the various definitions of Bloomsbury is that of a group of men and women who were all in love with Duncan Grant. Duncan was born in the Scottish Highlands, at The Doune, the Grants family house, at Rothiemurchus, in Inverness-shire. His father was a Major in the Indian Army and his mother, Ethel, is described as a penniless Scottish girl of great beauty. The Grants were fearless warriors of Norman origin going back to the 13th century. Duncan was descended from John Grant, 4th Laird of Freuchie, Chief of Grant, an eminent figure in the time of Queen Elizabeth I. John Grant, who knew all the moves, married Lady Marjorie Stuart in 1539, thereby making Duncan a potential claimant of the Scottish throne. I like to think of Good King Duncan. I had met Duncan Grant a number of times when I was quite young before the war, but it wasnt until he came to live as a fellow tenant in Leonard Woolf s London house, that I got to know him a great deal better. In speaking of my recollections of Bloomsbury I have touched on the curious mnage at 24 Victoria Square. Unfortunately there isnt the time to dwell on that, except to say that when the high-ranking civil servant who occupied the top floor flat died, it happened that Duncan had just lost his London pied--terre near Regents Park and Leonard needed a tenant for Johns flat. I hope that I shant disappoint you when I tell you that I am not going to talk about Duncan as a painter, except to say that I have always been a great admirer of his work. Nor

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shall I talk about Duncans rich and varied sex life, except again to observe that the great love of this avowed homosexuals life was a woman. Perhaps the first thing to emphasize about Duncan is that he was a charming man. Not that artificial charm we sometimes associate with professional hostesses, the charm that comes and goes. No onewell, very few peoplewho knew Duncan failed to be charmed by him. He was a delightful person to have staying in the house. He was incapable of guile. Paul Roche, whose relationship with Duncan spanned more than thirty years, from his being picked up by Duncan in Piccadilly as a sixteen-year-old in a sailor suit, until Duncans deathPaul said he never heard Duncan say anything nasty about anyoneexcept for that great enemy of Bloomsbury, the art historian John Rothenstein. Duncan was a small, slim man; quietly spoken, twinkly and very humorous. He had a quirky, Puckish sense of humour. There is a reference in Virginias Diary to Duncan having us all laughing, until the tears came. There are, of course, so many other quotable references to Duncan in the Diaries and I must read you one or two of them. Duncan drifted in, Virginia writes in August 1922, soft haired, vague, gentle as usual. And in another entry, Then Duncan drifts in, also, vague, absent minded and incredibly wrapped round with yellow waistcoats, spotted ties, and old blue stained painting jackets. His trousers have to be hitched up constantly. He rumples his hair. However, I cant help thinking that we grow in cordiality. In yet another entry, she refers to Duncan as divinely charming. And before I leave Virginias Diary and get back to my own recollections of Duncan, I must remind you of that passage where this least gushing of writers lists the six most important people in her lifeshe says if they died, she would find it impossible to continue living herselfand one of them is Duncan. I think he was an unusual combination of shy and immensely gregarious. He loved parties and I believe he loved dressing up, but I never saw him dressed in his national dress, a kilt and sporran. It must have been in the late 1950s or early 60s that Duncan, then in his seventies, moved into the flat in Victoria Square. It is, I suppose, a commonplace that fashion in the world of art and literature is as fickle as in that of haut couture and in those days many people thought Duncan Grant was dead. As Simon Watney has observed, his reputation as a painter suffered from his being so closely linked to Bloomsbury, whose reputation fluctuated. It was at that time in eclipse. The painters best known to the public then were Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and Ben Nicholson. Duncan continued to work at Charleston and in his little two-room attic apartment in Victoria Square. Paul Roche (otherwise known as Don), like most of Duncans lovers, remained his friend after he married Clarissa. He earned his living as a poet, giving poetry readings and lectures both in Britain and America. We saw a good deal of both of them at Victoria Square. Young men randomly met and brought home by Duncan, ostensibly to pose were sometimes troublesome, occasionally stealing things. Yet Duncan never seems to have encountered violence in these casual pick-ups, nor was he disturbed by the occasional petty theft. He was a placid, easy-going man who appeared to allow life to wash over him, though of course we mustnt forget the toxic jealousy of Vanessa when their physical relationship came to an endwhich may or may not have ruffled Duncan. I spent many hours talking with him. I visited him at Charleston once or twice when Vanessa was alive and several times after her death. On one occasion I was staying there and noticed a painting on a door which I particularly liked. Since it was unsigned I asked

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Duncan whose work it was. He looked at it for a long time and finally said, laughingly, I cant remember whether I painted it or Vanessa. There must be a number of paintings here whose authorship I can no longer recall. He drifted in and out of Victoria Square, sometimes alone, often with Paul, and occasionally with those dubious-looking men. When Duncan was around I always hoped he would remember to take his key and not have to wake me up at some unsociable hour to let him in. The most interesting moments I spent with Duncan were when we went together to exhibitions and he talked of what he loved most, painting. On one occasion we spent a happy and rather boozy day, visiting London Zoo, to look at and draw wolves. I had commissioned Duncan to create a logo for our publishing house. He made a number of sketches, but his final wolf turned out a characteristically benign creature, more like a friendly dog than the wild, rapacious animal I had in mind. I couldnt help liking Duncans cuddly wolf, but we never used it as a logo; years later we it put it on our Christmas card. I also commissioned a book jacket and illustrations for a collection of 18th century recipes we published. On that occasion, he produced a series of enchanting lithographs, which we included in In an Eighteenth Century Kitchen: a Receipt Book of Cookery, 1698 (1968). When Leonard died and the Victoria Square diaspora took place, Duncan gave me his dressing gown. It was a splendid garment, a Moroccan jalaba, I believe, of many coloured patches and many coloured paints which I greatly treasured. It formed one of the exhibits in a Bloomsbury exhibition that Jean and I staged in 1975, to launch her book, Virginia Woolf, Life and London. Sadly, it was later destroyed in a house fire. The last time I saw Duncan was in the 1970s, when we met unexpectedly in Piccadilly. It must have been shortly before his death, in 1978. He was well into his nineties and his face was crowded with experience. But he still talked animatedly; he remained youthful until the end. His hair had grown almost to his shoulders. We talked for some time and at last I couldnt resist asking him about his hair. Yes, he said, smiling broadly, my barber has died, you see.

