VIRGINIA WOOLF, V IRGINIA FASHION AND LITERARY MODERNITY R.S. KOPPEN VIRGINIA WOOLF Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity places Woolf’s writing in W the context of sartorial practice from the Victorian period to the 1930s, FASHION AND LITERARY MODERNITY and theories of dress and fashion from Thomas Carlyle to Walter OOLF Benjamin, Wyndham Lewis and J. C. Flugel. Bringing together studies in R.S. KOPPEN fashion, body culture and modernism, the book explores the modern , F fascination with sartorial fashion as well as with clothes as objects, signs, things, and embodied practice. ASHION AND Fashion was deeply implicated with the nineteenth-century modern and remained in focus for the modernities that continued to be proclaimed in the early decades of the following century. Clothing connects with the modernist topoi of the threshold, the trace and the interface; it is the place where character becomes image and where relations between subject L and object, organic and inorganic play themselves out in a series of ITERARY encounters and ruptures. Clothes also facilitate explorations in modern materialism, for instance as informing surrealist attempts to think the materiality of things outside the system of commodities and their fetishisation. Woolf’s work as cultural analyst and writer of fiction M provides illuminating illustrations of all of these aspects, ‘thinking through ODERNITY clothes’ in representations of the present, investigations of the archives of the past, and projections for the future. R. S. Koppen is Associate Professor in British literature in the Department of Foreign Languages in the University of Bergen. Dr Koppen has published articles on modern literature and drama in New Literary History and Modern Drama, and a monograph on contemporary feminist theatre R.S. K (Scenes of Infidelity: Feminism in the Theatre, 1997). She has also published on the topic of fashion in the Selected Papers of the Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference (2006 and 2007). OPPEN Cover image: Portrait of Nina Hamnett by Roger Fry, 1917. © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London ISBN: 978-0748638727 Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com 9 780748 638727 ISBN: 978 0 7486 3872 7 Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity KOPPEN PAGINATION (M1814).indd i 19/6/09 16:44:12 KOPPEN PAGINATION (M1814).indd ii 19/6/09 16:44:12 Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity R. S. Koppen Edinburgh University Press KOPPEN PAGINATION (M1814).indd iii 19/6/09 16:44:12 © R. S. Koppen, 2009 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 978 0 7486 3872 7 (hardback) The right of R. S. Koppen to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. KOPPEN PAGINATION (M1814).indd iv 19/6/09 16:44:12 Contents List of illustrations vi Abbreviations vii Acknowledgements viii Preface ix 1 Modern Clothes-consciousness 1 2 From Symbolism in Loose Robes to the Figure of the Androgyne 37 3 Fashion and Literary Modernity 66 4 Modernism against Fashion 92 5 Civilised Minds, Fashioned Bodies and the Nude Future 115 6 Hats and Veils: Texere in the Age of Rupture 140 Bibliography 161 Index 171 KOPPEN PAGINATION (M1814).indd v 19/6/09 16:44:12 Illustrations 1 Man Ray, photograph for Tristan Tzara’s essay ‘On a Certain Automatism of Taste’. Published in Minotaure, no. 3–4 (winter 1933). Reprinted by permission of the Man Ray Trust. 4 2 Winifred Gill and Nina Hamnett modelling dresses for the Omega Workshops. Reprinted by permission of the estates of Vanessa Bell and Nina Hamnett. Courtesy Henrietta Garnett. 21 3 The Dreadnought Hoax (Virginia Woolf (seated); Guy Ridley; Horace de Vere Cole; Adrian Stephen; Anthony Buxton (seated); Duncan Grant) by Lafayette (Lafayette Ltd), 7 February 1910. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 23 4 Virginia Woolf, 27 April 1925. Photographers: Maurice Adams Beck and Helen Macgregor, Marylebone Mews, London, for Vogue. Reprinted by permission of the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Houghton Library. 28 5 Angelica Bell as Ellen Terry in Freshwater, 8 Fitzroy Street, 18 January 1934. © Tate, London 2008. 42 6 Angelica Bell as the Russian Princess in Orlando. Place: ‘La Bergere’, Cassis, near Marseilles. Date: 1928. © Tate, London 2008. 52 7 Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe-Hall (‘Radclyffe Hall’) by Howard Coster. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 56 8 Virginia Woolf. Photographer: Man Ray. 27 November 1934. Reprinted by permission of the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Houghton Library. 62 9 ‘A University Procession’, from Three Guineas. Reprinted by permission of the Society of Authors. 