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Virginia Woolf's Virginia Woolf's "Cotton Wool of Daily Life" Author(s): Liesl M. Olson Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2, Virginia Woolf and Others (Winter, 2003), pp. 42-65 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831894 Accessed: 28-10-2019 13:29 UTC 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 Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Modern Literature This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:29:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Virginia Woolf's ** "cotton wool of daily life Liesl M. Olson Columbia University [Poetry] has never been used for the common purpose of life. Prose has taken all the dirty work on to her own shoulders; has answered letters, paid bills, written articles, made speeches, served the needs of business- men, shopkeepers, lawyers, soldiers, peasants. ? Virginia Woolf, "The Narrow Bridge of Art"1 [T]he everyday is what we are first of all, and most often: at work, at lei? sure, awake, asleep, in the street, in private existence. The everyday, then, is ourselves, ordinarily. ? Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech"2 v? irginia Woolf's prose has frequently been called poetic, a description that alludes to the rhythm and sound of her sentences, the lyric plotlessness of her novels, and the self-conscious interiority of her characters. Woolf's friend, E.M. Forster, once claimed that Woolf's "problem" was that she should have been a poet, not a novelist.3 But poetic is a term that invites question, largely because it suggests that Woolf does not tackle the pedestrian world of ordinary life, or that her novels disdain prosaic subjects. While Woolf sought to remove the heavy furniture of the realist and naturalist novel in order to render the inner workings of the mind ? the "atoms as they fall upon the mind 1. Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Vol. 2 (Hogarth Press, 1966), p. 223. 2. Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech" in Yale French Studies 73 (1987), p.12. 3. "So that is her problem. She is a poet, who wants to write something as near to a novel as possible," Forster writes in his somewhat hesitant tribute to Woolf after her death. See Forster's Virginia Woolf (Harcourt Brace, 1942), p.23. Liesl M. Olson, "Virginia Woolf's 'cottonwool of daily life,'" Journal of Modern Literature, 26.2 (Winter 2002-2003), pp. 42-65. ?Indiana University Press, 2003. This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:29:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Olson: Woolf's "cottonwool of daily life" 43 in the order in which they fall" ? she knew that the modern novel could not flee from the external world of everyday things, from "the common objects of daily prose, the bicycle and the omnibus," as she writes in "A Letter to a Young Poet" (1932).4 Her characters will not dwell solely in their heads; they will dwell, for instance, in a physical world of London streets and public parks, where vagrants sing for money and airplanes advertise overhead. Woolf's finest writing calls attention to ordinary experiences in a world full of ordinary things. Celebrators and critics of modernism have typically focused on Woolf's interest in the mind, or the "moment of being," but have left the ordinary largely overlooked, a tendency evident in our critical fascination with modernism's fantastic revelations: Joyce's "epiphany," Pound's "magic moment," Eliot's "still point of the turning world," or Proust's explosion of memory, triggered by such events as the taste ofthe madeleine.5 The modernist preoccupation with self-consciousness, located most strikingly in such moments as these, has been both praised and criticized, but it has rarely been questioned.6 Yet, as I will show, Woolf's modernism is not purely concerned with recording the subjective mind or heightened experience, but is deeply invested, stylistically and ideologically, in representing the ordinary.7 Certainly, those who argue that Woolf shares with other modernists an emphasis on subjec? tive interiority, above all else, find much support in Woolf's writing. In "Modern Fiction," Woolf herself states that "For the moderns 'that,' the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology," and many critics have taken this statement (among similar ones) as a point of departure.8 Elizabeth Abel, in Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989), examines the way Woolf's works "echo and rewrite the developmental fictions of psychoanalysis."9 Most of the introductions to Woolf's major works also pick up on what Abel describes as Woolf's interest in internal states, "the points of origin marked by mother and father," or other "[p]rivate power? ful sources."10 Beginning readers of Woolf's work will learn that "the external event is significant primarily for the way it triggers and releases the inner life" and that "there is a roominess about so many ofVirginia Woolf's characters, a sense of mystery and ofthe inexplicable; they are rarely 4. Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction" in The Common Reader, 1st series (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 150, Vir? ginia Woolf, "A Letter to a Young Poet," in The Death ofthe Moth and Other Essays (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), p. 214. 5. As Alex Zwerdling has recently pointed out, "moments of being" is a phrase that Jeanne Schulkind chooses as the title to her collection of Woolf's memoirs, but Woolf herself does not give the phrase such primacy. See Zwerdling's "Mas- tering the Memoir: Woolf and the Family Legacy" in Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2003), pp. 165-88. 6. "The most influential formal impulses of canonical modernism," Frederic Jameson writes, "have been strategies of inwardness, which set out to reappropriate an alienated universe by transforming it into personal styles and private languages." See Jameson's Fables of Aggression (University of California Press, 1979), p. 2. The Marxist critique of modernism has always claimed that modernism represents a withdrawal to privacy, a denial of history, and a privileging of subjectivity. In this vein, Georg Lukacs disparages the turn from the "objective reality" of the nineteenth-century novel to the "decadent" subjective experience of modernism, arguing that "specific individuality cannot be separated from the context in which they were created." See Lukacs' Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle (Harper and Row, 1971), p. 19. Lukacs fails to understand that modernists were profoundly skeptical ofthe "objective reality" in which he believed. 7. My exploration of Woolf's work is part of a larger project that examines literary modernism's preoccupation with the habitual, pragmatic actions of everyday life. I also look at the work of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens, focusing on how these writers emphasize the non-transformative power of the ordinary as its most compelling attribute: literary modernists depict ordinary experience as a satisfaction with the material rather than the spiritual, the local rather than the exotic, the constant rather than the unknown, and the democratic rather than the privileged. 8. Virginia Woolf, "Modern Fiction," p. 152. 9. Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. xvi. 10. Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, p. 3. This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:29:46 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 44 Journal of Modern Literature enclosed in precise outlines."11 Woolf also has been called "a novelist usually considered the most inward of all British writers," an appraisal that is misleading, and which she would certainly dislike.12 A general sense, in both popular and scholarly estimations of Woolf, is that her work explores a fluid state of consciousness, always heightened, never settling on an outline. My argu? ment is not that these claims about Woolf's writing are baseless; rather, I believe that they funda- mentally miss something crucial about her commitment to ordinary experience, about experiences that are not heightened. When Woolf, in "Modern Fiction," asks us to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day," she demands two things, seemingly incompatible. She wants her subject to be both "ordinary," and of the "mind," though by her own suggestions in her essays of this time, the subjective mind is a shifting, wildly complex thing, receiving "a myriad impressions ? trivial, fan? tastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel."13 To render the ordinary is to describe experiences with which every reader is familiar, but the mind is a strange, unique entity. How might modern fiction represent both psychological interiority and realism rooted in the things that are shared among us? Woolf bridges this divide by replicating the ways in which individu? als do the things that they always do ? repeated acts and habits ? because these actions are the fabric of what she calls "character." Woolf identifies the ordinary in several of her key non-fiction writings. She continues to emphasize a distinction between poetry and prose ? a distinction less tenable, in retrospect, than revealing of Woolf's belief in the capabilities of the prosaic.
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