Notes on Contributors
Judith Allen leads the Virginia Woolf Reading Group at Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2010. Her chapter on Feminist Politics will be included in Virginia Woolf in Context, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and she is currently writing a monograph on Woolf and Montaigne for Cecil Woolf s Bloomsbury Heritage Series. Suzanne Bellamy is an Australian artist and writer, currently completing a PhD at the University of Sydney. Website: suzannebellamy.com Ian Blyth is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English, University of St Andrews, and a member of the Editorial Board for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, for which heis co-editing Orlando (with Suzanne Raitt). His published works include Hlne Cixous: Live Theory (2004), and various articles on Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Stella Bolaki is a Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Kent. She is author of Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Womens Fiction (2011) and has published articles in MELUS, Mosaic and Textual Practice. She is currently writing a monograph on cross-genre illness narratives, and she is co-editor, with Sabine Broeck, of a forthcoming collection of essays on Audre Lordes transnational legacy. Wayne Chapman is Professor of English at Clemson University, editor of The South Carolina Review, and executive editor of Clemson University Digital Press. His most recent book is Yeatss Poetry in the Making: Sing Whatever Is Well Made (Palgrave Macmillan 2010). 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). John Coyle is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His main interests lie in the field of modernist and postmodernist literature from an international perspective. He has published articles on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alain-Fournier, Proust, and Joyce, and has edited two introductory studies on Joyce. Kristin Czarnecki is an associate professor of English at Georgetown College. Her work has been published in the Journal of Modern Literature, the Journal of Beckett Studies, College Literature, and the CEA Critic, among others. Her current project involves Kristevan analyses of the novels of Jean Rhys. Claire Davison-Pgon is Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the Universit dAix-Marseille, and is the current president of the French Virginia Woolf Society. Madelyn Detloff is Director of Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Associate Professor of English at Miami University (OH). Her published work includes The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the 20th Century and several essays on Woolf, modernism, queer studies, and/or feminist studies. Rebecca DeWald is a PhD student in English Literature and Hispanic Studies at the University of Glasgow. She is researching Jorge Luis Borges approach to and practice of translation and its impact on Translation Studies as a whole. Jeanne Dubino is Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. She most recently published the edited volume Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Lois J. Gilmore is Professor of Language & Literature at Bucks County Community

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College in Newtown, Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from Temple University with a dissertation entitled Modernist Primitive: Art and Ethnography in Modern British Literature. Her current research interests include Virginia Woolf and African art, along with Marianne Moore and fashion. Diane F. Gillespie, Professor Emeritus of English at Washington State University, is author of The Sisters Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and of numerous essays, most recently chapters for Bonnie Kime Scotts Gender in Modernism, Maggie Humms Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, and Helen Southworths Virginia and Leonard Woolf: The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. She is editor of Woolf s Roger Fry: A Biography and of The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf as well as co-editor of Julia Stephens writings, the selected papers volume Virginia Woolf and the Arts, and Cicely Hamiltons play Diana of Dobsons. Amanda Golden is a Visiting Scholar at Emory Universitys Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry where she also served as the Post-Doctoral Fellow in Poetics. She is completing her book manuscript, Annotating Modernism: The Reading and Teaching Strategies of Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton. With the poet David Trinidad she is also editing an essay collection, This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (2013). She is the Book Review Editor of Woolf Studies Annual and co-edited a special issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany on Woolf and Plath (2007). Jane Goldman is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is a General Editor of Cambridge University Press Edition of the Writings of Virginia Woolf and author of The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge UP, 1998), Modernism, 1910-1945: Image to Apocalypse (Palgrave, 2004) and The 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. She is co-editor, with Bryony Randall, of Cambridge UPs forthcoming volume Virginia Woolf in Context (2012). Oren Goldschmidt is a D.Phil student at the University of Oxford. His thesis on Virginia Woolf and Community examines the rich intellectual context behind Woolf s explorations of personal relationships and community, as well as her specifically literary responses to the problems they entail. Leslie Kathleen Hankins is Professor of English at Cornell College, where she teaches a variety of experimental courses. She has published essays on modernism and film in The Gender Complex of Modernism (2007), Woolf Studies Annual (2009), and Jaccuse: the 1919 Newly Restored DVD by Flicker Alley (2008). Most recently, she has published essays in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts (2010), and Approaches to Teaching Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway (2010). Maggie Humm is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at the University of East London. Her work on Woolf includes: Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema (2002); Snapshots of Bloomsbury: the Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (2006); and The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts (2010). She is currently researching Virginia Woolf s writings on art. Karen L. Levenback, former President and (before that) Secretary-Treasurer of the [International] Virginia Woolf Society, taught at George Washington University for more

