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Misperceiving Virginia Woolf Misperceiving Virginia Woolf James Harker University of California, Berkeley !e longstanding critical refrain that Virginia Woolf ’s fiction represents a turn “inward” to the vagaries of the inner life has more recently been countered with an “outward” approach emphasizing Woolf ’s interest in the material world, its everyday objects and their social and political significance. Yet one of the most curious and pervasive features of Woolf ’s oeuvre is that characters are so frequently wrong in their perceptions. !is essay consolidates the inward and outward approaches by tracing the trope of misperception in Woolf ’s fiction as well as in her conceptions of the work of author and reader. For Woolf, the modern literary experience derives from the nature of the faculties of percep- tion, the tenuous points of connection — and disjunction — between the inner and the outer worlds. Keywords: Virginia Woolf / perception / error / change blindness / birds rederic Jameson has argued: “"e most influential formal impulses of canoni- cal modernism have been strategies of inwardness” (2). "e literary impres- Fsionism of Conrad and Ford, the stream of consciousness of Richardson and Joyce and the depiction of sensation in Flaubert and of memory in Proust are among these “strategies.” But Virginia Woolf, the argument often goes, is the most inward of all. For Eric Auerbach, Woolf does not simply privilege the inner life over external reality, that external reality is arbitrary.¹ In Woolf’s fic- tion, moments of looking or noticing are not important for information about the real world but rather for the thoughts that they inspire, the world being a mere “framing occurrence.” Paul Ricoeur considers Woolf’s formal innovations to be the telos of the progression of “the novel of action, of character, of thought” (13). Neatly summing up, Michael North maintains that Woolf is “usually considered the most inward of all British writers” (81). A countervailing critical trajectory — one defending her from charges of solipsism, aestheticism and even snobbery — has been to emphasize Woolf’s focus on the external world. Alex Zwerdling emphasizes “historical forces and societal institutions” (3) as crucial sources for Woolf. Zwerdling concedes the earlier portion of Woolf’s career to inwardness, culminating in !e Waves, but argues that Woolf’s work in the 1930s represents a shift (12). More recently, however, 2 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Number 2 the date of Woolf’s “outward” tack has been subject to much backward revision. Mark Gaipa moves the crucial moment to the middle of Woolf’s writing To the Lighthouse in 1927,² while Liesl M. Olsen observes, looking back to 1925, that “Mrs. Dalloway, in particular, is a novel obsessed with the ordinary as a source of knowledge about another person” (28). Ann Banfield moves the date back all the way to December 1910, the date Woolf famously refers to in “Character in Fiction” when “human character changed” (9).³ Further studies exploring Woolf’s stylistic difficulty and aestheticism turn the solipsistic “inward” Woolf into almost the opposite — democratic, social and political.⁴ Both critical trajectories capture something of what is distinctive about Woolf’s narrative fiction: characters are constantly observing and thinking as they navigate the world, whether that means sitting alone in a room contemplat- ing an ordinary object, taking a walk, going to a party or looking out the window. "e inner life is rich with sensation and thought, inspired by the lowest and most common of material artifacts. Yet one of the most curious and pervasive features of Woolf’s oeuvre is that characters are so frequently wrong in their perceptions. "e line of argument from Auerbach, dismissing the external world as a mere frame to get at the inner life, does not explain why the frame is so ill-fitting. And for those who emphasize Woolf’s commitment to everyday things, the question remains just as important. Why, in a world of everyday things of social and political significance, do we have so much trouble recognizing them for what they are? Woolf’s fiction and essays show a rhetorical reliance on misperception — it is a central theme of her fiction, and it is also central to her conceptions of the work of author and reader. Woolf’s characters often have poor eyesight, misidentify sounds and confuse categories. Her more extreme experiments in perspective are marked by misperception as well — “Kew Gardens” reflects the fallible perspective of a snail and Flush of a dog. “Solid Objects” begins too far away to report anything in detail but then zooms in on the primary characters and actions. Readers, simi- larly, are