THE PACIFIST-FEMINIST: WAR AND GENDER IN WOOLF’S NOVELS AND
ESSAYS
AN HONORS THESIS
SUBMITTED ON THE TWENTY-SECOND DAY OF APRIL, 2020
TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
OF THE HONORS PROGRAM
OF NEWCOMB-TULANE COLLEGE
TULANE UNIVERSITY
FOR THE DEGREE OF
BACHELOR OF ARTS
WITH HONORS IN ENGLISH
BY
______Allison Babula
APPROVED:
______Dr. Molly Abel Travis Director of Thesis
______Dr. Adam McKeown Second Reader
______Dr. Brittany Kennedy Third Reader
Allison Babula. The Pacifist-Feminist: War and Gender in Woolf’s Novels and Essays.
(Professor Molly Abel Travis, English)
This thesis aims to examine the impacts war and political tensions across 20th century Europe had on Woolf’s life and writings. Specifically, this thesis considers World
War I, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise of World War II, alongside ideas of nationalism, fascism, and Nazism. Woolf’s writings reveal notions of war and nation to be an issue relating to masculinity. Woolf believed the catastrophes of the First World
War destroyed the illusions of traditional Western society, releasing women from their role as “looking-glasses… reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (A Room of One’s Own 30). As the Great War led Englishmen and women to believe their great civilization was on the verge of ruins, artists such as Woolf portrayed the flaws of their gender-rigid society that ultimately threw citizens into a horrific war. Thus, Woolf advocates for positive change in the form of peace and equality through the introduction of feminine voices and perspectives. Nationalism grew in Europe, reflected in the
Spanish Civil War, which took the life of Woolf’s nephew, while fascism and Nazism rose within the continent. These events hit Woolf personally, generating an anxiety of impending doom for the already mentally shaken author. Finally, in 1941 as Hitler’s powers continued to grow and the world faced another total war, Woolf took her own life. As Woolf’s life, death, and legacy were engulfed in the horrors and anxieties of the
20th century, her writings embody the same. This paper will include journal entries and essays by Woolf, as well as longer works such as Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the
Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts, that portray these events and ideals as problems deeply rooted in Western gender dynamics.
ii Table of Contents
Introduction
1-4
Chapter 1
Male Appropriation of Classical Antiquity and Shakespeare
5-13
Chapter 2
Overcoming Patriarchal Institutions Through Art and Nature
14-26
Chapter 3
Fascism and the Lives of Great Men
27-36
Conclusion
37-43
iii “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country
is the whole world.” – Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas in 1938 at the dawn of World War II.
The purpose of the book-length essay, to answer the question “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” (Three Guineas 3), remains unanswered by the conclusion of her work. Instead, Woolf provides the unnamed, male recipient with three actions, which in her opinion may eventually halt mass destruction. Her advice to write letters of protest to newspapers, to join an anti-war society, and to donate money to the anti-war effort reflects the lack of access to education, institutions, and professions women experience.
Thus, Woolf argues that the limited opportunities women have in comparison to men create an understanding of preventing war that only women are capable of grasping. To prevent war from a woman’s perspective is different than to prevent war from a man’s perspective, for their relationships with freedom and war differ greatly by gender.
Therefore, her response is fundamentally incompatible with the question asked by her male correspondence. Consequentially, Woolf’s writings reveal notions of war and nation to be issues relating to masculinity, for men are the persons of power.
Despite leaving the question unanswered, Woolf’s relationship with war remained at the forefront of her life. Her nephew fought and died in the Spanish Civil War. Her husband Leonard Woolf was a Jew witnessing the rise of Nazism. Finally, in 1941 as
Hitler’s powers continued to grow and the world faced another total war, Woolf took her own life, arguably making herself a victim of war. As her death may suggest, Woolf’s writings reflect the horrors and anxieties of the 20th century.
1 Woolf’s writings trace the relationship between hyper-masculinity and the World
Wars. Out of patriarchy comes nationalism, then comes Fascism, then comes, more specifically, Nazism. As war becomes an inevitable outcome for hyper-masculine
Europe, Woolf devotes her life and legacy to challenging the prominent male literary culture. In both context and form, Woolf’s novels illustrate a divergence from the male literary tradition and the masculine styles of popular modernism. Austen, Eliot, and the
Brontës paved the way for Woolf – Milton did not, Thackery did not, Fielding did not.
Moreover, women could not have been poets in the time of Shakespeare. Woolf argues in
A Room of One’s Own that “Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at” (A Room of One’s Own
49). As women were barred from education, institutions, and professions – then and during the majority of Woolf’s life – Woolf argues that “It is useless to go to the great men writers for help” (A Room of One’s Own 76).
“Never did any book [Ulysses] so bore me” (Letters 3:80). Woolf had several critiques regarding the boys’ club that was modernism, and literature in general. Woolf argued that men write about women, and of course incorrectly at that, that men’s writing is too flooded with their own voice, and that men are materialistic writers. Likewise,
Woolf declares, “Women do not write books about men” (A Room of One’s Own 27).
Women write about life. On men’s writing, Woolf notes, “It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of women” and “indicated such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself” (A Room of One’s Own 99). Furthermore,
“he had full-liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked… but after reading
2 a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight, dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’” (A Room of One’s Own, 99). Woolf argues that male privilege and male ego infiltrates male writing so that the actual author is implanted into the narrative. Lastly, in her essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf refers to some of her fellow modernists as materialists, “that they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and enduring” (Common Reader 149). By doing so, Woolf believes “life escapes” (Common Reader 149) the work. Despite it being obvious that “the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex… it is the masculine values that prevail” (A Room of One’s Own, 73-74).
The literary techniques practiced by men create “an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war” (A Room of One’s Own, 74). In contrast, the critic assumes another book insignificant “because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room” (A Room of One’s Own, 74). Woolf describes this phenomenon as
“everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists” (A Room of One’s
Own, 74) and it is the masculine values that carry the larger critical audience. Thus,
Woolf advocates to “look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’ [as shown in materialistic fiction]. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” (Common Reader 149). These three objections, though there may be many more, ultimately led Woolf to explore the mundane through indirect discourse, and Woolf’s experimental novels like Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse
(1927), and Between the Acts (1941) attempt to break away from the masculine fundamentals of Western literature.
3 Woolf rejects the notions of “the nature of manhood and the nature of womanhood,” that “the nature of manhood [is] to fight” for these problematic ideologies are “frequently defined by both Italian and German dictators” (Three Guineas 326).
Hence, Woolf challenges the masculine tradition by reclaiming literature, art, and history through a feminine, or oppositional lens, that refuses to emphasize the military conquest of England. Ultimately, Woolf’s novels examine the manipulation and appropriation of literature and history to glamorize militarization and promote ideals of nationhood and masculinity as an instrument of patriarchy in order to attain power over women and other nations. Through her examination and exploration of classical and Shakespearean literature and her rejection of history as the lives of great men, Woolf ultimately advocates for the necessity of feminine perspectives to reclaim scholarship. This newfound feminine perspective would function as a means of healing and rebuilding in the form of social and political progress, and eventually peace. However, in order for peace to be achieved, women must actively take a stance against patriarchy and fascism, which are both masculine at their core.
4 Chapter 1
Male Appropriation of Classical Antiquity and Shakespeare
I
Woolf’s earliest experimental novel, Jacob’s Room, functions as a modern bildungsroman of Jacob Flanders: a boy growing up in middle class English society before the Great War, whose last name may signify the battlefield on which he perishes.
Jacob travels to Greece driven by desires of lost love, sees the ruins of ancient civilization, and then dies fighting for the Allies in the war. While Woolf first explores
English society prior to the war, her succeeding novel, Mrs. Dalloway, portrays the aftermath of the war in London within a single day. Though consisting of only one day,
Woolf’s novel captures the failing British Empire – politically and socially. Mrs.