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than fifteen years and is Book Review Editor of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany and Archival Liaison for the IVWS Archive, which is housed at the University of Toronto.She is also Archivist/Librarian at the Franciscan Monastery, Washington, DC. Gill Lowe is Senior Lecturer in English at University Campus Suffolk. She edited Hyde Park Gate News, juvenilia written by Vanessa, Thoby and Virginia Stephen, and has published articles in international journals about Woolf and life-writing. Laci Mattison, a doctoral candidate at Florida State University, will complete her dissertation, From Modernism to Transnationality: Virginia Woolf, H.D., Yoko Tawada and Ethical De/territorializations of Subjectivity, in 2012. She is co-editor (with S.E. Gontarski and Paul Ardoin) of a forthcoming collection Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (Continuum, 2013) and co-editor (with Derek Ryan) of a forthcoming special issue of Deleuze Studies on Deleuze, Woolf and modernism (2013). Makiko Minow-Pinkney is Professor of Modern Literary Studies at the University of Bolton. Her publications includes Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (1987, 2010), Virginia Woolf and December 1910 (forthcoming 2012), and many articles and chapters on Woolf, literary theory and modernism. Vara Neverow is Professor of English and Womens Studies. Her most recent publications include essays in Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace, edited by Jeanne Dubino (Palgrave, 2010), The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, edited by Maggie Humm (Edinburgh UP, 2010), and The Theme of Peace and War in Virginia Woolf s Writings, edited by Jane Wood (Edwin Mellen Press, 2010). She is the managing editor of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany (2003-present), organized the second Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, and co-edited the first three volumes of the Selected Papers of the conference with Mark Hussey. Claire Nicholson is part-time Lecturer in English Literature and PhD student at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, where she is working on a thesis entitled In Woolf s Clothing. She has presented conference papers in a variety of contexts including BBC Wales, the British Library and the London College of Fashion. In October 2011 she coorganised a two-week public festival in Cambridge on Virginia Woolf. Sowon S. Park teaches English at Oxford University. Her publications on Woolf are Apostolic Minds and the Spinning House: Jane Ellen Harrison and Virginia Woolf s Discourse of Alterity, in Women: A Cultural Review (Spring 2011) and Suffrage and Virginia Woolf: The Mass behind the Single Voice, The Review of English Studies vol. 56 (Feb 2005). Amber K. Regis completed her PhD at Keele University and is Visiting Lecturer at the Universities of Chester and Liverpool John Moores. Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century life writing and the representation of lives across different media. She has published work on Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and John Addington Symonds, and is currently at work on a book-length study of Victorian experiments in auto/biography. Jocelyn Rodal is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation examines overlaps and commonalities between modernist literature and contemporaneous modernist mathematics, using mathematical conceptions of meaning to renegotiate and theorize formalism in literature. Derek Ryan recently completed his PhD at the University of Glasgow. His chapter on Woolf and Contemporary Philosophy will be published in Cambridge UPs Virginia Woolf

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in Context (2012) and he is co-editor (with Laci Mattison) of a forthcoming special issue of Deleuze Studies on Deleuze, Woolf and Modernism (2013). Currently, he is completing his book manuscript, Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life. Kathryn Simpson is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses primarily on modernist womens writing and contemporary fiction. She has published on Virginia Woolf (including Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf, Palgrave 2008), Katherine Mansfield and David Mitchell. She is reviews editor for Katherine Mansfield Studies and Vice-president of the International Virginia Woolf Society. Angeliki Spiropoulou is Lecturer in European Literature and Theory at the University of the Peloponnese, Greece. Sheis authorof themonograph, Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). She has co-edited volumes on contemporary Greek fiction, feminism, and Walter Benjamin, and has published essays on critical theory,Woolf,Benjamin and other modern writers, such as Wilde, Kafka, Proust, Brecht and Barnes,inGreek and English-language journals. She is currently co-editing a special issue of the European Journalof English Studies on Gender Resistance. Sara Sullam studied in Milan, Berlin and Berkeley. She holds a degree in English and German and a PhD in English. She has published articles on Joyce, Woolf, and William Carlos Williams and she is vice-director of Enthymema, a review of literary theory and translation. She is now a postdoc at Milan University. Katharine Swarbrick is lecturer in French at Edinburgh University and specialises in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. She has published on a range of French authors of the 18th and 20th centuries, theories of the avant-garde, and gender and sexuality. Marina Warner is a writer of fiction and cultural history. Her most recent book is Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. She is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy, and was awarded CBE for services to literature in 2008. Patricia Waugh isProfessor inModern English Literature at Durham University. She has written several books and numerous essayson modernism and post-war literature, literary theory and fiction, and intellectual history. She is currently completing two books, The Naturalist Turn: Rethinking Literary Moderns Thinking and the Blackwell History of the Post-war Novel: Neo-Modernist Fictions. She is also an investigator ontwo large collaborative interdisciplinary projects across literature, science and medicine:Tipping Points (on complex systems thinking) andHearing the Voice (on the phenomenology of auditory verbal hallucinations). Michael H. Whitworth is a lecturer in the Oxford English Faculty, and Tutorial Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. He is currently editing Night and Day for CUP and Orlando for Oxford Worlds Classics. Janet Winston is an Associate Professor of English at Humboldt State University in northern California. She is the author of Woolf s To the Lighthouse (2009), part of Continuum Books Readers Guides series on key texts in literature and philosophy. She is currently completing a project focused on contemporary art and performance inspired by To the Lighthouse. Sam Wiseman is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His work focuses on the role of cosmopolitanism and modernist experimentalism in

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reimaginings of the English landscape during the interwar period. Cecil Woolf is the nephew of Leonard Woolf by Leonards 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. Later, like Duncan Grant, he was a tenant in Leonards London house. Following in the steps of Leonard and Virginia, he set up his own independent literary publishing house in 1960. Cecil Woolf Publishers have published, among many publications, the Bloomsbury Heritage monographs, which celebrate the life, work and times of the Bloomsbury Group. He is married to the acclaimed biographer, Jean Moorcroft Wilson.

Conference Program
THURSDAY, JUNE 9 SESSION 1 THURSDAY 10.30-12.00 1A. Reading Woolf Chair: Eleanor McNees (University of Denver) Vanessa Underwood (Orpheon Voices), On the contrary: Four readings from A Room of Ones Own. 1B. Mad/Woolf, Enchanting/Woolf Chair: Jane Goldman (University of Glasgow) Katerina Koutsantoni (Kings College London), Mad but creative: Manic Depression in Woolf. Maria Cndida Zamith Silva (Universidade do Porto), Oh! You know the Goat is mad! - Virginia Woolf s madness at the root of her genius. PLENARY PANEL 1 THURSDAY 12.00-1.30 The Bi-Woolf Panel Chair: Jeanne Dubino (Appalachian State University) Jeanne Dubino (Appalachian State University), The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and Flush. Gill Lowe (University Campus Suffolk), Observe, observe perpetually, Montaigne, Woolf, The Common Reader I. Vara Neverow (Southern Connecticut State University), Bi-sexing the Mary Hamiltons in A Room of Ones Own: The Truth and Consequences of Unintended Pregnancy and Calculated Cross-Dressing. Kathryn Simpson (University of Birmingham), Come buy, come buy: Woolf s Contradictory Relationship to the Marketplace. SESSION 2 THURSDAY 1.30 3.00 2A. To the writing-table (A Room of Ones Own): Glasgow Creative Writers. Celebrating Woolfs writing and her influence on new writers, through an experimental reading event. Chair: Louise Welsh Deborah Andrews Paula MacGee Amy Parker Dixon Hannah Rosefield 2B. Culural Contradictions [Panel 1] Chair: Stella Bolaki (University of Glasgow) Ken-fang Lee (National Taiwan Normal University), Manipulating Literary Fame: A Study of Chinese Translations of Virginia Woolf s Works. Rebecca DeWald (University of Glasgow), The Original Task of the Translator: A Dialogue between Virginia Woolf s and Jorge Luis Borgess Orlando. Kath Swarbrick (University of Edinburgh), Orlando rides again: Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman. 2C. Feminsit Tensions [Panel 1] Chair: Henry King (University of Glasgow) Alice Wood (De Montfort University), Clearing the Air: Woolf s Clashes with Feminism.

