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A Xerox Education Company f 77-31,865 f FLYNN, Elizabeth Ann, 1944- | FEMINIST CRITICAL THEORY: THREE MODELS. I The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1977 | Literature, English

f | University Microfilms International,Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106

© Copyright by Elizabeth Ann Flynn 1977 FEMINIST CRITICAL THEORY: THREE MODELS

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Elizabeth Ann Flynn, B.A. , M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1977

Approved By Reading Committee:

James R. Kincaid Mildred B. Munday Marlene Longenecker /f' Adviser department of English PREFACE

This dissertation has almost shaped itself. It began as a feminist examination of Middlemarch, then

became feminist interpretations of Middlemarch, To the

Lighthouse, and The Bell Jar, and finally emerged as

feminist analyses of Mrs. Dalloway from three theoretical

perspectives— Marxist, archetypal, and neo-Aristotelian.

These metamorphoses can be explained quite simply: my

original intention was to formulate a theoretical model

to be used in the practice of feminist criticism and

then to apply the model, but this proved an impossible

task. I could not settle on a single theoretical per­

spective and so I decided upon three instead— chosen some­

what arbitrarily. The Woolf novel was chosen somewhat

arbitrarily as well. My present study is designed to

test the usefulness to the feminist critic of the three

critical models.

I wish to express my appreciation to my adviser,

Jim Kincaid, who encouraged me to become involved in a

project of this sort and who has allowed me to grope

toward some understanding of literary theory in general •

and Northrop Frye in particular. For him, I feel sure,

the study of literature is the pursuit of freedom. I

ii would also like to thank the other members of my

reading committee, Mildred B. Munday and Marlene

Longenecker. Both worked closely with me from conception

to completion and both offered perceptive comments and

enthusiastic encouragement. I could not have asked for

a more cooperative committee. I am also grateful to my parents— for everything. But certainly I owe my

greatest debt to my husband, John, who has always given

intellectual development highest priority.

iii VITA

December 17, 1944 Born - Jersey City, New Jersey

1966...... B.A. cum laude, Pace University New York, New York

1966-1967 .... Teacher, Newburgh Free Academy, Newburgh, New York

1967-1969 .... Teaching Assistant, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1969...... Research Assistant, College of Humanities, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1969-1971 .... Lecturer, The Ohio State Univer­ sity, Columbus, Ohio

1971-1972 .... Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1972-1974 .... Substitute Teacher, The American International School, Duesseldorf, West Germany

1974 ...... Teaching Assistant, Research Assistant, The University of Duesseldorf, Duesseldorf, West Germany

1974-1977 .... Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

FIELDS OF STUDY

Twentieth-Century British and American Literature Women1s Studies Nineteenth-Century American Literature Nineteenth-Century British Literature The Novel

iv TABLE OP CONTENTS

Page PREFACE ...... ii

VITA...... iv

LIST OP TAB L E S...... vi

LIST OP F I G U R E S ...... vii

CHAPTER

I. FEMINIST CRITICAL THEORY: SOME PRELIMINARY 1 OBSERVATIONS

II. MODEL ONE: MARXIST CRITICISM

THE M O D E L ...... 31 MRS. DALLOWAY...... 48

III. MODEL TWO: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM

THE M O D E L ...... 77 MRS. DALLOWAY...... 94

IV, MODEL THREE: NEO-ARISTOTELIAN CRITICISM

THE M O D E L ...... 120 MRS. DALLOWAY...... 133

V. CONCLUSIONS...... 159

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 170

a p p e n d i c e s

A. Fleishman’s Structural Scheme...... 177

B. Schaefer's Structural Scheme ...... , . 178

C. Daiches' Structural Scheme ...... 179

v LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Pratt's Classification of Feminist. 80 Criticism

Table 2. Fleishman's Structural Scheme ...... 177

vi LIST OF FIGURES

Figure. 1.. Bazin's Structural Scheme...... 153

Figure 2. Schaefer's Structural Scheme ...... 178

Figure 3. Daiches' Structural Scheme ...... 179

vii CHAPTER ONE

FEMINIST CRITICAL THEORY: SOME PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS

In her review of feminist literary criticism for

Signs, Elaine Showalter remarks, "On the whole, feminist literary criticism and scholarship have been stubbornly empirical; they have generated relatively little theory and abstraction."^ Actually, a fair amount of feminist critical theory has appeared; it has remained somewhat invisible, however, since it has been published in diverse places and since no one has yet provided an overview of it. Feminists have been practicing feminist criticism for the past seven years. It is certainly time to examine feminist critical theory in an attempt to assess its use­ fulness to the feminist critic.

Important theoretical statements have appeared in anthologies devoted to feminist criticism and in scholarly journals such as Critical Inquiry and College English.

An anthology of feminist criticism edited by Susan Koppelman

Cornillon, Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspec- tives, includes six articles of a theoretical nature.

Josephine Donovan's anthology, Feminist Literary Criticism:

Explorations in Theory, contains such significant essays 2 as Cheri Register's "American Feminist Literary Criticism:

A Bibliographical Introduction/" essentially an overview of feminist practical criticism up to the early months of 1973, and Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson's provocative

"Theories of Feminist Criticism: A Dialogue." Annette

Kolodny's "Some Notes on Defining a 'Feminist Literary

Criticism"' appeared in Critical Inquiry in the autumn of

1975.4 Early in 1977 Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards published their The Authority of Experience: Essays in

Feminist Criticism, an anthology which contains three essays which could be considered theoretical.5 Also, numerous unpublished papers exist, most of which were presented at g regional or national MLA conventions.

The problem is not so much that feminist critics have ignored theoretical issues; essays of a theoretical nature are increasing. Rather, there is a lack of agreement among feminist theorists and there has been an unfortunate hesitancy to relate feminist criticism to other forms of literary criticism. Of the essays mentioned above, none concentrates on discussing the relationship between a fem­ inist perspective and another critical perspective. Fraya

Katz-Stoker's "The Other Criticism: Feminism vs. Formalism" makes such an attempt, but it is too brief and it employs an unnecessarily limited conception of formalism. What is needed is a fuller exploration of the issues raised hy Annis

Pratt and Lillian S. Robinson in their debate over the rel­ ative merits of a formalist or an historicist feminism 3 criticism. The earliest collection of feminist criticism, the May 1971 issue of College English, which was devoted exclusively to the subject, contained Pratt's "The New

Feminist Criticism," and Robinson's reply, "Dwelling in

Decencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective."®

Pratt defends an archetypal approach, i.e., a formalist approach, and Robinson defends a Marxist approach, i.e., an historicist approach. This controversy should form the center of feminist critical theory and must be fully ex­ plored. First, though, it is necessary to discuss feminist critical theory that deals with other issues such as the kinds of feminist criticism and the characteristics of feminist or patriarchal literature.

Four theoretical works are particularly useful to ex­ amine in this discussion of "preliminary" issues. Cheri

Register's "American Feminist Literary Criticism: A Biblio­ graphical Introduction," and Annette Kolodny's "Some Notes on Defining a 'Feminist Literary Criticism,'" attempt to classify feminist criticism. Kolodny's classification is brief— her main concern is contemporary women's literature.

It is the classification which is of particular interest, however. It raises questions that her discussion of the­ matic concerns, image patterns, and stylistic devices used by women writers does not. Two works which focus upon the characteristics of feminist literature or patriarchal literature are Agate Nesaule Krouse's "Toward a Definition of Literary Feminism" and Pil Dahlerup's Literary Sex Roles. 4 The titles of these works indicate the tentative nature of the discussions. These are explorations rather than definitive pronouncements— a testing of hypotheses. Agate

Nesaule Krouse and Annette Kolodny admit as much, and the

Danish feminist, Pil Dahlerup, notes that her observa­ tions are "conjectures," and calls them "provisional"; she

invites the reader to make corrections and additions.It

is often because they invite corrections and additions that

these explorations are useful. One of Cheri Register's

classifications is called "prescriptive criticism," for

instance, a category which apparently includes analysis of

literature as well as prescriptions about how literature

should be written. But surely, prescriptive criticism

should be discouraged. Kolodny's classification is based

on the assumption that criticism written by women and fem­

inist criticism are synonymous. The ultimate extension of

this thinking is Kolodny's unfortunate separatist position.

She discourages men from engaging in feminist criticism or

teaching women's studies courses. Krouse and Dahlerup's

generalizations do not always hold up when tested against

actual feminist or sexist works.

Register, in "American Feminist Literary Criticism,"

recognizes three distinct subdivisions of feminist crit­

icism: 1) the analysis of the "image of women," nearly

always as it appears in works by male authors; 2) the

examination of existing criticism of female authors, and

3) "prescriptive criticism," which includes a) the analysis of female writers who employ female stereotypes in their work and b) the "prescribing" of what female writers should do in their future works.^ Register's classification places too much emphasis upon a prescriptive mode. This form of criticism emphasizes "what female writers can do in their future works, urging them to forget literary con­ vention when they create their female characters and to

TO rely on their own subjective experience." Prescriptive criticism would outline guidelines for those artists in­ terested in "earning feminist approval." In order to earn this approval, literature must perform one or more of the

following functions: 1) serve as a forum for women; 2) help

to achieve cultural androgyny; 3) provide role-models; 4) 13 promote sisterhood; and 5) augment consciousness-raising.

Register contends that such criticism may become the crux of feminist criticism in the future. This, however, has not been the case, and for good reason. Artists would not—

indeed, could not— heed Register's advice. It is impossible,

for instance, to ignore literary convention; all litera­

ture is conventional. The structuralists have emphasized

this idea. Also it is impossible — or nearly so— to judge

the effect literature has upon a particular audience. How

will we know if a work has provided role-models or achieved

cultural androgyny? Will a work "earn feminist approval"

if it is misunderstood or ignored completely? Feminists

should prescribe that sexism be avoided , but more specific

prescriptions are meaningless. They would probably have 6 no effect at all.

Edmund Wilson, in his essay, "Marxism and Liter­ ature," deals with the issue of prescriptiveness as it relates to Marxist criticism. Certainly his observa­ tions apply as well to feminist criticism. He says, "it is usually true in works of the highest order that the purport is not a simple message, but a complex vision of things, which itself is not explicit but implicit; and the reader who does not grasp them artistically, but is merely looking for simple social morals, is certain to be hope­ lessly confused. Wilson also notes that the rules ob­ served in a given school of art become apparent after the actual works have been produced.^-® It is impossible, there­ fore, to prescribe rules in advance. According to Wilson, the attempt, if it has any effect at all, will be to legis- 1 7 late good works out of existence. Wilson distinguishes between "short-range" literature and "long-range" liter­ ature. The former preaches and pamphleteers with the view to an immediate effect; the latter attempts to sum up wide areas and long periods of human experience, or to extract 18 from them general laws. Surely, feminist critics should encourage "long-range" literature rather than "short-range" literature, and this necessitates giving the artist the freedom to create as s/he sees fit.

Another problem with Register's prescriptive criticism is that it apparently includes description as well. It entails both the prescribing of what female writers should 7 do in their future works and the analysis of female writers who employ female stereotypes in their work. But it is unclear how the latter is "prescriptive." It would seem that it is more obviously descriptive and is an activity essentially like that described in category one— the analysis of the "image of women" as it appears

in works by male authors. The classification would no doubt be more useful if category one included an analysis of images of women in works by men and women, if category

two remained the same, i.e., exposed "phallic criticism"—

criticism which is inherently sexist, and if category

three included only the prescribing of what female writers

should do in their future works. Such categories would

at least be distinct and logical.

Annette Kolodny's essay, "Some Notes on Defining a

'Feminist Literary Criticism/" begins with a brief class­

ification of feminist criticism. According to Kolodny, t feminist criticism includes: 1) any criticism written by a

woman, no matter what the subject, 2) any criticism

written by women about a man's book which treats that

book from a "political" or "feminist" perspective, and

31 any criticism written by a woman about a woman's

book or about female authors in general.1^ But the

classification is not logical because the categories are not

mutually exclusive. Category one must necessarily include

categories two and three, and so a single work might fall

into two classes. Also, Kolodny assumes that any criticism written by a woman is necessarily feminist. This is the equivalent of arguing that all women are feminists; neither position is tenable. Feminists are individuals who are conscious of the inferior position of women in society and who support the alteration of traditional sex roles as a way of alleviating the oppression of women. Sexists, in

contrast, ignore the reality of the oppression of women and defend traditional sex roles. Women as well as men can be

sexists. And a good number of women are no doubt simply

unconscious, i.e., they have no opinion on the matter. Also, men as well as women can be feminists — feminism is a func­

tion of consciousness, not biology. Annette Barnes, in her

essay, "Female Criticism: A Prologue," defines feminism as

follows:

...all feminists, I argue, would agree that women are not automatically or necessarily inferior to men, that role models for female and males in the current Western societies are inadequate, that equal rights for women are necessary, that it is unclear what by nature either men or women are, that it is a matter for empirical investigation to ascertain what differences follow from the obvious psychological ones, that in these em­ pirical investigations the hypotheses one employs are themselves open to question, revision, or replacement.20

Feminists question assumptions about sex roles, assumptions

that have pervaded western thought for centuries. It

is unlikely, therefore, that a woman who had not gained a

perspective on western culture would be able to achieve

a feminist awareness. It is doubtful that women, simply

by virtue of their gender, recognize their own oppression.

It is instructive to look closely at an essay written by Elizabeth Hardwick in 1953 in order to illustrate this distinction between the female critic and the feminist critic. Hardwick would no doubt consider herself to be a feminist in good standing today. Her early review of

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, however, demonstrates that she was not aware of feminist issues in 19 53— indeed, 21 who was? Though ostensibly positive, the revxew reveals

Hardwick's resistance to the argument of The Second Sex, which she sees as "utopian," "radical." She presents three well-worn defenses of the status quo in countering de

Beauvoir's arguments: 1) woman's physical inferiority ex­ plains her subordination to men; 2) women are not as sexually aggressive as men and must therefore contain the sexuality of the male; 3) men are more "vigorous" than women when it comes to creating art. Feminists certainly do not now accept these arguments. Some would argue in­ stead that positions of authority in adult society are not determined by physical strength. Rather, women are sub­ ordinate to men not because of their physical inferiority but because they have not been allowed to compete with men

for positions of authority. Also, it is no longer accepted that men are more sexually aggressive than women. Masters

and Johnson have demonstrated that this is not so. It is no

longer possible, therefore, to defend the domination of the male within the institution of marriage on the assumption

that the male, in accepting monogamy, has made a greater

sacrifice than has the female, a sacrifice for which he must 10 be compensated. (Hardwick argues that the woman "pays" the man to restrain his appetite with "ironed shirts, free meals, the pleasant living room, a son."^2) Finally, while it is true that women have not achieved in the arts to the extent that men have, so have the opportunities been limited. Today Hardwick no doubt recognizes the significance of The Second Sex. But it is clear that in

1953 she was not a feminist; her early essay illustrates that feminism is learned and that "female" is not synon­ ymous with "feminist." It is only when an individual is able to achieve intellectual detachment from traditional values that feminism is possible. It is safe to say that today most women have not achieved this detachment— most accept traditional values. The ERA. would have been ratified long ago if this were not the case.

If we cannot equate "female" with "feminist," we cannot equate tiald'with'feexist." Kolodny's classification limits the activity of feminist criticism to women. She thinks men should be discouraged from contributing to the canon, at first, at least. She says:

...feminist criticism will, for a time, remain a quite separate and necessarily compensatory kind of activity, attempting to make up for all that has previously been omitted, lost, or ignored, and practiced for the most part by women. Not merely because women, more than men, need to celebrate their newly discovered right to expression and validation in the arts, but more so because the kind of rigorous stylistic and linguistic analysis called for here will depend on an aware­ ness of and sensitivity to the many layers of female experience and its consequent verbal expres­ sion. The male critic, only recently exposed 11 Cif at all] to women's language (written or other­ wise) , could not possibly begin to analyze it adequately; the best of our women critics and scholars will hardly be adequate to the enormous task— but at least they will begin from a neces­ sarily more informed b a s e . 23

Kolodny recognizes that feminist criticism cannot remain

separate forever; it must ultimately enlarge the boundaries of all literary criticism so that we finally achieve a

fully "humane" criticism. But she thinks that it should

remain separate for a time.

William W. Morgan, in his response to Kolodny's essay,

proclaims himself a feminist and insists that he should be

allowed to practice feminist criticism and teach women's

studies courses. He asserts, "It seems to me that once the

revolutionary implications of feminist literary study are

understood, separatism can be seen to be one of the most

damaging proposals one could make."24 The first section of

Kolodny's reply to Morgan is entitled, "Confronting the

Spectre of Separatism." The tone of the reply is harsh.

Kolodny re-emphasizes a point she made in the original

essay, that the sensitivity needed to read women's texts

properly will come first from female readers. This as­

sertion is based on the assumption that "there are sex

related differences in the ways in which men and women 95 internalize and manipulate language." The support for

this assumption is Robin Lakoff's Language and Woman's

•place,- a book which Kolodny admits is "too insubstantial

to serve as anything more than a highly suggestive intro­

duction. "2& Kolodny bolsters her argument by discussing 12 women's writing and emphasizing its special difficulty. She finds that Kate Millett's Flying poses particular problems because current critical theory cannot accommodate itself to such a text. She concludes that writing by women de­ monstrates "language habits" which haven't previously ap­

peared in literary works known to the male critic, that texts exist which fit no traditional genre description, and

that "local habits" which come out of the sewing room or

the menstruation hut are foreign to the experience of the male.27

There are a number of problems with Kolodny's argument.

First of all, it is certainly misleading to use Lakoff as

an authoritative source. Lakoff is concerned exclusively

with, speech, in Language and Woman1 s Place. She discusses

manifestations of what she calls "women's language"— but

these are modes of speaking not modes of writing. Women,

according to Lakoff, employ a separate dialect; they use a

specialized vocabulary such as recondite color words (e.g.,

"magenta" or "mauve"); they employ inappropriate question

intonation, using tag questions Cit's cold in here, isn't

it?).; they hedge or disclaim; they use special intensifiers

fit's such a hot day"); they use polite forms of speech.

But Lakoff observes;

If you look at the list of distinguishing criteria for women's language that I gave earlier, you will note that most of the characteristics are apt to be found only in spoken, or at least highly informal, style. This is because they are personal markers; they signal to the addressee how the speaker feels about what she (he, of course, in the analogous cases of men's language) is saying, and how the 13 speaker hopes or expects that the hearer will react. Such commentary is a part of informal style— person-to-person friendly speech, and some­ times, though increasingly rarely these days, letters— rather than formal style— lectures and most forms of writing.

If Kolodny is correct that women are best able to under­ stand Kate Millett's Flying, it is only because the work is highly informal and comes close to the style of speech.

But not all feminist works are informal, and not all are written in "women's language." Elaine Showalter, in her

A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From

Brontfe* to Lessing, reminds us that women writers in the nineteenth-century attempted to hide their female identity by taking on the r ame of a male. Showalter also notes that women writers in the Victorian era did not usually write about personal experiences such as childbirth. They were taught to keep these experiences to themselves and to record them in private d i a r i e s . it would seem, then, that men

could at least attempt to interpret feminist works written

in the nineteenth-century since these works would not defy

traditional generic description and would not abound in

descriptions of experiences common only to women.

Furthermore, we have evidence that men are capable of

successfully engaging in the practice of feminist criticism.

Herbert Marder's Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia

Wooif has been used and acclaimed by feminists,3® and

Kolodny herself admits, in her review essay of feminist

criticism for Signs, that the most useful works about women

writers written in 1975 were by men.3^ Also, feminists 14 often use the works of Marx, Engels, and John Stuart

Mill in their courses. Should their works be ignored simply because they are men? If we bar men from partici­ pating in the feminist dialogue, we impose a kind of censor­ ship that is frightening in its implications. It is not at all useful to begin prescribing how artists should write or which critics should do feminist criticism. Pre­ scriptions are limiting, self-defeating, and intellectually dishonest.

Frederick C. Stern provides a useful analysis of a comparable issue in his, "Black Lit., White Crit?" Stern, himself a white critic, feels that whites should become in­ volved in the struggle against racism. He does admit that black culture is different from white culture, i.e., that black language and black experience are different from white language and white experience. And he recognizes that "There are always problems in dealing with materials

■50 from another culture than one's own." But he thinks it is possible to "learn to understand" black culture. This may necessitate acquiring knowledge about it, but this is by no means impossible. The very function of a work of art,

according to Stern, is to "provide the perceiver with in­

sights into 'the Other,' through the form in which 'the

Other' can render experience in symbolic, i.e., artistic

fashion.He states forcefully, "To insist that no meaningful statement can be made by white critics because

they have, not had firsthand experience of the black world 15 is a little like prior censorship— there is no way of telling what the utterance will be until it has been ut­ tered."34

Men can "learn to understand" feminism; indeed, women themselves must undergo consciousness-raising before they become feminists. The function of the feminist critic should be to examine literature and criticism written by both men and women in an attempt to identify liberating or oppressive attitudes. The feminist critic should be intent upon discovering progressive or reactionary attitudes toward the alteration of traditional sex roles. But s/he should be aware that works written by women might be sexist and that works written by men might be feminist.

Both Register and Kolodny assume too readily that there is a correlation between gender and consciousness. But feminists, especially, should be alert to the reality that one's biological make-up does not determine one's political ideology. X contend, therefore, that there are really only two classes of feminist criticism— that which measures feminist or non-feminist attitudes in literature and that which measures feminist or non-feminist attitudes in criticism.

This is not to say, however, that feminists should abandon the very useful occupation of re-discovering heretofore unknown women writers. Such an endeavor re­ duces the invisibility of women. This activity is scholar­ ship rather than criticism, however. The critic 16 is engaged primarily in interpreting particular works.

The scholar is engaged in accumulating material which might assist the critic. Some scholarly occupations might include: textual study, tracing the reputation and

influence of a writer or a work, examining the distri­ bution of works written by women in an attempt to as­

certain why so many works by female writers have been ig­

nored. It should not be assumed, however, that the

texts uncovered by feminist scholars will all be feminist

ones. Possibly a good number will reflect the ideology

of patriarchy. Elaine Showalter observes:

There is clearly a difference between books that happen to have been written by women, and a "female literature"...which purposefully and collectively concerns itself with the articulation of women's experience, and which guides itself "by its own impulses" to autonomous self- expression. 35

Books that happen to have been written by women may bear

little resemblance to a feminist work. It is the function

of the feminist critic to make this final judgment, to

determine if a work is feminist, sexist, or some com­

bination of the two.

This task of determining how critics should go about

identifying feminism, sexism, or a blend of each is a

difficult one. Feminists like Ruth Yeazell in her "Fic­

tional Heroines and Feminist Critics" emphasize this

difficulty and point out problems with already existing

feminist criticism. Yeazell warns that "Feminist literary

critics— like any critics with strong ideological loyalties 17 ...run the risk of sacrificing literature to polemic, of seeing red so quickly that they are blinded to the subtler shades and tones with which fiction itself colors its pictures of life."^ She sees Kate Millett's Sexual

Politics as an example of such distorted criticism.

Yeazell's caveat is in some sense a caveat against an implicitly prescriptive criticism, one blindly com­ mitted to an ideology. She is disturbed, for instance, by critics who fail to see Isabel Archer as a vital heroine facing a tragic (and perhaps realistic) destiny but who prefer to chide James for failing to liberate her. Fem­ inist critics, she finds, fail to make important dis­ tinctions between art and life and are too willing to impose their own value system upon the literary work.

The value of Agate Nesaule Krouse's "Toward a Def­ inition of Literary Feminism" is that it allows for "subtler shades and tones" of meaning; it is well aware of the dan­ gers Yeazell warns of. Krouse finds that the close exam­ ination of the texts themselves reveals a blend of feminist and sexist elements and sees The Golden Notebook as "im­ plicitly feminist in its attention to aesthetic, phil­ osophical, and political concerns of women but deeply sexist in the treatment of the sexuality of women and under­ lying definitions of 'real women' and 'real men.'"37 Fem­ inists must begin making such fine distinctions. Unfortu­ nately, the tendency has been to rigidly categorize works as either feminist or sexist. Sometimes these categorizations 18 have not only been too rigid— they have been entirely inaccurate. Feminists too readily assume, for instance, that all works by Doris Lessing are feminist; Krouse main­ tains, however, that a work like Retreat to Innocence is actually sexist.

The center of Krouse's essay, however, is an attempt at defining literary feminism, and too often her gener­ alizations about the characteristics of feminist and sexist works are inaccurate. She suggests that feminist critics concentrate on analyzing characterization, point of view, selection of detail, and emphasis. She then argues that a work with characteristics of literary feminism will have either a female protagonist or several female characters who are significant to the central action, whereas a sexist work restricts the point of view to male protagonists. She also notes that feminism in characterization may be dis­ tinguished by the avoidance of stereotypes and stock char­

acters of women, that complexity and specificity save a

character from becoming a stereotype. "Multiplicity," she

feels, is another way of saving a novel from becoming sexist.

Individual responses by numerous women characters may fit

no trite commonplace about women."3^

Krouse’s model might be useful in analyzing a work

like' Fr'ide and Prejudice, one which has a female protag­

onist and many female characters and which does not re­

strict the point of view to male characters. And her 19 contention that feminist works either have a female protagonist or several female characters who are signif­ icant to the central action does seem sound. It is dif­ ficult to think of a feminist work in which this is not the case. There are problems, though, with her contention that a sexist work restricts the point of view to male pro­ tagonists, with her contention that feminism in character­ ization may be distinguished by the avoidance of stereo­ types and stock characters of women and with her contention that "multiplicity" saves a novel from becoming sexist.

