DOCSLIB.ORG

I, __Drew Patrick Shannon______, Hereby Submit This Work As Part of the Requirements for the Degree Of: Ph.D

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
I, __Drew Patrick Shannon______, Hereby Submit This Work As Part of the Requirements for the Degree Of: Ph.D UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:_31 July 2007_______ I, __Drew Patrick Shannon_____________________________________, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Ph.D. in: English and Comparative Literature It is entitled: The Deep Old Desk: The Diary of Virginia Woolf This work and its defense approved by: Chair: Tamar Heller___________________ Alison Rieke___________________ Michael Griffith________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ The Deep Old Desk: The Diary of Virginia Woolf by Drew Patrick Shannon, BA, MA A dissertation submitted in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, College of Arts and Sciences, at the University of Cincinnati, 31 July 2007 Committee Chair: Dr. Tamar Heller 2 ABSTRACT Virginia Woolf’s diaries have traditionally been used by scholars to augment discussion of her “real” and “major” works—the fiction and non-fiction whose publication she supervised in her lifetime—with details of their genesis, composition, and production. But as Quentin Bell, Woolf’s nephew and biographer, suggests, the diary itself is a major work, able to stand alongside her fictional masterpieces To the Lighthouse and The Waves (D1 xiii). The diary has been available nearly in its entirety for over fifteen years, and yet it is almost never considered as a text on its own. Of all of Woolf’s work, the diary is at once her most traditional (in its reliance on the “plot” of her own life and its day-to-day form) and her most modern and experimental (in the ways in which she often shatters the traditional diary form, uses it to her own ends, and distances it from the published, grand, monolithic male diaries of the past). The six published volumes suggest broad questions about audience, authorial intention, issues of the body and embodiment, and the development of Woolf’s modernism, while allowing for an extended look at her development as a writer, reader, wife, sister, and thinker. This project provides a comprehensive reading of the diary, and examines certain issues and themes through a series of individual “lenses” which correspond to biographical and thematic elements. Woolf once likened her diary to a “deep old desk,” and this metaphor of the desk—that solid fixture with many drawers, cubbyholes, nooks and crannies—informs my work. Much as the desk is made of compartments, my project will look at discrete themes and topics from Woolf’s diary in separate chapters, while addressing in each several overarching concerns that inform the diary as a whole. 1 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the following individuals for their support during the writing of this dissertation: I have been fortunate to work with three outstanding professors from the University of Cincinnati as my dissertation committee. Dr. Tamar Heller, my dissertation director, is, for me, a model of scholarship and devotion to reading and teaching. Her enthusiasm for Woolf and for my project was immeasurably helpful, as were her lucid, clear, concise comments and suggestions. Dr. Alison Rieke long ago instilled in me her belief that one should always trust one’s instincts and follow one’s academic interests, whether “fashionable” or not—the best advice that an incoming graduate student could have asked for. And Michael Griffith is a true gentleman scholar and writer, with whom I’ve worked on this and many other projects, always with extreme pleasure. For their friendship, love, encouragement, devotion, and conversational skills (hours and hours of talking about books!), I also wish to thank Kristin Czarnecki, Kirk Boyle, Rachel Zlatkin, Kelcey Parker, Elizabeth Gordon, Mark Hussey, James Schiff, Erin McGraw, Brad Payne, Max Seibert, Chad Davidson, Noah Soudrette, Michael Cunningham, Hank and Marian McCoy, my mother Sherry Baxter, Lee and Ernest Elliott, Bill Tiernan, Andy Bockhold, Michael Klaubunde, Michael Sontag, Elizabeth Bookser Barkley, Margaret McPeak, Joe Rouse, Michael Littig, Jason Cooney, and Christopher McLean. I am deeply grateful to you all. Finally, three people deserve special mention: Holly Alder, my favorite “partner in crime,” was always there to remind me—on those occasions when I forgot—why I love reading in the first place, and plied me with scores of children’s books and fantasy novels, which, as we both know, are the world’s best forms of escape. All that I know about telling a good story I learned from her. Though he was half a world away, Valerio Lanzani was a constant, daily source of love and friendship in final months of working on this project. I thank him for being there. Se non fosse stato per Virginia, avremmo potuto non incontrarci mai, e questo lavoro è il minimo che possa fare per ripagarla dell’averci fatto conoscere. And all of this work—indeed, life itself—would have been impossible without my partner, John McCoy. “But, looking for a phrase, I found none to stand beside your name.” This is for you. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 5 Chapter One: “What sort of diary should I like mine to be?”: Questions of Audience and Intention 17 Chapter Two: “Doing my scales”: A Writer’s Diary 46 Chapter Three: “Stay this moment”: The Diary of Virginia Woolf as a Modernist Text 141 Chapter Four: A Portable Room of One’s Own: A Woman’s Diary 174 Conclusion 203 Bibliography 207 4 Introduction: “My casual half hours after tea” As for many children, my first experience of a diary was when I was given one as a gift for Christmas when I was eight years old. It was brown, with the word “Diary” embossed in gold on its cover, the pages edged in gold all around, and a thin metal lock, which, in retrospect, I see could have been pried open with the flimsiest of butter knives. I began it on New Year’s day, the first blank dated page, and wrote down what I did, who I saw, where I played. Remarkably, I kept this up nearly daily until the end of August, just after my birthday, when I must have grown tired of filling in the extremely narrow lines with the same daily drudgery. I look through it now, and read of playing Star Wars with Tommy Knox, of my grandparents’ visit to Texas from Kentucky, of the end of the school year, of swimming. What I do not read is how I idolized Tommy Knox, how my parents argued bitterly over the grandparents’ visit (my mother wanted it, my father did not), how that summer there was a partial eclipse of the sun, which we observed through folded photographic negatives, after which I worried that I’d damaged my eyesight, how it was the hottest summer in years in Austin, when eggs would fry when cracked onto the sidewalk. I remember these things, but I cannot read about them. Writing them was beyond my capacity at the age of eight, and yet when I look at the pages of the diary, I long for some better way to transport myself back there, and I resent the empty pages after August, though as I remember, the days to December continued much as the days to August had, but for a change of weather. By the time I reached college, my interest in diaries had progressed to the point that I began reading those that had been published. Again, like many, the first published diary I read was The Diary of Anaïs Nin, spurred by the release of the film Henry and 5 June, the first NC-17-rated movie, where I was forced to show proof of age before entering, though I was past twenty-one. I was intrigued by Nin’s voice, and found that my own diaries, which I began to keep seriously at that time in order to make sense of a failed relationship, began to be less a record of events and more a delving into my own psychology, into my own emotional territory, into fantasy. I was dismayed soon after to learn that Nin’s diaries were heavily revised, and written with publication in mind; later I was pleased that Elizabeth Podnieks, in Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin (2000), reveals that she too was “dampened by some classroom discussion which castigated Nin for being a confessional poseur, for giving us a diary which was, after all, a fake—crafted, revised, and edited for the benefit of her audience” (3). But, I began to wonder, does this matter? Does the fact of revision, of the writing being done with one eye on the audience, affect my pleasure in Nin’s arch, melodramatic, often randy voice? As a senior in college, I took a course on “life-writing,” and studied Tristine Rainer’s The New Diary (1978). Rainer, a protégé of Nin, argues that “[t]he diary is the only form of writing that encourages total freedom of expression. Because of its very private nature, it has remained immune to any formal rules of content, structure, or style. As a result, the diary can come closest to reproducing how people really think and how consciousness evolves” (11). While I agreed with Rainer’s premise, I found the course itself to be something of a contradiction, for while the teacher encouraged total honesty and no self-censorship, she collected our journals, read them, and graded them. If there was something we did not wish her to read, we were to put a large red X, in pencil, across the page—she would not, she assured us, read such marked pages. Not surprisingly, there were nevertheless a 6 number of things I did not write about in that diary, nor was I able to formulate any ideas of why I might be continuing to keep my own “real” diary, the one I kept away from the classroom.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Virginia Woolf
    READING Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was one of the greatest English writers of all time. She was a modernist writer and some of her most famous experimental novels are Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. She was born in London on 25 January, 1882. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a very educated man. He was part of the “intellectual aristocracy” of Victorian England. Virginia Woolf had two brothers, one sister, two stepbrothers and two stepsisters. All eight children lived with their parents and a few servants at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. The family usually spent summer holidays at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall. This house was very important for Virginia's imagination. Virginia Woolf never went to school but she could use her father's large library and she decided to become a writer. Her brothers Thoby and Adrian went to Cambridge. There they met many intelligent young men. Some of them later became Virginia's friends. Virginia Woolf's mother died in 1895 and Virginia had her first nervous breakdown. After her father's death Virginia moved to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf and they decided to earn money by writing and journalism. Virginia finished her first novel in 1913. Its name was The Voyage Out and it was quite conventional. The book was published by Duckworth & Co in 1915. In 1917, the Woolfs bought a small printing press. Virginia wrote, published and printed. A lot of Virginia Woolf's friends died in the 1930s. After the start of the Second World War she and her husband moved to the country.
