Category Archives: Virginia Woolf

To the River

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A glowing review for the brillantissime Olivia Laing by Paul Farley in today's Observer:

A kind of desire to draw with, and be drawn by, the landscape informs Olivia Laing's first book. In 2009, a series of minor crises led Laing to the Ouse in Sussex. The river – like all rivers – has magnetic properties, and a reassuring sense of direction that appeals to those who've "lost faith with where they're headed". More than its geographical, material facts or its winding blue filament on an OS map, it provides a metaphor for time's eddy and flow, and for memory.

History hasn't crossed paths with the Ouse very often, and if we only know one thing about this river, it's likely to be that it was where Virginia Woolf drowned herself – wearing Wellington boots, fastening on her hat and filling her jacket pockets with heavy stones – in March 1941. Laing was aware of Woolf as soon as she first dipped her hand in the Ouse a decade ago, and began returning for walks and swims that "amassed the weight of ritual". Laing and the Ouse have history.

With Woolf as a presiding spirit, she undertakes to walk this 42-mile, ten-a-penny kind of English river that rises near Haywards Heath and empties into the Channel at Newhaven (City of the Dead, according to Woolf) from source to sea. Significantly, she chooses a week at midsummer, the year's hinge. The journey she records here feels like a clearing and a clarifying, bringing to mind the old Latin tag solvitur ambulando: literally, sorting it out by walking. She immerses herself in the landscape; she achieves that trance-like state "when the feet and the blood seem to collide and harmonise" that's conducive to writing.

Read more here.

Dr Maîtresse

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As some of you may know, I defended my dissertation on Thursday and earned an upgrade in my honorific. (Not bad for someone who failed gym so many times she almost didn't graduate from high school.) Here, in case you're interested, is an excerpt from the statement I made at the beginning of the defense. It outlines why I chose the texts I chose to analyze and how I see these texts (and my readings of them) working together to form a coherent statement on an important and overlooked aspect of late modernist women’s writing in Britain. I'd be happy to hear any responses you might have, as I begin thinking about how to revise the dissertation to book form.

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Elizabeth Bowen’s novels The House in Paris (1935) and The Death of the Heart (1938) indicate that something in Britain was broken long before David Cameron came on the scene. “Tradition is broken,” Bowen wrote in 1937. The social mores of the past– the means of organizing the unruliness of everyday life– have been eroded, and superseded by a movement toward a more open society. Social exchange has become a potential minefield, and the consequences of these new freedoms must be dealt with. But how, when (as Noel Coward notes in his play “Private Lives”) the situation is– or at least feels– entirely without precedent?

Elyot, the anti-hero of “Private Lives,” remarks that in light of this, “I shall continue to be flippant.” But Coward himself did not operate exclusively in this frivolous vein. Songs like “Twentieth Century Blues,” which was a hit song in 1931, indicate that Coward felt a more serious urge to bear witness to the confusion and pessimism of the period.

Why is it that civilized humanity
Can make the world so wrong ?
In this hurly-burly of insanity
Our dreams cannot last long

Blues —
Twentieth century blues.
They’re getting me down.
Blues —
Escape those weary
Twentieth century blues.

In Coward’s more serious moments, “humanity” rhymes with “insanity.” The song, Coward said later, “struck the right note of harsh discordance and typified…the curious hectic desperation [he] wished to convey” (177). The 1930s will continue in this “musical” vein: the rhythm is stylized, ironic, but the melody’s in a minor key, and the lyrics are laced with wariness and uncertainty.

Having read the scholarship on 1930s British women’s writing,  I knew that I didn’t want to look at texts that were explicitly political, as these had received ample attention, but rather texts that characterized what seemed to me most important to highlight about British women’s late modernism: a sense of uncertainty and belatedness. I wanted to concentrate on texts that seemed to hesitate before any final resolution, that were still interested in the potential of modernist form while aware of the limitations of what high modernism had achieved.

I tried to imagine what the aims of this late modernism could be– what all these revisions were tending towards. I tested out idea of authenticity, or impersonality, or more feminist ideas that would read these texts as “coming into their own” narratives.  In chapter five I do come close to this last idea, offering the thesis that Bowen appropriates masculine spaces as spaces for female “becomings.” but even this term “becoming” implies a forestalled arrival. “Becoming” is an ongoing state.

