Feminist Narrative in Virginia Woolf

Author(s): Rachel Blau Duplessis

Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 21, No. 2/3, Why the Novel Matters: A
Postmodern Perplex Conference Issue (Winter - Spring, 1988), pp. 323-330
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345500
Accessed: 27-11-2017 00:37 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction

This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:37:16 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Feminist Narrative in Virginia Woolf

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS

In homage to one of the great modes of the novel in our time, I am

this paper on some of the narrative possibilities offered by Reader's
Condensed Books. The book I am condensing is Writing Beyond the E
offering some of the background arguments and summarizing how t
tural work of Virginia Woolf exemplifies certain feminist strategies of
tive. By feminist I mean the explicit critique of existing gender arrange
and the sex-gender system as part of the necessary and enabling c
work of a writer.

In nineteenth-century fiction dealing with women, authors went to a good

deal of trouble and even some awkwardness to see to it that Bildung and ro-
mance could not co-exist and be integrated for the heroine at the resolution,
although works combining these two discourses in their main part (the narra-
tive middle) are among the most important fictions of our tradition. This con-
tradiction between love and quest in plots dealing with women as a narrated
group, acutely visible in nineteenth-century fiction, has one main mode of
resolution: an ending in which one part of that contradiction, usually quest or
Bildung, is set aside or repressed, whether by marriage or by death.1 It is one
of the projects of twentieth-century women writers to solve the contradiction
between love and quest and the alternate endings in marriage and death that
are the writers' cultural legacy by a different set of choices. They invent a
complex of narrative acts, which themselves draw on two contradictory oscil-
lations in the psychological and the social spheres, narrative acts which are
my general subject, and which I have termed writing beyond the ending.2
Significant twentieth-century female authors have taken the romance plot
as summarizing some intransigent set of relations which they will not accept
in the broadly cultural and specifically narrative forms in which it had ap-
peared at the resolution of nineteerlth-century texts (and in which it still ap-
pears in both modern and contemporary works). Hence the romance plot is a
major focus of their intrepid scrutiny which constitutes one aspect of their po-
etics of critique and their transformation of narrative.

* Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers, Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1985, O Rachel Blau DuPlessis, 1985. Material drawn from this book is reprinted
with the permission of the publisher and the author.
1 This either/or choice was the subject of considerable comment; for example, Mona Caird, The Morality of Marriage (London:
Redway, 1897): In the future "women will no longer have to choose between freedom and the affections of the home-now
the stern alternatives," p. 145. Nancy K. Miller's study of this contradiction for the eighteenth-century novel is exemplary:
The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

2 My use of narrative convention as a site of struggle, involving "the embodiment and performance of known but excluded
and subordinated experiences and relationships; the articulation and formation of latent, momentary, and newly possible
consciousness," is deeply indebted to Raymond Williams, for whom "The reality of conventions as the mode of junction of
social position and literary practice remains central," Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 212
and 179.

This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:37:16 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
324 NOVEL WINTER/SPRING 1988

This concern to examine romance enters their artworks, not only in over
content and critical remarks but more drastically in the place where ideolog
is coiled: in narrative structure. As a narrative pattern, the romance plot m
fles the main female character, represses quest, valorizes heterosexual ti
opposed to homosexual, incorporates individuals within couples as a sign
their personal and narrative success. The romance plot separates love a
quest, values sexual asymmetry including the division of labor by gende
can be based on extremes of sexual difference, and it evokes an aura around
the couple. In short, the romance plot, broadly speaking, is a trope for the
sex-gender system as a whole. Writing beyond the ending means the trans-
gressive invention of narrative strategies, strategies which express critical dis-
sent from dominant narrative as a branch of dominant values.
Virginia Woolf conducted a serious and continual scrutiny of these issues
throughout her career. Woolf's discussion of "Life's Adventure," an imaginary
book by an imagined contemporary novelist named "Mary Carmichael," pro-
poses two critica: acts for modern women writers: breaking the sentence and
breaking the sequence." Both are ruptures with conventional literary practice.
Breaking the sentence severs dominant authority and ideology. Breaking the
sequence is a critique of narrative, restructuring its orders and priorities pre-
cisely by attention to specific issues of female identity.
The formal questions about fiction which Woolf raised in "Modern Fiction"
are elaborated and socially grounded a decade later in "Women and Fiction"
(1929), a work related to A Room of One's Own. Here the sentence, the plot,
narrative convention and subject matter will alike be subjected to revisionary
scrutiny by the female novelist because these narrative forms and modes
carry an ideological and interpretive freight about gender. Woolf argued re-
peatedly that the prevalent values of fiction are androcentric, devaluing or
rendering minor and suspect female experiences.