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Joni Roylance (Independent Scholar), The Angel 2.0: The Latest Iteration of the Sweet Oppressor and How to Kill Her. Srinivas Venkata (University of Southern California), The Tediousness of Intellectualism: Jacob Flanders and his Room of His Own. Andrew Moffitt (University of Glasgow), Where Is She? Reclaiming a Feminine Subject in Virginia Woolf s Elegies. 2D. Contradictory Philosophies Chair: Sowon Park (University of Oxford) Lorraine Sim (University of Western Sydney), Woolf, Levinas and the Ethics of Alterity. Lisa Coleman (Southeastern Oklahoma State University), Whats Lost is Found: Woolf s Early Rendering of the Unpresentable. Patrizia Muscogiuri (Independent Scholar), Sublime and Anti-Sublime in Woolf s Writing. Laci Mattison (Florida State University), Woolf s Un/Folding(s): The Artist and the Neo-Baroque. 2E Object/Subject Chair: Sam Wiseman (University of Glasgow) Heather V. Fielding (Purdue University North Central), The Dark Side of Reading: Power and Point of View in Flying Over London and Solid Objects. Laura N. All (University of Virginia), Mixing the Vision and the Sideboard: Negotiating Subjects and Objects in Woolf s Fiction. Nuno Marques da Silva (University of Coimbra), The Senseless Movement of Birds and Insects Against the Glass in Woolf s Novels. SESSION 3: THURSDAY 3.30 5.00 3A. Performing Woolf: Finding that razor edge of balance for the vision[to] be perpetually remade: Performing To the Lighthouse An interactive panel with argumentation, conversation, and demonstration Chair: Vara Neverow (Southern Connecticut University) Janet Winston (Humboldt State University), Yes.But: Transposing To the Lighthouse from Page to Stage. Stephen Pelton (Artistic Director, Stephen Pelton Dance Theatre, London/San Francisco) and Janet Winston: An Interview with Stephen Pelton, Artistic Director of Stephen Pelton Dance Theatre. Stephen Pelton: it was this: it was this: Video and Live Demonstration of Phrasing Inspired by Woolf s Punctuation in To the Lighthouse. 3B. War/Peace [Panel 1]: Chair: Mary Joannou (Anglia Ruskin University) Ian Blyth (University of St Andrews), Do not feed the birds: Night and Day and the Defence of the Realm Act. Sangina Patnaik (University of California, Berkeley), Silence Falls on London: Wars Pervasive Absence in Jacobs Room and Mrs Dalloway. Christina Alt (University of Sydney), The Exterminatory Pacifism of Three Guineas. 3C. Community/Theatre: Between the Acts Chair: Heather V. Fielding (Purdue University North Central) Stephanie L. Johnson (The College of St. Scholastica), Woolf s Poetic Play: Recuperating the Lyric Cry in Between the Acts.

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Kholoud Ezzat (Cairo University), Metatheatrical Elements in Fiction: A Reading of Virginia Woolf s Between the Acts. Stuart N. Clarke (Independent Scholar), Virginia Woolf and the Sense of Community. 3D. Cross-Currents: The Waves [Panel 1] Chair: Christine Loflin (Emory University) Susan Green (Macquarie University, Sydney), Separate but the Same: The Representation of Consciousness in The Waves. Sayaka Okumura (Kobe University), Rhoda Reading P. B. Shelley: Discord in Her Distressed Voice. Robin Lysne (Mills College), Metaphysics, Consciousness and Archetypes in The Waves. Michael Clyne (Independent Scholar), Diffusing a Politics of Contradiction in The Waves. 3E. Granite/Rainbow: Auto/Biography [Panel 1] Chair: Andrew Eadie (Independent Scholar) Claire Battershill (University of Toronto) World-Makers and World-Shakers: Writers and Readers of the Hogarth Press. Sybil Oldfield (University of Sussex), Now is life very solid or very shifting? Permanence versus Transience in Virginia Woolf s Diaries and A Sketch of the Past. Bethany Layne (University of Leeds), Naming the Biographer: Fact, Fiction, and Bio-fiction. Urvashi Vashist (University College London), Virginia Woolf, Representation Matters, etc. PLENARY KEYNOTE 1 THURSDAY 5.15 6.45 Judith Allen (University of Pennsylvania), ButI had said but too often. Why but? Chair: Mark Hussey (Pace University) RECEPTION THURSDAY 7.00 9.00 FRIDAY, JUNE 10 SESSION 4 FRIDAY 9.00 10.30 4A. Queer/Woolf Chair: Elise Schraner-Thornton (Kings College London) Ryan C. Segura (University of Connecticut), The Carnival: Queering the Literary Landscape in Virginia Woolf s Orlando. Eileen Barrett (California State University), Indecency: Lesbian Woolf Narrates the Early Modernist Male Homoerotic. Sam Wiseman (University of Glasgow), Identity, Ecology, Eschatology: The Country and the City in Virginia Woolf. 4B. War/Peace [Panel 2] Chair: Sybil Oldfield (University of Sussex) Mary Joannou (Anglia Ruskin University), Virginia Woolf and the Peoples War. Kate McLoughlin (Birkbeck, University of London), But what after all is one night?: Getting the First World War into Perspective in To the Lighthouse. Cheryl Mares (Sweet Briar College, Virginia), Oh, BUT, Virginia: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West On the Dream of Peace.