This refusal of totalities, the suspicion of concepts like “marriage,” “civilization,” “humanity,” came to be a crucial aspect of late modernism for me. Throughout the dissertation I build upon this idea, and finally explore it in my final chapter on Woolf, where I look at the tension in Woolf’s poetics between embodiment and suspension, between sensation and the written word. I find that her reading of DH Lawrence is a key component to understanding her insistence on indeterminacy.   That Woolf herself participated in high modernism and late modernism places her work in a position to provide a solid conclusion to my exploration of these ideas of belatedness and uncertainty that I am claiming as characterizations of the era.

Let me contrast a novel I didn’t write about with one that I did, to make clear the difference between late modernism and 1930s women’s writing. Winifred Holtby’s 1936 novel South Riding similarly explores this feeling of incertitude, in the battered optimism of the young headmistress Sarah Burton, the impending bankruptcy of gentleman farmer Robert Carne, the fortunes of the brilliant young student Lydia Holley, born and raised in the Kingsport slums and charged with looking after her brood of brothers and sisters after her mother dies in childbirth, and the foibles and tragedies of the different members of the community of South Riding.

Holtby’s novel is about the difference that local government can make in people’s lives: each book of the novel is named after a sub-committee of the local council (which include Education, Public Health, and Highways and Bridges) and the events of the novel are filtered through these nexuses of social concern. Although the general tone of the novel is hopeful, its final lessons are ambiguous. Sarah Burton, the energetic young headmistress who is the novel’s heroine, quotes to her students at the 1935 Silver Julibee celebration the following lines from the nationalistic hymn by Cecil Spring Rice, “I vow to thee, my country”:

‘The love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best…’

“Don’t take that literally,” Sarah tells her students.

Don’t let me catch any of you at any time loving anything without asking questions. Question everything– even what I’m saying now. (510) 

This in an apt ending to an extremely moving and stirring novel, one that ends on an embrace of death and yet finds in the abyss a necessary outline for the life before us. (Woolf makes a similar  point, though in a more modernist mode, in The Waves.)  To question, always, is the political duty of these young women: not to subscribe to the doxa of patriarchal nationalism contained in sentimental patriotic solemnities. 
 
Although it seems most everyone in the town is having a difficult time of it, Holtby reserves most of her sympathy for the town’s women, who are fated by their sex to take jobs below their capacities and training, serve as “household drudges,” and bear not only the physical agony of childbirth, but the burden of raising the child.  “I’m going to have another child,” Nancy Mitchell wails. “And how are we going to live? Oh God! How are we going to live!” (246)

This question provides one of the most productive intersections between South Riding and The Death of the Heart. Bowen’s novel takes up this question in a mannered, elegant, ironic conversation between the sophisticated Anna Quayne and her friend St Quentin: “Also you know, you do always seem to think there must be some obvious way for other people to live.  In this case there really is not, I'm afraid” (16). Where in some cases the accepted social code may be “obvious,” in this case, Anna remarks, it is inapplicable.  Whereas the characters of South Riding ask “How are we to live?” and call on the local council for help, the disillusioned characters of The Death of the Heart, deserted by country, religion, or upbringing, can turn only to each other, glancing at their neighbors to see how they’re doing it, hiding from the neighbors their breaches of conduct. “We must live how we can,” the narrator concludes.

There are a number of differences, superficial and profound, between South Riding and The Death of the Heart: differences in each novel’s attitudes towards feminism and conservatism, the range of social classes of the characters they feature, as well as the contrast between the northern provinces of England and the southern metropolitan center. But the differences I want to highlight between the ambiguities and uncertainties of South Riding versus those of The Death of the Heart have to do with the blending of social concerns with issues of style and of form. Although the novels share many of the same concerns, this is the basis of my decision to include texts such as those by Lehmann, Rhys, and Woolf alongside those of Bowen: all four women are engaged in a similar project of social and formal revision.