... as men are the arbiters of that [social] convention, as they have established
an order of values in life, so to, since fiction is largely based on life, these values
prevail there also to a very great extent.
It is probable, however, that both in life and in art, the values of a woman are
not the values of a man. Thus, when a woman comes to write a novel, she will
find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values-to make seri-
ous what appears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to him important.4

3 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own [19291 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1957), abbreviated in the text as
AROO: "I am almost sure, I said to myself, that Mary Carmichael is playing a trick on us. For I feel as one feels on a
switchback railway when the car, instead of sinking, as one has been led to expect, swerves up again. Mary is tampering
with the expected sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence....- Perhaps she had done this
unconsciously, merely giving things their natural order, as a woman would, if she wrote like a woman. But the effect was
somehow baffling; one could not see a wave heaping itself, a crisis coming round the next corner.... For whenever I was
about to feel the usual things in the usual places, about love, about death, the annoying creature twitched me away, as if
the important point were just a little further on," pp. 85 and 95.

4 "Women and Fiction," Granite and Rainbow (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958), p. 81.

This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:37:16 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS I FEMINIST NARRATIVE 325

Trying to make fiction talk about women and their concerns, especially when
a woman is the speaking subject, may necessarily lead to a critical transforma-
tion of narrative structures, to reversals, reassessments, reweightings of all
sorts. Woolf's argument here strongly proposes female difference. The ques-
tion therefore follows: what is different about women, or at least sufficiently
different to make these claims plausible.
The psycho-sexual and socio-cultural structures of female identity are eluci-
dated in two oscillations repeatedly visible in the texts and careers of women
writers. The process of oedipalization traced by Freud contains the crucial
"admission" (in the Freudian context) that this crisis of gendering ineluctably
contains a massive oscillation between oedipal and pre-oedipal situations and
resolutions, so the goal of heterosexual object choice is repeatedly colored by,
and in some tension with, female bonding, mothering, and the mother-
daughter dyad.5
The narrative and cultural implications of this neo-Freudian picture of gen-
dering are staggering. With no easy or one-directional passage to "normal
femininity," women as social products are characterized by unresolved and
continuous alternations between allegiance to males and to females, between
heterosexuality and female-identified, lesbian, or bisexual ties. The "original
bisexuality" of the individual female is not easily put to rest or resolved by
one early tactical episode. Further, the emotional rhythms of female identity
involve repeated (and possibly even simultaneous) articulations of these two
principles or states, which are taken (ideologically) as opposing poles.'
Many twentieth century women writers undertake a reassessment of the
processes of gendering by inventing narrative strategies, especially involving
sequence, character, and relationship, that neutralize, minimize, or transcend
any oversimplified oedipal drama. Effort is devoted to depicting masculine
and feminine "sides" of a single character who contains her/his own "plot"
involving semi-conjugal relations-in Woolf's androgyny and in similar proce-
dures in Dorothy Richardson. Original bisexuality is extended the length of a
character's narrated life in Woolf and in H.D. Women writers readjust the
maternal and paternal in ways that unbalance the univocal sequence of object
choice. Such narratives, notably female Kiinstlerromane, may invent an inter-
play between mother, father and female hero in a relational triangle. These
changes are often accompanied by pointed remarks about the plots, charac-
ters, and situations once expected in narrative: gender polarization, patrisex-
ual romantic love, the arrest of female quest, the "happy ending"-remarks
that underline the self-consciousness of this critique of narrative scripts.

5 The relevant texts are Sigmund Freud, "The Psychology of Women" (1933), in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,
trans. W.J.H. Sprott (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1933); the same essay is called "Femininity" in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freua, Vol. 22, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and
the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1964); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of
Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

6 Chodorow summarizes the female's "emotional, if not erotic bisexual oscillation between mother and father-between pre-
occupation with 'mother-child' issues and 'male-female' issues," p. 168. I am indebted to Chodorow for the concept of os-
cillation which I have extended in certain ways.