131 KOPPEN PAGINATION (M1814).indd vi 19/6/09 16:44:12 Abbreviations AROO A Room of One’s Own BTA Between the Acts CDM The Crowded Dance of Modern Life CR 1 The Common Reader CR 2 The Common Reader, Second Series CSF The Complete Shorter Fiction D The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols) DM The Death of the Moth and Other Essays E The Essays of Virginia Woolf (6 vols planned; 5 published) FR Freshwater JR Jacob’s Room L The Letters of Virginia Woolf (6 vols) M The Moment and Other Essays MEL Melymbrosia MOB Moments of Being MD Mrs Dalloway ND Night and Day O Orlando PA A Passionate Apprentice RF Roger Fry: A Biography TG Three Guineas TTL To the Lighthouse TW The Waves TY The Years VO The Voyage Out KOPPEN PAGINATION (M1814).indd vii 19/6/09 16:44:12 Acknowledgements My scholarly debts are acknowledged in the text and notes, but let me mention here my personal gratitude: to all those whose conversation and advice have contributed to the writing of this book. First, colleagues and friends at the International Annual Virginia Woolf Conferences in Portland, Oregon 2005 and Birmingham 2006 for responding to early versions of my arguments. Special thanks to Dr Catherine R. Mintler for proposing and co-organising the panel on Woolf and Fashion for the 2006 conference, to Vara Neverow for her suggestions for Chapter 5, and to Maggie Humm for kindly answering questions about the Three Guineas photographs. Thanks are also due to my colleagues and friends in the TAS (Text, Action, Space) research group for their enthusiasm and support for this project over several years. I am especially grateful to Professor Lars Saetre for providing generous opportunities to present and discuss parts of this book at conferences and workshops in Chicago (Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago), Paris (Centre de Cooperation Franco-Norvegienne en Sciences Sociales et Humaine), and Bergen (University of Bergen). Thanks to the Andrew E. and G. Norman Wigeland Memorial Endowment and the Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago for their generous invitation to ‘A Norwegian-American Conversation’ in February 2007, and in partic- ular to Eric Santner and David Wellbery for stimulating discussions. For time to complete this project I am grateful to the Faculty of Humanities, University of Bergen, and to my colleagues in the Department of Foreign Languages. For invaluable help with the illustrations I thank staff at the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, the Society of Authors, and the estates of Nina Hamnett and Vanessa Bell. Lastly, and most of all, I thank Stella and Bengt for their patience and support. KOPPEN PAGINATION (M1814).indd viii 19/6/09 16:44:12 Preface A range of stimulating books on the theory of modern fashion and the connections between fashion and modernity have become available in recent years, many of them published as part of Berg’s ‘Dress, Body, Culture’ series, confi rming that the connections between mode and modernité far exceed the etymological. The interrelationships between literary modernism and modern theories and practices of fashion have been much less consistently explored, however. Clair Hughes and Mark Anderson have written valuable books on the connections between dress, fashion and fi ction (Hughes’s Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001) and Dressed in Fiction (2006), Anderson’s Kafka’s Clothes (1992)). Within Woolf studies a number of recent essays have been devoted to aspects of Woolf’s famous ‘clothes-consciousness’, proposing read- ings of her work in the contexts of shopping, masquerade, and cross- dressing, as well as exploring the complexities and contradictions of her engagement with a fashionable modernism, commodity culture and the cultural marketplace. These contributions are highly valuable, but remain uncollected and relatively scattered. A comprehensive reading of Woolf’s work as cultural analyst and writer of fi ction, set in the context of the modern interest in fashion as theory and practice, and in clothes as things, commodities and symbols, is still lacking. My own book is intended to begin to fi ll this gap. It directs itself to the current interest in the traffi c between literary, material and visual cultures, assuming that writing engages with the look and feel of culture in complex ways, and that exploring this engagement reveals more not only about what it means to be modern, but about the projects of literary modernism and the exchanges of some of its leading proponents. The book places Woolf’s writing in the context of sartorial practice from the Victorian period to the 1930s, bringing out its ‘look through clothes’ and its engagement with theorists of dress and fashion from Thomas Carlyle to Walter Benjamin, Wyndham Lewis and J.