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4C. Class Conflicts Chair: Jocelyn Rodal (University of California, Berkeley) Madelyn M. Detloff (Miami University), Am I a Snob? Well, sort of: Socialism, Advocacy, and Disgust in Woolf s Economic Writings. Minjeong Kim (State University of New York at Binghamton), The Sacred Sixpence, but. Martin Mhlheim (University of Zurich) Whoever Was Watching: Speech Representation, Point of View, and Class in Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway. 4D. Art/Life [Panel 1] Chair: Lorraine Sim (University of Western Sydney) Stefanie Heine (University of Zrich), Conflicting Images Virginia Woolf s Writing and Impressionist Painting. Lilyana Yankova (Universit Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III), Virginia Woolf and the Art of Collage. Elisa Sparks (Clemson University), Complicated Flowers: Floral Ambivalence in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Georgia OKeeffe. 4E. Subject/Object [Panel 2] Chair: Bethany Layne (University of Leeds) Lauren Kuhn (New York University), Isolated from Identity: The Paradox of the Relational Self in Virginia Woolf s Fiction. Kate Sedon (University of Pittsburgh) and Meryl Borato (York University, Toronto), Uncovering the Sunless Territory of (Non-)Identity: Woolf Beyond the Binary. Lauren Hauser (University of Virginia), Will you fade? Will you perish?: Episodic Identity in To the Lighthouse. Kateryna Moskalenko (Justus-Liebig University), For Nothing Was Simply One Thing: Woolf s Pluralistic Approach to Nature Representation. 4F. Public/Private Chair: Mark West (University of Glasgow) Petar Penda (University of Banja Luka), Private and Public Self: Ideology of the Aesthetic in Mrs Dalloway. Jane de Gay (Leeds Trinity University College), A Tower of Ones Own: Virginia Woolf and private space. Aneesh Barai (Queen Mary, University of London), The crepuscular walls of their intimacy: Windows, Walls and Intimacy in Woolf. PLENARY KEYNOTE 2 FRIDAY 11.00 - 12.30 Michael Whitworth (University of Oxford), Woolf, Context, and Contradiction. Chair: Anna Snaith (Kings College London) PLENARY PAPER/READING FRIDAY 12.30 1.30 Kirsty Gunn (University of Dundee), Sentence by Sentence: The Art of Making Fiction Real. Writer Kirsty Gunn will talk about Woolf s aesthetics and her own, and will give an inaugural reading from her forthcoming elegy, The Big Music (Faber) Chair: Jane Goldman (University of Glasgow)

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SESSION 5 FRIDAY 1.30 3.00 5A. Woolf s Antithetical Poetics Chair: Robin Lysne (Mills College) Thaine Stearns (Sonoma State University), Not Repulsive: Woolf on American Poetry. Emily Kopley (Stanford University), Virginia Woolf s Lampoon of Julian Bell. Sara Sullam (University of Milan), Figures of Contradiction: Virginia Woolfs Rhetoric of Genres. 5B. Contradictory Reading/Writing Chair: Elizabeth Reeder (University of Glasgow) Angeliki Spiropoulou (The University of the Peloponnese), Woolf s Contradictory Thinking. Ann Gibaldi (Campbell Lake Forest College), The Writer as Possessor and Possessed in Virginia Woolf s Early Metawriting. Kathryn Laing (University of Limerick), Phantom[s] of ourselves: Letters in Virginia Woolf s Jacobs Room and Elizabeth Bowens A World of Love. Magdalen Wolfe (University of Virginia), A light burning behind a thin, yellow blind: Mary Datchet as Readers Friend. 5C. Shadows/Lights/Curtains Chair: Theodore Koulouris (University of Sussex) Nan Zhang (Johns Hopkins University), Virginia Woolf s Chiaroscuro of Life and Death. Olga Vorobyova (Kiev National Linguistic University), Symbols Lost and Found: Verbal Holography in Virginia Woolf s The Symbol. Kristin Czarnecki (Georgetown College), Whos Behind the Curtain? Virginia Woolf, Nurse Lugtons Golden Thimble, and the Anxiety of Authorship. 5D. Science/Technology Chair: Urvashi Vashist (University College London) Rachel Crossland (University of Oxford), see[ing] the same thing from two different views: Complementary Woolf. Elizabeth M. Hull (Bethany College, West Virginia), Mrs. Woolf and Mr. Willett. Ann Martin (University of Saskatchewan), UnityDispersity: The Contradictory Motif of the Motor-Car. Jocelyn Rodal (University of California, Berkeley), Virginia Woolf on Mathematics: Signifying Opposition. 5E. Illness Chair: David Shuttleton (University of Glasgow) Stella Bolaki (University of Glasgow), When the lights of health go down: Virginia Woolf s Aesthetics and Contemporary Illness Narratives. Marcia Childress (University of Virginia), Illness, Metaphor, Mothering: Reading To the Lighthouse through Virginia Woolf s Illness Experience. Lucy Wilson (Loyola Marymount University), Virginia Woolf and Asclepius Versus Sir William Bradshaw: The Challenge to Western Medicine in Mrs. Dalloway. Eileen Pollard (Manchester Metropolitan Umiversity) But at second sight the words seemed not so simple: Thickening and rotting hysteria in the writing of Hilary Mantel and Virginia Woolf. 5F. Subject/Object [Panel 3] Chair: Claire Battershill (University of Toronto) Susan Clayton (Universit Paris-Diderot), Orlando Becomes Themselves: a few remarks on