    [Show full text]
  • The Disturbing Victims of Chuck Palahniuk
    The Disturbing Victims of Chuck Palahniuk Anders Westlie Master thesis at ILOS UNIVERSITETET I OSLO 16.11.2012 II The Disturbing Victims of Chuck Palahniuk III © Anders Westlie 2012 The Disturbing Victims of Chuck Palahniuk Anders Westlie http://www.duo.uio.no/ Trykk: CopyCat Express, Oslo IV Abstract The writings of Chuck Palahniuk contain a large variety of strange and interesting characters. Many of them are victims of the choices they or others made, which is how their lives become interesting. I aim to see if there is any basis in reality for some of the situations and fears that happen. I also mean that Palahniuk thinks people are afraid of the wrong things, and afraid of too many things in general, and will approach this theory in my discussion. V VI Introduction This thesis has been through an abundance of versions and changed shape and content very many times over the years; from being all psychoanalysis to pure close reading, and ended with a study of victims, fears and reactions. In the end, the amount of close reading that has gone into it has bypassed the use of theory. This is mostly a reaction to past criticism to my over-use of critics, and focusing on that rather than the texts at hand. I find my time disposition in the production process of this paper to be shame, but life will sometimes get in the way of good intentions. As such, I hope that you, dear reader, find my efforts not in vain and take some interest in what my efforts have produced.
    [Show full text]
  • Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Issue 38, Spring 1992
    .Vir Inia Woo r\sce an Number 38 Spring 1992 TO THE READERS: FROM THE READERS: There is so much material in this issue that I will keep the edi­ John Mepham of London writes that his Virginia Woolf: Criticism in torial comments to a minimum. The VWM editors have been much Focus (forthcoming, St. Martin's) with its consideration of biograph­ gratified by how many of you have written in volunteering to ical, modernism, feminist and philosophical questions, and an write reviews and will do our best to spread such opportunities "immense" bibliography, helps cope with much of the new material around. Please do not hesitate, however, to suggest specific books on Woolf. you might wish to review. J.J. Wilson will be editing the Fall issue (deadline Sept. 10) and, as announced in our last issue, it will be a Elizabeth Steele writes to request• that you send to her "some "theme issue," featuring short articles on writers and other artists good ideas on teaching Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury, etc. Methods, who have been influenced by the work of Virginia Woolf. Send philosophy, outlines, queries welcomed." They could then appear material to her, c/o English Department, Sonoma State University, in a column in this publication. Her address is 3219 Cheltenham Rohnert Park, CA 94928. Road, Toledo Ohio 43606. Declaring an interest-I am a member of the board of Charleston/ U.s.A. the American support group for Vanessa Bell's and Duncan Laura Davis-Clapper announces• a computer discussion group Grant's house-I have included a note from the chair of the Board begun January 25, 1992 called "ModBrits." Mod Brits covers about the organization.
    [Show full text]
  • SIBL. . V^'- ' / Proquest Number: 10096794
    -TÂ/igSEOBSIAW p o e t s : A. CBIIXCÆJEaaMIBA!ElûIif--CÆJ^ POETRY '' ARD POETIC THEORY. “ KATHARIKE COOKE. M. P h i l . , SIBL. v^'- ' / ProQuest Number: 10096794 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10096794 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 SYNOPSIS. As the Introduction explains this thesis sets out to look at the Georgians* achievement in poetry in the light of their intentions as avowed in prose and their methods as exemplified hy their poems. This is chiefly a critical exercise hut history has heen used to clear away the inevitable distortion which results from looking at Georgian poetry after fifty years of Eliot- influenced hostility. The history of the movement is dealt with in Chapter 2. The next three chapters examine aspects of poetry which the Georgians themselves con­ sidered most interesting. Chapter 3 deals with form, Chapter 4 with diction and Chapter 5 with inspiration or attitude to subject matter. Chapter 6 looks at the aspect of Georgianism most commonly thought by later readers to define the movement, th a t is i t s subjects.