It would be a stretch to classify South Riding within the category of modernism.  Although they share thematic concerns, Bowen seems more interested in the possibilities of form, whereas Holtby seems more interested in the possibilities of message. “We are members of one another,” Holtby writes in her prefatory letter to her mother, quoting Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 12:3-8). She is not only referring to members of the same community, of course, but to the community of humanity. Bowen’s citydwellers, on the other hand, feel more alienated than ever, and have an awareness of themselves as estranged from anything as conventional as a community. Communities, for Bowen, are in the process of being dissolved, and there is not much that can be done about it. Bowen’s novels and essays constantly interrogate and ironize concepts like “community,” and “humanity.”  Her novels interpret themselves for the reader, her sentences twist in syntax to avoid banality, her young heroines are intensely aware of themselves as young heroines, her novelistic forms double back on themselves. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle call this aspect of Bowen’s work the “dissolution of the modern novel.”

So how is one to live, when the very ideals Holtby turns to no longer seem coherent? I suggest that in order to answer this question, Bowen– and the other writers I consider– operates in a constant state of attunement: to the reader’s expectations, to her literary forebears, to high modernism, to the social context her novels describe. As I read and thought about these issues in the work of Rhys, Woolf, and Lehmann, it became clear to me that answering Nancy Mitchell’s question– how are we to live– requires a certain social literacy, requiring the pairing of visual perception with an informed sense-experience, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms. In Bowen’s novels, social expectations hang in the air as a vague presence to which all parties refer without knowing to what they are referring.  Bowen makes clear the extent to which these social norms are unarticulated; because of this they produce a generalized anxiety, both for those who can’t negotiate the rules, and for those who think they can. Rosamund Lehmann articulates social know-how as a question of “fit,” and her novel Invitation to the Waltz (1931) is accordingly preoccupied with clothing and fashion sense. Bowen articulates the breakdown of social norms through the dislocations, ruptures, deferrals, and elsewheres that mark her early novels. Storytelling, spectacle, and uncertainty are all associated in Rhys’s work. And in The Waves (1931), Woolf’s characters are all asking variants of this question, looking to each other to learn how to be, turning around an invisible center, their questionings punctuated by the cycles of nature.

There is, then, a coincidence of perception and late modernism, a function of the thoroughgoing  ambiguity or hesitation of the 1930s. (…)

 

Woolf and pedagogy

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cross-posted again.

"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery." A Room of One's Own (1929)

This quote just came in over the Woolf listserv, and got me thinking about Virginia Woolf's relationship to academe.  She saw it as a patriarchal institution, whose purpose was not to inquire for inquiry's sake but to maintain the structure of society and the methods of learning honored by it. To her everlasting regret and bitterness, she did not go to school like her brothers, and this sense of exclusion drives a good deal of her feminist texts. Her opinion of university professors was less than respectful (go and read Three Guineas to see what I mean).

But those of us who are professors today, who study and teach her work, can hardly blame her, given the aims and means of the profession in her day. We can, however, keep her words in mind in our own teaching. I can't say I don't have a measuring-rod up my sleeve when I read my students' writing, as I am about to do tomorrow for the first time this semester. I absolutely do. But I think what gives a professor the right to use that rod, beyond their own scholarship and experience, is the clear modeling of the kind of work you hope for from your students, a constant dedication to communication and demonstration.  Before you have the right to the measuring-rod, you have to learn to listen and to give back. The measuring-rod isn't there to deny the student his or her vision. It's there to help them articulate it, and it's there to help them realize that they have it.

Life As We Have Known It

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Life as weIn 1931, the Hogarth Press published Life as We Have Known It (Virago reprint, 1982), a compendium of testimonies from members of the Women's Co-Operative Guild, founded in 1883 and a key institution in the evolution of women's liberation.  Its members organized themselves in order to better the life of the average working women, sharing resources so that the quality of life of each of the members improved overall. Their organization extended into political activism as well, and they were responsible for the maternity benefits that were worked into the 1911 National Insurance Act. 