Dalloway reveals the Victorian ideals that once built an Empire and plummeted the same
Empire into war no longer speak to everyday English society. To the Lighthouse, a novel about coming to terms with the war and loss, contrasts these two previous novels, separating pre and post-war England with the “Time Passes” section. The three divisions of the novel reveal a decisive break from England before the war and England after the war, allowing for careful inspection of what led to such disaster and how humanity can regroup in its aftermath.
The protagonist of Jacob’s Room is based on Woolf’s most beloved brother
Thoby1, who died of typhoid fever shortly after a visit to Greece in 1906, the same year
Jacob attends Cambridge. Jacob’s education ingrains in him and his generation of men a
1 Thoby Stephen is credited with starting the Bloomsbury Group’s Thursday evening meetings. Thoby showed promise of distinguishing himself as a great thinker but died at the young age of 26. Woolf particularly mourned her brother’s death deeply.
5 connection between masculinity and war and power. Jacob’s Room, in particular, most notably juxtaposes Greece and England, believing Victorian English civilization to be the direct descendent of Ancient Greece, as shown in Jacob’s classical education, his affinity for Byron, and the continuous Grecian and Shakespearean references. In doing so, Woolf explores and critiques the ways in which patriarchal society desired to construct culture and literary tradition, and to control who has access to it, thus pointing out the educational inequality women face. Like Jacob Flanders, Thoby Stephen had the opportunity to immerse himself and benefit from a solely masculine literary canon.
Meanwhile, Woof had limited access to and representation within this literary tradition, just as “Miss Julia Hedge, the feminist” wonders, “why didn’t they leave room for an
Eliot or a Bronte” (Jacob’s Room 106); and as Lily Briscoe is told, “’Women can’t paint, women can’t write. . .” (To the Lighthouse 48). Therefore, Jacob’s education comes as a male birthright, putting him in a “position of power and instilled an imperialist urge to subdue and appropriate the culture of other nations” (“Literature of Survival” 69).
A common trope in Western literature is the allusion to the Classics. Woolf discusses the oddity of this fascination in her essay “On Not Knowing Greek.” The essay opens,
For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we
should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the
words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted,
and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race
and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition. (Common Reader 23)
6 Woolf regards Greek literature as “the impersonal literature” for “We have their poetry, and that is all” (Common Reader 23). Nevertheless, “the Greeks could say, as if for the first time, ‘Yet being dead they have not died’” (Common Reader 34). It is this timelessness that Western writers strive for and is present in its literature. By doing so,
English literature has abducted Ancient Greek literature in an attempt to live forever.
However, these classical tropes become distorted with ideals of masculinity, militarization, and nationhood.
Woolf suggests that Jacob’s admiration of English philhellenes perhaps prepares him for his death in the Great War. Jacob’s likeness to this sort of literature begins as a child when given the opportunity to choose a gift from Mr. Floyd’s home, “Jacob chose the works of Byron in one volume” (Jacob’s Room 21-22). Lord Byron, the romantic poet and politician, became a revolutionary in the Greek War of Independence, dying of typhoid fever during his campaign, for which he remains a Greek national hero.
Furthermore, as Jacob receives his copy of Byron from a member of the clergy, Woolf enforces a link between war and established religion, suggesting both as patriarchal institutions. Jacob identifies with Byron through his letter writing to his mother, as
“Byron wrote letters,” (Jacob’s Room 93) too. This reference to Byron returns later on in the novel during Jacob’s last sighting. While running through the streets, Jacob passes
Mr. Floyd, who remarks, “I gave him Byron’s works” (Jacob’s Room 173). Following this scene, it is understood that Jacob enrolls in and dies in the war, thus suggesting
Jacob’s admiration of Byron may have led him into battle. Likewise, the first description of Jacob’s room lends another connection between Greek and English civilization and war:
7 Jacob’s room had a round table and two low chairs. There were yellow flags in a
jar on the mantelpiece: a photograph of his mother; cards from societies with little
raised crescents, coats of arms, and initials; notes and pipes; on the table lay paper
ruled with a red margin – an essay, no doubt – ‘Does History consist of the
Biographies of Great Men?’ (Jacob’s Room 39)
Alone in his room, Jacob surrounds himself with national allusions, while he writes an essay connecting history with the lives of men. This may be considered a critique of
Woolf’s own father Leslie Stephen who edited the Dictionary of National Biography.
Jacob reads “long histories in many volumes… in order to understand the Holy Roman
Empire, as one must” (Jacob’s Room 43). The notion of empire is again exercised in
Jacob’s reading of a History of the Byzantium Empire from 716-1077 by George Finlay, a historian, who like Byron, died in Athens supporting Greek independence. Woolf purposely pairs English philhellenes with the notion that history is created by great men.
This idea is further exemplified by the repetition of Jacob’s sigh “there never was a time when great men are more needed” (Jacob’s Room 143). This quotation influences Jacob to finally leave his room and step into history through fighting in the war. By doing so,
Jacob reflects the notion that male desire to achieve greatness comes in the form of war and power as a means to preserve their culture. This idea is further shown through
Jacob’s decision to enter the war only after his visit to Greece, “looking up and seeing the sharp outline, his meditations were given an extraordinary edge; Greece was over; the
Parthenon in ruins; yet there he was” (Jacob’s Room 150). There, standing at “the height of civilization” (Jacob’s Room 164) in ruins, Jacob sees the potential loss of England and becomes a Homer for the English army.
8 II
The notion that history is created by the lives of great men is further portrayed in
To the Lighthouse’s Mr. Ramsay, who devotes his academic life to reaching “Q” as a means to quantify his achievements and place himself within a hierarchy of other great men. Mr. Ramsay believes his academic effort has brought him to “Q,” but he continues to wonder if he can reach “R.” However, Mr. Ramsay rationalizes that “Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something” (To the
Lighthouse 34). Mr. Ramsay is aware that not all men can become great, for “One in a generation. Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one?” (To the Lighthouse 35). Yet,
Mr. Ramsay continues to strive for greatness, as his masculine education and perspective of the world has taught him that there is value in being remembered; “It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? … The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare” (To the Lighthouse 35). Mr.
Ramsay is troubled by the idea that he will not be remembered, because as history and literature has taught him, great men should and will be remembered. Failing to be remembered comes as a failure to be a fully realized man. As a result of Mr. Ramsay’s insecurity in his manly greatness, he craves sympathy from every female in his life, most notably his wife. Therefore, Mrs. Ramsay’s submission to Mr. Ramsay’s needs presents how the patriarchy and its needs drain women and subjects them to men’s needs.
Similarly, in Jacob’s Room, the British Museum “bone lies cool over the visions and heat of the brain. Only here the brain is Plato’s brain and Shakespeare’s” with artifacts that “crossed the river of death… seeking some landing; now wrapping the body
9 well for its long sleep” (Jacob’s Room 109). At the same time, “Plato continues his dialogue… And Hamlet utters his soliloquy” (Jacob’s Room 109). Woolf contrasts the mummies in the museum with the habitual repairing humans put into keeping artifacts, like the great minds of Plato and Shakespeare, alive, thus leaving dead writers with a life in the present. Like Mr. Ramsay and Jacob, who share the same desire for longevity,
Richard Dalloway, the conservative politician, prepares his campaign while writing a history of the Bruton family, despite the dying conservative party and demise of the
Bruton family.
Woolf’s argument that Shakespeare continued the spirit of ancient Greece (most noted in her essay “On Not Knowing Greek”) is further portrayed in the description of the British Museum in Jacob’s Room: “There is in the British Museum an enormous mind. Consider that Plato is there cheek by jowl with Aristotle; and Shakespeare with
Marlow. This great mind is hoarded beyond the power of any single mind to possess it”
(Jacob’s Room 108). This scene is flooded with masculine dominance, as Shakespeare and Marlow were great male literary competitors. Jane de Gay suggests, “the museum is a symbol of British nationalism and the appropriation of culture” because the museum displays “the Elgin Marbles, taken from the Parthenon in Greece” (“Literature and
Survival” 79). Likewise, Jacob’s decision to travel to Greece sparked by “civilizations
[standing] around them like flowers ready for picking,” (Jacob’s Room 76) further reveals the masculine tendency to confiscate other cultures for their own. The quote connects Plato and Aristotle with Shakespeare through the phrase “cheek by jowl,” taken from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (III. ii. 338), a play which is set in
Athens and whose characters are taken from Greek mythology. The quote itself
10 emphasizes the notion of a literary canon beginning with Ancient Greece and progressing into England, the canon that inspires Jacob to head into war and fails to welcome Miss
Julia Hedge.