    [Show full text]
  • The World Without a Self
    The World Without a Self Virginia Woolf and the Novel by fames Naremore New Haven and London, Yale University Press, r973 Copyright © z973 by Ya/,e University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Library of Congress catalog card number: 72-9z3z5 International standard book number: o-300-oz594-z Designed by Sally Sullivan and set in Unotype Granjon type, Printed in the United States of America by The Colonial Press Inc., Clinton, Massachusetts. Published in Great Britain, Europe, and Africa by Yale University Press, Ltd., London. Distributed in Canada by McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal; in Latin America by Kaiman & Polan, Inc., New York City; in Austra/,asia and Southeast Asia by John Wiley & Sons Austra/,asia Pty. Ltd., Sydney; in India by UBS Publishers' Distributors Pvt., Ltd., Delhi; in .fapan by .fohn Weatherhill, Inc., Tokyo. For Rita and Jay What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, one with the object one adored? Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse "How describe the world seen without a self?" Bernard in The Waves Contents Acknowledgments xi 1 Introduction 1 2 A Passage from The Voyage Out 5 3 The Artist as Lover: The Voyage Out Continued 30 4 Virginia W 001£ and the Stream of Consciousness 60 5 Mrs. Dal.loway 77 6 To the Lighthouse rr2 7 The Waves 151 8 Orlando and the "New Biography" 190 9 The "Orts and Fr-agments" in Between the Acts 219 ro Conclusion 240 ·Bibliography 249 Index 255 Acknowledgments Portions of this book have appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and in The Ball State University Forum.
    [Show full text]
  • Virginia Woolf's Materteral Form Reynolds, R
    WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch Aunthood and Narrative Voice: Virginia Woolf’s Materteral Form Reynolds, R. This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © Ms Rosemary Reynolds, 2020. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Aunthood and Narrative Voice: Virginia Woolf’s Materteral Form Rosemary Jean Reynolds Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature School of Humanities, University of Westminster April 2020 1 ABSTRACT It is rare to find an area of Virginia Woolf’s work that has not had, in some form, critical attention. Yet this thesis is the first study, of any length, which takes aunts in Woolf’s writing as its focus. This thesis starts by asking the question, why are there so many aunts in Woolf’s writing? This initial enquiry leads to a consideration of the position of aunthood in British culture during Woolf’s lifetime, and argues that the discourse surrounding the 1907 Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act is emblematic of the aunt’s unique position between inside, and outside, the family. Using this historicist research alongside existing poststructuralist Woolf scholarship, this thesis develops a new way to read Woolf’s innovation in narrative form. It develops a theory of the materteral which takes into account the aunt’s specific historical position at the time, and Woolf’s personal conception of aunthood as expressed in her private writing as well as her fiction.
    [Show full text]
  • The Posthumanistic Theater of the Bloomsbury Group
    Maine State Library Digital Maine Academic Research and Dissertations Maine State Library Special Collections 2019 In the Mouth of the Woolf: The Posthumanistic Theater of the Bloomsbury Group Christina A. Barber IDSVA Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalmaine.com/academic Recommended Citation Barber, Christina A., "In the Mouth of the Woolf: The Posthumanistic Theater of the Bloomsbury Group" (2019). Academic Research and Dissertations. 29. https://digitalmaine.com/academic/29 This Text is brought to you for free and open access by the Maine State Library Special Collections at Digital Maine. It has been accepted for inclusion in Academic Research and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Maine. For more information, please contact [email protected]. IN THE MOUTH OF THE WOOLF: THE POSTHUMANISTIC THEATER OF THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP Christina Anne Barber Submitted to the faculty of The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy August, 2019 ii Accepted by the faculty at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in partial fulfillment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. COMMITTEE MEMBERS Committee Chair: Simonetta Moro, PhD Director of School & Vice President for Academic Affairs Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts Committee Member: George Smith, PhD Founder & President Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts Committee Member: Conny Bogaard, PhD Executive Director Western Kansas Community Foundation iii © 2019 Christina Anne Barber ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iv Mother of Romans, joy of gods and men, Venus, life-giver, who under planet and star visits the ship-clad sea, the grain-clothed land always, for through you all that’s born and breathes is gotten, created, brought forth to see the sun, Lady, the storms and clouds of heaven shun you, You and your advent; Earth, sweet magic-maker, sends up her flowers for you, broad Ocean smiles, and peace glows in the light that fills the sky.