Krouse's assertion that a sexist work restricts the point of view to male protagonists implies that all sexist works restrict the point of view in this way, but this is not necessarily true. It could be argued, for instance, that Beckett's Happy Days is in some ways sexist, and yet

it is a work in which point of view is restricted almost

entirely to a female character. The play is an unsympathetic

portrayal of a woman who is destructive because she denies

reality; she insists that life is composed of "happy days."

Winnie is an earth mother Cshe is literally buried in the

earth) who neither nurtures nor creates. Her self-de­

ception seems more pronounced and more malevolent than the

self-deception of Beckett's male characters in other works.

Krouse's assertion also suggests that works which restrict

the point of view to a male protagonist might possibly be

sexist. Sometimes, though, a feminist work restricts the

point of view to a male protagonist. An example might 20 be Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. It is not usual to consider Roth a feminist novelist; he is often chided for his unsympathetic portrayals of women (Mrs. Portnoy, for example). But in Goodbye, Columbus Roth is clearly ex­ ploring the ways in which Brenda Patimkin has been social­ ized to accept the mindless conformity of her parents and their suburban realm; we can see the novel as a portrayal of Brenda's consistent refusal to become free. The male protagonist, Neil, represents a liberating force. Another problem with this assertion is that it does not distinguish between the point of view of a character and the point of view of an author; Krouse neglects to discuss what Wayne

Booth calls "authorial silence."

This distinction becomes necessary when considering the feminism of a work like Doris Lessing's "One off the

Short List." Like Goodbye, Columbus, this work employs the perspective of a male protagonist, but unlike the Roth novel, the point of view is third person limited rather than

first person. We see the events of the story through the

eyes of Graham Soence, though he does not speak to the read­

er directly. But in the Lessing story the feminism is

indirect whereas in the Roth story it is direct. The male

protagonist, Graham Spence, is treated unsympathetically—

he is a male chauvinist. The. distance between the char­

acter and the. author is great. Spence is the representa­

tive of an outmoded patriarchy who decides he is going to

conquer Barbara Coles, a woman who has liberated herself 21

i from the fetters of traditional sex roles in a natural and unself-conscious way. Spence is humiliatingly de­ feated because he fails to recognize Barbara's liberation.

Nor is it necessarily true that feminism in char­ acterization may be distinguished by the avoidance of stereotypes and stock characters of women. Sometimes feminists make good use of stereotypes. In The Bell Jar, for instance, Dodo Conway is a stereotypical represen­ tative of an oppressed housewife; she is bovine. Also,

Philomena Guinea is a stereotypical representative of an oppressive aristocracy. Neither woman is treated sym­ pathetically; both function as models that Esther Green­ wood must reject if she is to become free. The Bell Jar is in some ways feminist not because it characterized by what Krouse calls "multiplicity," i.e., not because it contains a number of characters who, taken together,

"develop no trite commonplace about women." Rather, it is feminist because it explores the ways in which traditional roles adversely affect women. Plath employs stereo­ types to demonstrate that women who conform to traditional roles are one-dimensional. It is the characterization of

Esther Greenwood that saves the novel from blatant sexism.

She is treated as a confused young woman who must attempt to forge an identity in the midst of inadequate role models.

The concept of "multiplicity" suggests that quantity can become an important factor in the determination of feminism

or sexism. Almost always, though, it is quality that must 22 be taken into consideration.

The Danish feminist Pil Dahlerup, like Agate Nesaule

Krouse, is interested in generalizing about characteristics of works of literature. But Dahlerup is interested pri­ marily in patriarchal literature rather than feminist

literature. She aims -at identifying a patriarchal tradi­

tion in fiction. In her monograph, Literary Sex Roles,

a work originally intended to serve as a study-guide for

the Danish Teachers' Association, Dahlerup mentions certain

patriarchal patterns in literature: 1 ) the main character

is a man; 2) the majority of the text's persons are men; 3)

the women appearing represent sexuality; 4) the text's main point-of-view is formulated by men; 5) the text's

descriptions of characters emphasize the man's psycho­

logical and the woman's physical properties; 7) the text's

language and style emphasize traditional sex roles. One

value of Dahlerup's working model is that it can be ap­

plied to works by both men and women; she asserts, "a

book's sex role pattern naturally can be read independ­

ently of the author's sex."^ It is easy to find excep­

tions to Dahlerup's patterns, however. I have already

demonstrated that a sexist work can employ a female pro­

tagonist; Beckett's Happy Days served as an example. Nor

do all sexist works portray the sexuality of women and the

psychological characteristics of men. The male protag­

onist of Norman Mailer's "The Time of Her Time," for example,

is portrayed quite sympathetically— he is the narrator— 23 yet is the embodiment of sexuality whereas the female protagonist, who is portrayed unsympathetically, re­ presents intellectuality. Denise is a threat to

O'Shaugnessy because she is better educated than he is, because she is a Jewess Cto use Mailer's term) and there­ fore somewhat foreign to him, and because she is highly competitive. The story is sexist because it depicts a liberated woman unsympathetically.

The function of the critical theorist is to guide the critic. In the case of the feminist critical theorist, this guidance should take the form of discouraging prescriptive thinking or thinking dominated by considerations of gender.

Male critics and male authors can be feminists; male char­ acters can serve a feminist purpose. Female critics and female authors can be sexists; female characters can serve a sexist purpose. In the same way, a description of an unliberated women can serve a feminist purpose, and a de­ scription of a liberated woman can serve a sexist purpose.

It might very well be true that women are less resistant to traditional assumptions about "woman's place" than are men and are therefore more likely to accept feminism. It might also be true that men will be resistant to feminism because they have a vested interest in the status quo. It is nevertheless important to avoid generalizations which do not allow- for exceptions. Indeed, feminism is rooted in the assumption that assigned roles can be transcended— that anatomy is not destiny. The danger of a prescriptive 24 mode of thinking is that it interferes with a direct confrontation with the particular work at hand. Feminist critics should at least attempt to r.ead texts without prior formulations about what constitutes feminism and sexism in literature, even if it is virtually impossible to do so. Authors can impart their progressive or re­ actionary attitudes in a myriad of ways. Generalizations about the characteristics of feminist or sexist works tend to interfere with the critical process.

Feminist critical theorists should put aside these

endeavors to generalize about the characteristics of pro­

gressive or reactionary literary works and should con­

centrate, instead, on exploring the relationship between

feminist criticism and other forms of criticism. The

problems which the feminist critic must examine— the

relationship between the individual literary work and the

literary tradition; the relationship between literature

and society— have been examined before, by Marxist critics,

black critics, gay critics, critics not ostensibly com­

mitted to an ideology. Feminist critics should cease to

proceed as if these issues had never been explored before.

To be sure, feminists will have to greatly modify other

critical positions in order to make them suitable for their

purposes, but this is by no means an impossible task.

The chapters that follow will try to demonstrate the

usefulness of other critical perspectives in the practice

of feminist criticism. Chapter two will discuss Marxist 25 criticism and will then provide a Marxist feminist inter­ pretation of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Chapter three will discuss Frye's archetypal criticism and will then provide an archetypal feminist interpretation of Mrs.

Dalloway. Chapter four will discuss neo-Aristotelian criticism and then provide a neo-Aristotelian feminist interpretation of Mrs. Dalloway. The Woolf novel was chosen somewhat arbitrarily. I am quite certain that other novels (or poems, plays, etc.) would have worked as well.

Mrs. Dalloway seems to me to be particularly suitable since it is clearly a significant feminist achievement and since it has not been interpreted very frequently or very suc­ cessfully from a feminist perspective. The critical models are somewhat arbitrary as well. I wanted to try both historicist models and formalist models. Marxist criticism was an obvious choice since Marxism has obvious affinities with feminism. I could have chosen a psychoanalytic model, a biographical model, or a sociological model as easily, I feel certain. I selected two formalist models that are essentially unlike. The archetypal model, as articulated by Northrop Frye, is essentially a structuralist model, i.e., it relates the individual work to the literary tradition.

The neo-Aristotelian model, in contrast, examines the in­ ternal coherence (i.e., form) of the individual work. I probably could have chosen a new critical model or a dif­ ferent structuralist model instead.

Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards, in the foreward to 26 The Authority of Experience/ assert, "If feminist literary criticism does not connote a school of criticism with a rigidly defined methodology, the term does imply a general orientation, an attitude toward literature which can turn

AT. a wide variety of existing techniques to its own ends."*-1-

It is necessary to explore these existing techniques in order to demonstrate how they might be useful•to the prac­ titioner of feminist criticism. NOTES

Elaine Showalter, "Literary Criticism," Signs, 1 (1975), 436.

2 Susan Koppelman Cornillon, ed., Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1972).

2 Josephine Donovan, ed., Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory (Lexington, Kentucky: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1975).

^ Annette Kolodny, "Some Notes on Defining a 'Feminist Literary Criticism,'" CritI,2 (1975), 75-92.

2 Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards, eds., The Author­ ity of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism (Amherst, Mass.: Univ. of Mass. Press, 1977).

6 The topic of the workshop sponsored by the Women's . Caucus for the Modern Languages at the '74 convention was "Feminist Criticism." See PMLA, 89 (1974), 1176. The Women's Caucus sponsored a panel, "Theory of Feminist Literary Criticism" at the '75 convention. See PMLA, 90 (1975), 1009. A panel at the'76 convention was entitled "The Relationship of Feminist Criticism to Other Con­ temporary Critical Approaches." See PMLA, 91 (1976), 1015. Also, the Women's Caucus sponsored a panel, "Current Issues in Feminist Critical Theory" at the '76 convention. See PMLA, 91 (1976), 1027. Other essays dealing with feminist critical theory should be mentioned. A pamphlet entitled Feminist Literary Criticism: A Symposium, edited by Karen W. Borden and Fauneil J. Rinn (San Jose, Calif.: Diotima Press, 1974), contains four brief essays. The entire winter issue of Diacritics, entitled "Textual Politics: Essays in Feminist Criticism," 5 (1975) , was devoted exclusively to feminist criticism. The nine essays, all of which are ex­ amples of practical criticism, are of interest to the theo­ rist because they illustrate the usefulness of a structur­ alist perspective. For a discussion of the relationship between feminist criticism and drama see Margaret Lamb, "Feminist Criticism," Drama Review, 18, No. 3 (1974), 45-50. Julia Lesage discusses feminist criticism in relation to film in her "Feminist Film Criticism: Theory and Practice," Women and Film, 1, No. 5 and 6 (1974), 12-18. Diane 27 28 Gersoni-Stavn's "Feminist Criticism: An Overview,'* LJ, 99 (1974) 182-185, -is a. brief discussion of the relationship between feminist criticism and children's literature. The journal of the College English Association devoted an issue to "Women in Literature and Criticism." See C E A , 37, No. 4 (1975).

^ Fraya Katz-Stoker, "The Other Criticism: Feminism vs. Formalism," Images of Women in Fiction, ed. Cornillon, pp. 315-327. Katz-Stoker finds that "with formalism, lit­ erary criticism became 'functional,' that it studied the operation of literature only within the given value system, thus promoting the status quo" (p. 326).

^ Annis Pratt, "The New Feminist Criticism," CE, 32 (May, 1971), 872-878; Lillian S. Robinson, "Dwelling in Decencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective," CE, 32 (May, 1971), 879-889. Pratt developed her position lurther in "Archetypal Approaches to the New Feminist Criticism," BuR, 21 (Spring, 1973), 3-14. Her Feminism and Fiction, a study of the relationship between feminist criticism and archetypal criticism, is forthcoming. Robinson developed her position further in Lillian S. Robinson and Lise Vogel, "Modernism and History," NLH, 3 (1971), 177- 197.

3 Agate Nesaule Krouse, "Toward a Definition of Literary Feminism," to be published in an anthology of feminist criticism edited by Cheri Brown and Karen Olson of the Univ. of New Mexico. The anthology is forthcoming; Pil Dahlerup, Literary Sex Roles, trans. Marilyn Waniek (n.p.: Minnesota Women in Higher Education, 1975). Dahlerup's monograph was first published in 1973 in Denmark.

Dahlerup, Literary Sex Roles, p. 23.

11 Cheri Register, "American Literary Criticism: A Bibliographical Introduction," Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Donovan, p. 2. Register's essay was originally a chapter of her dissertation, "Feminist Ideology and Lit­ erary Criticism in the United States and Sweden," the Univ. of Chicago 1973. Publication of the dissertation is forth­ coming in Sweden.

3-2 Register, p. 12.

Register, p. 19.

Edmund Wilson, "Marxism and Literature," Atlantic Monthly» 160 (1937), 741-750, rpt. in 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1972), pp. 241-252.

15 Wilson, p. 247. 29 Wilson, p. 248.

^7 Wilson, p. 248.

^-3 Wilson, p. 25Q.

Kolodny, "Some Notes on Defining a 'Feminist Liter­ ary Criticism,11' p. 75.

20 Annette Barnes, "Female Criticism: A Prologue," The Authority of Experience, eds. Diamond and Edwards, p. 9.

Elizabeth Hardwick, "The Subjection of Women," Partisan Review, 20 (1953), 321-331, rpt. in Women's Literature and Liberation, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), pp. 201-211.

22 Hardwick, p. 208.

23 Kolodny, "Some Notes on Defining a 'Feminist Liter­ ary Criticism,'" p. 92.

24 William W. Morgan, "Feminism and Literary Study: A Reply to Annette Kolodny," CritI, 3 (1976), 808.

2^ Annette Kolodny, "The Feminist as Literary Critic," CritI, 3 (1976), 825.

26 Kolodny, "The Feminist as Literary Critic," p. 825.

27 Kolodny, p. 825. Actually, Kolodny's original essay is much, more moderate than this analysis would sug­ gest. She is not willing to assume that women have a unique style or that there is such a thing as a feminine conscious­ ness (p. 76). She says, "What we have not fully acknow­ ledged is that the variations among individual women may be as great as those between women and men— and, in some cases perhaps, the variations may be greater within the same sex than that between two particular writers of different sexes" (p. 79). She asks that feminist critics treat works as unique and individual. And she warns a- gainst reading literature as if it were polemic (p. 90). The arguments in the reply to Morgan seem to be politically motivated.

23 Robin Lakoff, Language and Woman's Place (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 58-59. 29 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), p. 81.

33 Herbert Marder, Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968). 31 Annette Kolodny, "Literary Criticism,"' Signs, 2 (1976), 404-421.

32 Frederick Stern, "Black Lit.., White Crit?" CE, 35 (March 1974}, 640.

33 S t e m , p. 648.

34 Stern, p. 647-648.

35 Showalter, A Literature of' Their Own, p. 4.

3® Ruth Yeazell, "Fictional Heroines and Feminist Critics," Novel, 8 No. 1 (1974), 31'.

37 Krouse, "Toward a Definition of Literary Feminism, p. 1. Krouse wrote a dissertation on Doris Lessing. See "The Feminism of Doris Lessing," The Univ. of Wisconsin, 1972.

33 Krouse, p. 1

39 Krouse, p. 8 .

4® Dahlerup, Literary Sex Roles, p. 48.

4^ Diamond and Edwards, The Authority of Experience, p. xiv. CHAPTER TWO

MODEL ONE: MARXIST CRITICISM

Most arguments for the emancipation of women pre­ suppose a liberal explanation of historical change rather than a Marxist one.^ Such an explanation usually regards the individual as the moving force in history. John

Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women is the classic man­ ifestation of this liberal position. Mills argues that in earliest times "every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some man."

Mill further explains that during this "twilight of human society" many men were enslaved as well. Men, however, gained their freedom through the efforts of individual thinkers, men who were bold enough to question the right­ fulness of slavery. Women remained slaves because men were able to dominate their minds. They were deprived of an opportunity to think independently and were taught, instead, to be primarily concerned with their attractive­ ness to men. The solution to the problem of the sub­ jection of women, therefore, is education. Women must be taught to reason independently. They must also be granted

31 32 equality in marriage, and should be allowed to partici­ pate in activities traditionally reserved for men— they should be permitted to have occupations. Mill argues that if customs and institutions were altered to grant women rights, society as a whole would benefit. Men would be­ come less selfish and the species as a whole would in­ crease its wealth of intellectual power. The problem is defined in terms of deprivation of individual rights. The solution is to restore those rights by changing existing laws and customs.

The Marxist position, in contrast, is that women are oppressed because of the forms their lives have taken in class society. For a Marxist, material conditions are ultimately the essential facts of human history. Inequal­

ities exist not because individuals have been denied their rights but because the economic order is structured in such a way that the owners of the means of production exploit

the labor of others. Oppression is eliminated not by

changing attitudes or laws, but by changing the economic

order itself. Equality necessitates common ownership of

the means of production. Martha E. Gimenez explains the

Marxist position in her essay, "Marxism and Feminism."

She says, "Marxism postulates that neither persons nor

their natural and social environment can be viewed in iso-

lation." She sees capitalism as the cause of sexism

and argues that only by eliminating capitalism will sex­

ism in turn be eliminated. Herbert Marcuse, in "Marxism 33 and Feminism," suggests that.the goals of the women's movement will be attained only by a change in the entire social system. He thinks that, potentially at least, the women's movement could transcend the capitalist frame­ work in which it presently operates and move "beyond equality" to the construction of a society governed by a different "Reality Principle," one in which the estab­ lished dichotomy between masculine and feminine is over­ come.^ His position is a typically Marxist one. Like

Gimenez, he thinks that only a radical alteration in the capitalist system will bring about equality between men and women.

Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State^ provides a Marxist explanation of the origin of the oppression of women. The explanation it­

self is based upon anthropological misconceptions, but

it is important because it illustrates what is still the basic Marxist approach to "the woman question." Engels

explains the evolution of the family in terms of a dev­

elopment from the pairing family (during the stage of

savagery) to group marriage (during the stage of barbar­

ism) to monogamy (during the stage of civilization). This

evolution represents a progression from sexual promiscuity

to sexual restraint as well as a progression from matriar­

chy to patriarchy. Engels sees this overthrow of "mother

right" as a revolutionary development— an historical de­

feat of the female sex. It resulted from the domestication 34 of animals and the breeding of herds, i.e., from the increasing accumulation of wealth which took place between the stages of savagery and barbarism. Men, in gaining control of property, gained control of women as well. This position is prototypically Marxist: power is synonymous with control of property; women became enslaved not because men gained control of their minds, but because men gained control of their right to affect inheritance. This, in turn, resulted from changes in the socio-economic structure.^

Most contemporary feminists would not agree with the

Marxist interpretation of the problem, however. Simone de Beauvoir's classic analysis, for example, insists that women have been enslaved because they have been defined in relation to men— they have been perceived as the "other."

In order for a woman to become emancipated, she must be allowed to have an independent existence— she must be al­ lowed to engage in a "project" which will result in trans­ cendence (assertion of self) rather than immanence (turning in upon the self). De Beauvoir rejects the Marxist inter­ pretation of the women question. She considers Engels' argument in The Origin of the Family to be an example of

"economic monism" and contends, "If the human consciousness had not included the original category of the Other and an original aspiration to dominate the Other, the invention of the bronze tool could not have caused the oppression of woman.She does not think that changes in a woman's 35 economic condition alone are enough to transform her.

The social context in which she functions must be altered, and this necessitates changes in laws, institutions, cus­ toms, public opinion. Women must be socialized in the same way men are. The solution is to cease treating women

as a second sex.

American feminists, as well, have been resistant to or unaware of the Marxist interpretation of the problem.

Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique** deals with the plight of the suburban housewife, but she ignores com­ pletely the problems of working class women. Friedan's

solution to the problem of unhappy housewifery is es­ sentially an individual rather than a collective one? women must be given educational opportunities and must develop

a new "life plan." They must pursue a satisfying career.

This life plan is to accompany, rather than replace, the traditional roles of wife and mother. Institutions must

simply be altered; the economic structure would remain

essentially the same.

For Kate Millett, the cause of the oppression of women

Q is the sexual caste system. In Sexual Politics-7 she

argues that sexual domination is the most pervasive ideo­

logy of our culture. Politics is defined as "power-

structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group

of persons is controlled by another."10 For her, the most

important political groups are those determined by sex.

Thus, sexual politics is the domination of the male sex 36 over the female sex. Power is equated with maleness rather than with ownership of the means of production. A logical extension of this position is her contention that

"male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.”11 Her solution is to eliminate male domination by eliminating prescriptive sexual roles. Humanity must be freed of the tyranny of sexual stereotypes, and this necessitates a sexual rather than a social revolution. Attitudes, not material reality, must be changed.

It would misleading to suggest that no contemporary feminists are Marxists. There are a few important ex­ ceptions to the generalization that most feminists are in the tradition of Mill and de Beauvoir. Juliet Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham are British feminists who are also

Marxists. Mitchell's "The Longest Revolution,"12 argues that the woman question must be discussed in relation to four key structures: production, reproduction, sex, and

socialization of children. All four structures must be transformed if liberation is to be achieved. In Woman1s 13 Estate, Mitchell argues that feminist consciousness must be transformed by socialist analysis of oppression; she

finds feminism and socialism to be "coextensive."

Rowbotham, a Marxist historian, has written Women, Re­

sistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution

in the Modern World ; Woman's Consciousness, M a n 's World ;

and Hidden from History: Rediscovering Women in History 37 from the 17th Century to the Present.^ Also, Shulamith

Firestone, an American feminist, has written The Dialec­

tic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, a work which is in some ways congenial to Marxism. Firestone

calls for a feminist revolution which would be larger

than, but inclusive of, a socialist revolution. She finds

that the problems of women stem not primarily from eco­

nomics but from biological sexuality and that a feminist

revolution would necessitate the elimination of the sex

distinction itself.3-5

But there is certainly no strong Marxist feminist

tradition in the United States, and it is not surprising

that there is no strong Marxist feminist literary critical

tradition. Lillian Robinson is one of the few literary

critics who defends a materialist approach to the study

of literature.3'6 Robinson repeatedly reminds us that art,

the artist, and the critic are situated in history. Art,

therefore, is ideological, as is criticism; both reflect

categories of class, sex, and race acting as historical

forces. She warns against criticism which ignores this

reality and warns against a feminist criticism, in part­

icular, which deals with women as if they did not exist

in history, i.e., which generalizes about all women

rather than dealing with particular classes of women in

particular historical moments. Robinson reminds the fem­

inist critic, as well, that she should not ignore the lit­

erature of working class women. Nor should bourgeois 38 universities create chairs of "Proletarian Studies."

What is needed as much as a defense of a Marxist

feminist criticism, however, is an explanation of just how such criticism might be practiced. Very little

Marxist feminist criticism has appeared, and almost nothing has been written on what methodological assumptions 17 . might lie behind such criticism. Marxist feminist critics would do well to use as a point of departure the trad­

ition of Marxist criticism which already exists. This

tradition can, in turn, be modified to meet the demands

of feminism.

Marxist critics generally agree upon a few funda­ mental propositions. They argue that art objects are

not isolated phenomena but are mutually dependent upon

other cultural activity— social, political, moral, reli­

gious , or scientific. They also agree that aesthetic

phenomena should be studied in a context of socio-his-

torical processes and should be seen as activities which

allow men to realize an innate potential.-1-® They tend

to agree, as well, that works which most successfully

reflect historical reality, i.e., works of "realism,"

are most worthy of attention. They note, however,

that realist works are not necessarily works written by

individuals with a Marxist orientation. Often realist

writers are simply individuals who, regardless of avowed

ideological affiliation, have heightened perceptions and

are able tin spite of themselves) to depict historical 39 reality, usually the oppression of the lower classes.

Lukacs explains this apparent contradiction in his

discussion of Balzac in Studies in European Realism.

Lukacs notes that although Balzac was an apologist for a

decadent nobility, his novels reflect deep ties with the

issues of his time and a sympathy for the sufferings of

the people.^ This important distinction between avowed

ideology and realist portrayal of events and characters 20 was basic to the thinking of Marx and Engels, as was

the concept of "typicality"— the chief characteristic of

realist works. It is Luk&cs, however, who most fully

explored the implications of these concepts. According

to Lukacs, when a type is created, "all the humanly and

socially essential determinants are present on their

highest level of development, in the ultimate unfolding

of the possibilities latent in them, in extreme presenta­

tion of their extremes, rendering concrete the peaks and 21 limits of men and epochs." A realist work, then, pre­

sents typical events and typical characters. In so doing,

it captures the essence of historical reality.

This is not to say that all Marxist critics accept

this notion of typicality. Frequently, though, they

provide similar explanations of the relationship between

concrete historical processes and their manifestation in

literature. Fredric Jameson in Marxism and Form speaks of

typification in terms of allegory. For him, typical

characters may be seen as allegorical representations of 40 22 particular groups or classes. For Brecht, concrete portrayal of a character or a situation allows for gener­ alization: types are most suggestive if they are only ap­ proximate. Thus, a description of a specific peasant is more suggestive than an abstraction or a fabrica- 2 3 tion. The portrayal of the peasant, even though in­ dividualized, is actually a representation of a type.