likely to become lost due to some of Woolf’s notoriously difficult stylistic experiments. Both textually and metatextually, Woolf’s experiments are attuned to the limitations of the senses and cognitive faculties. In what follows, I trace the trope of misperception through the authorial, textual and readerly components of Woolf’s conception of the literary experience. Beginning with her essays on modern fiction, I show how perceptual failure is a resource for the modern author. Woolf’s first published short story “"e Mark on the Wall” opens my reading of the pervasive theme of misperception in Woolf’s fiction. I follow the recurrent theme of misperceiving birds through Woolf’s novels and demonstrate how these episodes remain tied to the mechanics of perception and related psychological functions. Turning to the readerly component, I argue that errors of identifying and naming have a metatextual reverberation, for the designs of Jacob’s Room and !e Waves cause similar effects for readers. For Woolf, the modern literary experi- ence derives from the nature of the faculties of perception, the tenuous points of connection between the inner and the outer worlds. Misperceiving Virginia Woolf 3 “A VAGUE GENERAL CONFUSION”: WOOLF’S THEORY OF FICTION Part of the reason that the contrast between “inward” Woolf and “external” Woolf is so stark is that her own non-fictional writing seems to support either position, depending on which parts of what Jesse Matz calls Woolf’s “vague theory of fiction”(176) are emphasized. In her two very famous essays, “Modern Fiction” (1925) and “Character in Fiction” (1924), Woolf outlines a vision of what modern fiction ought to do differently from what came before. "e essays pit a generation of novelists including Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett, whom she calls the Edwardians in one essay and materialists in the other, against a succeeding generation, the Georgians or the moderns, including Forster, Joyce, Eliot and presumably Woolf herself. In “Modern Fiction,” she claims that those of the earlier generation “write of unimportant things . they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear true and enduring” (159). In “Character in Fiction,” Woolf eviscerates the opening of Arnold Bennett’s novel Hilda Lessways by showing how it describes not Hilda but her bedroom window, her street, neighborhood, then the nearby villas and then Hilda’s house. Of all of this description, Woolf writes: “he is trying to hypnotize us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a character living there” (430). "e reading public is primed to understand, for example, an old woman only through a certain set of predictable descriptors. “Old women have houses. "ey have fathers. "ey have incomes. "ey have servants. "ey have hot- water bottles. "at is how they are old women” (433). “Old women,” Woolf archly summarizes, “of course ought to be made of freehold villas and copyhold estates, not of imagination” (433). Woolf is frustrated by the convention of representa- tion — that a certain superfluous detail, a water bottle or the layout of a house — is supposed to conjure a particular kind of person. "e Georgians, the harbingers of modern fiction for Woolf, reject the exces- sive and programmatic description that has so recently been the established way to represent a realistic character. “Mrs. Brown,” Woolf’s iconic character, “must be rescued, expressed, and set in her high relations to the world” (433). "e Geor- gians’ attempt to save Mrs. Brown means breaking apart the house she is trapped in, one linked no doubt to Hilda Lessways’s house. “And so the smashing and the crashing began,” writes Woolf, “. the sound of breaking and falling, crashing, and destruction” (433–34). Only fragments remain after a climactic destruction and renewal — at least in “Character in Fiction.” In “Modern Fiction,” Woolf approaches the divide of moderns and their predecessors in very different terms in an often-cited passage: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. "e mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there, so 4 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Number 2 that, if a writer were a free man not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. (160) In one passage, Woolf represents modern fiction as the utter destruction of what comes before. In the other, it is akin to a slightly askew button on a suit or a different “accent.” Like the two versions of the modern turn in Woolf’s essays, one revolutionary and one rather subtle, critics of Woolf have emphasized her revolutionary turn inward or her subtly adjusted literary realism (which implies a continued focus on the external world).
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