    [Show full text]
  • November 2-5 2017
    LITERARY FESTIVAL NOVEMBER 2-5 2017 An International Festival Celebrating Literature, Ideas and Creativity. CHARLESTONTOCHARLESTON.COM FOR TICKETS VISIT CHARLESTONTOCHARLESTON.COM CALL 843.723.9912 1 WELCOME Welcome to an exciting new trans-Atlantic literary festival hosted by two remarkable sites named Charleston. The partnership between two locations with the same name, separated by a vast oceanic expanse, is no mere coincidence. Through the past several centuries, both Charleston, SC and Charleston, Sussex have been home to extraordinary scholars, authors and artists. A collaborative literary festival is a natural and timely expression of their shared legacies. UK © C Luke Charleston, Established in 1748, the Charleston Library Society is the oldest cultural institution in the South and the country’s second oldest circulating library. Boasting four signers of the Declaration of Independence and hosting recent presentations by internationally acclaimed scholars such as David McCullough, Jon Meacham, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, its collections and programs reflect the history of intellectual curiosity in America. The Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, England was home to the A Hesslenberg Charleston © Festival famed Bloomsbury group - influential, forward-looking artists, writers, and thinkers, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and frequent guests Benjamin Britten, E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot. For almost thirty years, Charleston has offered one of the most well-respected literary festivals in Europe, where innovation and inspiration thrive. This year’s Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival inaugurates a partnership dedicated to literature, ideas, and creativity. With venues as historic as the society itself, the new festival will share Charleston’s famed Southern hospitality while offering vibrant insights from contemporary speakers from around the globe.
    [Show full text]
  • (London, 1988), P. 125. PROLOGUE
    NOTES PREFACE 1. William Empson, Arguejying (London, 1988), p. 125. PROLOGUE: FAMILY TIES 1. Dame Felicitas Corrigan, Siegfried Sassoon: Poet's Pilgrimage (London, 1973), p. 17. 2. See Keith Middlemass, Edward VII (London, 1975), p. 44. 3. See Stanley Jackson, The Sassoons: Portrait of a Dynasty (London, 1968), pp. 84-88. 4. Jackson (1968), p. 75. 5. In 1871 her sister Laura became the second wife of Lawrence Alma- Tadema (1836-1912), the Dutch-born painter who in the 1880s and 90s achieved popular successes with his imaginary scenes from classical Greece, Rome and ancient Egypt. 6. Jackson (1968), p. 76. 7. In The Old Century there is mention of a cook and two maids, with a nurse - later replaced by a German governess - to look after the boys. The male element consisted of the head-gardener, two under-gardeners and Richardson the groom. 8. Philip Hoare, Serious Pleasures: the Life of Stephen Tennant (London, 1990), p. 88. 9. His book collecting may have reminded him of his grandfather Sassoon David Sassoon, who had spent his leisure hours building up a library of rare Hebrew manuscripts. Cf. Jackson (1968), p. 38. 10. Cf. Sassoon's own account of this venture in The Old Century, pp. 279-82. 11. Corrigan (1973), pp. 55-6. 12. Rupert Brooke's last girlfriend, the actress Cathleen Nesbitt (1888-1982) records in her memoirs, A Little Love (London, 1977), that she met Brooke later that same day and that he was full of indignation about Sassoon's remark. That she should recall such a trivial incident over sixty years later (and at the time Sassoon was still a complete unknown) is hard to believe, especially since, according to Sassoon's version, Brooke did not really make an issue out of it.