This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:37:16 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
326 NOVEL IWINTER/SPRING 1988

The new, contradictory paths back and forth through oedipal materials, the
psycho-sexual oscillation of the gendering process, so distinctly theorized, in-
teract with another systemic aspect of female identity, which shows the same
wavering, dialogic structure: a socio-cultural oscillation of hegemonic pro-
cesses.

In the social and cultural arenas, there is a constan

dominant and muted, hegemonic and oppositional,
that a woman may be described as (ambiguously) n
equal justice but less drama, as (ambiguously) hegem
and sexuality exist within dominant paradigms.7 Virgin
oscillating consciousness in A Room of One's Own:

It [the mind] can think back through its fathers or th

have said that a woman writing thinks back through her m
a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off
walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inh
tion, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and

Note how, interestingly for this argument, Woolf

preoedipal division in object relations to the social os
deep but unarticulated connection between both pro
female identity. The debate between inheritor and
tween strong identification with dominant values an
The way the passage proposes an opposition between
focuses its intent. "Natural" is what every ideology
beliefs, social practices, senses of the self are secon
word "critical," however, has the force of a severe a
from cherished mental structures and social practices.
lation of hegemonic process, writers like Woolf und
the mechanisms of social insertion for women through
private sphere and patriarchal hierarchies, inventing n
the multiple individual and the collective protagonist,
ual quests and couple formation.

Virginia Woolf's career as a novelist makes two grea

major problem-the formation of narrative strategies
both gendering and hegemonic processes by rupturi
quences of romance and related materials in quest plots
novels draw on the traditional concerns of love plots-t
joined heterosexual couples, and of quest plots-the Bildu
That is, in The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1
endings in engagement to marry and death.8 After the
7 "(Ambiguously) nonhegemonic" from my essay "For the Etruscans," in Elaine Show
Women, Literature and Theory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 271-91.

8 Jacob's Room, which I do not discuss in my book, could be seen as the symbolic dis
which clears the way for the female hero and her plots. Obvious abbreviations will b

This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:37:16 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS I FEMINIST NARRATIVE 327

romance is displaced from a controlling and privileged position in her work.9

It will never again appear as the unique center of narrative concern; it will
never again appear assumed or unquestioned. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) offers the-
matic and structural debates about romantic love, the structural debate center-
ing on the cunning device of a nonsexual yet secretly bonded couple-Mrs.
Dalloway herself and Septimus Smith-as the bifocal center of the work. To the
Lighthouse (1927) has a critical relation to the marriage plot and proposes a
special passage through "reparenting" for Lily. Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933)
close the issue of heterosexual love by drastic changes in its definition-the lat-
ter by describing the burning and yearning passions of a jealous pooch.
To the Lighthouse is able in a different way to express the desire for a female
bond which also emerges in Mrs. Dalloway's Clarissa-Sally materials, by fash-
ioning a story which displaces the heterosexual love plot in favor of the par-
ent-child tie, a bisexual oscillation between mother and father. The love of
Lily for Mrs. Ramsay, which creates vision, and the moment of empathy for
the widowed Mr. Ramsay, which creates sociability, are both formative events
of far greater importance than the traces of heterosexual courtship plots in the
novel. In the first section of To the Lighthouse, community (the dinner party)
had depended extensively on couples and the bait of romance; Minta's golden
haze of love helps the emotional entanglements of family life; Lily reluctantly
attends to the young man to whom she has been assigned, after rich medita-
tions on refusal and rebellion. But Woolf supplants the formation of a new
couple as plot center. Lily is fabricated deliberately to avoid the romantic in-
volvements that are proposed, and Mrs. Ramsay is explicitly criticized for
proposing them. The detailed consideration of an old couple always in the
process of reformation and affirmation is put in the context of many other
networks, communities and ties: "geniality, sisterhood, motherhood, brother-
hood" as another novel says (MD 209). And by the death of Mrs. Ramsay at
midbook, the affirmation of the romantic, polarized couple is put definitively
in the past. In the third section, community and selfhood must be negotiated
in the absence of the promise of couple love that once mediated them. This
occurs through a concerted use of the pre-oedipal materials of female identity,
to dissolve the purely romantic telos of the oedipal drama. In Mrs. Dalloway
and then in To the Lighthouse, Woolf has redefined the story of romance by
posing the pre-oedipal alternatives, lesbian bonding and the mother-child
dyad, to rupture the cultural hegemony of the love plot.
The novels along the second major line of Woolf's career-The Years (1937)
and Between the Acts (1941) as well as The Waves (1931)-ask a fundamental
ideological and structural question: what "social" desires will empower stories
and characters if a writer does not depend on the emphases and motivations
of romance? Here Woolf displaces the emotional aura and structural weight of

MD is Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925); Y is The Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1937); TG is Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1938).