Anna Davin, in her introduction, gives some background on the Guild and its relationship to the larger co-operation movement in the United Kingdom:

““Under the Co-operative system, no individuals can make fortunes, Co-operators evidently believing, like the old writer, that ‘money is like muck, no good unless it is spread.’ No ‘profits’ are made; the surplus, inseparable from trading, is shared among the purchasers, according to the amount each spends. Capital becomes the tool of labour, and not its master.

"Men and women, as members of their local Co-operative Societies, own the shops where they buy, supply their own capital (on which a fixed interest is paid), and manage their businesses through elected committees and members’ meetings, where the rule of one man one vote prevails. Federated together, over 1,000 Societies with some 6,000,000 members constitute the England and Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Societies. These, combined, form one of the largest trading and manufacturing concerns in Great Britain” (xii).

“This peaceful revolution from autocratic Capitalism to democratic Co-operation is based on the women’s Marketing BAsket. Isolated in their own individual homes, it is through their common everyday interests as buyers that married working-women have come together, and found their place in the labour world and national life. The Women’s Co-operative Guild [founded by Mrs Acland and Mrs Lawrenson in 1883], with nearly 1,400 branches and 67,000 members, has given the unity and force which enable the women to become a power in the Movement and to share in its administration” (xiii).

Virginia Woolf, who supported the Guild throughout her life, provided an introductory letter to the volume in which she recalls attending a Congress in Newcastle in 1913. She was impressed with what she saw:

“It soon became obvious that the mind which lay spread over so wide a stretch of England was a vigorous mind working with great activity. It was thinking in June 1913 of the reform of the Divorce Laws; of the taxation of land values; of the Minimum Wage. It was concerned with the care of maternity; with the Trades Board Act; with the education of children under fourteen; it was unanimously of opinion that Adult Suffrage should become a Government measure– it was thinking in short about every sort of public question, and it was thinking constructively and pugnaciously” (xix-xx).

(Her other comments are somewhat more controversial and I won't get into them here, unless someone wants me to.)

The women whose testimonies are collected here– some of whom were born as early as the 1850s– give accounts of the kinds of lives they led before and after their association with the Guild, and their narratives are mesmerizing. It's not very often that you get to read first-hand what life was like for working women in the 19th and early 20th century– our knowledge of the period, you realize as you read, comes from novelists and historians, not from the women themselves.

A felt-hat worker in North Wales with a lively interest in George Egerton and H.G. Wells tells the following story of the attempt to unionize at her factory:

"It was whilst at Lees' that I joined the Felt Hatters' Trade Union. They had tried to organise the trimmers very often; all the men were in the Union but only about six of the trimmers. Well, I joined, also a friend of mine. Then we began to try to get the other girls in. It was hard work, the answer would be 'I will when the others do.' So one day we went round with a list (there had been a lot of trouble over the work) and said, 'Just put your name down, those who will join if the others will consent,' and behold, we got the majority. We called a meeting, and in the meantime I had seen the men and told them they ought not to consider working with non-unionists, so they sent up a note saying they would not consent to work any longer with non-unionists, and after some persuasion, every trimmer joined the Union. Of course, the men at other shops tried to get their trimmers in, but they were more obstinate than ours so the masters locked us out for six weeks. It was a time; my sister was out, there was father, auntie, my sister and baby, and the income was only 11/- per week; but we got through. Then when we got back to work there was some further trouble and we had a stay-in strike. After it was settled I went down for my work, and the fore-mistress said, 'I am sorry, Nellie, but I cannot serve you.' I went back and told the girls, and everyone put down their work and two of those who had been worst against the Union went down to see the head of the firm. They all sat there until I was sent for and told it was a mistake. I always feel proud of the way they all stood by me" (90-1).

…And now back to taking notes from Nicola Beauman's A Very Great Profession.

Summer of Genji

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Genji Open Letters Monthly and The Quarterly Conversation have teamed up for a mammoth of a summer read-along: please join us for the Summer of Genji!

Generally credited with being the world's first novel (in terms of the coherence of plot, prose narrative– albeit punctured by thousands of mini-poems– and interest in psychological veracity), the Tale of Genji is an 11th century tale of love, intrigue, and infidelity at the 10th century royal court in Kyoto. The unabridged edition (which we're reading, yay) checks in at just over a thousand pages long.