According to Brecht, "the specialness is a mark of gen­ erality. 1,24

Lukacs is particularly useful for his discussions of realism and typicality. In these areas he has success­ fully expanded upon the thinking of Marx and Engels. But

in one important area he distorts the positions of Marx and Engels: he places almost exclusive emphasis upon the 25 / concept of mimesis. For Lukacs, art imitates (or should

imitate) life; it conveys the dynamic of social forces.

This unfortunate prescriptiveness is limiting. For

Lukacs, realist art is mimetic; all other art is decadent.

He extols the work of nineteenth-century realists such as

Balzac and Tolstoy and dismisses nineteenth-century nat­

uralists such as Zola and modernists such as Joyce. Nat­

uralism is labelled "pseudo-objectivism" because it does

not portray characters in extreme situations but rather

in average situations ("the lifeless average "). Modern­

ism or psychologism is labelled "mirage-subjectivism”

because it concentrates on the isolated individual, the

individual divorced from society. Naturalists describe 41 rather than narrate; they portray characters who are merely spectators of events whereas realists portray characters who are involved in events. Modernists too frequently identify the "human condition" with the iso­ lation of man.

In adhering to this rigid conception of the relation­ ship between art and history, Lukacs is forced to dismiss a good deal of nineteenth-century literature and almost all of modern literature. He is also forced to under­ play the important ways in which literature affects other

literature. In dogmatically insisting that art imitates

life, he distorts the relationship between art and other

art. He explains continuity within literary tradition,

for instance, as resulting from "interconnections exist- 27 ing in the objective reality of life itself." He deals with the question of literary influence in a similar way.

In discussing the influence of Tolstoy on European writers he says, "All truly great literature, however much of

foreign elements it may absorb, keeps to its own organic

line of development, determined by the social and histor- 28 ical conditions in the country which gave it birth."

Lukacs would like to show that art is almost entirely a

reflection of historical reality.

Stefan Morawski, in his introduction to Marx and

Engels On Literature and Art; A Selection of Writings,

shows that Marx and Engels, unlike Lukacs, allowed for 29 the existence of relatively autonomous structures. 42 Morawski interprets Marx and Engels as seeing both an

"ideogenetic" setting of influence (where new aesthetic activity is affected by previous aesthetic models) and an

"allogenetic" setting of influence (where non-aesthetic givens have influence on new artistic activity).30

Art "retains links" with ordinary experience but is not composed entirely of historical content. Morawski is preparing the way for a structuralist application of

Marxist aesthetics; unfortunately, he does not explore the methodological implications of his interpretation.

We can only imagine that a method based upon his assump­ tions would minimize the significance of the mimetic function and maximize the significance of the relatively autonomous structures of art. Such a method would elim­ inate the unfortunate prescriptiveness of Lukcics' method.

It would no doubt demonstrate that no works are entirely realist and that the elements in works differ in accordance with the significance of other autonomous structures present in a work.

Thus Lukcics would be an inappropriate model for the feminist critic since much explicitly feminist literature seems to be modern literature— it deals with alienation, with the ways in which patriarchal culture has affected women. It would serve no useful purpose to label "sub­ jective" fiction like Surfacing or Play I_t as Ijt Lays

"decadent." A much more appropriate model would be one which recognizes the historical basis of all form, i.e., 43 one which is not prescriptive. Fredric Jameson's

"dialectical criticism" might provide such a model.

Jameson is not bound by a concept of mimesis. His pos­ ition, as articulated in the final chapter of Marxism and Form, is essentially that all literary works bear in their form traces of the most significant features of contemporary reality. The form of a work is a re­ flection of its historical content. Jameson explains,

"form is itself but the working out of content in the realm of the superstructure.1,31 Whereas Luk^cs was concerned primarily with content, Jameson is concerned primarily with form.

Form is discovered through what Jameson calls "dia­

lectical criticism," a type of criticism which involves dialectical or historical thinking. The dialectical

critic recognizes that all thought is rooted in history,

i.e., is a product of a particular moment. Therefore,

the critic must not only uncover the form of a work;

s/he must also be self-consciously aware of the methodology

employed in uncovering form. The analysis of a work, hence,

must contain not only a discussion of that work, but also

a discussion of the kind of analysis dictated by that

work. Jameson says, "for a genuinely dialectical criticism,

indeed, there can be no preestablished categories of

analysis: to the degree that each work is the end result

of a kind of inner logic or development in its own con­

tent, it evolves its own categories and dictates the specific terms of its own interpretation."32 It is not possible, therefore, to formulate ahistorical cate­ gories which would apply to works written in different historical periods. Rather, the critic must become aware of the "terms" of the interpretation, i.e., of the par­ ticular method appropriate for that particular work.

The self-conscious critic uncovers the form of a work by formulating what Jameson calls an "historical trope"— a figure which provides for the juxtaposition of two distinct and incommensurate realities, the superstructure and the base.33 The critic "mediates" between private and public, between individual and socio-economic real­ ities. Jameson explains that the task of what he calls

"dialectical criticism" is not to "relate" individual and socio-economic realities, since the two were always re­ lated. The task is, rather, to "articulate the work and its content in such a way that this relationship stands revealed, and is once more visible."3^ The critic must reveal the work's "inner form."

Dialectical criticism would consist of local critical studies which would remain local, i.e., which could not be worked into a system since systematization, according to Jameson, is a denial of historicity. Thus, Marxist critics would not be interested in tracing images through various works but would, instead, deal with the image as a specific literary phenomenon which "draws attention to

its own peculiar structural characteristics, which identifies 45 itself as a process of symbolizing, which is conscious of 35 itself as 1irrealizing' the world." He also explains that a general science of stylistics is a contradiction in terms, but he does think that a critic might discuss particular stylistic elements in particular works.

Jameson sees the modern art-sentence as a commodity structure calling attention to itself. He says, "In • modern literature, indeed, the production of the sentence becomes itself a new kind of event within the work, and generates a whole new kind of form."36 He argues that a Marxist theory of plot would include the idea that plot is the very ground of the concrete itself; there can there­ fore be no independent analysis of it unless plot calls attention to itself as a distinct literary phenomenon.

Since dialectical criticism involves historical thinking, there can be no static category "realism."

Class descriptions in a work are either progressive or reactionary depending upon the perspective of the viewer.

If the critic stresses the nature of the relationship between the cultural object and the class which it

"reflects," s/he will come to one assessment about the degree to which the work is realist. If s/he focuses on the historic destiny of the class itself, the assess- ment will be different. Thus, Jameson sees Balzac as a realist, as did Lukcics and Marx before him, but

Jameson also observes that Balzac can also be seen as embodying the reactionary ideology of a dying class. 46 Jameson reminds us that the Marxist critic not only points out the relationship between literature and his­

tory. S/he also exists within history. And to Jameson,

"history is indeed precisely this obligation to multiply

the horizons in which the object is maintained, to mul­

tiply the perspectives from which it is seen."37 A

Marxist feminist criticism based on Jameson's model is

rich in possibilities. Such a criticism would emphasize

the way in which the form of a work is the embodiment of

patriarchal culture. The feminist critic might define

"realism" as that mode which most accurately reflects

the oppressiveness of a male-dominated order. The equiva­

lent of the Marxist term "socialist realism" (i.e., the -

term applied to works which are embodiments of Marxist

ideology) might be labelled "feminist realism." Such

works would be written by feminists and might go beyond

"realist" descriptions of the problem of women to "fem­

inist" projections of how these problems might be solved.

In the case of both the realist work and the feminist real­

ist work, the task of the critic would be to lay bare

the work's inner form.

If Jameson's model were to be applied, the feminist

critic would not employ a single method but would, rather,

allow the particular work to dictate an appropriate

methodology. The critic would then include in the analy­

sis itself a discussion of method. Characters might be

seen as allegorical representations of "classes," i.e., 47 as representatives of an oppressed or oppressive group.

Attention would be paid both to gender and to class.

Plots which call attention to themselves might be seen as reflections of alienated reality— might themselves be seen as commodities, as representations of reification itself. Style and imagery would be seen as reflecting oppressive social conditions.

Feminist criticism is an inherently politicized criticism. It aims not only to provide interpretations of literature, but also to judge literature, to determine

if it is feminist or sexist. It serves, as well, to promote a feminist interpretation of reality and in so doing to have an effect on existing social structures.

Marxist criticism is therefore a congenial model. Such a criticism encourages confrontation with oppressive real­

ities. It treats criticism not as a mere exercise, but

as a political act. It forces the critic to recognize

that all activity is inherently ideological and that lit­

erary criticism can become an instrument in the elimina­

tion of oppression and suffering. MRS. DALLOWAY

Virginia Woolf's feminist tracts are an expression of liberal feminism rather than Marxist feminism. In

■ 3 Q A Room of One's Own, she argues that women must have a room and money in order to be creative. A Marxist, how­ ever, would see this position as an implicit defense of middle class privilege since it ignores the problems of working class women. For a Marxist, changes in the social system itself must come about before all individuals will be able to achieve their creative potential. The focus on money and rooms betrays a middle class bias that is callous to the problems of an exploited class. In Three

Guineas Virginia Woolf uses the term "class" when re­ ferring to women but, again, she is concerned only with one class of women— the daughters of educated men. This liberal feminism is in the tradition of John Stuart Mill.

Woolf sees that the destructive impulses of society result from masculine competitiveness. When educated men em­ phasize their superiority over other people, they arouse feelings of jealousy in others, feelings which in turn encourage a disposition toward war. In order to eliminate this competitiveness, the educational system must be al­ tered. The institution should be built of "some cheap, 49 easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions" (p. 33). The traditions which must be eliminated are masculine ones— pomp and ceremony which lead to competitiveness. Woolf's "poor college" would not teach the art of dominating other people, of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital. In­ stead, it would teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and can be practiced by poor people— medicine, mathematics, music, painting and literature (p. 34).

The poor college would concentrate on teaching the art of human intercourse. Woolf says in Three Guineas, "Without private there can be no public freedom" (p. 120). She says elsewhere in the work, "The public and the private worlds are inseparably connected...the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other" (p. 142). For Virginia Woolf, problems must be solved, first, in the private realm. A change in the quality of private life will result in a change in the quality of public life. She sees oppression (or war) as a result of attitudes of individuals. The solution to

the problems of society is to change those attitudes by

changing the educational system.

Mrs. Dalloway is a formal embodiment of liberal

feminism. It demonstrates that the individual is the moving force in society and that changes in the public

sphere are brought about primarily by changes in the pri­

vate sphere. Clarissa Dalloway, a mere housewife, 50 can affect a male-dominated order. She believes in the power of the mind to overcome isolation and mortality.

Clarissa explains the process s•

Did it matter, then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not be­ come consoling to believe that death ended ab­ solutely? but that 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, 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 a mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.4®

The mind allows individuals to live in each other; a single

consciousness becomes part of other consciousnesses. The mind defies space and time by allowing for dispersal of the

self. The "stream of consciousness" technique employed

in the novel demonstrates this dispersal process. Minds make contact with other minds through memory. Peter Walsh

remains present in Clarissa's thoughts— the Peter Walsh of

the past and the Peter Walsh of the future. And Clarissa

remains present in Peter's consciousness. He admits to

himself that "Clarissa had influenced him more than any

person he had ever known" (pp. 232-233), and he recognizes

that her influence was strongest when she was physically

absent, i.e., when she was only a presence in his memory.

The novel, then, allows the reader to enter the

consciousness of individual characters in order to demon­

strate the essential interconnectedness of those characters 51

through memory. The public realm is alienating, but

the private realm allows for a sharing, an intimate

form of communication— thought. Jeremy Hawthorn, in

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: A Study in Alienation,

contends that the novel reflects a divided society and

that Clarissa is an embodiment of the contradictions

within that society. Hawthorn's analysis is a Marxist

one, but it suffers from an inattention to the form of

the work. He asserts, "Clarissa leads a life that is

full of contradictions, and so her self too is lacking in

consistency."^ He adds, "Clarissa is forced to be one

person in one situation and another person in a different

situation, because there are fundamental contradictions

in the society of which she is a part and in the human rel- 42 ationships which constitute it." But Hawthorn also

- recognizes that individuals in the novel are possessed of

a "central irreducible core of identity," and calls this

apparent contradiction between this irreducible core and

a divided personality a paradox.^ But surely, Woolf in

Mrs. Dalloway is demonstrating that public selves are di­

vided but that private selves can achieve a degree of

integration. The inconsistencies between public and private

selves are not paradoxical. Thus, after Clarissa has

ventured out into public to purchase her flowers, she

returns to the privacy of her home. It is here that she

can recover her central core. As she looks in the mirror she thinks: 52

That was her self— pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuae for the lonely to come to, perhaps (p. 55).

The self is composed of incompatible elements, but it is possible for the individual to momentarily reconcile

those incompatibilities through the power of the will.

This drawing of the parts together necessitates "some

effort"— it does not come easily. But if this effort is

expended, the individual can recover that diamond-like

core and radiate it so that it provides a meeting-point,

a refuge for the lonely. The private self, through an

effort of will, can, temporarily at least, eliminate

alienation.

Hawthorn also contends that "Mrs. Dalloway, unlike

the 'classical novel' of the nineteenth century, presents

the reader with no moral or other overview within which

all contradictions can be subsumed, or by reference to

which all conflicts can be resolved.He thinks that

the novel itself is an embodiment of unresolved contra­

dictions and as such is a manifestation of alienation.

But Hawthorn overlooks the way in which the form of the

novel manipulates the reader's response. Woolf presents

no confused vision; she carefully imposes her own "over­

view" on the events of the novel. Mrs. Dalloway employs 53 what Robert Humphrey calls "indirect interior monologue," or what Dorrit Cohn calls "narrated monologue" or

"erlebte Rede." 4 ^ Interior monologue makes use of pre­ speech thought processes— processes characterized by discontinuity and associativeness. These processes are filtered through a controlling narrator and presented indirectly, often in the past tense, with helpful guide words such as "she thought," or "they said," when in­ direct interior monologue is employed. The interior mon­ ologue in Mrs. Dalloway, therefore, is not entirely in­ terior. An intruding narrator controls and directs much as does a traditional narrator. This narrator also manip­ ulates the responses of the reader. It is impossible, for instance, to respond sympathetically to Sir William .

Bradshaw. The intruding narrator controls our responses in the "Proportion" and "Conversion" sermons. Also, the reader learns of Septimus' background through the seemingly omniscient narrator. J. Hillis Miller is certainly in­ correct when he asserts, "Mrs. Dalloway is almost entire^ ly without passages of meditation or description which are exclusively in the narrator's private voice.

The novel, then, represents both a continuation of the traditional novelistic form and a departure from it.

It, like traditional novels, portrays both the public and the private selves of characters, and those public and private selves are interpreted by an intruding narrator,

one whose attitudes bear a remarkable resemblance to the 54 attitudes of the author. But public and private selves are treated differently in Mrs. Dalloway. Whereas in most novels, the focus is upon interaction of characters in the public sphere, the focus in Mrs. Dalloway is upon inter­ action in the private sphere, i.e., the consciousness.

The reader is asked to judge the quality of the inner lives of those characters. Thus, Clarissa frequently thinks about herself and her relationship with other people in constructive ways, i.e., she attempts to reconcile con­ flicts and to eliminate hostilities. But Doris Kilman's thoughts are destructive. She is not aware of her own motives and does not reflect upon her own shortcomings.

Clarissa's interior monologues reveal an attempt to come to terms with conflicts she must confront; Doris Kilman's interior monologues reveal her egotism, her unwillingness to examine her life.

It would seem, then, that Mrs. Dalloway would be particularly unsuited to a Marxist analysis. It suggests that consciousness is a result of inner traits rather than external factors and that consciousness can be controlled by the individual will. It is unclear, for instance, why Clarissa is feminine and enjoys flowers while Lady Bruton is masculine and enjoys warfare. Each derives from the same social class; each has had a privi­ leged existence. Yet only Clarissa has gained the feminine gift of overcoming alienation. Lady Bruton's solutions to society's problems are public ones— she 55 wants to solve the population problem by emigrating young people to Canada. Clarissa's feminine sensibility is associated with the private sphere, Lady Bruton's with the public. Only the former will solve society's problems.

The solutions implicit in Mrs. Dalloway are not

Marxist ones, nor are the causes of society's problems.

Nevertheless, the novel can be interpreted from a Marxist perspective. It is an exploration of alienation, even if that alienation stems from masculine competitiveness rather than capitalism and even if it will be eliminated by a strengthening of the feminine principle rather than a socialist revolution.

Mrs. Dalloway suggests that in the post-World War I period, the period in which the novel is set, feminine sensibility is threatened by a masculinization of the pri­ vate sphere. This masculinization is a direct result of the ascendancy, after the war, of an emerging class of up­ wardly mobile members of the petite bourgeoisie, a class represented by Sir William Bradshaw and Doris Kilman— in­ dividuals who blunt feminine sensitivity by imposing their will on others. In Mrs. Dalloway, feminine sensitivity is associated with the aristocracy— an established class rooted in Victorian gentility and refinement which allows for a feminization of the public realm. The novel, then, depicts class conflict. It defends the aristocracy (with qualifications) and attacks an emerging middle class of un­ refined individuals who are incapable of functioning 56 within the private sphere and who attempt to destroy the private sensibilities of others.

This class conflict is most usefully explored by discussing characters as allegorical representations (to use Jameson's terra) of particular social classes. Hence,

Clarissa, Richard Dalloway, Peter Walsh, Lady Bruton, and

Hugh Whitbread are members of the aristocracy. Theirs has been a privileged existence characterized by education

(particularly in the case of the men), financial comfort, and leisure (represented by the country estate, Bourton).

Doris Kilman and Sir William Bradshaw do not derive from

this class; rather, they derive from the petite bourgeoisie

and hence have not had the advantages of the aristocracy.

Septimus and Rezia represent the proletariat, as do the many other characters briefly mentioned in the novel such

as Mrs. Dempster and Maisie Johnson. These individuals

have been exploited by the newly emerging middle class. The

aristocracy, in contrast, is portrayed as attempting to

alleviate the sufferings of the poor. Richard Dalloway,

the Conservative M.P., attempts to eliminate social in­

equities through acts of Parliament.

In Mrs. Dalloway, World War I marks a shift in sexual

power. War masculinizes— destroys. Septimus Warren Smith

becomes an embodiment of the destructive power of war. He

volunteers for the army in order to "save an England which

consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss

Pole in a green dress walking in a square "(p. 130). But 57 Miss Pole's influence, her ability to feminize Septimus, to develop his feelings, is nullified by the war: Septimus learns manliness and transfers his allegiance from his teacher to Evans. His masculinization is accompanied by his total alienation— he can no longer feel. Septimus is cut off from life and from the processes of time; the world becomes a projection of his solipsistic self. The leaves on the trees, he thinks, are connected to his body by millions of fibers; the aeroplane, he thinks, is signalling to him. He projects his cynicism onto liter­ ature: Shakespeare becomes a supreme pessimist and culture ceases to have a rejuvenating power. It is "revealed" to Septimus that the secret signal which "one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair" (p. 134). For Septimus, human beings are "lust­ ful animals" who have no lasting emotions but only whims and vanities, who have neither "kindness, nor faith, nor

charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment" (p. 135). The war, then, destroys culture, a

culture transmitted by upper middle class (i.e., aristo­

cratic) women of refinement, women who read and teach

Shakespeare. Septimus might have become a poet had the war not intervened. Instead, he loses his creative powers

and ceases to feel. Sir William Bradshaw completes the

destructive process by imposing his will on Septimus and

thereby forcing him to commit suicide. The suicide it­

self can be seen as an indication that the destructive 58 process has been completed, but it may also represent one last effort on Septimus' part to defy that process.

He no longer has a creative center, a self, but he can at least refuse to give himself over completely to the world of Proportion represented by Bradshaw. It is per­ haps a final tribute to Miss Isabel Pole and all that she represents— culture, sensitivity, pre-war refinement.

Lee R. Edwards, in her essay, "War and Roses: The

Politics of Mrs. Dalloway," argues convincingly that at the center of the novel is an opposition between war and roses, between masculine destruction and feminine creation

Thus, in Mrs. Dalloway, wars, madness, the love of suffering and pain, adherence to an abstract, hierarchical, authoritarian set of values and means of organization are linked to death, and frequently, if not exclusively, to a particular notion of masculinity; conversely, parties, roses, joy, and the celebration of the spontaneity and variability of life are tied to and embodied in various female figures. The politics of Mrs. Dalloway are such that life is possible only when roses, parties and joy triumph over war, authority, and death. Clarissa's celebrations— ephemeral and compromised though they may be— are a paradigm of sanity, a medium through which energy can flow in a world which is otherwise cruel, judgmental, and frozen.47

Edwards is certainly correct in seeing Clarissa as a

positive force in the novel. Her party does represent

a triumph over war, authority, and death. Edwards is

also correct when she says that for Virginia Woolf, women

are more free than men "precisely because they have less

power in society and therefore less of a vested interest

in either society or power.1,4® It is important to note, 59 however, that for Virginia Woolf certain classes of women are more free than others, and it is precisely, perhaps paradoxically, women of an empowered class who enjoy the most freedom. Such women are one step removed from the center of power because of their sex; their fathers or husbands participate in the political realm.

They nevertheless derive the benefits of privilege— they have leisure and can therefore cultivate their sensibil­ ities and participate in life-affirming, rather than life- denying, aspects of culture. Edwards maintains that the women characters in Mrs. Dalloway validate Clarissa's view throughout the novel— women like Rezia and Mrs.

Dempster. She thinks that they, too, are free. Most of the women in the novel, however, are set in contrast to

Clarissa; most have had no opportunity to become feminine or to have an influence upon a masculine realm. Virginia

Woolf suggests that women who have not had the advantages' of Bourton and of libraries have not had an opportunity to become fully human.. Thus, Maisie Johnson, just up from

Edinburgh for two days, is horrified by the sight of

Septimus and Rezia; she thinks them queer and wants to deny their reality— to return home. Her reaction is con­ trasted with Clarissa's epiphanic identification with

Septimus at the end of the novel. Clarissa can comprehend

Septimus' madness and can learn from his suicide; through her acceptance of his suicidal act she can overcome her own suicidal impulses and in so doing come to terms with 60 her own inadequacies and fears. In Clarissa's climac­ tic communion with Septimus she accepts the process of life and conquers her dread of death. But Maisie

Johnson is little more than an animal— she joins the company of squirrels, birds and dogs who have a "fixed unsurprised gaze" (p. 39).

Mrs. Dempster is also set in contrast with Clarissa.

Life has been hard for her and she has turned bitter.

She thinks, "For really, what with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and good, life had been no mere matter of roses" (p. 40). She implores pity for the loss of roses and recognizes that Maisie Johnson, standing by the hyacinth beds, will also lose contact with life.

The "poor mothers of Pimlico" are also described as being less than human. They form the fickle crowd which is first enchanted by the mysterious motor car entering the gates of Buckingman Palace and then entranced by the sky­ writing aeroplane above. They are poor and powerless but, ironically, see royalty as worthy of blind adulation; they believe in the "heavenly life divinely bestowed upon Kings”

Cp. 27). Typically, the'fehawled Moll Pratt," an old Irish­ woman who thinks the passing motor car contains the Prince of Wales and who feels the urge to toss a bunch of roses

into St. James's Street "out of sheer light-heartedness

and contempt of poverty," seems to be unconscious of her oppressive poverty. And surely, her loyalty seems in­

appropriate given her nationality. 61 Rezia Warren Smith is a woman who is also powerless.

She is a simple hatmaker from Italy who is confused by the city and by her husband's insanity. She is alone, dependent upon the advice of Holmes and Bradshaw, unable to help Septimus. Rezia exists in a state of darkness— compared by the narrator to the cfcrkness of the country first perceived by the ancient Romans, the island of England as it might seem at midnight "when all boundaries are lost" (p. 35). Rezia represents some ancient form of woman unsuited to modern conditions: she inhabits a land which cannot be known, which is uncharted. Rezia does, like Clarissa, have an artistic sensibility— her hatmaking is an indication of her artistry. And she does have at least momentary success in triumphing over Holmes and

Bradshaw when she ties up Septimus' papers and places them where the two will not get them. As she makes Mrs. Peters' hat, she succeeds in getting Septimus to laugh along with her. But Rezia is unable to prevent her husband from committing suicide and her artistry goes unnoticed.

These women, because of their class origins, exist outside of the feminine tradition which Virginia Woolf suggests can serve as a counter to masculinity. It is women like Clarissa's great aunt, Miss Helena Parry, who represents this feminizing tradition. Aunt Helena is described by Peter Walsh as belonging to a different age but, "being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse 62 marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage" (p. 247). She is a Victorian matron who is

"entire," a woman who "had no tender memories; no proud

illusions about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies— it was

orchids she saw" tp. 271). These orchids she painted and wrote about, in a book which came to the attention of

Charles Darwin. The war had little effect on Aunt

Helena— she is an "indomitable Englishwoman" whose ab­

sorption in flowers, in life itself, has made her invul­

nerable. Clarissa is clearly in direct line of descent

from this eminent Victorian lady. Like her aunt, Clarissa

loves flowers, and, like her aunt, Clarissa has remained

feminine.