9 Woolf investigates where to put romance even at the absolute beginning of her writing career, in "The Journal of Mistress
Joan Martyn" (1906); although unfinished, the work asks questions that Woolf's whole oeuvre answers. The work appears in
Twentieth Century Literature 25, 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1979), ed. Susan M. Squier and Louise A. DeSalvo.

This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:37:16 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
328 NOVEL WINTER/SPRING 1988

individual quest and of hero and heroine onto a communal protagonist. T

protagonist-a large family, a group of friends, an audience, containing m
close bonds and, importantly, including equalized members of all ages a
sexual persuasions-creates a structure in which couples, individuals, walls
tween public and private, polarized sexes, and closures in (and of) fami
houses are subject to strong oppositional formations. In general, Woolf se
rates eros from any forced or conventional bonds, especially such institution
as heterosexuality and marriage.
In 1927 Woolf foresaw intergeneric works which were to reject the realist
sociological novel of facts, incomes and environment; the psychological no
with "the incessant, the remorseless analysis of falling into love and fall
out of love ...," plots, in short, of quests ending in success or failure and
romance.1' Her later novels substitute for these discredited narratives the in
vention of a communal protagonist and a collective language.
The communal protagonist is a way of organizing the work so that neither
the development of an individual against a backdrop of supporting characters
nor the formation of a heterosexual couple is central to the novel. The collec
tive protagonist makes the group, not the individual, the central characte
Not based on individual Bildung or romance, but rather on a collective Bildun
and communal affect, the novel can suggest (a plausible utopia of) socia
change in the structures of narrative. The promotion of any given character
a position of greatest importance in a narrative indicates values and marks so
cial hierarchies.12 To discredit this social practice of narrative, in The Ye
and Between the Acts, Woolf has equalized the characters. No one stand
higher in the plot than any other: the final conveyor of value is plural. S
eral of Woolf's discarded titles for The Years show her thinking: The Caravan
a collective ramshackle journeying, Ordinary People evokes the multiple a
humdrum at once.13 Altogether, the books express "'I' rejected; 'we' subs
tuted.,,14
Woolf makes community plausible by rhetorical and stylistic tactics. She in-
terpenetrates choral remarks so that each character is continuing, adding, in-
tuiting, and humorously modifying the other's longing. She makes a con-
certed use of the ellipses of conversational outreach, of space for desire and
possibility. She uses a question mark as a political statement about dialogue,
openness.

10 Woolf, "The Narrow Bridge of Art," Granite and Rainbow, p. 19.

11 Indeed, in an essay on Turgenev written in 1933, after the completion of The Waves and during the inception of The
Woolf reflects that for the novel combining fact and vision, the poetic and the commonplace, poetry and realism-th
the work she excitedly contemplated as The Years-character as it is known in English novels must be sacrificed. Char
"dominate" and "destroy" the balance she sought. See "The Novels of Turgenev," in The Captain's Death Bed and Oth
says (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950), p. 57.

12 Raymond Williams makes this point in Marxism and Literature, p. 175.

13 Evidence for the rejected working titles is found in A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brac
Company, 1954), pp. 228, 229.

14 A Writer's Diary, p. 279, planning for Between the Acts.

This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:37:16 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS I FEMINIST NARRATIVE 329

"But how ..." she began, "... how can we improve ourselves ... live more
." she dropped her voice as if she were afraid of waking sleepers, "... live
more naturally ... better ... How can we?"
"It is only a question," he said-he stopped. He drew himself close to her-"of
learning. The soul ..." Again he stopped.
"Yes-the soul?" she prompted him.
"The soul-the whole being," he explained. He hollowed his hands as if to en-
close a circle. "It wishes to expand; to adventure; to form-new combinations?"
(Y 296)