Masculine characters within Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway continue to engage in this notion of earned greatness, shown through their misconceptions of Shakespeare’s works and their ignorance in using Shakespeare’s works as a form of patriotic propaganda. While aboard a ship with Timmy Durrant, Jacob knocks a copy of
Shakespeare overboard; “There you could see him floating merrily away, with all his pages ruffling innumerably; and then he went under” (Jacob’s Room 43). Not only does
Jacob fail to appreciate Shakespeare as he supposedly claims he does, the loss of
Shakespeare by going overboard suggests the fall of English civilization, even more so, the loss is suggestively caused by Jacob’s failure to use Shakespeare appropriately.
Likewise, Mrs. Dalloway’s Lady Bruton symbolizes a dying English conservative party.
She is a product of and supporter of the establishment, who fittingly misquotes
Shakespeare in her political speeches. The narrator notes that Lady Bruton “never spoke of England” and yet “this isle of men, this dear, dear land was in her blood (without reading Shakespeare)” (Mrs. Dalloway 176). Lady Bruton manipulates these lines from
Richard II to beautify militarization, as she begins to fantasize war. For, “if ever a woman could have worn the helmet and shot the arrow, could have led troops to attack, ruled with indomitable justice,” (Mrs. Dalloway 176) it would have been Lady Bruton. Similar to Jacob, Lady Bruton does not read Shakespeare, but feels it acceptable to acquire and misquote John of Gaunt’s eulogy to England in Richard II: “this sceptered isle … This happy breed of men … this dear dear land” (II. i. 40, 45, 57). Lady Bruton’s further
11 misreading stems from the fact that John of Gaunt’s speech actually advocates against war.
Though Woolf expresses appreciation for Shakespeare’s work in A Room of
One’s Own, titling him a true androgynous writer, gender complicates Woolf’s relationship with and response to Shakespeare. Julia Briggs notes, “while the beauty of
Shakespeare’s language and the beauty of Shakespeare’s landscapes always held a strong appeal for [Woolf], she was well aware that they could be borrowed for unwelcome political ends” (“Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare” 14). Woolf argues the ways “the education system has appropriated literature to legitimise war and nationalism in the case of Septimus Warren Smith, who, although from a very different social class from Jacob, is led into battle by his education (“Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare” 72). After studying Shakespeare in college, Septimus aspires to become a poet. Inspired by the national poet, Septimus volunteers to fight to “save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square” (Mrs. Dalloway 83). Not only does Woolf draw attention again to the manipulation of Shakespeare’s works in English society, but also the heterosexual economy which exploits women to challenge their husbands to volunteer and men to prove themselves by accepting this challenge.
Likewise, Miss Isabel Pole “reflected how she might give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra” (Mrs. Dalloway 83). Another allusion to Shakespeare, Miss Isabel Pole’s choice to use Antony and Cleopatra foreshadows Septimus’s fate, as the narrative follows: Cleopatra seduces Antony into waging an impossible war and commits suicide in an attempt to restore his lost honor. Following the war, Septimus no longer pursues
12 poetry, for he sees how “Shakespeare loathed humanity – the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly… the message hidden in the beauty of words” (Mrs. Dalloway 97). Despite the patriotic downfall of Shakespeare’s work, Woolf also read him as “a writer who spoke directly to women through his insight into the inner life” (“Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare” 15). Ultimately, Woolf critiques English education as a hyper-patriotic vehicle aimed at young men in order to distort and influence their perception of nationhood and force them into a belief system that encourages English male supremacy and war as a means to defend it.
13 Chapter 2
Overcoming Patriarchal Institutions Through Art and Nature
I
While Jacob’s Room observes pre-war England and Mrs. Dalloway post-,
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse takes the unique position of examining England before and after World War I. Briggs and other scholars describe To the Lighthouse’s chapter outline to reflect an H-shape. With the vertical lines of the H representing pre-war and post-war,
Woolf leaves the smallest chapter, “Time Passes,” to describe the entirety of World War I within the length of the horizontal line. As with Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf never directly address the war in To the Lighthouse. While Woolf hints that Jacob dies during the Great War on the final page of her novel, Woolf describes the war in “Time
Passes” as a storm. In doing so, as with all of her novels, Woolf rejects the notion of a history defined by war, and instead focuses on time in the natural realm.
In her diary during its first drafting, Woolf questioned her ability to craft a narrative as personal as To the Lighthouse, which reflects her own childhood experiences:
“Sentimental? Victorian?” (Diary iii 107). Thus, Woolf’s dilemma becomes how to exclude herself from her narrative and how not to indulge in sentimentality. Woolf opposed first person narratives, believing this style to be overtly masculine, flooded with the author’s voice and repeated “I”; instead, she used free indirect discourse in order to reach into the heads and hearts of her characters without revealing her own voice.
Woolf’s refusal to follow a linear narrative follows the notion of a psychological form of time, unlike the even intervals Big Ben produces. Woolf uses this sort of psychological time to describe the war and the impacts of the war in order to avoid adding more
14 attention to and to avoid following male literary traditions. Jacob’s Room never directly mentions the war and no warfare is actually described, though it is understood that the last page suffices for Jacob’s entire time in battle. Likewise, in Mrs. Dalloway, the war is over; however, during the course of a single day, the audience understands that the war remains a backdrop, or omnipresent, in the lives of her characters. This is expressed most clearly in Septimus, who is unable to separate the past from the present due to his shellshock from the war. “Time Passes” is the smallest of the three sections that composes To the Lighthouse, yet the section is responsible for a decade of time. This decade is then condensed again into one storm. Furthermore, the war is described in
“Time Passes” as a storm and told from the perspective of the house itself. Woolf does this in order to separate her literature from the masculine narrative war produces and rather reverts to the natural order of the world as a means of female perspective that opposes the typical male narrative at the time.
Originally, Woolf began writing To the Lighthouse in order to examine her own family dynamic. The Ramsay family (modelled after the Stephen family) is introduced in
“The Window” as an archetypal Victorian family on vacation, with a tyrannical father and gentle mother. Julia Briggs notes that, “Woolf’s complex and at times uneasy relationship with Shakespeare is reflected in a series of divagations, rejections and rediscoveries that closely parallel her retrospective relationship with her Victorian parents” (“Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare” 10). However, in the “The Lighthouse” section, the novel reveals a family grown and changed by the horrors of the war in “Time
Passes.” The characters in “The Lighthouse” no longer regard Mr. Ramsay as a rigid, masculine, god-like leader, but rather as a fallible human being like themselves. Woolf
15 reexamines the Ramsay family through a postwar perspective during “The Lighthouse” section through Lily Briscoe’ eyes in order to understand the ways their particular historical moment had determined Woolf’s own family dynamic: who her parents were, what they believed, and how they behaved.
Each death in “Time Passes” is described in parentheses, aside from the main actions of the passage, and in concise sentences to signify how inevitable and common death is, and therefore should not be gratified in sentimentality, as masculine war narratives do.