This is not to say that all women of this privileged

middle class have remained feminine. It has already

been mentioned that Lady Bruton is quite masculine. Like

Aunt Helena she visited India, but unlike her, she noticed

nothing of the flora or the fauna there. Lady Bruton

would like to have worn the helmet and shot the arrow, to

have "ruled with indomitable justice barbarian hordes"

(p. 274). Lady Bruton is masculine and chauvinistic, a

"spectral grenadier." She does not read Shakespeare and

she cannot, perhaps because she is lazy, write a letter

to the Times without the aid of Richard Dalloway and Sir

Hugh Whitbread. Whereas feminine women are associated

with flowers, with literature, and with writing, Millicent

Bruton is associated with politics and with warfare. She 63 has the reputation of "being more interested in politics than people; of talking like a man; of having had a finger in some notorious intrigue of the eighties, which was now beginning to be mentioned in memoirs" (p. 160). The narrator suggests that Lady Bruton might have advised one Sir Talbot Moore to send a telegram ordering the

British troops to advance "upon an historical occasion"

(p. 160).

Perhaps significantly, Lady Bruton is also associated with the exploitation of other classes. Whereas the first two lines of the novel tell us that Clarissa has decided to buy the flowers for her party herself because Lucy, her servant, already had her work cut out for her, Millicent

Bruton is surrounded by a "grey tide of service" (p. 163) which enveloped her in a fine tissue, "broke concussions, mitigated interruptions, and spread round the house in

Brook Street a fine net where things lodged" (p. 163).

Clarissa, when possible, does things for herself while

Lady Bruton makes use of an entourage of servants who protect her, cut her off from life. These numerous ser­ vants are adept at the "grand deception" of making it appear that the food was not paid for. Lady Bruton, then, the great-grand-daughter (or perhaps great-great-grand- daughter) of a General, represents those aspects of a privileged existence which are to be condemned. She is masculine, insensitive, ineffectual (it is doubtful if her plan to emigrate young people to Canada will serve a 64 useful purpose), and she exploits other classes. In depicting Lady Bruton as she does, it is possible that

Woolf is suggesting that there is a feminine tradition which has been corrupted, masculinized. Lady Bruton derives from a family of warriors; she, too, has been infected by the poison of warfare.

But Lady Bruton seems to be essentially harmless.

She is linked to Clarissa by a mutual bond, even if the two have little in common and are not friends. When she has lunch with Richard Dalloway she at least inquires,

"How's Clarissa?" The narrator tells us this "signified recognition of some feminine comradship which went be­ neath masculine lunch parties and united Lady Bruton and

Mrs. Dalloway, who seldom met, and appeared whem they did meet indifferent and even hostile, in a singular bond"

(p. 161). Our final judgment of her is perhaps Peter

Walsh's judgment of her. He says, "She had her toadies, minor officials in Government offices who ran about putting

through little jobs on her behalf, in return for which she gave them luncheon. But she derived from the eighteenth

century. She was all right" (p. 264).

But Doris Kilman does not derive from the eighteenth

/ century. Her form of masculinization is destructive. Be­

tween Clarissa and Miss Kilman there is mutual antagonism

rather than a mutual bond. Miss Kilman is a woman who is

incapable of tending her own garden, who has no sensitivity

to the feelings of others. She stems from the petite 65 bourgeoisie— her grandfather kept an oil and colour shop in Kensington— and as a result, she lacks sensitivity.

Her knowledge of history does not compensate for her inability to conduct herself in the private realm and her religious ecstasy has made her callous; she inflicts positive torture on people because of her lack of feeling for others. Clarissa refers to her as a "dominator" and a "tyrant" (p. 17),and Miss Kilman does nearly succeed in dominating Elizabeth. The tutor is predatory, ego­ tistical; in a novel whose very form celebrates lyricism, she appears to be "some prehistoric monster armoured for primeval warfare" (p. 190). Kilman is the female counter­ part of Sir William Bradshaw, the son of a tradesman, an individual who has not had the advantages of a liberal education and who "feasts on the wills of the weakly"

Cp. 151). Both Kilman and Bradshaw pose a threat to the survival of the species because both are set upon de­ stroying the only lifeline of a declining civilization— the feminine principle. Bradshaw succeeds in defeating his own wife, of absorbing her will into his. And, of

course, he destroys Septimus. If his kind gain ascendancy,

the feminine impulse itself will be absorbed by the

destructive masculine impulse.

It is perhaps easiest to illustrate the corroding

effect of an emerging middle class by looking at Virginia

Woolf's depiction of Sally Seton, Clarissa's friend who

had been, in her youth, an advocate of women's rights, a 66 free spirit who had shocked Helena Parry by running along the passage naked when she stayed with Clarissa at

Bourton. Sally's vibrance is associated with her der­ ivation from a privileged class— her great-grandfather had been given a ruby ring by Marie Antoinette. She has

lost that vibrance, however, now that she is the wife of an owner of cotton mills, a man who is the son of a coal miner. The implication is strong that Sally's decline

is the direct result of having married .beneath her .

Sally has become Lady Rosseter, an individual who believes we are all "prisoners" who scratch on the walls of our cells. She has come to despair of human relationships and has retreated to her qarden. Her privacy is a prison rather than a source of nourishment. Clarissa, too, has declined since the days at Bourton when she and Sally would discuss poetry, people, and radical politics. But Clarissa has not despaired of human relationships; she has not

retreated. Clarissa contributes the gift of her parties

and the gift of her self.

Mrs. Dalloway explores the impact of disturbing

changes in society upon the generation of young people who

will have to adapt to those changes. The suicide of

Septimus serves as an indication that some members of the

younger generation will not adapt— members who are partic­

ularly sensitive, who might have become poets. Clarissa

observes that young people "could not talk" (p. 270).

They would shout, embrace, swing, i.e., move about 67 frenetically, but they were not verbal. She laments,

"But the enormous resources of the English language, the power it bestows, after all, of communicating feelings... was not for them" (p. 270). The novel suggests that there is a danger that the post-war generation will be unable to carry on cultural traditions and thereby be unable to communicate feelings. At the center of the novel, then, is the important question of the direction Clarissa's daughter's life will take. Elizabeth must carry on the feminine tradition. But her association with Doris

Kilman represents the possibility that the tradition will be destroyed. If Elizabeth becomes absorbed by a class unappreciative of the private domain, as Sally Seton has become absorbed, then the "long, long voyage" of a con­ stantly evolving feminine tradition will come to an end.

It is important, then, that Elizabeth flirts will Doris

Kilman but that she ultimately rejects her. The feminine

tradition will survive, but in altered form.

Elizabeth's release is accompanied by a symbolic

journey. She takes a bus to the Strand and becomes a part of the London working world, a world quite removed

from Westminster. As she 'breasts the stream of the Strand'

she thinks about the profession she will have; she will

become either a doctor or a farmer. The environment

itself is conducive to such thinking— people here are

connected with mundane realities— with ships, business, law,

administration. Elizabeth explores the area shyly; it is 68 unfamiliar territory. The exploration itself is indicative of her departure from the lifestyle and the values of her mother. Elizabeth will not be confined to the domestic realm and will not be stifled by the institution of marriage in the way her mother is. She is described as a "pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting" (p. 208).

Her profession will bring her into contact with the "pro­ cession" of humanity represented by the crowds on the

Strand. But her adjustment to the world of work will not, presumably, be accompanied by the destruction of her fem­ inine sensibility, a sensibility nurtured by the aristocracy, by a heritage of eminent women such as Helena Parry. Her acceptance of a career will, rather, be a kind of return to another aspect of .upper class privilege. We are told,

"There was in the Dalloway family the tradition of public service. Abbesses, principals, head mistresses, dig­ nitaries, in the republic of women" (p. 209). Elizabeth will adjust to post-war society by returning to a pre-war tradition of service to society. Her contribution will not be the contribution of her mother— she will not give parties. But neither will she compromise that tradition of feminine sensibility by completely rejecting her mother’s values and embracing Doris Kilman's lifestyle. She will not become masculinized and she will not retreat from society.

From the perspective either of the contemporary

Marxist or the radical liberal feminist, the novel appears to be a reactionary statement— a defense of a dying class

and a nostalgic yearning for a pre-war past of class privilege. Certainly Alex Zwerdling in incorrect when he

argues that the novel embodies progressive thinking be­

cause it attacks the "Establishment." Zwerdling sees the

fundamental conflict in the novel as the opposition be­

tween "those who identify with Establishment 'dominion'

and 'leadership' and those who resist or are repelled by

it. "49 ''Establishment" in the novel is portrayed

quite positively; we are asked to sympathize with Clarissa

and Richard Dalloway— only peripheral characters like

Hugh Whitbread are attacked. The novel, then, presents

no radical view of things. It is in many ways incompatible

with Marxist thought and even liberal feminist thought.

For a Marxist, for instance, capitalism causes masculine

competitiveness; if humane values are to be achieved,

capitalism itself must be eliminated. Privilege also must

be eliminated. And for a contemporary liberal feminist,

oppression is the result of traditional sex roles; liber­

ation is defined in terms of the alteration of those roles.

Feminists today do not emphasize the ways in which house­

wives can have an effect upon society. They stress, in­

stead, the importance for women of gaining positions of

power in male-dominated society. Virginia Woolf, however,

suggests that masculine competitiveness is a first cause

rather than a result of a particular economic system. She 70 also suggests that positions of power in male-dominated society are to be avoided— they will destroy the feminine principle.

If, however, we see Mrs. Dalloway as an expression of a moment in time, we can see it as an example of feminist realism. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf does demonstrate sympathy for proletarian women— women who, because of their class origins, have been deprived of an opportunity to become fully human, to become conscious.^®

And Woolf is no doubt correct in seeing that, in the early modern period, only those few women from a privileged class were educated enough to develop refined sensibil­ ities. Today, women from less privileged classes have a somewhat greater opportunity to study literature and to learn to evaluate themselves and their environment. But

Virginia Woolf was writing in a period when women, unless they were members of the aristocracy, were largely in­ visible. Women, after all, did not gain the right to vote until 1918. Virginia Woolf is no doubt also correct in seeing that the members of an upwardly mobile class are most likely to be adversely affected by destructive com­ petitiveness.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf is exploring the ways in which sensitivity may be developed given an op­ pressive social order, given the oppression of women, and given the disorientation which resulted from World War I. 71 She does sympathize with the plight of proletarian women, and she does recognize that the aristocracy was, unfor­ tunately, isolated from other classes. The portrayal of

Elizabeth reminds us, as well, that Virginia Woolf did support the alteration of traditional sex roles. The novel can be judged reactionary only if we rigidly im­ pose contemporary standards upon it. It we attempt, at least, to refrain from doing so, we can perhaps appre­ ciate some aspectsof Woolf's vision. The novel does serve as a reminder that the ultimate aim of any human en­ deavor should be the elimination of destructive human

impulses and the creation of the capacity to become sensitive to the feelings of others. NOTES

1 Charnie Guettel in Marxism & Feminism (Toronto, Canada: The Women's Press, 1974) dTscusses the "bourgeois liberalism" of radical feminism.

2 John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1970), p. 7.

3 Martha E. Gimenez, "Marxism and Feminism," Fron­ tiers, 1, No. 1 (1975), 62.

4 Herbert Marcuse, "Marxism and Feminism," WS, 2 (1974), 281.

5 Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Pri­ vate Property and the State (trans. Alec West, 1942; rpt. New York: International Publishers, 1972).

® Jane Flax, in "Do Feminists Need Marxism?" Quest, 3, No. 1 (1976), 46-57, finds that Engels does not adequate­ ly explain how the original sexual division of labor came about nor why "mother-right" was overthrown; he does not explain why cattle, etc. became the private property of men rather than women. Flax concludes, "the dynamic which Engels sees centered in property and inheritance must also be grounded in a struggle for power, in the dialectic of sex" (p. 50).

^ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1952), p. 52.

® Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1963) .

9 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Avon Books, 1970).

10 Millett, p. 43.

11 Millett, p. 53.

12 Juliet Mitchell, "The Longest Revolution," The New Left Review, No. 40 (1966), pp. 11-37.

72 73

1^ Juliet Mitchell, Woman1s Estate (New York: Vintage Books, 1971) .

1^ Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Rev­ olution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 1972); Woman's Conscious­ ness, Man's World (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1973); Hidden From History: Rediscovering Women in History From the 17th Century to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1973).

-*5 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Bantam, 1970). Another contemporary Marxist feminist is Evelyn Reed. See Problems of Women's Liberation: A Marxist Approach (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970) and Woman's Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975) . The latter is an elaboration upon, but essentially a defense of, Engels' interpretation of the origin of the woman problem. Reed has also written "In Defense of Engels on the Matriarchy," Feminism and Socialism, ed. Linda Jenness (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972). See also Green Mountain Quarterly, No. 2 (Feb. 1976) . This issue of this Marxist-oriented publication was devoted to feminism.

See Lillian S. Robinson, "Dwelling in Decencies: Radical Criticism and the Feminist Perspective," CE, 32 (May 1971); Lillian S. Robinson and Lise Vogel, "Modernism and History," N L H , 3 (1971), 177-197, rpt. in Cornillon, ed., Images of Women in Fiction, pp. 278-307 ; Lillian S. Robinson, "Who's Afraid of a Room of One's Own?" in The Politics of Literature (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), pp. 354-411, edited by Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter.

1"^ One exception is Angelika Bammer's "Toward a Feminist-Marxist Criticism," presented at the 1976 MMLA in St. Louis.

1® Stefan Morawski identifies these fundamental propositions in his introduction to Marx & Engels on Literature _& Art (St. Louis, Mo.: Telos Press, 1973), pp. 3-47. The book was edited by Morawski and Lee Baxandall.

Georg Luk^cs, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), p. 12.

20 See Morawski's introduction to Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, p. 31. 74 2-*- Lukcics, Studies in European Realism, p. 6.

22 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth- Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 398-400.

22 Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. J. Willett (London: Methuen, 1965) , rpt. in Elizabeth and Tom Burns, eds., Sociology of Literature & Drama (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 368-374.

24 Brecht, p. 371.

23 Morawski discusses both Lukcics and Marx on mimesis in his introduction to Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, p. 16. He thinks that Luk^cs is too anxious to provide Marx's concept of "Mass" with an inclusive mimetic meaning.

23 Luk^cs, Realism in Our Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 24.

27 Lukcics, Studies in European Realism, p. 218.

23 Lukcics, Studies in European Realism, p. 244.

29 See note # 25.

30 Morawski, Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, p. 9.

3^ Jameson, Marxism and Form, p. 329.

32 Jameson, p. 333.

33 Jameson, p. 189.

34 Jameson, p. 407.

35 Jameson, p. 397.

33 Jameson, p. 397.

37 Jameson, p. 390.

33 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1929).

33 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1938). Subsequent references are to this edition. 75

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1925), p. 130. All sub­ sequent references are to this edition.

Jeremy Hawthorn, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: A Study in Alienation (London: Sussex Univ. Press, 1975), p. 15.

42 Hawthorn, p. 15.

43 Hawthorn, p. 12.

44 Hawthorn, p. 15.

45 Robert Humphrey discusses Virginia Woolf's use of indirect interior monologue in his Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1954). Dorrit Cohn in "Narrated Monologue: Def­ inition of a Fictional Stvle," CL, 18, No. 2 (1966), 97-112, argues convincingly that the term, "indirect interior monologue" should be replaced by "narrated monologue" or 'brlebte Rede." Cohn stresses that the voice in erlebte Rede or narrated monologue is that of the narrator, not the character.

46 j. Hillis Miller, "Virginia Woolf's All Souls' Day: The Omniscient Narrator in Mrs. Dalloway," Melvin J. Friedman and John B. Vickery, ed., The Shaken Realist: Essays in Modern Literature in Honor of Frederick J. Hoffman (Baton Rouge, La.: La. State Univ. Press, 1970), p. 103.

47 Lee R. Edwards, "War and Roses: The Politics of Mrs. Dalloway," in Diamond and Edwards, eds., The Author­ ity of Experience, p. 162. Edwards' impressive essay is one of the few fully developed feminist interpretations of the novel. Carolyn Heilbrun's Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) devotes no more than several paragraphs to the novel. Herbert Marder does not treat the book at length in his Feminism and Art. Sydney Janet Kaplan's Feminine Consciousness in the British Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1975) discusses the novel fully. But Kaplan's analysis, though valuable, is not really a feminist one. See also O.P. Sharma, "Feminism as Aesthetic Vision: A Study of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway," WS, 3 (1975), 61-73.

48 Edwards, p. 175. 76

Alex Zwerdling, "Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System," PMLA, 92 (1977), 75. Zwerdling's rigid adher­ ence to hxs central thesis leads to a misreading of the novel. He aligns Doris Kilman and Septimus simply be­ cause they are in conflict/ with the establishment— but certainly Kilman is treated unsympathetically while Septimus is treated sympathetically. Their protests are evaluated differently. Zwerdling also fails to make distinctions between Richard Dalloway's mode of governing and Sir William Bradshaw's mode. Clearly, Dalloway's is harmless, Bradshaw's destructive. Understandably, Zwerdling has difficulty with the characterization of Clarissa. He says she is given a "pivotal" role— balancing the anesthesia of the governing class against the fervor of Septimus or Doris Kilman (p. 81). The two poles in the novel are not pro-Establishment and anti-Establishment but, rather, feminine (i.e., life- affirming) and masculine (i.e., life-denying).

99 Jeremy Hawthorn, in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, discusses Woolf's treatment of the mothers of Pimlico and other proletarian women and sees it as a manifestation of class condescension. He finds that Woolf is unsuccessful in her attempts to convey the speech-habits and conscious-1 ness of people outside her class. See p. 101. Hawthorn, however, does not recognize that Woolf intended to treat these women as less than fully human; she reserves in­ dividualized portrayals for women who are conscious of them­ selves. CHAPTER THREE

MODEL TWO: ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM

Annis Pratt has been the most visible defender of an archetypal feminist criticism. In "The New Feminist

Criticism" she explains that archetypal criticism allows one to describe the "psycho-mythological development of the female in literature.1,1 For her this involves studying heroines of fiction as passing through immanent phases of adolescent naturism, sexual initiation, marriage and childbirth in a quest for transcendence. In "Arche- 2 typal Approaches to the New Feminist Criticism" she defends an archetypal approach by contrasting it with a

Marxist approach. The central issue, as she sees it, is that for a Marxist, psychic processes are caused entirely by material determinants in the socio-economic environ­ ment and have no autonomy or life of their own. She con­ cludes, "Criticism based on analysis of the individual inner life, in this view, would be meaningless, since text does not exist aside from context or inner, psycho­ logical forms except as reflections of socio-economic 3 realities." But for Pratt, criticism based on analysis of the individual inner life is not meaningless. It is,

77 78 in fact, the center of her conception of archetypal

criticism. Pratt concludes, "It seems to me there is

room in the New Feminist Criticism...for analysis of both external-material and internal-psychic components

in women's experience as reflected in literature."^

Pratt's paper, "Archetypal Theory and Women's Fic­

tion: 1688-1975," delivered at the 1975 MLA convention,^

is a further elaboration of this position. Again, she

distinguishes between an "interior psychic landscape tra­

versed by the individual woman hero and an external, g material landscape impinging upon her." An archetypal mode of criticism, she feels, is designed to explore

this interior psychic landscape. Pratt's paper is es­

sentially a summary of the results of her research for

her forthcoming volume, Feminism and Fiction. She and

several assistants have spent the past five years reading

women's fiction written since 1688. Her conclusion is

that archetypal patterns do emerge and that the common

pattern is one of a "series of head-on clashes between

patriarchal 'society as known' and the desire of women 7 heroes for full selfhood." Such quests were usually

thwarted: "the elixir of new selfhood that they achieved

could not emerge into a society which was not constituted q to receive them and their boon." The study leads Pratt

to believe that women's fiction has not evolved or pro­

gressed but has remained static. She argues, further,

that novels written by women in different historical 79 periods have more in common than they have with novels written by men in the same historical period. She finds

sex more significant than history in the production of

literature, and she implicitly attacks the historicism of

Marxist criticism.

Unfortunately, Pratt's conclusions are questionable

because she defines archetypal criticism far too narrowly.

Her conception of it clearly derives from Jungian psychol­

ogy: the archetypal critic explores inner journeys, not

social context. Pratt also claims to have been influenc­

ed by Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism,9 and thinks

there is no essential difference between Jung's definition

of an archetype and Frye's. She says they both outline

the "psycho-mythological development of the male, as re­

flected in anthropology, mythology, and literature."^-0

Frye and Jung, however, differ considerably. Jung did not

concern himself very much with literary criticism as such,

and Frye does not explore the "internal-psychic com­

ponent" of experience as reflected in literature. Frye

is not interested in psychology but rather in literary

criticism, and, in fact, makes clear his independence

from Jung. Frye's archetypal criticism is formalist crit­

icism; it relates the particular literary work to the

literary tradition. Jungian criticism is historicist

criticism; it relates the particular literary work to

Jungian psychological principles.

Perhaps it is easiest to illustrate Pratt's critical 80 misconceptions by examining her classification of feminist criticism, provided in "The New Feminist Criticism: Ex­ ploring the History of the New Space:

Table 1. Pratt's Classification of Feminist Criticism

Criticism

I. Stereotypical— Images of wo­ men in literature

II. Archetypal— The psycho-mytho­ logical development of the fe­ male hero as reflected in pat­ terns of symbol and myth found in women's literature

III. Textual A. Explication and Generic B. The Question of Female Style Is there a distinct "Male" and "Female" style reflect­ ing distinct sexual sensibili­ ties?

IV. Contextual A. Historical— The survey of trends in women's litera­ ture as related to historical forces B. Sociological— Literature in the context of attitudes to­ ward the family, culture, etc.; literature as document

V. Ideological— Analysis of litera­ ture from a set approach, from a nonliterary body of theory, such as Marxism, Zen, etc.

VI. Bibliographical

VII. Spadework Criticism— Reviving forgotten women authors and determining why they were for­ gotten

VIII. Phallic Criticism— Exposing sexism in male critics The first problem with the classification is that the

terminology employed is idiosyncratic? Pratt's terms are not

commonly employed by literary critics and so the reader must extrapolate. It appears that "textual" criticism

involves explication of a particular text and is the equi­ valent of what is usually called New Criticism. Her

"contextual" criticism seems to be historicist criticism.

If this is the case, then other problems arise. The

classes are not mutually exclusive. If we exclude cate­

gories V and VI from consideration since bibliographical

and spadework criticism are best thought of as forms of

scholarship, then it becomes clear that all of the other

categories should fall under Categories III and IV,

textual and contextual criticism. Generic criticism,

stylistic criticism, and Frye's form of archetypal crit­

icism belong under textual criticism— usually called form­

al or formalist criticism. Stereotypical criticism, histor­

ical criticism, sociological criticism, ideological critic­

ism (including Jungian archetypal criticism) and phallic

criticism belong under contextual criticism— usually called

historicist criticism. Actually, phallic criticism is

ideological criticism, the ideology being feminism. Also,

Pratt makes no mention of other possibly productive

critical approaches such as structuralist criticism,

neo-Aristotelian criticism, phenomenological criticism,

psychoanalytic criticism, etc. A classification of potential

models for feminist criticism might bear some resemblance 82 to the following:

I. Formalist criticism A. New criticism B. Stylistic criticism C. Structuralist criticism (including Frye's archetypal criticism) D. Neo-Aristotelian criticism

II. Historicist criticism A. Marxist criticism B. Sociological criticism C. Psychoanalytic criticism D. Jungian criticism E. Stereotypical criticism F. Biographical criticism

Pratt makes the mistake of assuming that archetypal criticism and Marxist criticism differ because they ex­ amine different content. She thinks that archetypal critics focus upon the inner journeys of characters,

Marxists upon external conflicts. Both critics, however, examine the same content— but they do so in different ways.

The formalist critic is concerned with the form of the work, or with the form of a particular work as it re­

lates to other literary forms. The historicist critic

examines the relationship between a work and its socio­

economic milieu or the peculiarities of its author. One

focuses upon the work itself, the other upon forces ex­

ternal to the work.

The form of archetypal criticism I wish to explore

is a type of formalist criticism and its best representative

is Northrop Frye, a structuralist concerned with un­

covering the fundamental patterns and conventions in lit­

erary works. Frye says in Anatomy of Criticism, "The 83 aim is to give a rational account of some of the struc­ tural principles of Western literature in the context of the Classical and Christian heritage."I2 Arche­ typal criticism, then, involves a discussion of a lit­ erary work in relation to the literary tradition. Lit­ erature as a whole becomes the context within which a work is to be studied. Literary structures, according to

Frye, are patterned around quest myths, but those quests are certainly not exclusively internal and psychological as Pratt assumes. Frye explains how his approach differs from historicist approaches as follows:

Instead of fitting literature deterministically into a prefabricated scheme of history, the critic should see literature as, like a. scheme, a unified, coherent and autonomous created form, historically conditioned but shaping its own history, not determined by any external his­ torical process. This total body of literature can be studied through its larger structural principles, which I have just described as con­ ventions, genres and recurring image-groups, or archetypes. When criticism develops a proper sense of the history of literature, the history of what is not literature does not cease to exist or to be relevant to the critic. Similarly, seeing literature as a single created form does not withdraw it from a social context: on the contrary, it becomes far easier to see what its place in civilization is. Criticism will always have two aspects, one turned toward the structure of literature as a whole and one turned toward the other cultural phenomena that form its environ­ ment. Together, they balance each other; when one is worked on to the exclusion of the other, the critical perspective goes out of f o c u s . 1 3

Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, at least, is primarily

interested in the first aspect, the one turned toward

the structure of literature as a whole. His aim is to 84 look carefully at "that aspect of symbolism which re­ lates poems to one another" (p. 96), and such an as­ pect is an archetype, "a symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and inte­ grate our literary experience" (p. 99) .