It's also written by a woman. On which, more later.

I taught the abridged version to my freshmen at NYU this year and they (and I) loved it.  So I'm looking forward to getting the full story this summer.  Because, you know, I don't have a dissertation to write or anything. I can easily squeeze a thousand more pages into my reading schedule. I'll be blogging about my readings here, in case you're interested.

Here, for your personal edification, are a couple of excerpts from essays who led their own Summer of Genji back in 1925: the original English translator, Arthur Waley, and my dear friend Virginia Woolf. Both were writing in the pages of British Vogue.  Both had glowing things to say about the novel:

Waley says:

In a previous article I said that The Tale of Genji belongs to the sort of fiction which is less concerned with what happens than with the effect of the events on the minds of persons.  The moment at which art most often reaches perfection is when some new means of self-expression is being for the first time explored.  In this, literature differs from science, which generally takes a long time in making use of the new powers which invention places at its disposal.  It is true that the Prinesse de Clèves, in which the ‘psychological’ method is used for the first time in Europe, just as it was used for the first time in Asia by Murasaki– the Princesse de Clèves opened up the way for Balzac, Stendhal, Proust.  But in the whole realm of French fiction there is nothing more perfect as art than the Princesse.  And Murasaki, like Madame de Lafayette (and, for the matter of that, like Shakespeare), was both inventor and perfector.  But, unlike the French writer, she found no successors.

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We feel that the authoress herself stands always on some such eminence, never lost in the intricacies of the plot as it proceeds from episode to episode, but steadily viewing the ultimate course of the story as though from some detached, commanding crest.

One very peculiar device by which she succeeds in giving a large movement to the narrative is by leaving gaps in the story, but referring to the omitted incidents as though they were already familiar to the reader.  Later on these gaps are gradually filled.  Proust uses the same device.  In mentioning for the first time some previous dealing of Marcel’s with the Princesse de Parme he will speak as though we knew all about the business.  When at last (quite out of its course in the narrative) the matter is fully discussed, our mind at once travels back to the earlier hints and allusions, so that the story no longer remains a succession of brief divided incidents, but begins to unfold to us as a vast corridor of eventful years and days.

“Murasaki, Japanese Novelist: Some Account of the Authoress of a Unique Oriental Novel of the Eleventh Century.” British Vogue, Early October 1924.

And Woolf says:

The Lady Murasaki lived, indeed, in one of those seasons which are most propitious for the artist, and, in particular, for an artists of her own sex.  The accent of life did not fall upon war; the interests of men did not centre upon politics.  Relieved from the violent pressure of these two forces, life expressed itself chiefly in the intricacies of behavior, in what men said and what women did not quite say, in poems that break the surface of silence with silver fins, in dance and painting, and in that love of the wildness of nature which only comes when people feel themselves perfectly secure.  In such an age as this Lady Murasaki, with her hatred of bombast, her humour, her common sense, her passion for the contrasts and curiosities of human nature, for old houses mouldering away among the weeds and the winds, and wild landscapes, and the sound of water falling, and mallets beating, and wild geese screaming, and the res noses of princesses, for beauty indeed, and that incongruity which makes beauty still more beautiful, could bring all her powers into play spontaneously.  It was one of those moments (how they were reached in Japan and how destroyed we must wait for Mr. Waley to explain) when it was natural for a writer to write of ordinary things beautifully, and to say openly to her public, ‘It is the common that is wonderful, and if you let yourself be put off by extravagance and rant and what is surprising and momentarily impressive you will be cheated of the most profound of pleasures.’ For there are two kinds of artists, said Murasaki: one who makes trifles to fit the fancy of the passing day, the other who ‘strives to give real beauty to the things which men actually use, and to give to them the shapes which tradition has ordained.’ How easy it is, she said, to impress and surprise; ‘to paint a raging sea monster riding a storm’– any toy maker can do that, and be praised to the skies. ‘But ordinary hills and rivers, just as they are, houses such as you may see anywhere, with all their real beauty and harmony of form–quietly to draw such scenes as this, or to show what lies behind some intimate hedge that is folded away far from the world, and thick trees upon some unheroic hill, and all this with befitting care for composition, proportion, and the like–such works demand the highest master’s utmost skill and must needs draw the common craftsman into a thousand blunders.’