The main action of this section, the storm and subsequently the sinking into oblivion that the house faces reflects the length of time it has been abandoned; the longer it is left, the more disorganized it appears. Woolf writes, “The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain-pipes and scatter damp paths” (To the Lighthouse 128). Here, the focus lies on the effect severe weather has on the house – the wind is roaring, trees have fallen, the gutters are broken; the length of the night has destroyed the property. This, of course, is a metaphor for the war. It can be additionally read as the home front (England) forgotten, while soldiers fight abroad, mainly on continental Europe. Ultimately, Woolf asserts that nature is more powerful than war and other forms of manmade mass destruction. Likewise, the old woman singing in Regent’s Park is able to embrace a timelessness of nature that has no chronological timeline.
Woolf’s narrative then switches to describe human events, specifically the death of Mrs. Ramsay, in which she utilizes brackets to resist the masculine urge to wallow in and glorify death: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched
16 his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty]” (To the Lighthouse 128). This quote follows
Woolf’s description of the house in shambles. Despite their succession, this quote lacks connection to the former. While one focuses on the natural physical world with great detail, the following simply mentions a human death in one short sentence. This lack of connection is further asserted through the use of brackets. Woolf uses these brackets to suggest Mrs. Ramsay’s death is a side note or background action; the focus remains the storm occurring outside. Ultimately, through brackets and closing the chapter immediately after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, Woolf limits the discussion of Mrs. Ramsay’s passing in order to prevent overstating her death, as masculine literature often does.
Furthermore, this technique places human time in the context of a vast natural time.
“Time Passes” eventually reaches news of Andrew’s death in the Great War. Written in brackets like his mother’s and sister’s deaths are, Andrew’s death is portrayed as even less personal than the prior, “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were up in
France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous]” (To the Lighthouse 133). News of Andrew’s passing is written like a report from a correspondent relaying events of the war and is further belittled down to an imprecise statistic, in order to suggest greatness and remembrance through war is unachievable, despite the efforts of Andrew, Septimus, and Jacob.
Woolf argues that industrial time functions as a masculine institution through portrayals of the differences between psychological time and chronological time through numerous interruptions by masculine forces (Big Ben, aeroplanes, etc.) that impede female thought. As Big Ben strikes, “the leaden circles dissolved in the air” (Mrs.
17 Dalloway 4). Big Ben can be read as a phallic symbol, representing the masculine,
English establishment that produces heavy, “leaden circles,” or oppressive institutions, whereas the lead itself may suggest bullets, caskets, or, more generally, death in war. As
Big Ben’s rings interrupt characters’ thoughts, specifically those of Clarissa and
Septimus, who appear dissatisfied with English society to some extent, the habitual ringing of Big Ben grounds characters to a superficial reality. These interruptions come as an oppressor to Clarissa and Septimus, as they hinder the thoughts and progress of these two characters. While deep in thought, the clamor forces Clarissa and Septimus to halt their innermost reflections and assemble back into English society. In this sense, Big
Ben and other interruptions function as an artificial reminder, compelling Clarissa and
Septimus to expel individual thoughts and perform their assigned roles, thus eliminating the opportunity to express emotion and thought.
Therefore, Woolf advocates for a more feminine relationship with time, shown through the contrast of Big Ben with the old woman singing in Regent’s Park, who portrays a more timeless relationship women have with the earth. The woman is described with “a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end… with an absence of all human meaning” (Mrs. Dalloway 79). Her voice has “no age or sex,” but rather as coming from “an ancient spring sprouting from the earth… [singing] in the eternal breeze” (Mrs. Dalloway 79). Her relationship to the earth is illustrated as without intention or manipulation, as timeless, and as otherworldly, as opposed to human constructed time, and is devised through unrefined musicality. The old woman’s song confuses Peter Walsh, who “couldn’t help giving the poor creature a coin,” (Mrs.
Dalloway 80) revealing how men fail to comprehend, a form of existence that is spiritual
18 and earthly. The timeless connection women have to the earth critiques male attempts to achieve greatness and timelessness through manufactured achievement, in the forms of civilization and war, while also commenting on how masculine control of time further oppresses female expression.
Clarissa’s experience with same-sex romance is not able to be expressed or acted upon due to England’s heteronormative culture that functions on a gender and sexual binary. Clarissa’s closest experience to erotic love comes as a schoolgirl with her dear friend Sally Seton. She is infatuated by Sally for she reflects, ‘“If it were now to die
‘twere now to be most happy.’ That was her feeling – Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!”’ (Mrs. Dalloway 34).
Clarissa and Sally kiss which Woolf describes as an act of great passion. Despite the passion shared between the two women, they do not continue their relationship due to the heteronormative pressures of society. Thus, Clarissa ultimately marries the conservative
Richard Dalloway and Sally gives birth to five sons. However, Clarissa still reflects on her time with Sally in the present day. “Sally’s power was amazing, her gift, her personality. There was her way with flowers, for instance. At Bourton they always had stiff little vases all the way down the table. Sally went out, picked hollyhocks, dahlias – all sorts of flowers that had never been seen together – cut their heads off, and made them swim on the top of the water in bowls. The effect was extraordinary” (Mrs. Dalloway 33).
Woolf expresses a connection to the order of the natural world unique to femininity which differs from the artificial masculine society of England, as shown in Clarissa,
Septimus, and Sally. Sally removes the stiff, masculine flowers from the erect vase and
19 places their various heads in a yonic dish. Stripped only to their heads, these flowers represent a kind of androgyny. This androgyny is void of masculine affliction as they circulate in a never before created environment. Clarissa notes that her love of Sally was unlike her love for Richard, for “it had a quality which could only exist between women”
(Mrs. Dalloway 33). Clarissa is attracted to Sally because Sally embodies a mixture of masculine and feminine qualities. Thus, Woolf solidifies the notion of erotic love and natural love in fluid relationships which opposes England’s artificial norm.
In relation to Clarissa’s suppression of same sex desire, Septimus’s homosexual urges come in the form of hysterics, which further disrupts Septimus’s understanding of chronological time. The incomplete narratives of hysterics, such as Septimus, distort and rearrange information because of sexual repression, specifically his desire for his former lieutenant Evans. Jamie Carr acknowledges the historical silencing of traumatized soldiers upon returning from the war. Carr reveals how Woolf describes heterosexuality as a masculine duty, and therefore men must repress their sexual urges for men, stating that “The grief Septimus might feel over the loss of another man is not socially acceptable, and it is this proscription that is socially traumatizing” (Carr 54). Because
Septimus is unable to mourn same-sex loss and come to terms with his homosexuality, instances of Evan appear repeatedly and in the form of a ghost-like entity that confuses
Septimus with the past and present. Woolf writes from Septimus’s perspective, “There was his hand; there the dead. White things were assembling behind the railings opposite.
But he dared not look. Evans was behind the railings!” (Mrs. Dalloway 24). Believing that Evans is visiting him in Regent’s Park, Septimus’s repressed feelings and
20 experiences emerge in the form of shell-shock, or hysteria, which further isolates him from his wife and heteronormative society.
Woolf’s uses characteristics of hysteria in her portrayal of Septimus to describe his traumas from the war and his homosexual desires, both of which the dominant patriarchal society will not allow to be expressed. Septimus’s outbursts, a symptom of shell-shock, reflects symptoms ascribed to women undergoing hysteria. As Septimus’s behavior mirrors the flaws of the female species, the patriarchal society of 20th century
England ostracizes and scapegoats Septimus in order to encourage its traditional masculine narrative.2 Elaine Showalter’s essay “On Hysterical Narrative” draws a connection between Freud’s idea of hysteria3 and women’s writing, specifically modernist literature. Showalter describes hysteria as “Sometimes referring to all fictional texts by women, sometimes to writing about hysterical women, sometimes to writing that is fragmented, evasive, and ambiguous, hysterical narrative has taken on disturbing connections with femininity” (Showalter 24). Thus, Septimus’s inability to connect with reality in real time labels him feminine.