According to Frye, the fundamental structures of literature are most readily identified in myth rather than in realistic works since myth is "an abstract or purely literary world of fictional and thematic design, unaffected by canons of plausible adaptation to familiar experience" (p. 136). Myth is the imitation of actions

"near or at the conceivable limits of desire" (p. 136).

It is a world of total metaphor, a world in which every­ thing is potentially identical with everything else

Cp. 136). In realistic works mythic patterns are "dis­ placed," made plausible. Hence, myth is at one extreme of the literary design, naturalism at the other. The former is the realm of the ideal, the latter of the real.

In myth we might have a sun-god or a tree-god. In real­ istic works we have sun or tree imagery. There are, then, according to Frye, four organizations of myths and arche­

typal symbols in literature: 1) undisplaced myth, a world

identified with the two contrasting worlds of heaven and hell; 2) romantic literature, literature in which mythical patterns are suggested in a world more closely associated with human experience; 3) realistic literature, literature

in which content and representation are more strongly 85 emphasized than the shape of the story; 4) ironic liter­ ature, literature which tends toward myth but which us­ ually represents the demonic rather than the apocalyptic realm.

Structures of imagery which correspond roughly to the above categories are: apocalyptic imagery, appropriate to the mythical mode; demonic imagery, appropriate to the ironic mode; and three intermediate structures cor­ responding roughly to the romantic, high mimetic, and low mimetic modes (p. 151). The high mimetic and low mimetic modes are divisions of category three above— realistic literature. Imagery of the apocalyptic world derives from the mythic portrayal of desire and takes the form of the garden, the farm, the grove, the park, the city, the sheepfold. The demonic world, in contrast, is the world that desire totally rejects, the world before the human imagination begins to work on it. It is a world of perverted or wasted work, of ruins and catacombs, of instruments of torture and monuments of folly. When structures of imagery are closest to the mythic apocalyp­ tic world, Frye associates them with the mode of romance, a mode characterized by brave heroes and beautiful heroines, of spiritual fathers, wise old men, children, purifying fire, sheep and lambs, the tower and the castle,

fertilizing rains, fountains and pools, Imagery of what

Frye calls the high mimetic mode is closer to the human

realm than is the imagery of the romantic mode. The 86 organizing ideas of the high mimetic mode are love and

form, and images are the capital city, the disciplined

river, the eagle and the lion, animals of proud beauty.

The low mimetic mode is the mode of human experience.

Images are the ordinary images of experience; the garden becomes the farm; cities take the form of the laby­

rinthine modern metropolis; water symbolism becomes the

destructive sea and fire symbolism is often ironic and

destructive.

Frye recognizes, however, that images are best dis­

cussed in terras of narrative patterns or images in ac­

tion, and so he identifies four mythoi or generic plots—

narrative categories of literature broader than, but

logically prior to, ordinary literary genres. The four

mythoi are comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony (including

satire). Tragedy and comedy are opposed pairs as are

romance and irony. But comedy may be ironic or ro­

mantic; romance may be comic or tragic; tragedy may be

romantic or ironic; irony may be tragic or comic. There

are four mythoi, then, each of which consists of six

phases or blendings with other mythoi.

According to Frye, comedy usually involves the pur­

suit of a young woman by a young man, opposition to that

pursuit, usually by a parent, and finally some twist in

the plot which enables the hero to have his will. The

movement of comedy is usually a movement from one kind of

society to another. At the beginning of the play (or 87 novel, etc.) the obstructing characters are in charge of society and the audience recognizes that they are us­ urpers. At the end of the play, the device that brings the hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero, and the moment when this crystallization occurs is the point of resolution in the action, the comic discovery. The appearance is signalled by some kind of party or festive ritual. The blocking or obstructing characters are usually controlled by some ruling passion or humor and are impostors or usurpers.

Their removal Cor conversion) results in the creation of a harmonious order which recalls a golden age in the past before the action began. Frye sees the action of comedy, then, as the equivalent of the removal of a neurosis or blocking point of an unbroken current of energy and memory.

The essential element of romance is adventure, usually a series of minor adventures leading up to a major or climacteric adventure. This adventure is a quest, and the completion of the romance is the success­ ful quest. Completion usually involves three stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; finally, the exaltation of the hero. This hero is analogous to the mythic Messiah or deliverer who comes from the upper world but confronts an enemy from a lower 88 world of winter, confusion, darkness, sterility, mori­ bund life. Victory, therefore, is usually victory over the waste land and often involves the gaining of treasure, symbol of power and wisdom, and a bride.

The center of tragedy is the isolation of the hero.

The movement is toward an epiphany of law, of that which must be. In its most elementary form the vision of law operates as revenge. The hero provokes enmity or in­ herits a situation of enmity, and the return of the a- venger constitutes the catastrophe. Sometimes the re­ venge comes from another world, through gods or ghosts or oracles. The tragic hero disturbs the balance in nature, a balance which must be righted. The instrument of neme­ sis may be human vengeance, ghostly vengeance, divine vengeance, accident, fate, or the logic of events. But tragic action is not determined by fate. Rather, it is the hero's disturbance of the internal balance of things that brings about .the instrument of nemesis; fate becomes external to the hero only after the tragic process has been set going. Nor is this disturbance of the balance of nature necessarily the result of a moral transgres­

sion. The innocent sufferer in tragedy— Iphigenia,

Cordelia, Socrates, Christ— cannot be explained in moral

terms. In tragedy there is a sense of some far-reaching mystery of which a morally intelligible process is only a part.

Frye explains irony as a parody of romance: 89 the application of romantic mythical forms to a more realistic content which fits them in unexpected ways.

Satire is irony which is structurally close to the comic.

Irony with little satire is the non-heroic residue of tragedy, centering on the theme of puzzled defeat. In irony, there is no victory over the humorous society.

Rather, inconspicuous low-norm "heroes" are contrasted with the blocking characters who are in charge of society.

This low-norm "hero" takes it for granted that the world is full of injustices, follies, anomalies, and crimes and so his deepest conviction is convention. Or, the ironic "hero" runs away to a more congenial society with­ out transforming his own. If the ironic "hero" is de­ feated, his defeat is explained in terms of social or psychological factors rather than ritual inevitability.

Human misery is made to seem superfluous. Irony in its darkest manifestation presents life in terms of unrelieved bondage and takes as its setting the prison, the mad­ house, the place of execution. It differs from the pure inferno mainly in that on earth suffering has an end in death.

Feminist critics might usefully employ Frye's arche­ typal model. A formalist approach would necessitate that the critic pay careful attention to form; such an approach should, therefore, eliminate ideologically biased inter­ pretations. Robert Boyers in his "A Case Against Feminist

Criticism" no doubt has a point when he complains that feminist criticism is not always precise or even honest.

He says, feminist criticism should be "distinguished by intellectual candor and some degree of precision. This 14 I have failed to discover in most feminist criticism."

Some of the early feminist interpretations of works did reveal more about the politics of the critic than about the complexity of the work under consideration. James

R. Kincaid in "There Are No Women in Literature— Only

Words," identifies what he calls the "criticism militant," the individual who is so interested in a particular cause

(in this case, feminism) that s/he distorts or over­

simplifies the work of literature.15 Kincaid calls for a

formalist feminist criticism and argues that historicist

feminist critics "accept too readily the notion that art

is a product of its society and author and...underplay or ignore the connections between art and art."15 Arche­

typal criticism is, by definition, concerned with the rel­

ationship between art and other art and would (or should)

encourage readings which allow the work to speak for itself.

The feminist critic, after all, is primarily concerned

with identifying feminist and sexist elements in works.

Those elements will remain hidden if interpretations

are superficial or simplistic.

Frye's model must be modified, however, before it may be applied to feminist or sexist works. The model it­

self tends to be male-biased. Frye deals almost ex­

clusively with works in which protagonists are heroes 91 rather than heroines and ignores almost completely the increasingly numerous works in which women rather than men undergo archetypal journeys. Annis Pratt re­ cognizes Frye's limitations in this regard. She says,

Another critic important to my early literary training was Northrop Frye. But what does Frye say about the typical poet? "The poet," Frye asserts, "who writes creatively rather than de­ liberately, is not the father of his poem. He is at best a midwife, or more accurately still, the womb of Mother Nature herself. Her privates he, so to speak." Here, it seemed, the critic had got his telescope backward, or, at least, that he was not looking at it through my end. Do I, then, as a woman poet, write from the phal­ lus of Father Nature, his privates I, "so to speak."?17

Frye, in the passage quoted, at least, assumes that all poets are men. His observations in Anatomy of Criticism are accurate in terms of a male-dominated literary tra­ dition, but do not always apply to contemporary feminist literature.

Frequently, for instance, feminist works explore the potential oppressiveness, for women, of the institution of marriage. They do not, therefore, resolve comic struc­

tures in the traditional way. Nor would the heroine of

romance demonstrate physical prowess or be rewarded with lft the acquisition of a bride. Marge Piercy's Small Changes,

for instance, is in some ways patterned upon comic models.

It describes the development of two women, Beth and Miriam,

women who must define themselves in relation to the tra­

ditional institution of marriage. Miriam accepts the insti­

tution , marries, has two children, and eventually becomes 92 divorced; her portrayal demonstrates that the institution itself is damaging to women. In getting married she gives up the possibility of having a successful career.

Beth, in contrast, escapes from a suffocating marriage at the beginning of the novel, experiments with different life-styles throughout the novel, and enters into a lesbian "marriage" by the end of the work. It is clear that Beth has chosen correctly and that Miriam must sort out the elements in her confused life bv learning from Beth. This "comic" resolution is by no means a traditional one.

Feminists who employ Frye's archetypal approach may discover that most feminist works are ironic ones.

Critics have observed, for instance, that many feminist works examine the chaos of women's lives and present no satisfying resolutions of conflicts. Ironic works center on puzzled defeat; in irony there is no victory over

the humorous society, in this case, male-dominated society.

The numbers of feminist works that fit this description

are legion: Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, and The Edible

Woman, Plath's The Bell Jar, Lessing's The Golden Note­

book, The Grass is Singing, etc., Kate Chopin's The

Awakening, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall­

paper , Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, Kate Millett's

Flying, etc., etc.-^ It is difficult to think of a feminist

work that does not fit this pattern— perhaps Small Changes.

Frye contends that archetypes are universal symbols, 93 images "common to all men" (p. 118) . These symbols include food and drink, the quest or journey, light and darkness, sexual fulfillment, which usually takes the form of marriage. Feminists might agree that food and drink are indeed universal symbols and that the jour­ ney motiv is common to men and women. But certainly there is no reason to believe that sexual fulfillment must necessarily be associated with marriage or that sexual fulfillment is even the most important kind of fulfillment. Experiential reality in the twentieth century is forcing men and women to re-examine tradition­ al structures and to re-define what is universal and what is not. Feminist literature alters traditional structures.

It demonstrates that women infrequently achieve freedom in this society, but that when they do, this often necessitates alterations of traditional institutional structures. An archetypal feminist criticism would, then, identify pregeneric mythoi in literary works. But exam­ ination of a particular text would also involve mod­ ification of the original model. MRS. DALLOWAY

Mrs. Dalloway contains within itself its own fem­ inist mythology. The "battered woman" standing op­ posite the Regent's Park Tube station is the modern man­ ifestation of an eternal feminine principle. This battered woman once, in some primeval May, walked with her lover and sang an ancient song of eternal love, a song which was life-giving. The passage of ages, how­ ever, has blurred the clarity of that May day and her lover has died. The bright petalled flowers have be­ come "hoar and silver frosted" (p. 124) and the woman no longer sees the brown eyes and black whiskers of her lover but only a "looming shape, a shadow shape" (p.

124). She has become frail, a tall quivering shape

"like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten

tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run

up and down its branches" (p. 122) . Her voice quivers

and bubbles up "without direction, vigour, beginning

or end, running weakly and shrilly and with the ab­

sence of all human meaning" (p. 122). It is the voice

of no age or sex. The battered woman is the frail trans­

mitter of an ancient song of love. When she dies the

94 95

"pageant of the Universe" will be over.

The battered woman serves as a reminder that in modern times the eternal feminine principle is weak­ ening and may soon die. In some golden mythical past an androgynous masculine and feminine principle nur­ tured each other and together formed a harmonious and potent source of love. The masculine element has died, however, an indication that masculinity has ceased to be a life-affirming force, and the feminine principle has became a sexless "rusty pump." The battered woman is the modern displacement of a mythical past and serves as a symbol for Virginia Woolf's entropic vision. Civ­ ilization itself is on the decline, is battered, and mo­ dern women must attempt to prop it up. The feminine prin­ ciple must not be allowed to fade away as has the mas­ culine principle. If it does, civilization will come to on an end because love will cease to exist.

This myth informs the novel. Clarissa Dalloway can be seen as the modern manifestation of this feminine

principle— life-affirming, yet weakened and approaching

death. Like the battered woman, Clarissa is relatively

sexless; she is described as nun-like and virginal.

Clarissa is a heroine in the low mimetic mode, a heroine

who must struggle to overcome a death-wish and destruc­

tive hatreds and jealousies. The novel, then, portrays

the attempt of an entire culture to survive. Clarissa

is the human embodiment of the feminine principle whose fragility is the fragility of civilization itself. Her bout with influenza is paralleled by the world war; both she and society are attempting to recover from nearly devastating blows. Septimus, Clarissa's Doppelganger, is the equivalent of the "shadow shape" of the deceased masculine principle. Her identification with him serves as a reminder that she is not far removed from madness 21 or death. Mrs. Dalloway, then, is best seen as an irony with comic, romantic, and tragic elements— elements which are often (though not always) parodic and so reinforce the ironic structure. The informing myth of the novel is one of bondage and progression toward death. The novel does suggest that freedom is possible, but that freedom is only momentary, a temporary interruption of the process of decline. The comic world of innocence is present in the novel, but usually only to serve as a reminder that in­ nocence has been lost.

The novel begins with a celebration of life usually

associated with comedy. Clarissa likens the freshness of

the morning to the freshness of children on a beach. This

is the world of innocence. Her interior monologue con­

tinues, "What a larkl What a plunge!" (p. 3), expressions

of exuberance also associated with comedy. But Clarissa

begins to digress, to think of Bourton, her father's

country home, and she remembers having felt, on a par­

ticular day thirty years before, that "something awful was 97 about to happen" (p. 3). The reader learns subsequently that on that day Peter Walsh proposed to her and she re­ fused him. The comedy is suddenly darkened. In the world of the novel, awful things can happen. We then learn that

Clarissa has been ill and that the war has taken the lives of children of acquaintances of hers and that Hugh

Whitbread's wife is in the hospital. This is not the world of children on a beach but rather of sickness and devastation. We can see this juxtaposition between comedy and irony in the following passage:

But what was she dreaming as she looked into Hatchards' shop window? What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open: Fear no more the heat o' the sun Nor the furious winter's rages. This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing (p. 13).

Clarissa attempts to recover the world of innocence, of white dawn in the country, but such a world is gone forever. All men and women must participate in a world of experience; all inhabit a vale of tears and all must endure by maintaining a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. The juxtaposition serves to heighten the ironic structure.

The passage is significant because it introduces the most important leitmotiv in the novel, the lines from

Cymbeline, "Fear no more the heat o' the sun/ Nor the furious winter's rages." The leitmotiv itself contains both comic and ironic elements. The lines advise,

"Fear no more," but at the same time they admit that the heat of the sun and the winter's rages are usually feared, probably for good reason. In the play the lines are sung rather than spoken. They are the first two lines of a dirge sung in honor of Imogen (disguised as Fidele), daughter of Cymbeline, King of Britain. In the play, however, there is every reason to "fear no more." Imogen is not actually dead but rather drugged; she will awaken.

The singers of the song are, unknown to her or them, actually her brothers. Imogen has no reason to fear life or death since she is young and healthy. The world of

Cymbeline is a comic one. Imogen is eventually united with her loved one, Posthumus; the blocking characters, the queen, her son Cloten, and Iachimo, an Italian who rather gratuitously plots to prove Imogen unfaithful to

Posthumus, are killed or converted; Cymbeline is united with his long-lost sons. In Cymbeline, reality is better

than it seems; death is actually life. In Mrs. Dalloway,

in contrast, reality is worse than it seems; life is

actually death. Clarissa has to constantly remind her­

self to "fear no more." In fact, she has every reason

to fear life and death and the passing of time. The lines,

then, serve an ironic function by contrasting the world

of the novel with the comic world of the play.

Indeed, it is possible to see the novel as a parody

of the play. The imagery of the two works is remarkably similar: light/darkness, flowers, summer/winter (the play, like the novel, is set in summer), birds (even beaked ones), prisons. And in Mrs. Dalloway there are similar shifts in setting from England to Italy. But

in Cymbeline Rome is the imperial power, Britain the colony; in Mrs. Dalloway London is the center of the uni­ verse, the empire, and Italy is represented by Rezia,

an unsophisticated individual unable to cope with London or with modern life. 9 9 In Mrs. Dalloway the comic and

triumphant love of Imogen and Posthumus becomes the

ironic and frustrated love of Peter Walsh and Clarissa.

Clarissa's father "blocks" the relationship, but we are made to feel that he does so wisely. Besides, Clarissa

herself prefers Richard Dalloway. Peter's "banishment,"

then, is a parody of Posthumus' banishment. Peter does

not deserve Clarissa. In Cymbeline, Imogen disguises her­

self as a young boy in order to meet her lover. In Mrs.

Dalloway Clarissa's confusion of sexual identity is no

disguise; her most intense experience of love is homo­

sexual rather than heterosexual. Also, in Cymbeline it is

the doctor, Cornelius, who is responsible for saving

Imogen's life, indirectly at least. He controverted the

queen's order by substituting sleeping potion for poison

and so Imogen is not killed, but rather, merely put to

sleep temporarily. But in Mrs. Dalloway the doctor,

Sir William Bradshaw, is a villain; he is responsible for 100 Septimus' suicide. In Cymbeline the innocent live and the guilty die. But in Mrs. Dalloway, in contrast, the innocent die and the guilty live. Finally, forces that control the universe are benevolent in the play; the gods watch over man and Jupiter even makes an appearance on stage. In Mrs. Dalloway the gods, if they exist at all, are malevolent.22

Mrs. Dalloway invites comparison with tragic form as well, but again, the form is usually parodied. Jacqueline

E. M. Latham, in "Archetypal Figures in Mrs. Dalloway,11

finds that Septimus is portrayed as a Prometheus figure and cites the following evidence: he is a scapegoat figure; he is described as a "criminal," an "eternal sufferer," a "victim," an individual "straying on the edge' of the world." Avrom Fleishman sees Septimus as representing the archetype of the scapegoat. According to Fleishman, the

scapegoat is excluded from society and his exclusion re­

affirms the organic ties of the group.24 But surely,

Septimus is an ironic hero rather than a tragic hero. His

death does not unify society— Holmes and Bradshaw remain

unchanged by his suicide. Clarissa alone is altered by

his act of defiance. Septimus thinks, "It is I who am

blocking the way" (p. 21), but it is really Holmes and

Bradshaw who are blocking the way toward a better society,

and at the end of the novel they have not been disposed

of or incorporated into a rejuvenated order. 101

The tragic hero is a lightning rod figure, one

standing halfway between the gods and men. Septimus, in contrast, is a low mimetic figure whose god-like qual­

ities are delusions of grandeur. He is like the drowned

Phoenician sailor of the Waste Land, the "last relic

straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world" (p. 140).

Having "committed an appalling crime and been condemned

to death by human nature" (p. 145) , Septimus surrenders to

the destructive forces of the world. The narrator tells us, "He gave in" (p. 136) . Holmes is summoned because

Septimus can no longer struggle against an alien world; his

crime is that he is human; his punishment is inexplic­

able death. Septimus recognizes that "it might be pos­

sible that the world itself is without meaning" (p. 133).

It is clear from the tone of the narrator that we are not

to take the scapegoat role entirely seriously:

Look the unseen bade him, the voice which now communicated with him who was the greatest of mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness (p. 37).

This is the conception of a madman rather than a hero. And

Septimus' rejection of his eternal suffering is in direct

contrast to the acceptance of the suffering of the tragic 102 hero. It is difficult to imagine Prometheus putting off his loneliness with a wave of his hand. Septimus does not rebel as does Prometheus; his defiance is not the equiva­ lent of giving to mankind the gift of fire. Nor does he have superhuman visionary powers. Beverly Ann Schlack is certainly correct when she argues that Septimus "is too palpably psychotic to have the rational and ethical di­ mensions which Christ figures and Socratic martyrs usually possess. His spontaneous suicide is just not the same kind 2 6 of moral emblem as a Crucifixion." Septimus poses as a tragic hero. He is able to do so because he is highly literate and carries within him tragic plots, tragic phrases. But his literary fragments do not raise him to the stature of a tragic hero. It is only when he defies

Holmes and Bradshaw and the human condition itself and commits suicide that his posture ceases to be a pose. But his heroism is only momentary and it certainly does not reverberate as does Hamlet’s or Lear's.

If Cymbeline provides a comic frame which brings into relief Clarissa's ironic world, Antony and Cleopatra provides a tragic frame which brings into relief Septimus' ironic world. It is this play which Septimus studies with

Miss Isabel Pole, and it is this play which he returns to after the war and which convinces him that Shakespeare loathed humanity. Septimus is a parody of Antony. Both were soldiers and both became involved with foreign women.

But Antony is a triumvir, one of the most important men in 103 the Roman Empire— his actions determine the fate of a nation. Septimus is merely a clerk, a would-be poet who is destroyed by the war. Antony is ruled by his passions; he abandons his wife for the voluptuous Cleopatra and in so doing bringsabout his own downfall. But Septimus is passionless— his crime is that he cannot feel. He marries

Rezia after he discovers that he is incapable of experienc­ ing love. Also, Antony commits suicide because he is about to be defeated in battle and because he thinks Cleopatra is dead— his deed is perceived as an act of courage and serves to redeem him from his cowardice in battle.

Septimus, in contrast, had been manly in battle— he re­ turned from the war a hero; he commits suicide be­ cause he is trapped by Holmes and Bradshaw, but his suicide is perceived as an act of cowardice. After Septimus flings himself on to Mrs. Filmer's railings, Holmes cries, "The coward" (p. 226). In Antony and Cleopatra manliness and and success in battle are heroic and even suicide is per­ ceived as courageous. In Mrs. Dalloway manliness and success in battle lead to psychic disorientation. Heroism, if it is possible at all, takes a negative form— suicide— and such acts are perceived as being cowardly.

Clarissa is also different in significant ways from a tragic heroine. She remembers the line from Othello,

"if it were now to die 'twere now to be most happy"

(p. 51) as she prepares to meet Sally Seton. But the feeling does not have the tragic intensity of Othello's 104 passionate love. Clarissa is characterized by passion­ lessness rather than passion, and she does not die for love; she sleeps apart from her husband and has disap­ pointed him numerous times. Clarissa is also contrasted with the tragic heroine when she retreats to her tower upon learning that Lady Bruton has not invited her to lunch.

The narrator says:

She began to go slowly upstairs, with her hand on the bannisters, as if she had left a party, where now this friend now that had flashed back her face, her voice; had shut the door and gone out and stood alone, a single figure against the appalling night, or rather, to be accurate, against the stare of this matter-of- fact June morning (p. 45).

The image of the figure standing alone in the face of the appalling night is the figure of the defiant tragic heroine. But in Mrs. Dalloway the appalling night is the matter-of-fact June day. Everyone in the novel faces the fear of isolation and death and so everyone is heroic— or

no one is heroic. The passage foreshadows Clarissa's

epiphanic identification with Septimus at the end of the

novel. Only then does she bear some resemblance to the

tragic heroine; she vicariously defies life itself by

accepting Septimus' death. At the same time, paradoxically,

she accepts the process of life and ceases to fear death.

The genre of romance is parodied as well. Peter

Walsh, for instance, embarks upon a romantic journey as

he crosses Trafalgar Square. He pursues an "enchanting"

but unknown woman. But, unlike romance, this pursuit is perhaps of a woman not entirely "respectable." In ro­ mance, the reward of the successful quest is often a pure virgin. Peter's adventure takes him across Piccadilly and up Regent Street to Oxford Street and Great Portland

Street where the mysterious woman bids Peter farewell by glancing in his direction and disappearing into her house.

The quest is frustrated— the romantic buccaneer is re­ jected. Clarissa's journeys are also parodies of journeys of heroes of romance. When she returns from purchasing flowers for her party, her servant, Lucy, takes her para­ sol and handles it "like a sacred weapon which a Goddess, having acquitted herself honourably in the field of battle, sheds" (pp. 43-44) and places it in the umbrella stand.

Kenneth Ames argues that such passages are evidence of neo-classical mock-heroic devices similar to those used by

Pope in The Rape of the Lock. He finds that such devices may be seen as "an ironic detachment in Clarissa herself which she deliberately creates to avoid being hurt by the world.The tone of the line is mock-heroic. But it is the narrator who is detached, not Clarissa. The narrator sometimes chooses to view Clarissa's activities from a distance and with a smile.