Review, "The Tale of Genji." British Vogue, Late July 1925.

the Woolves take Manhattan

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I'm mildly amused at all the coverage the 2009 Woolf conference is getting.  It must be because it's taking place in New York, but I think as well the rise of Twitter and the proliferation of culture blogs has created a real kind of buzz for a conference which has not traditionally attracted much media attention. 

I am chagrined that it is taking place in my hometown and I can't make it (I can't make it to New York until late June, when I'm going for a cousin's wedding); I was going to be on a panel with some colleagues from the Graduate Center but at the last minute decided not to submit my paper.

Nevertheless Anne has done a brilliant job organizing and I wish everyone a happy and productive conference!

Meanwhile I leave you with my notes from the 2006 Woolf conference in Birmingham (i.e. the last time I thought a Woolf conference would be of any interest to my readers!)

Virginia Woolf’s work ethic

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"Even in a year broken by illness (such as 1925, she would finish revising and publish one novel and a collection of essays, write eight or so short stories, start work on another novel, publish thirty-seven review articles, keep a full diary, read a great number of books, and write a great number of letters."

–Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf. (p. 4)

Well! Back to work then.

Le plaisir du texte

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Virginia Woolf on "The Pleasure of Reading":

‘Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, valuable books in leather, cheap
books in paper – one stops sometimes before them and asks in a
transient amazement what is the pleasure I get, or the good I create,
from passing my eyes up and down these innumerable lines of print?
Reading is a very complex art – the hastiest examination of our
sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as
readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first
duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one
were writing it . . . – we get pleasure from reading. It is a complex
pleasure and a difficult pleasure; it varies from age to age and from
book to book. But that pleasure is enough. Indeed that pleasure is so
great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far
different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed
the world and continues to change it. When the day of judgment comes
therefore and all secrets are laid bare, we shall not be surprised to
learn that the reason why we have grown from apes to men, and left our
caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked
and given to the poor and helped the sick – the reason why we have made
shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of
the jungle is simply this – we have loved reading.’

via Jeanette Winterson

around the internet on a tuesday

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Quick and dirty today.

Michael Dirda has a nice long review of Mrs. Woolf and the Servants in the Washington Post.

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Roger Kimball on beauty and beatitude in art. (Via AL Daily)

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ReadySteadyBook has a really good interview with Lee Rourke.

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Charlotte Mandell, translator of Proust, Blanchot, and BHL, is interviewed here. (Via Three Percent)

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Don't miss Stephen Michelmore's breakdown of (lit)blogs.

tuesday links

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Previously unpublished letters between Vita Sackville-West and a young writer called Margaret Howard, written in 1941, which discuss Virginia Woolf just after her death, are being auctioned off at Southeby’s, reports The Guardian.

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A full set of chapters of the Tale of Genji dating to the mid-fourteenth century have been discovered in a private residence in Tokyo. [Via TEV]

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And from the très ancien to the avant-garde: in the Guardian’s Books Blog, Lee Rouke wonders, what ever happened to British avant garde fiction? “It
seems to have found a home in London’s conceptual art world,” he writes.

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A new project at Library Thing lets you look at the libraries of famous writers: I See Dead People’s Books. Right now you can peek into the libraries of Marie Antoinette, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Plath, among others, and there are many other in progress. Via Three Percent. Also via 3%: Zoomii Books, a virtual bookshop. It’s a neat idea, but the titles are a little hard to read, at least on my computer screen.

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The incomparable Nicolas Weill takes another look at Jean-Paul Sartre’s Reflexions sur la question juive (1946) for Le Monde. [FR] If you’re interested by what you read there, you might do well to look at Weill’s book La République et les antisémites. 

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The New Yorker only just now gets around to realizing there was a controversy around the “Paris sous l’Occupation” exhibit at the Hotel de Ville this spring. (I told you about it in April.) Via Ed.