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foreignness and desire in Virginia Woolf s Orlando. Jonas Gardsby (University of Colorado, Boulder), The Dialectics of Writing in Orlando. Maria Aparecida (UNESP/Araraquara/Brazil), A flight into androgyny: A contradictory perception of the world. 2.30 6.30 Glasgow University Reading Room, University Avenue One cannot go on saying but To celebrate the Contradictory Woolf Conference, curator Kitty Anderson, artists Anne-Marie Copestake, Kate Davis, Rachel Lowther and Lorna Macintyre have developed a new collaborative art project. Drawing inspiration from a series of reading groups looking at A Room of Ones Own, alongside the conference theme, they have created a series of limited edition risograph prints and bags, each of which honours a variety of female figures, past and present. These works will be for sale and all the proceeds will go to Glasgow Womens Librarys Women Leading Through Reading programme which supports the development of womens literacy and communication skills in a range of different communities. SESSION 6 FRIDAY 3.30 5.00 6A. Woolfing the Long Loch With Davis and Wilding: Film and Presentation Chair: Kirsty Gunn (University of Dundee) Kate Davis (Glasgow School of Art), What have we got to do with A Room Of Ones Own? [Film (2010), Medium: 16mm transferred to dvd, Black and white with sound. Duration: 25mins] Kate Davis and Faith Wilding (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Woolfing the Long Loch with Davis and Wilding 6B. Woolf/Theory Chair: Laci Mattison (Florida State University) Derek Ryan (University of Glasgow), From Spaniel Club to Animalous Society: Virginia Woolf s Flush. Jessica Berman (UMBC, Maryland), Is the Trans in Transnational the Same as the Trans in Transgender?, or reading Orlando from a Trans Perspective. Makiko Minow-Pinkney (Bolton University), December 1910 and the Question of the Fourth Dimension. 6C. Friendship/Woolf Chair: Terry DeHay (Southern Oregon University) Noriko Kubota (Tsuru University), A Country Where Cyrus Asiatica Lives: A Japan Fantasy in Friendships Gallery. Stephen Barkway (Independent Scholar), Im a bat and youre a butterfly: Virginia Woolf and Sibyl Colefax. Barbara Lonnquist (Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia), Competing Impulses: Woolf among the Travel Writers. 6D. Paradoxes: Personal and Political Chair: Lauren Elkin (CUNY Graduate Center/Universit de Paris VII ) Drew Patrick Shannon (College of Mount St. Joseph, Cincinnati), Balanced between extremes: The Marriage of Leonard and Virginia in The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Huang Zhongfeng (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Virginia Woolf s Quest for the Theory of Paradoxical Impersonality. Victor Vargas (Claremont Graduate University), From the heart of the Empires metropolis, but

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also from the jungles of S. Asia: Virginia Woolf s modernist aesthetic. 6E. Forehall: Contemporary/Woolf [Panel 1] Chair: Deborah Andrews (University of Glasgow) Clare Morgan (Oxford University), Woolf Re-imagined: A Book For All And None. Susan Sellers (St Andrews University) and Elizabeth Wright (Bath Spa University), Vanessa and Virginia: page to stage. 6F. Subject/Object [Panel 1] Chair: Elizabeth M. Hull (Bethany College, West Virginia) Brandon Truett (University of South Carolina), The Epistemological Crisis of Knowing the Other in Virginia Woolf s Characterological Experiments. Nick Smart (The College of New Rochelle), So Mighty a Result: Woolf s Critical Ego. Elizabeth F. Evans (Pennsylvania State University), Contradicting Type: Woolf s Characterization and the Social Type. Yi-Chuang Elizabeth Lin (National Tsing-Hua University), The Kierkegaardian Irony of Being in Virginia Woolf. PLENARY KEYNOTE 3 FRIDAY 5.15 6.45 Patricia Waugh (University of Durham), As for the soul: why did I say I would leave it out?: Neutral Monism and Woolf s mind-body problem. Chair: John Coyle (University of Glasgow) RECEPTION FRIDAY 7.00 8.30 THEATRE PERFOMANCE FRIDAY 8.30-10.00 Vanessa & Virginia This workshop performance version of the play has been specially arranged by Moving Stories Theatre for the Contradictory Woolf Conference. Moving Stories was set up by Director Emma Gersch in 2010 to create theatre that allows stories to be shared and heard, and engages audiences in an immersive theatrical event. Vanessa & Virginia has been adapted for the stage by Elizabeth Wright, based on the acclaimed novel by Susan Sellers. We aim to awaken the senses and stimulate the emotions by creating bold, ambitious and beautiful work for both theatres and unusual locations and sites. SATURDAY, JUNE 11 IVWS MEETING SATURDAY 8.00 9.00 SESSION 7 SATURDAY 9.00 10.30 7A. Cultural Contradictions [Panel 2] Chair: Helen Southworth (University of Oregon) Claire Davison-Pgon (Universit dAix-Marseille), Virginia Woolf and the Russian Oxymoron. Emma Sutton (University of St Andrews), Flying Dutchmen, Wandering Jews: Mrs Dalloway and the Jewish Question. Elise Schraner-Thornton (Kings College London), Woolf s Triangle in The Voyage Out and To the Lighthouse. John Brannigan (University College Dublin), Dispersed Are We: Englishness, Devolution, and Virginia Woolf s Between the Acts.

