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Religious Belief in a Secular Age: Literary Modernism and Virginia Woolf's Mrs

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Religious Belief in a Secular Age: Literary Modernism and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Religious belief in a secular age: Literary modernism and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway Author(s): Emily Griesinger Source: Christianity and Literature , Vol. 64, No. 4 (September 2015), pp. 438-464 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26194858 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26194858?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Christianity and Literature This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:02 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Article Christianity & Literature 2015, Vol. 64(4) 438–464 Religious belief in a ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/ secular age: Literary journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0148333115585279 modernism and Virginia cal.sagepub.com Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway Emily Griesinger Azusa Pacific University, USA Abstract This article explores Virginia Woolf’s conflicted relationship with Christianity, namely, her avowed atheism and hostility to religious dogma, yet her openness to mystical experience and her use of the language of Christian mysticism in her writing. In par- ticular, Woolf’s critique of secularism in her novel Mrs. Dalloway remains open at some level to Christian beliefs and values. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique reveals the soul as a ‘‘sacred’’ space or ‘‘sanctuary,’’ and her allusions to Christ in the character of Septimus Smith, and less obviously Clarissa Dalloway, suggest yearning for answers to human suffering in a ‘‘godless’’ world. In the end, however, the modernist effort to ‘‘sacralize’’ human goodness does not resolve deeper theological issues at stake in the novel, which Christianity locates in the doctrine of the fall and God’s redemptive work in Christ. Keywords Christianity, literary modernism, religious belief, secular enchantment, Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf’s hostility to Christianity is well known. The most convincing evidence is a letter to her sister, Vanessa Bell, in which she famously responds to the conversion of T. S. Eliot: I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God. (Letters III: 457–58)1 Corresponding author: Emily Griesinger, Azusa Pacific University, 901 E Alosta Ave Azusa, CA 91702, USA. Email: [email protected] This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:02 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Griesinger 439 As Jane de Gay and other scholars have recognized, Woolf’s relationship to Christianity was complicated. Not only were her Victorian grandparents leading members of the Evangelical Clapham Sect, which included such luminaries as William Wilberforce and Henry Venn, but both parents, Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth Stephen, were outspoken agnostics who challenged the Evangelical faith of their parents and raised their daughter to do the same. She later married a Jewish atheist, Leonard Woolf, and surrounded herself with artists and intellectuals, the Bloomsbury Circle, many of whom traced a similar lineage to the Clapham Sect and were eager to distance themselves from that heritage, which they found repressive.2 Her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, confirms that his aunt’s views on religion are not easily pinned down: Using the word in a very wide sense we may find a ‘‘religious’’ element in her novels; she tended to be, as she herself put it, ‘‘mystical’’; but she entertained no comfortable beliefs. That the Universe is a very mysterious place she would certainly have allowed, but not that this mysteriousness allows us to suppose the existence of a moral deity or of a future life. (Q. Bell II:136) We are not obliged to accept Quentin Bell’s opinion, of course, but it is a helpful starting point for the conversation I wish to engage in this essay, which examines religious themes in Woolf’s first successful stream-of-consciousness novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925).3 For our purposes applying the term ‘‘religious’’ to Virginia Woolf means at least the following: (1) she is conscious of unseen realities beneath or within the ordinary world; (2) she experiments with narrative technique in an effort to express or convey the inner world where the spirit or soul resides; (3) she employs religious imagery as part of this effort, drawing on Christian as well as pagan allusions, myth, and symbol. My concern here is to suggest how Woolf’s literary sensitivity to the unseen or spiritual reflects an imaginative response to secularization. This is not an entirely new thesis. Pericles Lewis and Amy Hungerford have recently studied literary responses to secularism, Lewis taking on modern novelists Henry James, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf in Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (2010); and Hungerford focusing on J.D. Salinger, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson in Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (2010). My argument differs from theirs in drawing on insights from Christian theology to illuminate Woolf’s response to secularism in Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, during the peak of literary modernism. In her article on Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, Gabrielle McIntire argues that Woolf’s experimental method employs religious language and symbol to ‘‘repudiate’’ and ‘‘renegotiate’’ the divine in ways that allow her characters to reject God, while remaining ‘‘astonishing[ly]’’ open to ‘‘immanence, transcendence, redemption, and illumination’’ (1). My interest is in how such ‘‘negotiations’’ occur in Mrs. Dalloway. Through close reading of the main characters, Clarissa Dalloway and her ‘‘dark double,’’ the war veteran, This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:26:02 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 440 Christianity & Literature 64(4) Septimus Smith, who commits suicide at the end of the novel, I will identify some of the ways ‘‘secular’’ and ‘‘sacred’’ collide in the text, and will consider the theo- logical implications of several moments of illumination, what literary critics fol- lowing James Joyce call ‘‘epiphanies,’’4 in which characters seek transcendent or ultimate meaning in this world without reference to an external deity. While expressing the secular unbelief associated with literary modernism, Mrs. Dalloway critiques secularism in ways that remain open at some level to Christian beliefs and values. In the end, however, the effort to ‘‘sacralize’’ human goodness does not resolve deeper theological issues at stake in the novel, which Christianity locates in the doctrine of the fall and the need for redemptive grace in a ‘‘godless’’ secular world. Virginia Woolf and Christianity The argument that Mrs. Dalloway is open in some measure to Christianity bears careful scrutiny given Woolf’s expressed hostility to institutional religion and all forms of Christian doctrine and dogma. Born in 1882 to Leslie and Julia Stephen, both committed agnostics, Virginia Woolf appears to have believed Christianity had something of value to offer in terms of ethics and morality. She was intention- ally (and perhaps maddeningly) vague about what that was, but whatever it was, it did not depend on what most Christians find essential to their faith, things like the Incarnation, the miracles recorded in the Old and New Testaments, the Resurrection, the immortality of the soul, and any sort of personal relationship with Christ. Such subversive views were common in the intellectual environs of Bloomsbury where she and her sister Vanessa moved when their father, Sir Leslie Stephen, died in 1904, opening their home at 46 Gordon Square to their brother Thoby’s Cambridge friends, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and others, who together with Virginia, Vanessa, and Thoby formed the Bloomsbury Circle.5 According to Charles Taylor, literary Bloomsbury was itself a secular subversion of Christianity that can be traced indirectly to the moral earnestness of the ‘‘Bloomsbury’’ parents and grandparents, the latter of whom two generations back were founding members of the Clapham Sect. Absent a personal faith in Christ, the earnestness of the Claphamites degenerated in the next generation (i.e. that of Leslie Stephen) into a repressive moralism that alie- nated their children, the Bloomsberries (Taylor 395–407).6 Vincent Pecora traces Woolf’s critical appropriation of her Evangelical heritage in her first novel The Voyage Out in which the protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, loses her faith during an Anglican church service while visiting a British
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