But the battle metaphor is occasionally used in a more serious way. Clarissa's interior monologue consists, fre­ quently, of internal struggles with individuals who threaten her, usually Doris Kilman or Peter Walsh. For Clarissa,

Miss Kilman is "one of those spectres with which one battles 106 in the night" (p. 17). Her daughter's tutor has become some monster within her, some weakness which she must at­ tempt to eliminate. Clarissa's hatred for the woman

gave her physical pain, and made all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and making her home delightful rock, quiver, and bend as if indeed there were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of content were nothing but self love! (p. 17).

Doris Kilman, or really the idea of Doris Kilman, is the equivalent of the forces of evil with which the hero of romance must contend. She is described as "some pre­ historic monster armoured for primeval warfare" (p. 190), and as a soul on the threshold of the underworld (p. 203).

But Clarissa's victory over this monster is not a deci­ sive one. She does succeed in separating her daughter and the tutor: Elizabeth will not become a religious fanatic and, toward the end of the novel, does reject her history teacher. But even so, Clarissa cannot eliminate the idea of Doris Kilman, i.e., she cannot totally eliminate her own hatred. In the middle of her party she is reminded of Doris Kilman: "Kilman her enemy. That was satisfying? that was real. Ah, how she hated her— hot, hypocritical, corrupt; with all that power; Elizabeth's seducer; the wo­ man who had crept in to steal and defile (Richard would

say, What nonsense!). She hated her: she loved her. It was enemies one wanted, not friends..." (p. 266). Clarissa's

conflicts cannot be resolved as can the battles of

romance heroes largely because they are essentially 107

internal ones. The monsters of the underworld are never

entirely defeated. In Mrs. Dalloway the wasteland lives within each character in the form of sexual sterility and

neurosis. Clarissa's tower is not the protected realm of

innocence of the romance heroine, but a retreat, a symbol

of her frigidity. In the novel the wasteland is not

renewed.

If Mrs. Dalloway is primarily ironic in form, it is

still not a portrayal of total bondage. It does end,

after all, with a party, traditionally a comic resolution.

And it does contain moments of vision, moments of freedom.

I would argue, however, that Mrs. Dalloway depicts a

world in which freedom is extremely limited, a world in which chaos and confusion are the rule, temporary freedom

the exception. The world of flux, of transition, is

symbolized in the novel by the image of the wave:

So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and re­ news, begins, collects, lets fall (pp. 58-59).

The waves of the sea become a symbol of the inevitability

of death. Life itself collects, overbalances and falls.

The individual has no choice but to accept this reality.

The body which lies in the sun on the beach learns "that

is all," there is no afterlife, only the incessant pound­

ing of the waves. The individual will "fear no more" 108 only by accepting this reality, by committing the heart's bur­ den to the sea. The movement of the waves is the equivalent of the passing of time. Life passes and brings about de­ day, deterioration. The sounding of Big Ben throughout the novel is a reminder of the inevitability of death.

The redemptive "moments" of the novel must be seen in relation to this pervasive ebb and flow of time, this ceaseless process of deterioration. The moments of in­ tense spirituality are usually simply temporary releases

from clock time and its concomitant, mortality. They are not, as some critics have maintained, evidence of another order entirely, a tranacendent realm of timelessness.

Carolyn Wilkerson Bell, in her dissertation, "A Study of

Virginia Woolf's 'Moment of Vision,"' defines the moment as "that fleeting apprehension of a stable reality which 2 8 transcends the flux of ordinary clock and calendar time."

Morris Beja in his Epiphany in the Modern Novel sees

these moments as "secular mystical experiences" in which

the person feels himself "outside of time, in eternity;

he experiences irrational enlightenment, a new awareness 2Q of something that cannot be explained." But m Mrs.

Dalloway, there is no "stable reality," no eternity, or

even feelings of eternity. There is no still center. Very

often the "reality" that the individual experiences is

the recognition of and the acceptance of absurdity. Or,

at best, the individual comes in closer contact with the 109 physical world, with the beauty of nature, or with other people.

The first such important moment takes place at the end of the first section of the novel when Clarissa enters a flower shop. The flowers overwhelm her and she partakes of their beauty. They also spark her imagination and she is transported to the "moment between six and seven when every flower— roses, carnations, irises, lilac— glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds" (p. 18).

Clarissa's epiphanic moment involves the imaginative re­ creation of the time when flowers are most essentially themselves. She is not given a vision of a stable reality.

Rather, she recognizes the transitoriness of the beauty of nature. The period between seven and eight is unlike the period between six and seven— the passing of time destroys the beautiful moments of life. Clarissa gives herself over more completely to the flowers in Miss Pym's shop, and they serve as a balm: "as if this beauty, this scent, this

colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred,

that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and

up when— oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!"(p. 19).

Clarissa's exquisite moment is interrupted; all moments

are interrupted.

Later in the novel the narrator describes another

exquisite moment, Clarissa's intense infatuation for Sally 110 Seton:

?..she did undoubtedly then feel what men felt. 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 some 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 seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over— the moment (p. 47).

The description is similar to the description of the moment mentioned above. In both, Clarissa yields and

allows the experience to spread over her. And in both,

the experience alleviates pain, if only temporarily.

It is important to note, however, that an inner meaning

is "almost" expressed. It cannot actually be expressed

because it does not exist. There is no inner meaning,

only the here and now, the outer experience. The image of

the match burning in a crocus is an appropriate one; the

illumination can last no longer than the burning of a

match. It will be extinguished. The burning of a match

can also be taken as a symbol of the lifespan of an in­

dividual; it too must come to an end.

Clarissa's climactic identification with Septimus is

strikingly similar to these two earlier moments. She

initiates the experience by retreating to the empty room

and reflecting upon the suicide. And, again, the ex­

perience brings about a temporary relief from her own 1 1 1 conflicts, from the pain of living. The suicide be­ comes "her disaster— her disgrace" (p. 282). She recognizes that she has been weak— "she had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success" (p. 282). Clarissa comes to accept herself and the inescapability of her own death, a problem which had been plaguing her throughout the day and which she had attempted to evade. She parts the curtains and sees (and is seen by) the old lady across the way, a woman going to bed, alone. Clarissa actually sees her­ self in the future— an isolated old woman, and she accepts the inevitability of old age and the inevitability of her own extinction:

The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the sun (p. 283) .

The old lady putting out the light is the equivalent of the match burning in the crocus going out. Clarissa learns to "Fear no more" by imaginatively recreating her own old age and her own extinction.

The moments do not present an alternative to the

ironic world; they represent an acceptance of it. Sim­

ilarly, the party is the temporary creation of com­ munity in a world where permanent community is impossible.

Jean 0. Love, in her Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic

Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf, finds that 112 at the party there is an "indiscriminate mingling and, finally, fusion into a single whole of persons from dif- 30 ferent social strata." But the guests are not from dif­ ferent social strata— there is a clear line of demarca­ tion between the servants and the others, and Doris

Kilman does not attend. Nor is there a "fusion into a single whole." Certainly the appearance of Peter, Sally

Seton, and even Aunt Helena represents some continuation of a golden past of "white dawn in the country" when the protagonists were young and passionate, but the party can­ not recreate the past. Rather, it serves as a reminder of loss, of time having irrevocably passed.^ The final image is of a single individual, Clarissa, rather than of a community. Peter's exaltant, "For there she was" (p.

296) underscores Clarissa's physical presence— she has not yet reached the moment of her own extinction. But it does not emphasize Clarissa's unity with the other members of > the gathering. Clarissa has become whole largely as a re­ sult of her solitary epiphany. Her parties do not serve to unify society. They are important because they provide her an opportunity to make an "offering" in a universe in which there is no God— no recipient of the gift. The parties are an offering for the sake of an offering— an acceptance of absurdity, and Clarissa is an existential heroine who acts in the face of meaninglessness.

The patterns of comedy, romance, and even tragedy 113 allow for social renewal. In all three, blocking figures are eliminated in order for society to be reunited. In irony there is usually no renewal of society. Blocking characters continue to block; individuals remain isolated from one another. The only possibility for communion is

for the individual to search for it on her/his own, to accept it when it appears accidentally and temporarily, and to create situations in which it may come about, again perhaps only temporarily. Peter Walsh explains Clarissa's strategy for overcoming alienation:

Clarissa had a theory in those days— they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftsbury Ave­ nue, she felt herself everywhere; not "here, here, here"; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftsbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind the counter— even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary com­ pared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death...perhaps— perhaps (pp. 231-232).

We know that Clarissa still adheres to her theory be­

cause early in the novel she herself articulates a

similar position (p. 12). Her answer to the problems of 114 mortality and isolation is that the individual is com­ posed of both seen and unseen parts and that the unseen aspect is immortal and becomes unified with other people and with the environment. The novel itself demonstrates that this is so. Clarissa completes Septimus and vice versa. Her unseen part is her mind, her memory. The process of thought itself allows her to overcome her iso­ lation. But it does so only occasionally and only tem­ porarily; this unity of conscionsness only partially miti­ gates the painfulness of the human condition.

Peter Walsh explains how Clarissa's unseen part has affected him:

Looking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years her theory worked to this extent. Brief, broken, often painful as their actual meetings had been what with his absences and interruptions... the effect of them on his life was immeasurable. There was a mystery about it. You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfort­ able grain— the actual meeting; horribly pain­ ful as often as not; yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and understanding, after years of lying lost. Thus she had come to him; on board ship; in the Himalayas; suggested by the oddest things...She had influenced him more than any person he had ever known (pp. 232-233).

What Peter describes is a redeeming moment, or a series of redeeming moments, in which he has communicated with

the unseen part of Clarissa. His memory of her is des­

cribed in terms of the blossoming of a flower. Clarissa herself, then, becomes the equivalent of the flowers in

Miss Pym's shop, the agents of Clarissa's first exquisite moment. She continues to nourish Peter even though they 115 have been separated by miles and years. If, then, Mrs.

Dalloway in any way affirms a comic view of things, it does so in a highly unusual way. It is not the party that provides a glimpse of a world of unity and freedom.

The externals— the social structure, human interaction, warfare, the striking of the clock— remain unchanged in the novel. The informing myth of the battered woman re­ minds us that civilization is on the decline. But the individual can experience momentary pleasure and can give momentary pleasure to others. Redemption, if it is pos­ sible at all, takes place within the fragile conscious­ ness of the individual. But even this form of redemp­ tion will cease to be a possibility if the feminine prin­ ciple is extinguished. Women such as Clarissa Dalloway must continue to nurture the "unseen part" of the in­ dividual— the private soul. The fate of civilization de­ pends upon it. NOTES

Annis Pratt, "The New Feminist Criticism," CE, 32 (May 1971), 877.

2 Annis Pratt, "Archetypal Approaches to the New Feminist Criticism," B u R , 21, No. 1 (19 73), 3-14.

Pratt, "Archetypal Approaches," p. 10.

4 Pratt, "Archetypal Approaches," p. 14.

5 Annis Pratt, "Archetypal Theory and Women's Fiction: 1688-1975," presented at the Women's Caucus Panel, "Theory of Feminist Criticism."

® Pratt, "Archetypal Theory," p. 12.

7 Pratt, "Archetypal Theory," p. 7.

8 Pratt, "Archetypal Theory," p. 7.

^ Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957).

^ Pratt, "Archetypal Approaches," p. 3.

H Annis Pratt, "The New Feminist Criticisms: Ex­ ploring the History of the New Space," in Joan L. Roberts, ed., Beyond Intellectual Sexism: A New Woman, A New Reality (New York: Davie McKay Co. Inc., 1976), pp. 175-195. The table as shown is incomplete; Pratt also includes examples of the particular modes of criticism.

12 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 133. Subsequent references are to the Princeton Univ. Press edition noted above.

Northrop Frye, "The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism," Daedalus, 99 (1970) , excerpted as "The Social Context of Literary Criticism," in Elizabeth and Tom Burns, ed., Sociology of Literature and Drama (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books Inc., 1973), p. 147.

116 117

^ Robert Boyers, "A Case Against Feminist Criticism," Partisan Review, 43 (1976), 610.

James R. Kincaid, "There Are No Women in Liter­ ature— Only Words," presented at the Pioneers for Century III Convention, Cincinnati, Ohio, April, 1976, p. 2.

15 Kincaid, p. 2.

17 Pratt, "The New Feminist Criticisms: Exploring the History of the New Space," p. 179.

18 Marge Piercy, Small Changes (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Pub., Inc., 1972). 1 Q Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1972); Atwood, The Edible Woman (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969); Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1971); Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1962); Lessing, The Grass is Singing (N.Y.: Popular Library, 1950); Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899; rpt. N.Y.: Capricorn Books, 1964); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (1890; rpt. Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 19 73); Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (N.Y.: The New American Library, 1973); Kate Millett, Flying (N.Y.: Ballantine Books, 1974).

20 O.P. Sharma, in her "Feminism as Aesthetic Vision: A Study of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway," briefly discusses the battered woman, as does Avrom Fleishman in his Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975), but neither emphasizes the way in which the figure represents the deterioration of the feminine principle through the ages. Sharma, for example, sees her as the "immortal and disembodied joy of living" (p. 72). Clearly, though, she is neither disembodied nor joyous. Jean M. Wyatt, in "Mrs. Dalloway: Literary Allusion as Structural Metaphor," PMLA, 88 (1973), 440-451, sees the woman as the earth-mother who mourns her dead lover in the Adonis lament (p. 442). Wyatt finds that the woman is the manifestation of nature's regenerative power (p. 443). She also thinks the episode is a self-enclosed interlude (p. 442) and that this sexless figure is a symbol of "fertility it­ self." But the interlude is not self-enclosed, and the woman is as much a symbol of degeneration as regeneration.

2^ That Septimus and Clarissa are doubles is by now a critical commonplace. Beverly Ann Schlack in "A Freudian Look at Mrs. Dalloway," L&P, 23 (1973), 49-58, finds that Septimus is the death-wish to Clarissa's life-instinct and her ego's id (p. 51). 118

22 Katherine K. Blunt says in "Jay and Hawk: Their Song, and Echoes in Mrs. Dalloway," VWQ, 2, No. 3-4 (1976), "To think of Mrs. Dalloway in the context of Cymbeline is to trace, behind its transparent surface impressions of London, the shadows of all England and the Roman world, and to extend the duration of its day, measured in clock time, endlessly to before even the near legendary British King Cunobelinus at the beginning of the Christian era, back to the times of the pre- Republic Tarquins with their testing and raping of Lucrece. The characteristics of the romantic plot of Cymbeline (the wager, the denial of the villain, the deceptive tokens, the attempt of the husband to punish infidelity by death, the wanderings of the heroine in dis­ guise, the final reconciliation), a plot much like that of Boccaccio's ninth novel of the second day of the Decameron, appear often in all European literature so far back in time a date cannot be pinned down. Many of these plot features are in Othello whose lines Clarissa recalls as she thinks of her love for Sally. The motif of the cruel stepmother (in the Queen's relationship to Cloten and Imogen) exists early in German folklore and, with the cave element, recalls the fairy tale of Little Snow-White" (pp. 317-318). Blunt suggests elsewhere in the article that Septimus' name derives from Hawthorne's Septimus Felton. Blunt's essay is a very useful account of the many literary reverberations of the novel.

22 jean M. Wyatt in "Mrs. Dalloway: Literary Allusion as Structural Metaphor" finds that the parallels between the novel and the play underscore the comic themes of the . novel. She says, 'Cymbeline celebrates the rebirth of his entire family at the end of the play...So in Mrs. Dalloway the theme of death and rebirth radiates from the exper­ iences of various characters to converge on a last scene of rebirth" (p. 442). But the rebirth in Mrs. Dalloway is different in significant ways from the rebirth in Cymbeline. It is fragile, temporary— hardly comic.

24 Jacqueline E. M. Latham, "Archetypal Figures in Mrs. Dalloway," NM , 71 (1970), 480-488; Fleishman, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading, p. 77.

25 Fleishman draws this comparison. See p. 77.

26 Schlack, "A Freudian Look at Mrs. Dalloway,11 p. 56.

27 Kenneth J. Ames, "Elements of Mock-Heroic in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway," MFS, 18 (1972), 364. 119

28 Carolyn Wilkerson Bell, "A Study of Virginia Woolf's 'Moment of Vision,"' Univ. of Texas, Austin 1972, p. vi.

29. Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modefn Novel (Seattle, Wash.: Univ. of Washington Press, 1971), p. 123.

2° Jean 0. Love, Worlds in Consciousness: Mytho­ poetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1970), p. 158.

Morris Philipson in "Mrs. Dalloway, 'What's the Sense of Your Parties?'" CritI, 1 (1974),123-148, observes that "Mrs. Dalloway's party offers the sym­ bolic ritual for integration to those for whom the mythology of a religion cannot supply symbols for trans­ formation and integration, to those for whom there are extremely few images through which to see themselves whole. Rituals are symbols in action" (p. 132). The party is a ritual, but it does not achieve integration in the way a religious ritual might. Philipson is incorrect when he asserts that the participants in the party are "believers" in Clarissa's values (pp. 130-131). Bradshaw and Ellie Henderson are not "believers." There is an underlying discordant note at the party, symbolized by the quarrel between Professor Brierly and Jim Hutton. Clarissa "meant to have dancing" (p. 270) at the party, but has forgotten about it. Dancing would have symbolized social harmony— its absence is an in­ dication of disharmony. CHAPTER FOUR

MODEL THREE: NEO-ARISTOTELIAN CRITICISM

Neo-Aristotelian criticism, also known as pluralist criticism or Chicago criticism,^- is formalist criticism, but it differs in significant ways from the formalism of

Northrop Frye. R. S. Crane, in his The Languages of Crit­ icism and the Structure of Poetry, explains that his criticism is concerned with "the forming principle or immediate shaping cause of structure in individual poems."

Whereas Frye situates the particular work in the liter­ ary tradition, Crane and other neo-Aristotelians identify the form of an individual work in reference to the con­ ditions of its intended effect— the form being the unique creation of an individual author. Crane explains the assumptions underlying his method: "We shall assume that any poetic work, like any other production of human art, has, or rather is, a definite structure of some kind which is determined immediately by its writer's intuition of a form to be achieved in its materials by the right use of his medium, and, furthermore, that we can arrive at some understanding of what this form actually is and use our

120 121 understanding as a principle in the analysis and crit­ icism of the work" (p. 165). Crane, unlike Frye, stresses the uniqueness of the individual work and the importance of the choices of the individual author in the creation of the work; for him, an important task of the critic is identifying the particular problems the writer has had to solve in the process of creation. He stresses the neces­ sity of going beyond generic classifications— of dis­ tinguishing between the different material structure pos­ sible in lyrics, for instance (p. 178).

This emphasis upon the uniqueness of the individual work and upon the choices of the particular author has methodological implications. Every effort is made to isolate the work from its external contexts, literary and non-literary. Each work is considered as a self-contained unit. Crane explains, "The structure of a poem...can be discovered only by examining all of its parts, however minute, in their interrelations or interactions one with

another" (p. 103). Form is the sum total of the con­

stituent elements of a work rather than some manifesta­

tion of a traditional structure.

The first task of the neo-Aristotelian critic is

to identify what Crane calls the "shaping cause" of the work. The shaping cause (or directing cause) is the

"subsuming form of the materials." The expression,

"shaping cause," implies a shaper, a creator who can give

reasons for her/his decisions. Crane makes it clear, 122 however, that he is not interested in identifying the prior intentions of an author, only the effect of the in­ tention, the "cause" as manifested in the finished pro­ duct. According to Crane, "the shaping cause of any given literary work— the principle which determines for its writer the necessities and opportunities he must con­ sider in composing it— is something over and above and, as a principle, causally distinct from any of the poten­ tialities he or anyone else can attribute in advance to either the materials he has assembled in his mind or the technical devices at his disposal. He can know what he can do, in fact, only after he has done it" (p. 144).

The shaping cause is some identifiable whole. Elder Olson emphasizes that "whole" is related to the pleasurable effect the work has on the audience. He says, "the achieve­ ment of form is signalized by a revolution in the ordering and constitution of the parts: once the specifically pleasurable effect has luckily been produced, the part which is primarily effect becomes principal, develops its proper extension and qualities, and all other parts re­

adjust to it, in their proper artistic order. A dis­

tinctive synthesis— a species of art— has now formed, and

its poetics may begin."3 Olson's description does not

emphasize the importance of deliberate choices on the

part of the author. But it does coincide with Crane's

notion that form necessitates some unifying element, some

whole to which the parts are subordinate, and it does stress 123 the uniqueness of the created product. Both Crane and

Olson agree that an author creates a beautiful product when s/hecreates a whole which subsumes its parts, a beautiful object which gives pleasure to the audience.

Crane associates beauty with completeness and magnitude

(p. 60).

It is possible, therefore, for the critic to discuss both the poetic problems of the author and the effect

of the work upon an audience. The critic might, after

identifying the unifying principle of a work and showing

how the parts relate to the whole, attempt to re-con­

struct some imaginary conception of the poetic problems

faced by the writer and to discuss the success or failure

of the solutions to the problems. The critic might also

attempt to determine whether the poet has been successful

in producing the maximum "emotional effect" (p. 20) . S/he

might also consider the ways in which the parts of the work,

the beginning, middle, and end, work together to produce

that effect.

The primary problem, however, is to identify the

"whole" and to discuss the relationship between the whole

and its parts. It is sometimes difficult to determine, in

the theoretical writings of the neo-Aristotelians, just

how this whole is to be identified, however. It seems,

often, to involve a classification of the plot-structure

of a work. This is certainly the method employed, at

least, in Crane's important essay, "The Concept of Plot 124 and the Plot of 'Tom Jones.' But plot is defined very broadly as "the formal principle which makes of this system /the material system of happenings/ a definitely effective whole and which actually operates, in so far as we concentrate closely on the text, to direct our emotionalized expectations for Tom and the others and our subsequent responses when the hoped-for or feared events occur” (p. 77). In Tom Jones, it seems, the plot is the whole, and, particular, a whole which affects an audience in a particular way. The plot is an "imitation" of an action and as such a formal principle. According to Crane,

Aristotle uses the term "imitation" to "signify the in­ ternal relationship of form and matter characteristic of the class of objects to which poems, or rather some of them, belong" (p. 81). The important phrase is "inter­ nal relationship of form." "Imitation" does not involve imitating external reality as it does for the Marxists.

Rather, it describes internal relationships. The critic's job is to identify those relationships. The plot is the starting point; the critic then "inquires how far and in what way its peculiar power is maximized by the writer's invention and development of episodes, his step-by-step rendering of the characters of his people, his use and elaboration of thought, his handling of diction and imagery, and his decisions as to the order, method, scale, and point of view of his representation" (p. 69). Crane's method is not limited to novels, though he admits that it 125 is most effective with full-length imitative forms such

as narrative and drama. He insists, however, that lyrics

can be treated as well. They do not have plots but do

have "a specific form which synthesizes into a definite

emotional whole what is said or done in the poem and con­

ditions the necessities and probabilities which the poet must embody somehow in his lines" (p. 161) . This formal

principle might take the form, Crane explains, of a man

in an evolving state of passion interpreted for him by

his thought (as in "Ode to a Nightingale") or a man ad­

justing himself to an emotionally significant discovery

about his life (as in "Ode on Intimations of Immortality")

(p. 161).

Crane argues that this "whole" or plot structure

Cor formal principle in the case of the lyric) may be ar­

rived at inductively. He finds that the shaping principle

of a work is an empirical fact. For him, "The first prin­

ciple of our analysis must be an induction of which the

only warrant is the evidence of the poem itself" (p. 146).

He admits that we may be assisted in making this de­

cision about the structure of the work by our knowledge of

other poems; he says, "we need general concepts, more­

over, to guide us, since it is only through concepts that

we are ever able to understand particular things. But

what we are looking for is, first of all, a fact— possibly

a fact of a kind that has no complete parallel in the

earlier or later history of poetry, inasmuch as it is the 126 mark of good poets that they try to avoid repeating too often the invention of others” (p. 146) . Crane thinks it is "fatal" to think that we can know the shaping prin­ ciple of any poem in advance and he attacks those who employ a deductive method— those who come equipped with paradigms of poetry, or epic, or tragedy, and so on. Such critics are unable to see "any structural principles in poems except those already contained in their preferred definitions and models" (p. 146).

It could easily be argued, however, that it is im­ possible to distinguish between induction and deduction, except in theory, and that all critics must employ both methods. It is impossible to identify unique wholes ex­

cept by placing them in categories. In discussing Macbeth,

for instance, Crane begins by labeling the work an "im­

itative tragic drama." He has placed the work in a cate­ gory, and he clearly has a preconceived notion of what

tragic drama is. Olson goes so far as to attempt to

schematize the possible objects of imitation in poetry,

drama, and fiction:

The serious, i.e., what we take seriously, comprises characters conspicuously better or worse than we are or at any rate such as are like ourselves and such as we can strongly sympathize with, in states of marked pleasure or pain or in fortunes markedly good or bad. The comic, i.e., the ridiculous, comprises characters as involved in embarrassment or discomfiture to whom we are neither friendly nor hostile, of an inferiority not painful to us. We love or hate or sympathize profoundly with the serious characters; we favor or do not favor or . 127 condescend to the comic. Serious and comic both divide into two parallel classes: the former into the tragic kind, in which the character is better than we, and the punitive, in which the character is worse? the latter into what may be called "lout- comic," in which the character, though good natured or good, is mad, eccentric, imprudent, or stupid, and the "rogue-comic," in which the character is clever but morally deficient.