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7B. Feeling/Knowing Chair: Emily Kopley (Stanford University) Sowon Park (University of Oxford), The Feeling of Knowing in Mrs Dalloway. Kirsty Martin (University of Oxford), But who am I: Sympathy, Individuality and Rhythm in the Work of Virginia Woolf. Lauren Elkin (CUNY Graduate Center/Universit de Paris VII ), We who live in the body: Language, affect, and the real. Christa Schneider (City University of New York), The Image of a Sentence: A Body for Woolf. 7C. Victorian/Woolf Chair: Jane de Gay (Leeds Trinity University College) Mary Jean Corbett (Miami University), How It Strikes a Victorianist: Night and Day in LateVictorian Contexts. Andrea Zemgulys (University of Michigan), Freshwater But Freshwater. Joyce Kelley (Auburn University Montgomery), Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde Park Gate: Echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson in Mrs. Dalloway. Eleanor McNees (University of Denver), Contradictory Conversations: Arnolds Function of the Critic in Woolf s Essays. 7D. Contemporary/Woolf [Panel 2] Chair: Erik Fuhrer (Independent Scholar) Elizabeth Reeder (University of Glasgow) and Amanda Thomson (University of the Highlands and Islands), I Plant a Lighthouse Here. (Film and Paper) Maggie Graham (Writer), Rainbows and Bells: Close your eyes and think about nice things. (Reading) 7E. Counter-Readings, Contrary Histories: The Years [Panel 1] Chair: Kristin Czarnecki (Georgetown College) Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva (Stockholm University), Virginia Woolf: Fabricating Value. John Young (Marshall University). If there were a patternwhat would it be?: Reading the 1921 Section Back into The Years. Anna Snaith (Kings College London), The Years and Contradictory Time. Annette Oxindine (Wright State University), Going to Peoples Parties: Neither Here Nor There in The Years. 7F. Character Contradictions Chair: Kate Sedon (University of Pittsburgh) Shelby Gibbs (Mills College), Reflecting on Rachel. Maria Domenica Mangialavori (Universit Roma Tre), Virginia Woolf and Duality: Harmonies and Dissonances. Jessica Sticklor (City University of New York), Mrs. Woolf and the Underbelly. Ingrid Baker (Radford University), Virginia Woolf, Feminism, and the Wonder Woman Syndrome. PLENARY KEYNOTE 4 SATURDAY 11.00 12.30 Suzanne Bellamy(University of Sydney), The Plays the thing BUT we are the thing itself. Prologue, Performance, Epilogue. Introduced by Diane Gillespie (Washington State University)

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Sat 12.30 1.30 Bute Hall LUNCH & PLENARY ROUND TABLE 1 SATURDAY 12.30 1.30 Queering Woolf and Pedagogy Chair: Madeline Detloff (Miami University) Nick Smart (College of New Rochelle) Erin Douglas (Miami University) Kathryn Simpson (University of Birmingham) SESSION 8 SATURDAY 1.30 3.00 8A. Cultural Contexts & Contradictions: There thats all the guide book you shall have Chair: Claire Davison-Pgon (Universit dAix-Marseille) Leslie Kathleen Hankins (Cornell College), As I spin along the roads I remodel my life: Travel Films projected in Orlando. Diane Gillespie (Washington State University), Please Help Me!: Virginia Woolf, Viola Tree, and the Hogarth Press. Helen Southworth (University of Oregon), Perfect Strangers?: Francesca Allinson and Virginia Woolf. 8B. Woolf Fashion/Fashion Woolf Chair: Kathryn Simpson (University of Birmingham) Claire Nicholson (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge), BUT Woolf was a sophisticated observer of fashion: Virginia Woolf, clothing and contradiction. Jane Garrity (University of Colorado at Boulder), Fashioning Modernity in Orlando. Amanda Juliet Carrod (Keele University), Virginia versus Vogue? 8C. Cross-Currents: The Waves [Panel 2] Chair: Patrizia Muscogiuri (Independent Scholar) Roberta Rubenstein (American University, Washington DC), Dissolution and Erasure: Woolf s Grammar of Negation in The Waves. Pam Morris (Independent Scholar), Woolf s Modernist Realism: Anti-Individualsim in The Waves. Katarzyna Rybiska (Wroclaw University), Experiencing Solitude in The Waves. 8D. Granite/Rainbow: Auto/Biography [Panel 3] Chair: Gill Lowe (University Campus Suffolk) Maggie Humm (University of East London), Contradictions in Autobiography: Virginia Woolf s Writings on Art. Lolly Ockerstrom (Park University), but the biographer must accept the perishable: Woolf, The Essay, and the Dialectics of Disclosure. Mary I. Thompson (Sussex County Community College), Hybridization of Fact and Fiction: The Precarious Balance of Woolf s New Biography in Orlando. 8E. Intertextual Woolf: Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Muir Chair: Wayne Chapman (Clemson University) Suzette A. Henke (University of Louisville), Virginia Woolf Re/Joyce: Do I Contradict Myself? John Coyle (University of Glasgow), Embeddings and Travesties: Proust and Woolf. Wayne Chapman (Clemson University), Woolf, Yeats, and the Making of Spilt Milk. Margery Palmer McCulloch (University of Glasgow), Caught in the whirlwind of modern thought: The Muirs and Virginia Woolf.

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8F. Feminist Tensions [Panel 2] Chair: Alice Wood (De Montfort University) Terry DeHay (Southern Oregon University), Woolf s Quest for the Androgynous Form: The Man/Womanly Sonnet. Margarita E. Snchez (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), Spiritual vs. Materialistic: The Appearance/ Reality Opposition in Woolf s Essays. Siren Hole (University of Oslo) Fiction and Nonfiction: Narrative Strategies in A Room of Ones Own. Kristy Firebaugh (University of Denver), Framing and Time in To The Lighthouse. PLENARY KEYNOTE 5 SATURDAY 3.30 5.00 Marina Warner (University of Essex), Report to the Memoir Club: From the phrasebook of a colonial childhood. Chair: Jane Goldman (University of Glasgow) CITY CHAMBERS RECEPTION AND DINNER SATURDAY 6.00 Hosted by Glasgow City Council SUNDAY, JUNE 12 FUTURE CONFERENCES MEETING Sunday 8.00 9.00 SESSION 9 SUNDAY 9.00 10.30 9A. Intertexts Chair: Madelyn M. Detloff (Miami University) Ana Drobot (Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest), Lyricism and Opposing Feelings in Virginia Woolf s Mrs Dalloway and in Graham Swifts The Light of Day. Hsiu-yu Chen (Durham University), Being in the Moments: Dialogues on the Matter of Time. Adriana Varga (Etvs Lornd University, Budapest), National Identity, Bilingualism, and Cosmopolitanism in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Ferenc Bkssy. Susan Wegener (Southern Connecticut State University), Prostitution and the Plane Tree: Amy Levy and Virginia Woolf Embrace the Ambiguous. 9B. Counter-Readings, Contrary Histories: The Years [Panel 2]: Chair: Karen Kukil (Smith College) Oren Goldschmidt (University of Oxford), Can I become we?: Addressing Community in The Years and Three Guineas. Isabel M. Andres-Cuevas (University of Granada), But She Too Was Deformed: The Role of Cripple and Contradictoriness in Sara Pargiter. Blazey Heier (University of Colorado at Boulder), Battlefields and Home Fronts: Woolf s Spatial Historiography in The Year. 9C. Granite/Rainbow: Biography [Panel 2] Chair: Maggie Humm (University of East London) Amber K. Regis (Keele University), But something betwixt and between: Roger Fry and the Contradictions of Biography. Ashley Whitmore (Wayne State University, Detroit), Nothing is Any Longer One Thing: Expanding Time and Subverting Biography in Woolf s Orlando. Randi Saloman (Wake Forest University), Life conflicts with something that is not life: Essayistic Speculation in A Room of Ones Own.