2 The British Army during World War I viewed some men suffering from shellshock to be cowards and put men on trial, even executing them, for committing the military crimes of desertion and cowardice. It was believed that long-lasting episodes of shellshock revealed flaws in their characters, instead of a mental disorder brought upon by wartime trauma. In 2006, the United Kingdom granted posthumous pardons to those executed for shellshock. 3 Freud’s concept of hysteria emerged through his case study on a female patient named Ida Bauer. Freud gave Ida the pseudonym Dora and published the study in Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria in 1905. Dora was diagnosed with hysteria after an 11-week treatment in 1900 after experiencing aphonia, or loss of voice. Dora’s father brought her to Freud after claiming that a family friend, Herr K, made sexual advances toward her, despite being a married man. Freud concluded that Dora’s hysteria developed from a jealousy toward the relationship between her father and Frau K, while also being confused by Herr’s sexual advancements. Interestingly, Freud gave Ida the name Dora for possible unconscious reasons. Freud’s sister and her nursemaid were both named Rosa. Upon her hiring, Freud’s sister took the name Dora. Hence, both Rosa and Ida were women who could not keep their names. Thus, Dora came to Freud’s mind. Perhaps Freud should have analyzed his own decision.
21 Based on Woolf’s own negative experience with doctors over her struggles with mental health, Septimus’s repressed sexuality and trauma are further ultimately silenced through his impeding institutionalization and ultimate suicide. While women are typically tucked away into hospitals and diagnosed with hysteria for interfering with the dominant male agenda, Septimus’s admission to the hospital further feminizes his character.
Showalter relates hysteria and femininity since science rejects both as antithetical to its purpose. Therefore, Septimus’s shell-shock and feminine qualities are attempted to be reversed through medical care and scientific inquiry. Thus, in addition to male dominance of popular culture, scientific authority is dependent on male perspective and focus.
II
Opposing the masculine literary tradition and ideas of nation, Woolf injects feminine characters, such as Lily and Clarissa, with the ability to reclaim literature and the arts with the means of creating peace and rebuilding after the war. Lily Briscoe uses art as a means of coping and coming to terms with loss after the war through the completion of her painting, signifying an overcoming of something which halted her the decade prior. Lily paints the lighthouse, a symbol of enlightenment during darkness, perhaps a metaphor for recuperation after the war. Clarissa, unlike Lady Bruton who views art as an opportunity to generate destruction instead of healing, is able to recite several of Shakespeare’s plays properly. Specifically, Clarissa repeats, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun/ Nor the furious winter’s rage,” (Mrs. Dalloway 9) from Cymbeline, three times throughout the novel. Most notably, Clarissa recites this phrase following news of
Septimus’s suicide, a death she claims to feel within her own body. The original quotation is used in Cymbeline to mourn the supposed death of the play’s female
22 protagonist, Imogen. While Lady Bruton uses Shakespeare to prepare for battle, Clarissa suggests Shakespeare can be used as a soothing remedy to recover from loss.
Woolf sheds a positive light on characters who are capable of embracing nature, displaying them as sympathetic characters, in order to advocate for freedom of emotional and sexual expression. Clarissa’s connection to the natural world is further underlined through her admiration of flowers. Introduced on the first page, Clarissa is shown on an errand to buy flowers. Additionally, Clarissa possesses a spirituality that is present in the natural realm, believing that when an individual dies his/her soul lives amongst the trees.
Septimus, who functions as Clarissa’s double, equates cutting down trees to murder, for
“Men must not cut down trees. There is a God” (Mrs. Dalloway 24). However, Septimus and Clarissa do not create a pure parallel. While Septimus represents this notion to the extreme and perhaps mimics psychosis, Clarissa stands as a middle ground. Clarissa’s yearning for the emotional freedom that Septimus practices is present throughout the text, yet she remains a product of the upper-class where feelings are suppressed. Furthermore,
Clarissa’s interest in flowers lies in their presentation instead of their existence, which again reflects her tendency and her class’s tendency to focus on appearances. On the reverse end of the spectrum, characters who feel uncomfortable around flowers, namely
Richard who hands Clarissa a bouquet rather awkwardly and Lady Bruton who is unsure what to do when given a bouquet, represent the masculine and artificial English establishment that oppress and restrict both men and women from expression.
Lily uses art to release herself from Mrs. Ramsay’s domestic influence, ultimately freeing herself from patriarchal demands and allowing herself a freedom of expression and individuality inside and outside of the domestic sphere. One evening during a dinner
23 party, Lily’s picture becomes her means of escape from the dominance of Mrs. Ramsay.
While Mrs. Ramsay means no harm in her attempts to encourage courtship between
Charles Tansley and Lily, Lily has no interest. Mrs. Ramsay’s attempts to stir up conversation between the two go virtually unnoticed by Lily, whose mind wanders to her artwork. Lily mentally utilizes the tablecloth as a canvas and the salt as a kind of marker,
“For at any rate, she said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree rather more to the middle” (To the
Lighthouse 102). Therefore, Woolf argues art offers women a freedom from patriarchal demands and provides substance focus, and balance.
To the Lighthouse’s gendered experiences reveal a difference between how men and women interpret the world around them and for what gain, specifically in the separate sensation literature brings to Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay. In “The Window,” the couple sit with one another at the close of day, both with a book in hand. Mr. Ramsay reads Scott’s novel The Antiquary, while Mrs. Ramsay drowns herself in sonnet 98,
“From you have I been absent in the spring,” a work of poetry utilizing nature as a literary device. As Mrs. Ramsay reads, “She was climbing those branches, this way and that, laying hands on one flower and then another… She read and so reading, she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on to the summit. How satisfying!” (To the Lighthouse
131). Through literature, Mrs. Ramsay embraces the natural realm, almost transcendentally. As Jane Marcus puts it, “Mr. Ramsay reads to find himself, Mrs.
Ramsay to lose herself” (“Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare” 10). This scene
24 particularly notes the possible self-fulfilling approach men employ when grappling with literature.
As Mrs. Ramsay feels comfortable in a traditional Victorian life, specifically through conventional marriage, Lily acknowledges its downfalls, referring to marriage as a form of degradation. Lily believes marriage is upheld by the notion that marriage is a universally righteous and delighted pleasure, while marriage is actually an institution that stifles independence and self-actualization, as Lily witnesses through Mr. Ramsay’s demands on Mrs. Ramsay. However, Lily still struggles to be released from Mrs.
Ramsay’s grasp. In “The Window” section Lily becomes overwhelmed with her insecurities as a woman instilled on her by Mrs. Ramsay. However, she also expresses her admiration for Mrs. Ramsay, while attempting to paint her portrait:
And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there
forced themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance,
keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road, and much ado to control her
impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs.
Ramsay’s knee and say to her? – but what could one say to her? ‘I’m in love with
you?’ (To the Lighthouse 49)
Lily is ultimately able to break away from this idolized image of Mrs. Ramsay and domestic life, as indicated by the completion of her painting. Therefore, the completion of the painting, as Lily finally “has had [her] vision,” (To the Lighthouse 209) identifies
Lily’s split from Mrs. Ramsay and her assumed gender roles, specifically the submissive life of a Victorian wife. Lily’s artistic achievement and self-fulfillment correlates with her unmarried circumstance. Therefore, based on Lily’s success as a female, unwed artist,
25 Woolf ultimately advocates for feminine readings of literature and art in order to overcome the masculine institutions that enforce ideals of masculinity, power, and dominance through confiscating literature and art for their own nationalistic agenda – ideas that will be interrogated in Between the Acts.
26 Chapter 3
Fascism and the Lives of Great Men
I
Woolf, like the women she discusses in Three Guineas, was the daughter of an educated man. Her father, Leslie Stephen, devoted his literary life to constructing and publishing English history. Most notably, Stephen served as the first editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography. Though Woolf admired her father dearly, Woolf felt conflicted by his perspective, specifically his focus on masculine history. This focus on history as the lives of great men reflects an indifference to the lives of the obscure and of women alike; lives which Woolf found great value in. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf remarks, “history is too much about wars; biography too much about great men” (A Room of One’s Own 108-109). The last of Woolf’s works, Between the Acts (1941), published posthumously by Leonard Woolf, perhaps most explicitly discusses the intersection of war, history, and masculinity. Briggs notes that, “By the late 1920s, the success of
Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, accompanied by such slogans as ‘Believe! Obey!
Fight!’ and ‘War is to the male what childbearing is to the female!’ gave warning of where such hero-worship might lead” (“The Novels of the 1930s” 78).
World War II illuminated the evolution of nationalism to fascism and Nazism, thus embodying the notion that war is in fact a product of hyper-masculinity. Taking place in an unknown English countryside, Between the Acts describes the village’s annual pageant. Woolf’s narrative observes the performance, and more importantly, the audience. Between the Acts reveals the historical emphasis English society places on militarization and war, in order to explain the link between the dominant patriarchal
27 society and continuous European warfare. To the villagers and audience members,
England’s victorious past proves their culture as superior to all others and their nation to be the peak of long-lasting civilization, and thus they hold military might as the greatest aspect of England. Therefore, when Miss La Trobe, the director, skips over times of military victories, the audience disregards her artistic piece and its moral implications all together. Briggs compares Between the Acts to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for both works represent “our island history” (“The Novels of the 1930s” 86). While Woolf uses a “popular fictional model of an episode of village life, revising and compressing the family chronical and centuries of English history, miraculously and effortlessly into a single day,” (“The Novels of the 1930s” 85). both Woolf and Shakespeare construct a literary work constructed within the unities of time and place in order to create a snapshot of English village life at the dawn of war. Thus, moments before the outbreak of World
War II, a war which Woolf does not outlive, Between the Acts suggests a desperate urgency to learn the lessons of history, though without a clear-cut answer on where to begin. At the same time, perhaps, all of the old immunities, confidences and assumptions were now under attack.
Woolf illustrates the English village hosting the pageant as a community stuck in a national narrative of the past. Their inability to move forward in history and ultimately acknowledge their actions or lack of actions in the wake of World War II becomes a central theme in this novel. The manor house which sets the stage for the pageant faces away from the sun, metaphorically suggesting that the people who live in or associate with the house are hiding from the light or knowledge of current events. This emphasis on the town’s members’ comfort in the past is reflective in the Noble Barn as well. The
28 barn “that had been built over seven hundred years ago and reminded some people of a
Greek temple, others of the middle ages, most people of an age before their own”
(Between the Acts 99). Just as Jacob appropriates Classical antiquity, the community associates England with the height of civilization. This admiration for the barn reiterates a past that no living being in the novel has known, as characters typically look back on the good old days fondly. This notion is further expressed in Mrs. Swithin’s reading of an
Outline of History and her admiration of one of “the poets from whom we descend by way of mind,” (Between the Acts 68) though she has forgotten his name.
The novel’s critique of romancing the past leaves contemporary citizens stuck, hence the title Between the Acts. Presumably, these acts represent the First and Second
World War. Thus, Woolf implores her readers to reflect on the present moment, the beginning of World War II, and bids them to enter history. The stagnation expressed by
Englishmen in 1939 is reflective of Giles’ interaction with the snake and toad. While in the grass Giles notices a snake and observes, “Dead? No, choked with a toad in its mouth.
The snake was unable to swallow; the toad was unable to die…So raising his foot, [Giles] stamped on them” (Between the Acts 99). The snake and toad represent an incompletion, a stagnant moment in time. Meanwhile, the masculine figure Giles implants himself into the narrative through violence, which leaves Isa unamused and disgusted. The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci regards a similar experience in a novel as an instance of interregnum, for “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Gramsci 276). While
Woolf portrays a society in limbo, Giles opts to continue a violent narrative and therefore highlights a violent and masculine relationship with history.
29 Woolf uses certain characters in Between the Acts to represent patriarchy and to examine its connection to war, specifically through Giles and Bart as the archetypal patriarchs. Bart most readily represents the old establishment’s relationship with militarization and history through his insistence on history chronicled by war. In his hyper-masculine verbal abuse of Giles, Bart continues the vicious cycle of achieving manhood and respect through violence and dominance. Woolf examines how certain characteristics of Giles encourage people to gravitate toward him, particularly Manresa, who describes Giles as a “surly knight” (Between the Acts 109). Woolf links war to patriarchal culture through her descriptions of Giles. Described as “the muscular, the hirsute, the virile,” Giles adorns a “blue jacket and brass buttons” (Between the Acts 106) that mirrors the uniforms of tyrants. Through his eruptions of selfishness and brutality, like his killing of the snake and toad, in both the public and private spheres, Giles aims to reproduce men with similar ideals of dominance, just as Bart has done onto him.
While Giles represents the new generation of hyper-masculine, war-driven men,
Isa portrays the literary ignorance of the same generation. Woolf writes from Isa’s perspective, “What remedy was there for her at her age – the age of the century, thirty- nine – in books?” (Between the Acts 18). De Gay notes that, “[Isa’s] age makes her representative of a particular generation, so that her quest for something to read becomes a more general rhetorical question about how literature might be of help at such a crucial time” (“Bringing the Literary Past to Life” 189). Instead of diving into the world of novels and fiction, like the works Woolf produces, Isa relies on newspapers as her main mode of attaining information and entertainment. However, particularly for this time,
Isa’s interest in newspapers reveals a twisted notion of mass entertainment through
30 reports of war. As a result, “Isa becomes both victim and perpetrator of the system which imprisons her and favors war” (“Virginia Woolf’s Matriarchal Family” 181).
While Woolf creates representations of patriarchy and their agents through characters like Giles, Bart, and Manresa, she contrasts these characters with matriarchal characters to reveal the possibility of a different kind of society. Based on the father-son struggle for power4, shown in Giles and Bart, Woolf rejects Freud’s notion that this is the only way society can function. Patricia Cramer explores “matriarchal configurations in order to provide a model for an alternative ‘family of origins’ – centered on women’s values rather than on violent, dominating men” (“Virginia Woolf’s Matriarchal Family”
167). Thus, Lucy, Isa, and Dodge are presented as the matriarchal group in response and may perhaps be considered the only hopes of a positive future by the novel’s close. Miss
La Trobe’s future appears less than hopeful.
II
Miss La Trobe’s pageant presents history as a questionable concept. By queering the dominant masculine timeline that highlights militarization, Miss La Trobe reclaims history through a female perspective rid of warfare. Woolf hints that Miss La Trobe is homosexual by describing her as a single, “swarthy, sturdy, and thickset,” woman
(Between the Acts 58). Like Septimus whose sexuality isolates him from society and allows his character to be a point of interpretation and criticism to the heteronormative
English society, Miss La Trobe’s unconventional position allows her to draw backward
4 Freud, Jung, and many other psychologists consider the father complex to be derived from the Oedipus complex. Freud in particular believed that a male child’s strong feelings of fear or distrust toward his father figure stemmed from sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent. While many psychologists today refute Freud’s claims, it appears that the father complex applies most readily to the Victorian family, which was headed by a strong patriarch. Despite Woolf’s rejection of Freud’s ideas, her literature contains several instances of the father complex. In addition to the tense relationship between Bart and Giles, James Ramsay’s hostility toward his father can be read through a psychoanalytic lens as well.
31 and forward through time. Stuart Christie claims, “The engendering of historical disciplines and creative presentation of the history of gender…constitute Woolf’s participation in a broader, philosophical discourse about how historical actions confer gender ‘identity,’ and how identity, once trammeled within representation, becomes
‘history.”’ (Christie 162). Thus, Woolf employs a lesbian woman to convey history’s truth.
Miss La Trobe’s plot jumps through time and omits any mention of military victories, though it claims to be a representation of English history. The pageant is constantly interrupted by the rain, the cows, and the village idiot, among other things, and
“Great Eliza had forgotten her lines” (Between the Acts 85). Thus, the national narrative is blemished. Yet, the audience’s greatest dismay is Miss La Trobe’s decision “to skip two hundred years in less than fifteen minutes,” to which Colonel Mayhew questions,
“’Why leave out the British Army? What’s history without the Army, eh?’” (Between the
Acts 157). Colonel Mayhew, a military man, asserts that history be a connection from point A to point B, in which each point is a battle or war. Mayhew’s insistence on a militarized history follows the dominant masculine narrative, which fails to cherish and acknowledge times of peace and which lacks oppositional perspectives.
Woolf utilizes the audience as a reflection of the current English society at the inception of the Second World War, most particularly, the inability for Englishmen and women to change the national narrative of continuous warfare and interject peace into history. As the play assembles, audience members lounge in their seats, for “There was nothing for the audience to do. Mrs. Manresa suppressed a yawn. They were silent. They stared at the view, as if something might happen in one of those fields to relieve them of
32 the intolerable burden of sitting silent, doing nothing, in company” (Between the Acts 65).
The town’s members resist interacting with the pageant set and other audience members.
Throughout the scenes an audience member questions, “D’you think people change?
Their clothes, of course… But I meant ourselves… do we change?”’ (Between the Acts
121), ultimately highlighting the confusion and disconnect between the audience and the actors. The audience member thus questions her role in their narrative, yet remains still.
With the pageant’s many costume changes, Woolf begs the audience to investigate questions of historical and temporal fluidity, in contrast to rigid and concrete notions of a linear history, as in A Room of One’s Own. Likewise, Miss La Trobe’s decision to portray history as a play reveals the performativity aspect of gender roles in England, especially during the rise of European fascism. However, reconsidering these notions in Between the
Acts takes on a sense of desperation, tinged with the comic, as the pageant is performed merely weeks before England declares on war Germany for the second time in twenty- five years. Briggs notes that, “Between the Acts adapts a way of writing with amused affection about domestic or village life that was popular during the 1930s… to interrogate the significance of history, portraying English middle-class society on the eve of war”
(“The Novels of the 1930s” 97). Thus, Woolf reiterates the last chapter of Jacob’s Room, but in greater depth, encompassing the entirety of the book in the background. As a result, Between the Acts reflects a uniquely British response to loss of national identity at home and the growth of fascism across the sea.
Miss La Trobe forces the audience to engage in England’s narrative by portraying
“Present Time. Ourselves.” (Between the Acts 177), in which she presents a cracked mirror in front of the audience. Like the looking-glass from a Room of One’s Own that
33 has shattered, the broken mirror leaves Englishmen of an unflattering view of themselves and their reality. However, the shock of her finale left the audience “suspended, without being, in limbo” (Between the Acts 178). Miss La Trobe attempts to convey an individual citizen’s and England’s collective roles in creating and representing history by showing the audience in present time. By doing so, Miss La Trobe emphasizes the importance of the current moment, which is defined as the beginning of a Second World War, instead of reminiscing on an overly glorified past. Woolf writes, “And the audience saw themselves, not whole by any means, but at any rate sitting still” (Between the Acts 185). Despite
Miss La Trobe’s attempt to place the community within history, they fail to acknowledge its importance and moral implications.
Following the shock of the pageant’s finale, the Minister is able to redirect the community’s mentality back into their comfort zone of historical ignorance by asking the audience members to donate to the Church. Miss La Trobe’s purpose is dismissed by the
Church, a patriarchal institution, for monetary needs – an obvious insult to Miss La
Trobe’s work. Reverend G.W. Streatfield “stood their representative spokesman; their symbol; themselves” (Between the Acts 190). The Reverend becomes a symbol of unification which allows the audience to follow, instead of thinking for themselves, as
Miss La Trobe had hoped. Thus, Woolf suggests a continuation of the same masculine narrative which led to Jacob’s fight in the First World War is affecting all of Europe again in the Second.
The idle response of the audience reflects the status of art during times of war, thus revealing a lack of audience and understanding of art, specifically feminine creation that Woolf felt before her suicide. Upon the audience’s failure to grasp her message, Miss
34 La Trobe reflects, “Audiences were the devil… But here she was fronting her audience.
Every second they were slipping the noose. This is death, death, death, she noted in the margin of her mind; when the illusion fails” (Between the Acts 180). Despite the pageant’s inability to reach the audience, Woolf suggests the blame should be placed on the audience’s inability to acknowledge their spot within history. Miss La Trobe claims,
“’I am a slave to my audience’” (Between the Acts 211), a remark which Woolf most definitely felt before her death. Woolf regarded fascism to be a megaphone, like how “the megaphone’s call at the end [of the pageant] is for a return to the simple language of an imaginary primal state, of a romanticized infancy of the species” (Wirth-Nesher 192).
The words of Hitler and Mussolini reached thousands of Europeans and supported, as well as justified, this form of reverse evolution. Wirth-Nesher notes, “Hardy voices of affirmation, these alarming disembodied speeches had their counterpart in the ominous voices on the radio, voices of Hitler that Woolf recorded in her diaries as the sounds of brute ancestors” (“Final Curtain on the War” 192). Furthermore, political propaganda – through the modern technology of radio – displaces literature, philosophy, and history. At the novel’s close, Miss La Trobe reflects, “She could say to the world, You have taken my gift… Her gift meant nothing. If they had understood her meaning; if they had known their parts; if the pearls had been real and the funds illimitable – it would have been a better gift” (Between the Acts 211). Miss La Trobe, like Woolf, suggests the audience’s inability to break away from the dominant, patriarchal, war-driven historical narrative strips artists of their gifts. For if there is no audience to receive these gifts, the gifts have no purpose. Here, the regressive, yet popular, megaphone has taken their gifts. Thus,
35 Woolf’s purpose passes on the eve of the Second World War, contributing to the many reasons she commits suicide, ultimately making herself a victim of war.
36 Conclusion
If we could free ourselves from slavery we should free men from tyranny. Hitlers are bred
by slaves. – Virginia Woolf, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”
Unlike Lily Briscoe, Woolf had never achieved her vision. On the 28th of March
1941, Woolf filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the River Ouse. Among the many aspects contributing to Woolf’s decision to end her own life, the diminished status of art and literature became central. Prior to her death, the events of the 1930s inspired
Woolf to urgently critique the patriarchal system upon which Western civilization operates. In 1936, the same year the Spanish Civil War broke out, Woolf published an article titled “Why Art Today Follows Politics” for the communist newspaper The Daily
Worker. In her piece, Woolf describes being forced to take a political position in her art because the status of the artist and art itself is now under threat. Woolf’s argument examining patriarchy ultimately comes in the form of Three Guineas, which details the injustices Englishwomen experience that hold them back from political and financial freedoms. While Three Guineas can be understood as a sequel to A Room of One’s Own,
Woolf’s feminist call to action appears more urgent and dire in Three Guineas. Briggs comments on the moments of anger Woolf struggles to transcend in her work, noting that
“anger at the oppression of women was problematic in itself. Since there was no point in responding to men’s unconsidered (and possibly unconscious) anger with women with further aggression, no point in women becoming what they were fighting” (“The Novels of the 1930s” 82). Therefore, Woolf’s underlying assumption reveals that women may be
37 just as guilty as men in upholding the patriarchy, specifically though their lack of appropriate action.
At a time and in a civilization where the possibility of total war was inevitable,
Woolf’s reluctance to suppress a war with Germany by pacifism became impossible.
Thus, the question arises: “How was England to fight Germany without losing its higher moral ground, without meeting weapons with weapons?” (“The Novels of the 1930s” 82).
Of course, finding the answer to this question becomes more crucial once the German’s systematic killing of Jews became known. These questions on fighting anger with anger become more conflicted in Three Guineas. Furthermore, Three Guineas reveals how sexism at home is synonymous to fascism abroad. Thus, Woolf is begging the reader to look at who has the gun.
Woolf’s Three Guineas was certainly extremely controversial at the time of its publishing and still remains so today. The critics of Woolf’s day were quick to discuss the untimeliness of her essay. Molly Abel Travis writes, “The critics of Three Guineas did complain about Woolf’s incredibly bad timing in mounting such an argument in
1938, but the real thrust of their angry response was that her conclusions were non sequiturs – out of time, out of joint – the product of a paranoid vision that perceived all events as temporally and causally related in a grand malevolent design” (Travis 166).
Three Guineas functions as a platform to discuss three questions: how to prevent war, why the government does not fund women’s education, and why women are not allowed in the workplace. Thus, England’s patriarchal society became disturbed by the notion that war and fascism were of concern to women – that war and fascism were somehow linked to male dominance and gender inequality. Three Guineas draws parallels between “the
38 totalitarian regimes of Spain, Germany, and Italy” and domestic British fascism, meaning
“the heart of British institutions and the heart of the patriarchal family” (Travis 167).
Ultimately, Three Guineas, in addition to much of Woolf’s fiction and other essays, examines the British family dynamic where women are subordinate to men in order to reveal that the domestic structure with fathers at the head of families transfers just the same into the public world.
Woolf expands upon these issues in her essay “Thoughts On Peace in an Air
Raid,” which documents an air raid led by the Germans on Woolf’s home in England a year prior to her death. However, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” in comparison to
Three Guineas, places a greater sense of responsibility on women in orchestrating
Europe’s evolution to peace. Along with the typical and jarring language Woolf uses to describe the catastrophes of war – the bombs, the landmines, the terror, the photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses – “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” introduces a different kind of war-time language. Woolf advocates for a new way of communicating between the sexes and nations. Thus, Woolf argues, words can become weapons and critical reasoning. More importantly, Woolf suggests that women are responsible for preventing war, whereas previously in Three Guineas Woolf’s argument on the emancipation of women relies heavily on the male’s role in freeing women from his grasp. Woolf criticizes British women, the “women gazing; painted women; dressed-up women; women with crimson lips and crimson fingernails” (“Thoughts On Peace” 3), suggesting that these women feed into the patriarchal system and thus indirectly support it. Here, Woolf places blame on female passivity in the war against fascism. Therefore,
39 the central idea of the short essay emerges, if women can free themselves from patriarchal oppression, women must work to free men from it as well.
In “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” Woolf describes how war inhibits thoughts. To examine the relationship between war and language, take the essay’s opening lines, “The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that.
Here they are again. It is a queer experience lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death” (“Thoughts on Peace” 1). The zoom of the hornet, a metaphor to represent the sound of the bomber overhead, disturbs the narrator’s thoughts of peace, as seen in Clarissa’s inability to complete thoughts at the sound of Big Ben, and the interruptions of Miss La Trobe’s pageant caused by the sounds of aeroplanes above. As the narrator waits for the bomb to drop, “all thinking stopped”
(“Thoughts on Peace” 5). It is here, in the midst of an air raid that Woolf emphasizes the urgency of women to free themselves, instead of hoping and trying to teach men to let go of their patriarchal stance first.
“Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” uses a varying range of voices and perspectives to illuminate the complexity of issues surrounding war and its prevention.
The struggle for readers to identify with one voice mirrors Woolf’s own struggle in finding a single truth for how to deal with war. The conversational mode that Woolf utilizes, which includes “narrators, quotations from loudspeakers and politicians, William
Blake, Sir Thomas Browne, newspapers, radio, Lady Astor and a young Englishman who fought in the last war,” (Allen 85) avoids an authoritarian stance on the matter. Instead, the experimental dialog enables Woolf’s narrators and characters within their interactions with one another to reveal the several contradictory perspectives. Therefore, like the
40 former experimental works of Woolf, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” searches for a new mode of expression that once again refuses the dominant masculine narrative.
Judith Allen describes the “hybrid nature” of the essay, “its openness and freedom, [which] all serve to resist the purity, totality and certainty of patriarchal/fascist modes of expression” and that furthermore “the essay’s crucial interaction with its readers…serves to perpetuate the indeterminacy of its potential meaning” (Allen 88). Of the many voices in the text, the narrator notes the internalized voices in the minds of the young airman fighting in this air raid. Like several male characters in Woolf’s fiction, most particularly Jacob Flanders, this young airman is driven by the ingrained ideologies
“ancient instincts, instincts fostered and cherished by education and tradition” (“Thoughts on Peace” 4). Likewise, the women in the text reflect the same internalized relationship with war – that men fight and women wish for peace.
As shown in the speeches of Hitler and Mussolini, the fascists practiced a strict polarization and policing of gender. Men assumed the militaristic role – the fighters.
Women assumed the maternal role – weaponless mothers. Woolf notes, “Women have not a word to say in politics,” that “all the idea-makers who are in position to make ideas effective are men,” and lastly, that “there are no women in the cabinet; not in any responsible post” (“Thoughts on Peace” 2). Here, the relationship of women to war appears to be one without responsibility. Though a deeper look reveals that this relationship between women and war is one without agency. Allen notes, “Weapons and words have been connected, so for women to be weaponless is also to be without a voice, without a language for political purposes” (Allen 92). Therefore, Woolf encourages women to “puncture the gas-bags and discover seeds of truth” (“Thoughts on Peace” 2)
41 for both man and woman are prisoners tonight. The man – “boxed in his machine with a gun handy; The woman – “lying in the dark with a gas mask handy” (“Thoughts on
Peace” 3). Thus, the narrator levels both genders’ experiences in war in their respective sphere.
Allen pays further attention to Woolf’s attempt to deconstruct the artificial divisions through reclaiming the ideologies behind the masculine desire to fight in war through a woman’s perspective. The narrator writes, “The maternal instinct is a woman’s glory. It was for this that my whole life has been dedicated, my education, training, everything” (“Thoughts on Peace” 5). By mimicking the words of the English militant of prior mention through a woman’s voice, the meaning of the sentence changes entirely.
Instead, the narrator reveals “the patriarchal desires that women have internalized and made their own” (Allen 94). The narrator then, through the repetition of “we must” in relation to freeing men of “their fighting instinct” and bring them “out of his prison into the open air,” thus “freeing him from the machine” (“Thoughts on Peace” 6) becomes a feminine obligation. However, Allen acknowledges, that this English woman narrator’s plan becomes complicated at the thoughts of the young Germans and Italians who will remain slaves under their nation’s dominant patriarchy and fascism. Woolf juxtaposes the perspective of an English soldier with that of an enemy soldier who hates fighting, in order to qualify the claim that men are inherently fighters. The enemy soldier is happy to hear “the fight is over” (“Thoughts on Peace” 6) and is overtly in favor of peace.
However, the need to amend “the loss of his glory and his gun” (“Thoughts on Peace” 7) is noted. Only after the man is freed from the machine may he be able to experience creative thought – “the seed may be fertile” (“Thoughts on Peace” 8).
42 “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” calls attention to the need for both men and women to become aware of their internalized notions of war and peace intertwined with their gendered position so that multiple voices and perspectives can be heard – instead of a singular authoritarian voice. Woolf’s use of complicated dialogic strategies transition readers out of their comfort zone into a struggle to find their own voice and comprehend oppositional voices. Woolf describes patriarchy as fascism in the home and is ultimately able to suggest that patriarchy and fascism are women’s issues at their core. However, positive changes can be made. In the hope that peace will be reached eventually, it is essential that women free themselves from actively and passively participating in and supporting the patriarchal structure around them. If women can free themselves from the slavery of domestic patriarchy, men can reimagine a civilization free from violence in the name of fascism. As Woolf states, “there is another way of fighting for freedom without arms; we can fight with the mind. We can make ideas that will help the young
Englishman who is fighting up in the sky to defeat the enemy” (“Thoughts On Peace” 2).
Freedom starts with the mind. Freedom from fascism can start today. Despite the destruction that defined the first half of the 20th century and the darkness that is embodied in Woolf’s fiction and essays, Woolf ultimately left this world with the message that there can be life after fascism.
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