The scheme is not nearly as elaborate as Frye's, but it

is similar in kind. Olson is attempting to establish

categories. Indeed, it is impossible to define an en­

tity without establishing general types. An item must be assigned to a group before it can be distinguished

from other members of that group. The concept of "unique­

ness" implies comparison. Something is unique only if it

is different from something else. Frye makes a similar

point: "Hence while every new poem is a new and unique

creation, it is also a reshaping of familiar conventions

of literature, otherwise it would not be recognizable as

literature at all." Frye understands that both induction

and deduction must be employed in discussing individual

works. He says:

If we attend only to the uniqueness of Lycidas, and analyze the ambiguities and subtleties of its diction, our method, however useful in itself, soon reaches a point of no return to the poem. If we attend only to the conventional element, our method will turn it into a scissors-and-paste collection of allusive tags. One method reduces the poem to a jangle of echoes of itself, the other to a jangle of eches from other poets. If we have a unifying principle that holds these two tendencies together from the start, neither will get out of hand.^

That unifying principle must be some bridge between the 128 individual work and the tradition. It allows the critic to assign the work to its type (dramatic monologue, for instance) and then to discuss its uniqueness (i.e., the way in which it differs from other dramatic monologues).

It is nevertheless true that neo-Aristotelians, because they choose to stress uniqueness and to discuss conscious choices of an author, emphasize different aspects of a work than does Frye. It is undeniably val­ uable to attempt to view the work as a self-contained whole— even if it is impossible to do so entirely. In­ dividual works do have elaborate internal systems which should be isolated and discussed. Crane defends his ap­ proach on a number of grounds. It provides a basis for making value judgments: the process of analysis is a process of uncovering the beauty, usually the symmetry, of a work. He also thinks that literary history would profit from a widespread use of his method, as would lit­ erary education, since the approach is quite teachable.

He feels that it would give students a comprehensive scheme of questions to be asked about all the different kinds of literary works they might be studying. It would

engender habits of observation and would tend to make the

student independent of her/his teacher.

But Crane suggests that his method is limited in

that it cannot "give us insights into the larger moral

and political values of literature or into any of the 129 other organic relations with human nature and human ex­ perience in which literature is involved" (p. 192). I

think, though, that here Crane underestimates the use­

fulness of his approach. He notes that it is impossible

to talk about form without talking about "the human

qualities of the actions, persons, feelings, and thoughts

the work brings before us and the very human, but no

less poetic, responses these evoke in our minds" (p. 189).

If this is so, then a discussion of form does bring us

into contact with the "human experience in which liter­

ature is involved." Crane also stresses that form and

content are not distinct entities. He says, "A poem, on

the view of its structure suggested by Aristotle, is

not a composite of res and verba but a certain matter

formed in a certain way or a certain form imposed upon

or wrought out of a certain matter. The two are insepa-?

rable aspects of the same individual thing, though they

are clearly distinct analytically as principles or causes"

Cp. 153). If, then, form and matter are one and the same,

an analysis of form should bring us closer to an under­

standing of the matter. Form should reveal content.

For the feminist critic, then, the neo-Aristotelian

model would have the advantages of the archetypal model—

it would allow the work to speak for itself and would

minimize the extent to which the critic distorts a work

by imposing an ideological content upon it. A neo-

Aristotelian model would also allow the feminist critic 130 to focus upon the ways in which a work departs from tradition. Since all feminist works react against a patriarchal order, they all react against tradition, even against literary tradition. The neo-Aristotelian model would encourage the feminist critic to explore ways in which the work is a unique manifestation of the problems of women. The particular work would be scrutin­ ized— parts would be related to the whole. Plot structure would be studied. It would certainly be valuable, for instance, to explore the structure of The Golden Notebook; the work is seemingly amorphous, but would no doubt re­ veal unifying principles if examined from a neo-Aristotel­ ian perspective. And once such works were revealed to be carefully controlled artistic creations, the patriarchal literary establishment might respond to them more favor­ ably.

Also, the neo-Aristotelian model would allow the critic to stress ways in which feminist works are the pro­ ducts of the conscious control of the individual writer.

Frye's model does not provide such a focus; for him, works are produced by modifying literary conventions— the choices of the particular author are minimized. But for Crane and others, the decisions made by the writer are probably the most significant factor in literary creation. Such a model would re-affirm the value of feminist writers by con­

centrating on their mastery of technical skills. It would make evident the ways in which feminists struggle against 131 an oppressive order in their work and would examine de­ vices employed to serve a feminist end. Using a neo-

Aristotelian model, it might even be possible to talk about the intended effect— political effect— of a par­ ticular work. This would not entail exploring audience response— such tasks must be reserved for the scholar, perhaps for the sociologist of literature. Rather, it would involve examining the work itself in an attempt to

determine what effect the author intended to create.

It would seem, for instance, that the ending of Small

Changes is intended to create sympathy for alternative

life-styles such as lesbian marriages. The ending of

The Awakening creates sympathy for a woman unable to es­ cape the fetters of traditional sex roles.

Feminist criticism has, most frequently, demonstrated the dubious critical practice of stereotype-hunting. A critic examines the characters in a work without regard to the ways in which those characters are part of a formal arrangement. A neo-Aristotelian feminist criticism could discourage such practices. Characters are not real people;

they function within a formal structure, a linguistic one.

Neo-Aristotelians focus upon the relationship between

character and plot. In so doing, they minimize the pos­

sibility of distortion. If, for instance, it is determined

that a character such as Philomena Guinea in The Bell Jar

appears to be negatively portrayed, it would also be pos­

sible to determine the intended effect of the artistic 132 whole and to decide that her portrayal does not render the work reactionary. The critic could only make such a judgment if Esther Greenwood herself were portrayed negatively. Philomena Guinea is significant only in relation to the main plot — Esther's trip to New York, her break­ down, and her tentative recovery. She represents one of the choices Esther could have made. But her limiting aristocratic pretensions are rejected by Esther, an im­ portant step in her growth toward health.

Neo-Aristotelian criticism would appear to be among the most conservative forms of contemporary criticism. If the biographies of the neo-Aristotelians were examined, as have those of the new critics, in an attempt to assess their political ideologies, it is doubtful if they would be judged among the defenders of political change. It is nevertheless possible for a politicized critic to make use of formalist procedures. Literature, after all, is not polemic. It does have form. There is nothing inherently reactionary in examining that form in an attempt to inter­ pret content. MRS. DALLOWAY

Mrs. Dalloway is an ironic epic. The style of the novel, like the style of an epic, is self-consciously elevated in tone, but there is usually an ironic edge to the lofty language, a kind of simultaneous deflation. A good example of this juxtaposition : of tones is the passage toward the end of the novel which contains an epic simile. Peter Walsh makes a comparison:

Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour (p. 245) .

The simile is in some ways Homeric: the language is

formal and the description is sustained, carried beyond

the specific points of parallel to the changed day. But

it also differs from Homeric similes— it is just a bit

absurd and it serves to lessen rather than heighten the

seriousness of the tone. Peter Walsh represents mas­

culine egotism and this particular comparison is a re­

flection of his sexual fantasies. The change from day to

evening is like the change in a woman's attire; both

changes are accompanied by a "sigh of exhilaration," the

133 134 freedom that results from disrobing, taking off the trappings of civilization. Usually an epic simile en­ hances the ceremonial quality of epic style, but this particular one undermines ceremony and reminds the reader, instead, of those hidden subversive impulses which inhabit the minds of everyone.

This ironic deflation is characteristic of the work as a whole. Epic form is parodied. It is a masculine form, one which affirms the value of manliness in battle.

Virginia Woolf's epic, in contrast, is a feminine one and must drastically alter the original form by affirming entirely different values. Women do not engage in battle? p their heroism (or heroinism to use Ellen Moers1 phrase ) is less visible, less dramatic. They must uphold civ­ ilization by upholding domesticity— by nurturing in­ dividuals in private rather than in public. In Woolf's epic, Penelope herself becomes the epic heroine. Clarissa is a woman of "indomitable vitality" (p. 236) who has

"courage," "social instinct," and the "power of carrying things through" (p. 93). She has the capacity to unite the disparate elements of her own personality and to project that self in such a way as to bring about a kind of temporary relief from the pain of living. She gives parties; she brings people together. Clarissa inhabits

Westminster and stands as a protectress of the best in

English society— imagination, sensitivity to the feelings 135 of others. It is no coincidence that she lives in the environs of the Abbey and of Poet's Corner. She, too, is a poet of sorts. Like Adam in Paradise Lost, Clarissa is a representative of everyone, a kind of savior of civilization itself.

But Clarissa inhabits an ironic world, and she is a woman. Her sphere is limited, her heroic possibilities contained. There is a negative quality to her actions— she attempts to halt the process of disintegration. Be­ cause she is a woman she can neither build a nation or found an empire, but she can attempt to keep her nation from crumbling. Peter Walsh recognizes the negative quality of many of Clarissa's actions. He says,

Oddly enough, she was one of the most thorough­ going sceptics he had ever met, and possibly... possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship...as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow- prisoners...decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan't have it all their own way,— her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put off if, all the same, you behaved like a lady (p. 117).

Clarissa's vision does not seem to be quite this bleak;

Peter's cynicism is perhaps coloring his perception of

her. Nevertheless, Clarissa does recognize that it is

"very, very dangerous to live even one day" (p. 11).

She inhabits a world of maimed individuals— herself in­

cluded. It does seem as if the Gods "never lost a chance

of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives." Clarissa's 136 psyche has been damaged: she lacks warmth. She thinks,

"she could see what she lacked. It was something cen­ tral which permeated; something warm which broke up sur­ faces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together" (p. 46). It is within an absurd universe that Clarissa must accomplish her heroic deeds.9

The absurdity of Clarissa'a world is demonstrated through the depiction of a destructive male-dominated order. War is the symbolic representation of this order; it creates victims rather than heroes. In the traditional epic, especially the Homeric epic, war is the institution which determines heroism; in Mrs. Dalloway heroism cannot be a function of warfare because warfare cannot determine the value of human action— it is meaningless. Septimus, for instance, is an ironic Achilles. Like the hero of the

Iliad, Septimus suffered the loss of a close friend in war. Unlike him, however, Septimus did not transform his grief into courage. Instead, the loss upsets his men­

tal stability; he becomes a "drowned sailor on a rock"

(p. 104) . Septimus is unable to conquer the forces that

oppose him and so he goes mad. His manliness, his valor,

destroy him.

In Woolf's feminist parody of the traditional epic,

civilization itself seems to have been tainted by war.

As Peter Walsh saunters through the streets of London, he

encounters "Boys in uniform, carrying guns" (p. 76) who

"marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their 137 arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England"

Cp. 76) . Peter himself seems uncritical of the military parade; he tries to keep up with it, to join up. But the narrator makes it clear that the boys in uniform re­ present reification. They march "as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties,

its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline" (p. 77). The boys march past the "exalted" statues of Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, and the narrator imagines that they, too, begin to take on the "marble stare" of the statues. War turns men

into stone, and one is able to encounter its reifying power everywhere. No one can escape it.

Clarissa's task is to survive amidst destructive

forces. Her journey is largely an internal one— she must

overcome obstacles no less dangerous than the Cyclops or

Scylla and Charybdis but less visible because they exist within the personalities of the individuals she must

confront daily. Clarissa's epic decisions involve evalu­

ating people who impinge upon her existence. She must

accept those who enliven her, reject those who threaten

to destory her. The central conflict in the novel, there­

fore, involves Clarissa's choice of a marriage partner.

She has married Richard Dalloway and thereby accepted a conventional life-style. But she wonders if she made the right choice. She could, after all, have married Peter

Walsh, the unconventional "romantic Buccaneer." Her epic journey entails a discovery of self in relation to the environment she has chosen. The "plot" of the novel, then, involves this internal struggle, one in which the reader, too, is involved. It must be determined if

Clarissa has accepted the correct form of masculine authority. Certainly this plot differs greatly from the plot of Tom Jones, and also from the plots of traditional epics. Even R.S. Crane recognizes, however, that not all plots involve a great deal of action; he distin­ guishes among plots of action, plots of character, and plots of thought in his essay on the plot of Tom Jones.

Mrs. Dalloway is certainly a plot of character— "a com­ pleted process of change in the moral character of the protagonist, precipitated or molded by action, and made manifest both in it and in thought and feeling."^ The novel concludes with Clarissa's recognition that she, in fact, made the correct choice. This recognition brings about a change in her "moral character."

The reader is invited to speculate on the problem of

Clarissa's choice of a marriage partner from the outset of the novel. Peter Walsh, not Richard Dalloway, plays

an important role in Clarissa's initial monologue. The

reader, naturally, wonders who this character is. We

learn that some "awful" experience is associated with Peter 139 Walsh and that he is in India but is expected to visit soon. We also learn that his letters are "awfully dull," but that 'one remembered his sayings, his pocket-knife, his smile, and his grumpiness1 (p. 4) . Clarissa thinks about Peter and argues with herself about whether she should have married him; "So she would still find her­ self arguing in St. James's Park, still making out that she had been right— and she had too— not to marry him"

(p. 10). The reader's curiosity is aroused— should

Clarissa have married Peter? It is aroused even more when

Peter Walsh himself arrives unexpectedly. As Clarissa talks to him she mentally evaluates him. The narrator says, "For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alonei she cried to herself in irrepressible irritation; it was his

silly unconventionality, his weakness; his lack of a ghost of a notion what any one else was feeling that an­

noyed her" (p. 69) . But she also recognizes that Peter brings out the gaity in her and she thinks, "If I had married him this gaity would have been mine all day"

(p. 70). Peter then asks Clarissa if she is happy with

Richard, but just as he does so, the two are interrupted

by Elizabeth and the issue remains unresolved— both for

Peter and the reader. At this point in the plot, the

reader suspects that perhaps Clarissa made the wrong

choice.

Throughout the novel the reader is given evidence

to weigh. Richard, in a scene much later, admits to 140 himself that he had been jealous of Peter Walsh. He nevertheless concludes that "she had been right not to marry Peter Walsh; which, knowing Clarissa, was ob­ viously true; she wanted support" (p. 177). Sally

Seton, in contrast, is certain Clarissa cared more for

Peter than for Richard (pp. 292-293). Peter himself admits that Clarissa's refusal of him "had spoilt his life" (p. 292), but also recognizes "it would not have been a success, their marriage. The other thing, after all, came so much more naturally" (p. 236). "The other thing" is his relationship with Daisy and with others— his pursuit of women. Peter tires very easily of mute devotion and wants variety in love (p. 241) .

Ultimately, the reader is made to feel that Clarissa made the correct choice. Richard does allow her privacy and he is devoted to her. His purchasing of flowers to bring to her is evidence of this, as is their brief t£te-ih:§te subsequently. Richard is, as Peter recognizes,

"a thorough good sort" (p. 112) and he deserved to have

Clarissa (p. 95). When Peter says of Richard, "What­ ever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sen­ sible way; without a touch of imagination, without a spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type" (p. 113), he is no doubt correct. Richard is reliable because he is mediocre. He represents con­ tinuity, a handing on of traditions of the past (p. 177).

He is not uncritical of his society— he denounces the 141

"detestable social system" (p. 175), but he also ap­ preciates that which is valuable in society; he sees

Buckingham Palace as a unifying symbol for millions of people (p. 177); he accepts the social order. Peter, in contrast, is self-centered, removed from the heart of society. Clarissa recognizes his inadequacies when she compares him to Doris Kilman, both of whom destroy the privacy of the soul. Clarissa thinks that love, re­ presented by Peter, and religion, represented by Doris

Kilman, are cruel, unscrupulous. She remarks, "Think of

Peter in love— he came to see her after all these years, and what did he talk about? Himself" (p. 192). But it is the conclusion of the novel which makes evident the correctness of Clarissa's choice. In the last scene,

Richard expresses his affection for her daughter, Elizabeth.

Sally Seton, noticing this, remarks to Peter, "Richard has improved. You are right" (p. 296). Sally has been

Peter's staunchest supporter and Richard's staunchest opponent. But even she is converted by the end.

The evidence against Peter Walsh is presented subtlely, indirectly. He is, after all, sensitive and charming. But he is also egotistical, an embodiment of masculine destructiveness. One of the strongest pieces of evidence to support this interpretation of his char­ acter appears early in the novel. Peter walks through

Regent's Park and sits down next to a nurse who is knitting. 142

The woman is described as "the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches" (p.

85). The narrator proceeds to create an imaginary tableau, one which reveals Peter's inner restlessness.

He is described as a "solitary traveller, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great hem­ lock plants" (p. 85). The nurse, the feminine nurturer, is contrasted with Peter, the masculine devastator. As ' i he proceeds down the path he endows the sky and branches with womanhood. Such visions, the narrator tells us,

"proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary traveller" (p. 86). But the cornucopias are imaginary and symbolize frustration rather than satisfaction. The visions are like "sirens lolloping away on the green sea waves" (p. 86) , or they rise to the surface "like pale faces which fishermen flounder through floods to embrace"

(p. 86). They are illusory, unattainable, and serve the function of the Lotos-Eaters of the Odyssey. (Peter is, after all, an ironic Odysseus, one who returns to his home­ land a failure rather than a hero and one who is reminded that his Penelope has long ago married another.) The nar­ rator of the "solitary traveller" passage continues, "Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing; often over­ powering the solitary traveller and taking away from 143 him for substitute a general peace" (p. 86). The

"visions" prevent Peter from confronting reality and prevent him from securing a psychic home. He thinks,

"may I never go back to the lamplight; to the sitting- room; never finish my book; never knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs. Turner to clear away; rather let me walk straight on to this great figure, who will, with a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to nothingness with the rest" (p. 87). In the passage the visions are contrasted with mundane reality.

A mother (presumably Peter's mother) awaits his return, awaits a "lost son." The scene shifts to an interior setting where a landlady asks, "There is nothing more to-night, sir?" (p. 87), but the solitary traveller makes no reply. He exists in another realm entirely.12

Peter is homeless; he would have been an inappropriate choice for Clarissa. In choosing Richard Dalloway she accepts her society. Richard allows her to remain fem­ inine, yet function within a masculinized society. He is a gentleman and he is not competitive. Clarissa's epic journey concludes with her epiphanic identification with

Septimus, an episode in which she demonstrates her heroic stature. Septimus' suicide becomes "her disaster— her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and dis­ appear here a man, there a woman, in this profound dark­ ness" (p. 282) . Clarissa takes on the burdens of an 144 entire society; she accepts responsibility for the wrongs inflicted upon men and woman, and she accepts the punish­ ment. By the end of the novel she does achieve the stature of an epic heroine, even if she is a heroine in an ironic world, one in which endurance is the chief virtue. As she contemplates the suicide of Septimus she walks to the window and thinks that she sees, in the sky above Westminster, "something of her own in it" (p. 282) .

The sky is referred to as "this country sky," an expres­ sion suggesting both the idyllic rural past of Bourton and the nation with which she now identifies. By the end of the novel Clarissa has become one with her past and with her country.

Traditionally, the epic has extolled the leaders of a nation and has narrated the events important in the development or expansion of that nation. It does not, usually, focus upon the shortcomings of a country. In

Mrs. Dalloway, however, descriptions of the achieve­ ments of England are infused with irony. The narrator, for instance, describes the mysterious motor car heading toward Buckingham Palace in an unusual way:

But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand's breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pave­ ment this Wednesday morning are but bones 145 with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be known (p. 23).

The motor car is referred to as the "enduring symbol of the state," yet the passage reminds the reader that the state will not endure. Time will destroy it. It will become detritus, the equivalent of decayed teeth, to be examined by curious antiquaries. For the present, however, the state seems to be enduring and the motor car does serve as a unifying symbol— people of all social classes stop what they are doing and observe it, and the narrator tells us, "For the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very pro­ found" (p. 26). There is some profound link between the citizens of England.

The description of the aeroplane has a similar ironic edge. The aeroplane seems to represent the po­ tentialities of civilization. Mr. Bentley thinks it represents "an aspiration? a concentration; a symbol

...of man's soul; of his determination...to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory" (p. 41).

It is described as swooping exactly where it likes, swiftly, freely, like a skater" (p. 30). But the aero­ plane is skywriting a message which cannot be deciphered, certainly an ironic comment on man's determination to get outside his body by means of thought. If we assume

that one of the words being written is "toffee," then 146 we may also assume that the message is trivial— an advertisement.

The Britain of Mrs. Dalloway is decaying rather than expanding. Its past glory is embodied in Lady

Bruton, probably the most conventionally patriotic character in the novel:

...she had the thought of Empire always at hand, and had acquired from her association with that armoured goddess her ramrod bearing, her robustness of demeanour, so that one could not figure her even in death parted from the earth or roaming territories over which, in some spiritual shape, the Union Jack had ceased to fly. To be not English even among the dead— no, no! Impossible (p. 275).

But Lady Bruton's chauvinism is accompanied by a lack of penetration. Her scheme to emigrate young people to

Canada in order to solve the nation's economic problems seems simple-minded at best, and her inability to con­ struct a letter in defense of her play is further evi­ dence of her failing mental faculties. Lady Bruton, 13 perhaps, symbolizes Britain itself.

Other characters in the novel give evidence of

Britain's weakness rather than her strength. Professor

Brierly, who lectures on Milton, attends Clarissa's party. The narrator says of him, "With all those degrees, honours, lectureships between him and the scribblers he suspected instantly an atmosphere not favourable to his queer compound; his prodigious learning and timidity; his wintry charm without cordiality; his innocence blent with 147 snobbery" (p. 268). For all his learning, he is not cordial, not accessible. He does no t hit it off with

Jim Hutton, a young man who cannot make his hair lie

flat (p. 267) t although Clarissa has no trouble talking to the young m a n — they discuss Bach. Brierly re­ presents an intellectual elite which has desiccated.

It no longer performs the important function of directing

the nation.

It is n o t the England of royalty ensconced in motor cars, militaristic women or stodgy professors

that Clarissa must protect; these, it seems, England

could do without- it *-s' rather, the England of "fields

spread out a n ^ dark brown woods where adventurous

thrushes hopping boldly, glancing quickly, snatched the

snail and tapPe<^ him on stone, once, twice, thrice" (p.

41) , or the England of "flowing corn and.. .manor houses"

(p. 26) . The land itself is abundant; there is a potential

ity of streng'h*1 that must be preserved. Richard Dalloway

remembers that in Norfolk "a soft warm wind blew back

the petals; confused the waters; ruffled the flowering

grasses. Haymakers, who had pitched beneath hedges to

sleep away tb e morning toil, parted curtains of green

blades; moved trembling globes of cow parsley to see the

sky; the blu^' hhe steadfast, the blazing summer sky"

(p. 171). England is represented, in these few pastoral

scenes, as a i aud of richness, of fertility. Richard

Dalloway is associated with this pastoral setting. He 148 is more at home in Norfolk than in London, and his daughter seems to take after him. In uniting himself with Richard, Clarissa has become united to the abundant land itself. The novel, then, both attacks and embraces the nation of England. The members of English society, taken individually, seem, for the most part, to be un­ worthy of emulation. More are like Hugh Whitbread than like Richard Dalloway. But there is a core of un­ corrupted strength, usually associated with the country rather than the city, which must be protected. Characters who have removed themselves from their native land—

Peter Walsh who lives in India, and Doris Kilman who identifies with Germans— are portrayed as rootless, home­ less.

Northrop Frye observes that the cyclical form of the

Classical epic is based on the natural cycle and that this cycle has two main rhythms: the life and death of the individual and the slower social rhythm which, in the course of years, brings about the rise and fall of empires. One 14 represents the foreground, the other the background.

Certainly the novel is concerned with the approaching death of Clarissa, and this concern is mirrored in the natural cycle. The action takes place within one day, one pro­ gression of the sun, and Clarissa is recovering from in­ fluenza and must confront the reality that she will die, perhaps in the not-so-distant future. But this is only the foreground action. In the background is the slower-moving 149 social rhythm: the present Conservative government is threatened by the Labour Party and may soon be replaced;

England is suffering the effect of the European War and is undergoing radical changes (Peter Walsh calls it

"that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed innovable" (p. 24 6)).; the battered woman serves as a reminder that civilization itself is on the decline, is battered. Frye also observes that the

Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid begin at a kind of nadir of the total cyclical action. Certainly this is true in Mrs. Dalloway. The action begins in the morning;

Clarissa is alone and feeling the effects of her recent illness. Also, Septimus appears early in the novel and embodies the destructiveness of warfare. He represents the vanquished, the casualties of civilized life. Society is in a period of transition and is badly in need of a hero.

Significantly, the hero is a woman; only a woman can counter masculine destructiveness.

The epic paradigm does inform the novel. Mrs. Dalloway is not simply about an individual, but about an entire nation, perhaps an entire civilization. But it is an iron­ ic epic, a feminist epic. It attempts to invert the epic form itself. Critics have speculated on the degree to which Virginia Woolf was influenced by Ulysses, another ironic epic, one which itself inverts epic form. Jean

Guiguet observes, for instance, that Woolf had been reading

Ulysses while she was writing Mrs. Dalloway. But he concurs with the conclusions of J.W. Beach and David

Daiches that the similarities between the two works are superficial. Both, he says, aim at being a summa, both take place in twenty-four hours in a capital city, both employ stream of consciounsess or interior monologue.