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9D. Art/Life [Panel 2] Chair: Joyce Kelley (Auburn University Montgomery) Lois J. Gilmore (Bucks County Community College), But somebody you wouldnt forget in a hurry: Bloomsbury and the Contradictions of African Art. Catherine W. Hollis (UC Berkeley), The Mountaineer as Bloomsbury Artist: George Mallorys Aesthetic Alpinism. Evelyn Haller (Doane College, Nebraska), Woolf, Italian Futurism, and British Vorticism: Contradictory but Parallel Aesthetics and Praxis. 9E. Contradictory Mrs Dalloway Chair: Gloria Schultz Eastman (Metropolitan State College of Denver) Michael F. Davis (Le Moyne College), But cricket was no mere game. Constance C. Turpel (Mills College), Septimus Warren Smith: A Conflicted Character. Dolors Ortega (University of Barcelona) Septimus : The Counter Narrative of Gender. Lorna Chigwende (Birmingham University), What matter they?: Contradictions of Social Convention in Mrs Dalloway. 9F. Early Modern/Modern Early Woolf Chair: Rachel Crossland (University of Oxford) Alison Wright (Brown University, Providence), Multivalent Shakespeare/Ambivalent Woolf: Figurations of Shakespeare in Mrs. Dalloway. Jeremy C. Bradley (Independent Scholar), Ah, But Underneath: Montaigne and Woolf, Defamiliarization, and the Foundations of Modernism. Jim Stewart (University of Dundee), Major Punning in The Waves: contra Andrew Marvell. PLENARY ROUND TABLE 2 SUNDAY 11.00 12.00 Confronting War: Approaches to the Contradictory Topics of War and Peace in Woolf s Life and Work Chairs: Karen Levenback (Franciscan Monastery) and Jane Wood (Park University) Eileen Barrett (California State University) Stuart Clarke (Independent Scholar) Lolly Ockerstrom (Park University) Vara Neverow (Southern Connecticut University) SESSION 10 SUNDAY 12.00 1.30 10A. Textual Margins Chair: Jane Goldman (University of Glasgow) Verita Sriratana (University of St Andrews), A Region of Very Strong Sensations: Virginia Woolf s Marginalia as Spaces/Non-spaces of/in Becoming. Karen Kukil (Smith College), Virginia Woolf: An Epistolary Iconoclast. Amanda Golden (Emory University), A Brief Note in the Margin: Virginia Woolf and Annotating. Mark Hussey (Pace University, New York), A sort of sacrilege: The Proof Copy of A Room of Ones Own. 10B. Hellenism/Classicism/Translation Chair: Lolly Ockerstrom (Park University) Vassiliki Kolocotroni (University of Glasgow), The strangest cry: Radical Unintelligibility in the Common Reader.

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Theodore Koulouris (University of Sussex), Ambivalent Feminisms: Woolf, Greece and Gender. Rebecca Beasley (Queens College, University of Oxford), Woolf s translations. 10C. Inside/Outside/Education Chair: Adriana Varga (Etvs Lornd University, Budapest) Christine Loflin (Emory University), Burn it down, reinvent it, or fund it? Virginia Woolf s Conflicting Attitudes Towards Womens Colleges. Gloria Schultz Eastman (Metropolitan State College of Denver), For Nothing is Simply One Thing: Using Contradictory Things to teach To the Lighthouse to Secondary and Early-College Students. Elinor Taylor (University of Salford), A Conspiracy of Silence: The Academic Apparatus of Three Guineas. 10D. Ecstasy and Exodus: Bodies and Spaces Chair: Rebecca DeWald (University of Glasgow) Claire Eager (University of Virginia), To [and from] our bodies turn we, then: Physical and Ecstatic Spaces in Night and Day. Erik Fuhrer (Independent Scholar), Exodus in To the Lighthouse. Tosha R. Taylor (Radford University), Lesbian Vision and Resistance: Lily Briscoes Journey Away from the Lighthouse. 10E. Mirror Opposites Chair: John Young (Marshall University) Diana Royer (Miami University), Through the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Reflections in Woolf s Fiction. Georgia Johnston (Saint Louis University), Contradictory Technology: Post-Specular Woolf. Irene Yoon (University of California, Berkeley), Beauty Behind a Pane of Glass. Zhao Mingzhu (Minzu University of China) Tension vs. Fluidity: A Stylistic Analysis of Woolfian Sentences in To the Lighthouse. 10F. Myth/Materialism/Violence Chair: Jim Stewart (University of Dundee) Evelyn Chan (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Specialisation, Money and Prehistory in Between the Acts. Helen Wussow (Simon Fraser University), Butting Against History: Between the Acts and the Dislocation of Myth. Lisa Griffin (University of St. Andrews), She would never know him. He would never know her: Charles Tansley, Lily Briscoe and the Mapping of Gender Violence in To the Lighthouse. LUNCH & PLENARY PANEL 2 SUNDAY 1.30 2.30 Class Contradictions David Bradshaw (University of Oxford) and Laura Marcus (University of Oxford) Chair: Judith Allen (University of Pennsylvania)