    [Show full text]
  • Vita & Virginia Teaching Material
    ! EDUCATIONAL MATERIAL Vita & Virginia, by Eileen Atkins Adapted from correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West ! Teatret ved Sorte Hest Playing dates: 28th October – 19th November 2016 Mon – Fri 20.00; Sat 17.00 Playing time: 2 hours including interval Directed by: Barry McKenna On stage: Sue Hansen-Styles and Nathalie Johnston Lighting designer: Katja Andreassen !1 Tickets: Tel. 33 31 06 06 (Mon – Fri 12 – 16) or write to [email protected] Groups of young people under 25: 45 kr per ticket Why Not Theatre Company presents the revival of their highly acclaimed 2011 production of ”Vita & Virginia”, which chronicles the relationship between novelist Virginia Woolf and aristocratic socialite Vita Sackville-West; a relationship that spanned two decades and had a profound impact on both women's lives. Why Not Theatre Company played to full houses and garnered superlative reviews from many of the country’s reviewers with their first production of “Vita & Virginia” in 2011 at CaféTeatret. Now, 75 years after Virginia Woolf’s death, the Company returns with a new cast and plays for the first time at Teatret ved Sorte Hest. Director Barry McKenna again directs this production with Sue Hansen-Styles again playing Virginia Woolf and Nathalie Johnston playing Vita Sackville- West. Nathalie co-founded Why Not Theatre Company with Sue in 2007 and it will be the first time that the two share the stage again, after Nathalie’s return to England in 2010. Why Not Theatre Company started its professional productions in Denmark in 2007 and founded a formal theatre association in 2010.
    [Show full text]
  • Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, and Turn of the Century Consciousness
    Colby Quarterly Volume 13 Issue 1 March Article 5 March 1977 The Moment, 1910: Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, and Turn of the Century Consciousness Edwin J. Kenney, Jr. Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq Recommended Citation Colby Library Quarterly, Volume 13, no.1, March 1977, p.42-66 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby. Kenney, Jr.: The Moment, 1910: Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, and Turn of the The Moment, 1910: Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, and Turn ofthe Century Consciousness by EDWIN J. KENNEY, JR. N THE YEARS 1923-24 Virginia Woolf was embroiled in an argument I with Arnold Bennett about the responsibility of the novelist and the future ofthe novel. In her famous essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," she observed that "on or about December, 1910, human character changed";1 and she proceeded to argue, without specifying the causes or nature of that change, that because human character had changed the novel must change if it were to be a true representation of human life. Since that time the at once assertive and vague remark about 1910, isolated, has served as a convenient point of departure for historians now writing about the social and cultural changes occurring during the Edwardian period.2 Literary critics have taken the ideas about fiction from "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" and Woolfs other much-antholo­ gized essay "Modern Fiction" as a free-standing "aesthetic manifesto" of the new novel of sensibility;3 and those who have recorded and discussed the "whole contention" between Virginia Woolf and Arnold Bennett have regarded the relation between Woolfs historical observation and her ideas about the novel either as just a rhetorical strategy or a generational disguise for the expression of class bias against Bennett.4 Yet few readers have asked what Virginia Woolf might have nleant by her remark about 1910 and the novel, or what it might have meant to her.
    [Show full text]
  • Virginia Woolf's to the Lighthouse: Toward an Integrated Jurisprudence
    Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: Toward an Integrated Jurisprudence Lisa Weilt I. INTRODUCTION Since the publication of Virginia Woolf s novel To the Lighthouse in 1927, a significant volume of critical commentary has grown to surround the work. These critical interpretations come in two types: some consider Woolf's technical experiments in style and form;' others consider her ideology. Commentaries which address Woolf's ideology include discussions of her views on philosophy, aesthetics, relations between the sexes, and feminist issues.2 In recent years, scholars have approached the novel with the insight of Woolf's autobiographical writings and have taken a particular interest in feminist and psychoanalytical themes in the work. This Article's analysis differs from the existing body of commentary by exploring another dimension of Woolf's ideology: her legal philosophy. Existing commentaries interpret the celebrated expedition to the Lighthouse as a quest for psychological maturity, truth, harmonious social relations between men and women, and aesthetic harmonies. This Article adds another dimension to the symbolic voyage and interprets the expedition as a quest for justice. Critics have often placed Woolf within the intellectual aristocracy of her time and judged her as an elitist who avoided themes of social and political importance.4 This Article counters that criticism and concludes that Woolf's t B.A. University of Pennsylvania, 1989; J.D. Georgetown University Law Center, 1993. 1 would especially like to thank my research advisor, Professor Robin West, whose scholarship and teaching, and insightful comments enriched this essay and this author. I would also like to thank Professor Mari Matsuda for her exemplary integration of feminist method and theory in the classroom.
    [Show full text]