Nevertheless, he concludes, "in structure the two novels are not comparable, that of Ulysses being a transportation of the Odyssey and that of Mrs. Dalloway being auton­ omous."16 James Hafley seems to agree. He says, "If

Mrs. Dalloway is not an imitation of Joyce's novel, neither does it seem a criticism, inspired or otherwise, except insofar as any novel written by an author aware of his contemporaries and not completely satisfied with their achievements is, by its very difference, a crit­ icism; and in this sense Mrs. Dalloway cannot be called a criticism of any other novel in particular.’,J" But if we recognize what neither Guiguet nor Hafley seems to recognize, i.e., that the novel is formally similar to

Ulysses and is not autonomous (indeed, no works are autonomous— writers cannot help but incorporate forms employed by other authors into their works) , then we must see the influence of Ulysses in the work. It could be argued, in fact, that Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf's answer to Ulysses— her feminist rejoinder.

Ulysses is characterized by an elaborate structural framework. It is a masterpiece of organization. Virginia 151 Woolf seems deliberately set on providing an organic rather than a mechanical pattern. It is immensely frus­ trating not to find the symmetries one finds in Ulysses.

Big Ben sounds, but not predictably and not at regular intervals. David Daiches is undeniably incorrect when he asserts, "almost every fifteen minutes is indicated by a clock chiming, or in some other way, throughout 18 the book." At certain periods in the novel, hours go by without some temporal marker. Nor are we always cer­ tain, when Big Ben does strike (or when some other clock chimes), precisely what time it is. The first striking of the clock, for instance, is unaccompanied by an indication of the time. It is virtually impossible to determine when Clarissa begins her day. Avrom Fleishman suggests that Big Ben strikes for the first time at 10:00 o'clock; this he determines by counting back from the striking of the clock at 11:00 (mentioned on page 30). But Fleishman is assuming that Big Ben strikes every hour, whereas we know that it can strike, too, on the half hour (as it does, for instance, on p. 1 2 ) . ^ The day might begin at 10:00, but it also might begin at 9:30 or 10:30. There is no way of knowing. Clock time, Virginia Woolf suggests, is mas­ culine time; it measures and controls. But there is also psychological time— feminine time. It is fluid, defies mechanized clock time. The narrator says, "Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley 152 Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission/ upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion" (p. 154). Clocks

shred and slice; they interrupt the fluidity of nature.

The novel itself repudiates activities like shredding and slicing— it therefore repudiates precise temporal pat- ternings.

The very structure of the novel affirms fluidity in

contrast to mechanization. Mrs. Dalloway is not sym­ metrical in structure. The work is divided into eight sections, but these divisions seem to be entirely ar­ bitrary. Some are very short— the "solitary traveller" passage, for instance, is only three pages long. Others are quite long— the seventh section, for instance, is

153 pages long (extending from p. 97-p. 250) . These

divisions, indicated by double-spacing, do not seem to be determined by length. Nor are they always determined by content. Often there are shifts in scene without a

structural indication. The party, understandably, stands

alone. But, curiously, Lady Bruton's luncheon does not.

Ulysses has a carefully controlled plan. Mrs. Dalloway,

in contrast, appears to be a loose, baggy monster.

Nancy Topping Bazin, in Virginia Woolf and the Andro­

gynous Vision, identifies what she calls the "basic

framework" of the novel. She sees that there is a pat­

tern of alternating scenes so that the Clarissa plot and

the Septimus and Rezia plot are carefully intertwined: Richard 153 Clarissa Elizabeth Peter Clarissa and Clarissa's Clarissa Peter Peter Miss Kil'man party;

Septimus Septimus Septimus Septimus and and and and Rezia Rezia Rezia Rezia

Figure 1. Bazin's Structural Scheme

Bazin's diagram does seem to describe the interior mono­

logues in the novel accurately in that it correctly indi­

cates the order in which they appear, but the scheme does not

indicate the differing lengths of the monologues, nor does

it include significant sections of the novel such as the 21 luncheon at Lady Bruton's. The overall impression of Mrs.

Dalloway is that episodes and voices flow into one another

fluidly; at times it is difficult to distinguish between

the narrator's voice and the voice of a particular char­

acter. Mrs. Dalloway, then, represents a feminine organic order in contrast to the masculine mechanistic order of

Ulysses.

A passage in the novel illustrates the nature of this

organic order. Elizabeth, as she explores the area of the

Strand, hears military music. The narrator describes the music as being "consolatory, indifferent" (p. 209):

It was not conscious. There was no recognition in it of one fortune, or fate, and for that very 154

reason even to those dazed with watching for the last shivers of consciousness on the faces of the dying, consoling. Forgetfulness in people might wound, their ingratitude corrode, but this voice, pouring endlessly, year in year out, would take whatever it might be? this vow? this van? this life? this procession, would wrap them all about and carry them on, as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on (pp. 209- 210) .

The music described is the natural process itself— a stream which impels a glacier carrying fragments of life.

The lines are reminiscent of the "enduring symbol of the state" passage quoted above with its reference to the process of decay and its mention of detritus. It is also similar to the passage earlier in the novel: "So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall? collect and fall? and the whole world seems to be saying 'that is all' more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all"

(p. 59). In all three passages, there is a description of the rhythmic movement of the natural process and a stylistic recreation of that process. The form of the novel reflects this rhythmic natural process as well. The narrator's voice is like the voice of the music— consolatory. The narration takes up and carries along (like a stream, like a wave) the fragments of life— symbols, conversations, thoughts. The very form of the work indicates that there is a cycle which is more significant than any one fortune or fate. The narrator's voice is consoling for this reason. 155 If life results in death, death also brings about life.

This re-creation of the natural cycle is typical of the epic form. Frye says, "The discovery of the epic action is the sense of the end of the total action as like the beginning, and hence of a consistent order and balance running through the whole. This consistent order is not a divine fiat or fatalistic causation, but a stability in nature controlled by the gods, and extended to human beings 22 if they accept it." But Mrs. Dalloway is an ironic epic. The order is stable only in the sense that life, predictably, leads to death. In the universe of the novel, the gods do not control things; harmony can only be momen­ tary because chaos rules the.lives of men and woman. But if the individual accepts the reality of the natural order, i.e., accepts the processes of life and death, then tempor­ ary relief from the pain of living can be achieved.

Clarissa is able to gain such temporary relief, and she is able to have a positive effect upon others. In the uni­ verse of the novel, this constitutes heroism. NOTES

Neo-Aristotelian critics would prefer to be called pluralist critics, a term which suggests their willingness to accommodate themselves to critical pos­ itions different from their own. Crane, for instance, states, "There is thus a strict relativity, in criticism, not only of questions and statements to frameworks but of frameworks to ends, that is, to the different kinds of knowledge about poetry we may happen, at one time or another or for one or another reason, to want," The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1953), p. 27. He also asserts, "the truth about literature or poetry is not and cannot be enclosed within any particular scheme of terms and principles of method," p. 27. But Crane proceeds to discuss and dismiss almost every important critical school outside his own, usually because they do not answer the questions he thinks they should answer. He distorts Frye's archetypal criticism in particular, arguing that it is akin to new criticism and labelling both— inappropriately, certainly— "semantic" criticism.

2 Crane, The Language of Criticism, p. 140. Sub­ sequent references are to this edition.

2 Elder Olson, "An Outline of Poetic Theory," Critics and Criticism, short ed., ed. R.S. Crane (ChicagorUniv. of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 15.

^ R. S. Crane, "The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones," Critics and Criticism, pp. 62-93.

8 Olson, "An Outline of Poetic Theory," p. 12.

8 Northrop Frye, "Literature as Context: Milton's Lycidas," Milton's Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C.A. Patrides (N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. 207.

7 Frye, "Literature as Context," p. 209.

8 Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Writers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1976).

156 157 9 Lucio Ruotolo, in Six Existential Heroes; The Politics of Faith (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), discusses the novel as an exploration of "nothing­ ness within the context of Being and time" (p. 18). He sees Clarissa as an existential heroine.

Crane, "The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones," p. 66. 11 Crane, pp. 66-67.

12 The criticism which discusses the "solitary traveller" passage often refers to Rueben Brower's treatment of it in The Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading (N.Y.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951). Brower says, "It is in a picturesque sense a beautiful passage, but merely beautiful, a piece which could be detached with little loss. The detailed picture of the woman, the evening, the street, and the adorable land­ lady does not increase or enrich our knowledge of Peter or of anyone in the book" (p. 135). On the contrary, the passage is central to our understanding of Peter. Another critic, Alice van Buren Kelley, says that the passage indicates that Peter experiences Woolf's central vision of universal merging and peace: The Novels of Virginia Woolf: Fact and Vision (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 98. The passage, though, is a description of restlessness rather than peace.

Katherine K. Blunt, in "Jay and Hawk," thinks that Lady Bruton's name suggests "Britain," "Briton," and "Brutus," p. 318.

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 318.

Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and her Works, trans. Jean Stewart (N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1965) , p. 227.

Guiguet, Virginia Woolf, p. 241

^ James Hafley, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (N.Y.: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1963), p. 72. David Daiches, in The Novel and the Modern World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960), thinks that Mrs. Dalloway is a "far shorter and less ambitious work than Ulysses" (p. 203). I think Daiches underestimates the work.

Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World, p. 207. 158 Fleishman, Virginia Woolf, p. 70.

20 Nancy Topping Bazin, Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1973), p. 115. The chart also indicates the connecting links between the two plots— the motor car, airplane, etc. 21 A number of critics have attempted to describe the structure of Mrs. Dalloway. Fleishman is particularly intent on demonstrating the novel's Ulysses-like plan. He finds that the work is divided into twenty-one sections, each approximately ten pages long (see Appendix A for Fleishman's complete scheme). But these sections seem to have been arrived at arbitrarily; some are interior monologues ("Clarissa on Miss Kilman," for instance), while others are external actions ("Peter's walk to the Park," for instance). If some internal mono­ logues are included, why are not all of them included? If they were, it is doubtful if the novel would divide up into twenty-one sections approximately equal in length. Also, a close look at Fleishman's chart reveals that often the reader does not know approximately what time it is (the most obvious example being the period between 6:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. when the party ends). Fleishman admits that temporal designation is less than precise in sections VI and VII. ' Presumably, Peter walks to Regent's Park from Westminster and takes a nap— all in fifteen minutes (p. 70). Josephine O'Brien Schaefer, in The Three-Fold Nature of Reality in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Mouton & Co., 1965), provides a structural scheme similar to Bazin's. The scheme (see Appendix B) is in "simplified form" and demonstrates the fluid movement of the novel. Schaefer sees that at three significant moments in the novel (indicated by the asterisks) the action moves back to the Dalloway home. She says, "every time the action is suspended at Clarissa's home, Virginia Woolf supplies a commentary on the relationship between Clarissa and Septimus" (p. 86). This statement is not explained further, however. I have a difficult time finding Woolf's commentary in the sections indicated. David Daiches, in The Novel and the Modern World, provides still another scheme (see Appendix C ) . In the diagram, A,B,c, etc. represent characters, T represents the present moment, T^,T2 ,T,, etc. represent past moments. Daiches admits that the book does not proceed in the straightfor­ ward way indicated by the diagram (p. 205), but he thinks the illustration represents the novel's "general move­ ment." Clearly, though, the "general movement" is me­ andering and defies schematization.

22 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 319. CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSIONS

When I began this project, I was quite certain that historicist criticism would provide the most use­ ful model for the feminist critic. It seemed to be compatible with a form of criticism which is, by def­ inition, inherently ideological. I now feel, however, that historicist criticism has serious limitations and that formalist criticism can serve as a corrective to historicist distortions. It is easy to overlook form when ideology is the chief concern, and overlooking form inevitably results in distortions. A feminist formalist method need not be divorced from social reality; it need not be reactionary. Feminist formalists do not have to insist upon the autonomy of the work of art nor upon the primacy of form over content. And they will certainly be resistant to what Robert Scholes calls the

"formalistic fallacy"— "a lack of concern for the 'meaning' or 'content' of literary works." Scholes says that the formalistic fallacy is a charge "frequently brought against that criticism which refuses to acknowledge the presence of a cultural world beyond the literary work

159 160

and a cultural system beyond the literary system."^

Formalist critics, especially New Critics, have been

guilty of committing the formalistic fallacy. And fre­

quently they have revealed political conservatism in 2 their work. This does not mean, however, that formalism

itself must be abandoned; it can be successfully

employed by liberated critics. Fraya Katz-Stoker, in

"The Other Criticism: Feminism vs. Formalism," objects to

formalist criticism because it studies literature only within a given value system and thus promotes the status

quo.3 This Katz-Stoker calls the "formalist illusion;"

feminist criticism, in contrast, is a "materialist"

approach which attempts to do away with this formalist

illusion. It is possible, though, to attack the status

quo, to expose the formalist illusion, and at the same

time make use of formalist methods. Such a criticism

would be rooted in formalism but would be concerned

primarily with the relationship between a particular

work and feminist ideology. It would discuss form,

either the relationship between a work to other works or

the relationship between the parts of a work to one another,

but would focus upon content.

I must conclude from my study that the archetypal

and neo-Aristotelian models yielded better results than

the Marxist model. Jameson's "dialectical criticism,"

even though it appears to be primarily concerned with form, 161 is hardly a formalist model. Jameson, in fact, re­ pudiates formalism in his article "Metacommentary."

He says, "Formalism is thus...the basic mode of inter­ pretation of those who refuse interpretation."^ Jameson rejects formalist methods, but, unfortunately, never makes it clear precisely what he means by form or how it is to be discovered. I had difficulty applying his model and so reverted to a more primitive form of Marxist criticism— assigning characters to particular social classes— the method of "vulgar" Marxists. This "allegori-

zation" certainly has its limitations— it is not suitable

for every work of literature, and it focuses, on character, usually to the exclusion of form. That it worked with

Mrs. Dalloway is perhaps simply a coincidence. What is needed, as a way of completing Jameson's model, is an

articulation of a Marxist formalism, i.e., one which de­ monstrates the relationship between historical content

and literary form. Ira Shor, for instance, argues:

A marxist formalism becomes possible when a materialist intelligence reads texture and structure as closely as do New Critics. The deepest level of literary experience occurs through diction, imagery, patterns of lan­ guage and character, structures of incidents, motifs, figures, and gestures. A method which absorbs that level of aesthetic form demonstrates most profoundly the unity of knowledge, action, and feeling which is art's mimesis of life.5

But, unfortunately, Shor does not elaborate.

Feminist criticism, as it has most frequently been

practiced, has been historicist criticism; it focuses upon

characterization and, usually, ignores form. Authors who employ stereotypes are labelled sexist; authors who do not but who provide "role models" are given the stamp of approval. The danger in employing this practice is that the work will be made to serve the ideological purpose of the critic rather than the ideological purpose of the author. There is plenty of evidence that distorted inter­ pretations result. Judith Little, for example, in "Hero­ ism in To the Lighthouse," discusses the portrayal of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and concludes, "The role of the hero is reserved for Mr. Ramsey / s i c / , as the role of the hero in literature generally is reserved for the man; the woman, the 'heroine,1 must then protect him from the rather large

ZT burdens of his extravagant fortitude." A committed fem­ inist might like to identify partiarchal attitudes, i.e., might like to complain that men are always the heroes, women always in the shadows. But Woolf's view of things is not this simple. We have already seen that Woolf can depict heroic women. In To the Lighthouse she explores the highly complex relationship''between Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay.

The former does defer to her husband, and he does seem to represent a patriarchal order, but Mrs. Ramsay is also a hero (or heroine) of sorts. She controls (indeed, dominates) the private sphere, and she is able to influence her

children and others— indeed, she appears to be the strongest

character in the novel. Her Boeuf en Daube is a master­ piece, and her presence is felt long after her death. Mr.

Ramsay, in contrast, appears to be weak, nearly incapacitated. 163

He can cope only if his wife gives him sympathy, and he seems to be downright unstable as he dashes about quoting lines from "The Charge of the Light Brigade." It is surely an oversimplification to ascribe heroism to one character and not to the other.

I must also conclude from my study that Virginia

Woolf's form of feminism differs considerably from con­ temporary feminism. This is not the position taken by

Carolyn Heilbrun, however. She argues, in her paper,

"Virginia Woolf and Feminist Thought," that Woolf's fem­ inist views were so far ahead of her time as to appear pro- 7 phetic. Heilbrun outlines several areas in which this is true— Woolf's concern with androgyny, her reappraisal of psychoanalysis, and her attitudes toward marriage. She maintains that Woolf saw what modern psychologists are only now beginning to see— that personal maturity and in­ tegration of personality are highly correlated with androgyny. Heilbrun also maintains that Woolf anticipated the findings of recent psychoanalysts who have found that the male child has greater difficulty achieving maturity than does the female child. She illustrates Woolf's under­ standing of this concept by discusssing the characteriza­ tions of James and Cam in To the Lighthouse: James's ad­ justment is more difficult, Heilbrun thinks, than his sister's. Finally, Heilbrun notes that Woolf had en­ lightened views on marriage, recognizing the potentialities of the single life in the portrayal of Lily Briscoe and 164

demonstrating, through the characterization of

Clarissa, that "marriage if it is not to be suffocating

Q must offer a woman, above all, space."

But Heilbrun's view appears to be a minority op­

inion; other feminists have emphasized the ways in which

Woolf differs from other feminist writers. Lillian

Robinson, for instance, finds that Woolf's solutions to

the problems of women are inadequate. In an essay other­ wise sympathetic to Woolf (Robinson goes so far as to

say that Woolf's definition of the problem of the oppres­

sion of women is materialist in a Marxist sense),

she concludes:

Virginia Woolf speaks of all of ds living with the famous hundred pounds /sic7 and rooms of our own, with the habit of freedom and the courage to live fully human lives, saying that if we do so, then the poet will finally rise from among us. But she never really means all of us and she cannot explain how we each— separately— put on the habit of freedom. The poet, she maintains, "would come if we worked for her, and...so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while." This is itself poetry, but it also embraces private martyrdom and self- effacement, with no clear notion of how that individual austerity will lead to the desired advent. It is self-interest that should make us work, not merely for the conditions that will allow a female poet to be a poet, but for the liberation of all people, on which that poet's freedom fin­ ally depends. If we do so, who can tell what poetic energies will be released from our ranks to take their part in remaking human life?9

Robinson is uncomfortable with Woolf's rather idealistic 165 way of eliminating inequities which interfere with human creativity; it is exclusive and aimed at individ­ uals rather than groups. A room and money simply will not solve the problems of women.

Margaret Blanchard is also critical of Woolf’s rather idealistic solutions. She finds that Woolf's

"intellectual" snobbery (i.e. snobbery based on intel­ lectual rather than social achievement) interfered with her work and her feminism 1) by allowing her the luxury of cynicism about political action, 2) by allowing her to write for an elite audience and to develop a somewhat exclusive, obscure style, and 3) by allowing her to advocate, at times, vision without power.10 For Blanchard, vision without power "is the kind of conclusion one comes to when individual insights about oppression are not united to collective struggles against that oppression and when the individual can re­ main content with her class privileges. Blanchard also finds that Woolf's achievement in Mrs. Dalloway is limited because Clarissa's passivity "is so extreme that one can't 12 help viewing her as a dubious model of liberation."

But these attacks are bland in comparison with the diatribes of Elaine Showalter against Woolf, Richardson, and others who adhere to the idea of a "female conscious­ ness." Showalter emphasizes that "Today women novelists are continuing a phase of female self-discovery and 166 self-scrutiny in forms and vocabularies very dif­ ferent from those employed by Woolf. For Showalter,

"female consciousness," does not exist: maleness and femaleness are not two distinct principles, nor is there such a thing as "inherent sexual qualities in prose apaft from its content.;"14 A room of one's own is a re­ treat, Showalter thinks, the sphere of the exile and the eunuch.15 She says, "The ultimate room of one's own is the grave."16

It is true that Woolf's form of feminism differs significantly from that of contemporary feminists. She does not define the problems of women as do Kate Millett or Betty Friedan. In fact, for Woolf, women, usually, have solutions rather than problems. Men have created an alienating environment; women must restore it. But most of the attacks levelled at Woolf by contemporary feminists are unsound. It is true that her solutions mentioned in

A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas seem to be politically naive. But there is something wonderfully imaginative about the ideas contained there: Woolf suggests nothing less than a radical alteration of alienating patriarchal society— her projections are utopian. Blanchard is not being fair when she labels Woolf's attitude toward pol­

itical action "cynicism." For Woolf, political action is

inhuman and must be avoided because it corrupts. Nor is

she being fair when she labels Woolf's style "obscure."

Woolf's work is difficult, and it is rich in literary allusion, but it is not "exclusive." Woolf's novels re­ pudiate intellectual pretension and pedantry. Nor is

Blanchard accurate in her attack upon Clarissa's

"passivity." By Woolf's standards, Clarissa is quite active; she confronts life directly in a way that many other characters in the novel do not. Elaine Showalter's harsh denunciations are equally unjustified. She implies that Woolf's aesthetic theories and political ideas are directly related to her breakdowns and suicide. When Showalter observes, "The ultimate room of one's own is the grave," she is implying that Woolf's literary contribution was a form of retreat, a self- imposed exile which eventually led to her death. But it could as easily be argued that her art represented acceptance rather than retreat, involvement rather than exile. Quentin Bell suggests in his biography that his aunt's breakdowns were directly related to her crea­ tive productivity. It seems that the strain of writing 17 brought on emotional instability. If this is so, then Woolf's work appears to have been an heroic of­ fering rather than an escape.

It would be easy to dismiss Woolf's feminism be­ cause it appears to be so politically reactionary. It might be better, though, to think of her ideas as complementing the ideas of contemporary feminists rather than contradicting them. Woolf reminds us of 168 the importance of the private sphere, of the cul­ tivation of sensitivity to the feelings of others.

Contemporary feminists should, then, combine the strug­ gle for the equal status of' women in society with a struggle against dehumanization and reification. NOTES

^ Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), p. 11. o For a thorough discussion of the political conservatism of the New Criticism see Richard Ohmann, "Teaching and Studying Literature at the End of Ideology," The Politics of Literature, pp. 159.

3 Fraya Katz-Stoker, "The Other Criticism: Feminism vs. Formalism," p. 326.

4 Fredric Jameson, "Metacommentary," PMLA, 86 (1971), 12.

3 Ira Shor, "Questions Marxists Ask About Lit­ erature," CE, 34 (Nov. 1972), 179.

6 Judith Little, "Heroism in To the Lighthouse," Images of Women in Fiction, ed. Cornillon, p. 242.

7 Carolyn Heilbrun, "Virginia Woolf and Feminist Thought," delivered at the 1976 MLA Convention, p. 1.

® Heilbrun, p. 3.

® Lillian S. Robinson, "Who's Afraid of a Room of One's Own?" The Politics of Literature, p. 407.

Margaret Blanchard, "Socialization in Mrs. Dalloway," CE, 34 (Nov. 1972), 289.

Blanchard, p. 289.

^2 Blanchard, p. 304.

^3 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, p. 298.

3-4 Showalter, p. 258.

15 Showalter, p. 285.

Showalter, p. 297.

3,7 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1972) .

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Yeazell, Ruth. "Fictional Heroines and Feminist Critics." Novel. 8, No. 1 (1974), 29-38.

Zwerdling, Alex. "Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System." PMLA, 69-82. APPENDIX A

Table 2. Fleishman's Structural Scheme

Section Pages Character-focus and situation Time

I 5-6 Clarissa's shopping trip 10:00-11 a.m. II 16-25 Londoners (including the 10:00-11 a.m. Smiths and Clarissa) observing Prime Minister's car and sky­ writing III 25-30 Septimus in Regent's Park— 10:00-11 a.m. fantasies IV 33-45 Clarissa at home 11:00 a.m. V 45-54 Peter's visit to Clarissa after 11:00 a.m. VI 54-63 Peter's walk to the Park after 11:30 a.m. VII 63-72 Peter's dream and memories of * 11:30 a.m. Bourton, etc. VIII 72-79 Septimus and Rezia in Park— * 11:30 a.m. fantasies IX 79-92 Peter's memories of Bourton after 11:45 a.m. etc. X 92-104 Smiths leaving Park— summary just before noon of Septimus's career XI 104-13 The Bradshaw consultation 12 noon-1:30 p.m. XII 113-25 Lady Bruton's luncheon 1:30-3 p.m. XIII 125-32 Richard's return home arriving at 3 p.m. XIV 132-41 Clarissa on Miss Kilman before 3:30 p.m. XV 141-48 Miss Kilman at tea and at after 3:30 p.m. church XVI 148-53 Elizabeth's bus ride after 3:30 p.m. XVII 153-66 Septimus's suicide 6:00 p.m. XIX 181-201 The party— shifting points of ?-3:00 a.m. view XX 201-5 Clarissa's withdrawal and ?-3:00 a.m. return XXI 205-13 Conversation of Peter and ?-3:00 a.m. Sally

177 APPENDIX B

Clarissa CAR Septimus and Rezia SKYWRITING Clarissa *

Peter RUNNING CHILD Septimus and Rezia CLOCK Richard *

Clarissa CLOCK Elizabeth and Miss Kilman SHADOW Septimus and Rezia AMBULANCE Peter *

Clarissa's Party

Figure 2. Schaefer's Structural Scheme•

178 APPENDIX C

A B C D E

F D E C A B

T4 T3 T2 T1 T,0

Figure 3*. Daiches' Structural Scheme

179