And what prevents this expansive, interrogative possibility? "Each is his own
little cubicle; each with his fire, his wife ..." (Y 296). Allegiances to particular
romance, private property, and defensively maintained values are the barriers
to "new combinations"; it is the business of The Years not to attack but rather
to dissolve these barriers, whose knotlike bastion is the private sphere. Hence
a narrative dissolution of the institution that produces a private/public dicho-
tomy, related to and upheld by conventions of gender, becomes central to the
novel. I mean the family.
By transforming the family into a group protagonist, Woolf goes to the
heart of the Victorian ideology of the dichotomous division of the world into
separate and opposing spheres: public/social and private/domestic, which are,
in apparently natural fashion, allocated to the sexes in a division of labor and
activities. The family, Woolf shows oppositionally, is the institution that re-
veals the interpenetration of public and private, "the tyrannies and servilities
of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other" (TG 142). She dedi-
cates the texture and structure of her later novels to elaborating that insepara-
ble connection and to contesting the ideology of separate spheres.
So out of her critique of romance, with its icon of couple formation, its
idealization of the family house, the private sphere for women, and the often
hierarchical division of labor by gender, Woolf has formulated an oppositional
narrative strategy expressing a set of critical values: the collective protagonist.
This protagonist functions, to allude back to the citation from A Room of One's
Own, to allow inheritor and critic to coexist in one narrative space. For while
Woolf wanted strongly to propose changed values and ideas, she resisted, for
political reasons of great power, coercion and promulgation; she resisted the
authoritarian both in idea and in narrative practice." Hence the new center
of vision represented by North, Eleanor, Nicholas, Peggy and Sara remains in
a willing dialogue with hegemonic values and characters, desiring not to
coerce but to welcome them. This is why, during the resolution, Nicholas
never makes a public celebratory speech (coded by Woolf as a ridiculous

15 During the long and painful process of composition of The Years, Woolf engaged in an intense debate about its narrative
politics, asking how to bring the dominant order into question without being tainted by dominant values. One solution
was her wrenching rejection of a brilliant mixed-genre design for the novel-The Pargiters design-which alternated didactic
essay with narrative. The values she wanted the w )rk to express were being undermined by the preachy patriarchal tone
of the essays. Woolf feared that The Pargiters had been Creonesque: commanding assent, making it possible to interpret
certain incidents only one way, brooking no argument. In contrast, Woolf projected an Antigonesque narrative: tolerant,
humane, forgiving.

This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:37:16 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
330 NOVEL I WINTER/SPRING 988

presumption of authority), but responds to Kitty's individual need for a toast

by a personal gesture. This is why the novel ends as emergent Eleanor ex-
tends welcoming hands to her retrograde brother Morris and inquires, "And
now?" having seen from the window yet another bourgeois house close with
a thud on yet another young couple. Woolf constructs the work so that the
whole collective protagonist includes both vanguard outsiders and the "old
brothers and sisters," and all may step into the postbourgeois world together.

Conspicuous Construction;
or, Kristeva, Nabokov, and The Anti-Realist Critique

ELIZABETH DEEDS ERMARTH

The conflict between realists and anti-realists re-enacts a powerfu

habit of dualistic formulation. No sooner do we stop assuming re
tional values, a state aggravated, no doubt, by reading realistic nov
we proceed to find reflexiveness everywhere; and, whether the sho
pulse is James Joyce or French philosophy, we proceed to apply
norm with the same zeal once reserved for the old one. For those who thrive
on the agony of combat my presentation will perhaps sound a dull note be
cause I find no abyss between representation and reflexion, or between thei
counterparts, the symbolic and semiotic; no abyss even between realist and
anti-realist conceived as two halves of a similar dualism. The differences look
to me more like matters of position on the same playing field and the distinc-
tion more like a net across which a certain game is played. By emphasizing
one or the other half of a dualism we reinforce a deeply rooted mental habi
that not only easily contains shifts of 180 degrees-for example, the shift from
mimesis to reflexion-but that also survives such shifts and actually thrives on
them. How to move away from this time-honored playing field to something
really new is not only a problem for critical discourse but also a much broader
cultural issue.
I will concentrate on the work of two writers, one a French theorist, one a
Russian-American novelist. Both participate in the current critique of Western
discourse in ways that not only are mutually informative but that also suggest
new directions for the energies of interpreters like ourselves. By inviting Julia
Kristeva and Vladimir Nabokov into the same paragraph I suggest that they
act as accomplices-perhaps unwitting ones-in that redefinition of fundamen-
tal premises which I take to be central to postmodernism. Both begin with
language and its processes and for both a key step, perhaps the key step, is
the reinstatement of semiosis into the symbolic order. Privately I think that

This content downloaded from 132.248.9.8 on Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:37:16 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms