Apostolic Minds and the Spinning House: Jane Ellen Harrison and Virginia Woolf's Discourse of Alterity Sowon S
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This article was downloaded by: [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] On: 20 October 2012, At: 13:17 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Women: A Cultural Review Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwcr20 Apostolic Minds and the Spinning House: Jane Ellen Harrison and Virginia Woolf's Discourse of Alterity Sowon S. Park Version of record first published: 09 Mar 2011. To cite this article: Sowon S. Park (2011): Apostolic Minds and the Spinning House: Jane Ellen Harrison and Virginia Woolf's Discourse of Alterity, Women: A Cultural Review, 22:1, 69-78 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2011.545656 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. SOWON S. PARK w ....................................................................................................... Apostolic Minds and the Spinning House: Jane Ellen Harrison and Virginia Woolf’s Discourse of Alterity ANE Ellen Harrison (1850Á1928) and Virginia Woolf (1882Á1941) are two Jof the most iconic figures in British feminist history whose enduring influence has helped create and sustain a multitude of feminist discourses. Interestingly, both produced their landmark studies in Cambridge when it was, arguably, the most aggressively anti-feminist institution in Britain at that time. As a Classics tutor at Newnham between 1898 and 1922, Harrison pioneered comparative anthropological analysis of religion, which not only revolutionized the field of Ancient Greek studies but resulted in transforming her into ‘the most famous female classicist in history’, inhabiting cultural locations far beyond the realms of academia.1 Similarly, what began as a talk Woolf gave to Newnham and Girton 1 Mary Beard, students has undergone numerous transformations to become today’s ‘‘‘Pausanias in global feminist primer, A Room of One’s Own (1928). This article Petticoats’’, or The examines the socio-historical context and the reactionary intellectual Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University Oxford] at 13:17 20 October 2012 Blue Jane’, in Susan E. Alcock, John F. politics of Cambridge against which the feminist theories of Harrison and Cherry and Jas Elsner Woolf were produced to identify some of the methods with which they (eds), Pausanias: Travel negotiated masculine orthodoxy and structured their feminist discourse of and Memory in Roman Greece, New York: alterity. Oxford University *** Press, 2001, pp. 224Á46 (p. 237). .................................................................................................................................... Women: a cultural review Vol. 22. No. 1. ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2011.545656 70 × WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ....................................................................................................... In October 1928, Virginia Woolf claimed that ‘the University ... 2 Virginia Woolf, A seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would Room of One’s Own [1928], London: soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Penguin, 2004, p. 10. Strand’.2 To this, one might interject that, actually, the pavement of the 3 Contrary to prevalent Strand had been peaceably accommodating the undergraduates of King’s belief that Virginia Woolf was self- College London since 1831, except that the university to which Woolf 3 educated, Christine was referring was not universities in general, but Cambridge. Cantab, as Kenyon Jones and both metonym and metaphor, features widely in Woolf’s writing, and the Anna Snaith have recently shown that idea of Cambridge as a sanctuary or a cloistral refuge was a theme she Woolf received formal frequently revisited, but, of course, it is not restricted to her writing. By education at King’s common consent, this was a fair description of Cambridge and Oxford in College London between 1897 and the early twentieth century, their origins reaching far back to their 1901. She took courses ecclesiastical inception in the thirteenth century when most of the in History scholars of the universities were clergymen or in holy orders of some sort. (Continental and English), Greek Woolf conflates Oxford and Cambridge into Oxbridge, as is commonly (intermediate and done, and while it is true that the two are interchangeable in many advanced), Latin, instances, Harrison and Woolf drew on a particular aspect of Cambridge German, Italian, Architecture and Art. that is very distinct from Oxford, and it is this particularity and its effects See Christine Kenyon that I shall focus on in this article. Jones and Anna The main divide between the two institutions was most powerfully Snaith, ‘‘‘Tilting at expressed during the English Civil War (1642) when they took up Universities’’: Woolf at King’s College opposing political positions: the Cambridge Puritans, or the ‘Round- London’, Woolf Studies heads’, versus the Oxford Cavaliers. This political difference reflected a Annual 16, 2010, broader intellectual disagreement, which, over the centuries, produced pp. 1Á44. 4 For a comparative the opposition of the Cambridge Whigs and the Oxford Jacobites; the history of Oxford evangelical puritanism of Cambridge and the High Church Oxford and Cambridge, see movement; the insular ‘high and dry’ climate of Cambridge and the Christopher Brooke 4 and Roger Highfield, cosmopolitan, worldly and romantic Oxford. When the young men who Oxford and were to form the Bloomsbury group were being educated from, say, 1885 Cambridge, to 1905, Cambridge, unlike Oxford, was imbued with a puritan ethos Cambridge: Cambridge University which became fundamental to their later convictions, values and beliefs. It Press, 1988. See also, was this specificity of Cambridge that laid the ground for, on the one Arthur Engel, From hand, Bloomsbury’s moral puritanism and, on the other, the unrelenting Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic attack on religion. And the intellectual attitudes of the Apostles, in Profession in particular, owe much to the puritan integrity stressed by the upper- Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University Oxford] at 13:17 20 October 2012 Nineteenth-Century middle-class group of reforming Cambridge evangelicals, of which Oxford, Oxford: 5 Oxford University Woolf’s great-grandfather was an active member. As S.P. Rosenbaum Press, 1983. has forcefully argued: ‘the significance of Cambridge in the ...history [of 6 5TheCambridge Bloomsbury] is difficult to overemphasise’. Apostles is a private The intellectual tradition of puritanism in Cambridge affected another intellectual society founded in 1820 to important issue: the ‘woman question’. Cambridge fought harder and which women gained longer to block women’s admission than any other university in Britain. APOSTOLIC MINDS AND THE SPINNING HOUSE × 71 ....................................................................................................... It was only in 1948 that women were allowed full membership of the university, as opposed to 1921 in Oxford, and Magdalene, the last of the all-male colleges to desegregate, did not do so until 1988. Out of the extensive and vigorous efforts to preserve Cambridge as a male institu- tion, one might look at 1897 when there was a call to vote on whether women should be allowed to be examined for degrees*when Jane Ellen Harrison would have just returned to Newnham College after 20 years. The Times printed train timetables from London to Cambridge to maximize the attendance of alumni, who were evidently thought of as being against the idea. Cambridge, undoubtedly the last bastion of the male ‘sanctuary’ in Britain, was a very powerful one to boot. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the university had taken on various powers that now seem inordinate*the power to elect its own Member of Parliament with alumni votes, for example, or the vice chancellor’s powers to overrule the local jurisdiction. All Woolfians are familiar with the chained-down books in Cambridge libraries and the many rules regarding access to turfs. Less well known, but much more alarming, was the university’s power to incarcerate women who were judged to be admission in the compromising the morals of the undergraduates. 1970s. See Peter Allen, As the three ‘Committals Books’ (1823Á94) in the University Archives The Cambridge of Cambridge attest, hundreds of girls*allegedly lewd and some as young Apostles: The Early Years, Cambridge: as 13*were locked in cells 19 feet square, with