VIRGINIA WOOLF'S SHORT FICTION: A STUDY OF ITS RELATION TO THE STORY GENRE; AND AN EXPLICATION OF THE KNOWN STORY CANON by David Roger Tallentire B.Sc, The University of British Columbia, 1963 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF Master of Arts in the Department of English We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard. THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA April, 1968 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirement for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada Date /&, /?6S ii ABSTRACT The short stories of Virginia Woolf have never re• ceived serious scrutiny, critics determinedly maintaining that the novels contain the heart of the matter and that the sto• ries are merely preparatory exercises. Mrs. Woolf, however, provides sufficient evidence that she was "on the track of real discoveries" in the stories, an opinion supported by her Bloomsbury mentors Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey. A careful analysis of her twenty-one known stories suggests that they are indeed important (not merely peripheral to the novels and criticism) and are successful in developing specific techniques and themes germane to her total canon. One of the reasons why the stories have never been taken seriously, of course, is that they simply are not stories by any conventional definition— but are nonetheless "short fiction" of interest and significance. The stories derive from three distinctly separate chronological periods. The earliest group (1917-1921) was published in Monday or Tuesday and included two stories avail• able only in that volume, now out of print. (To enable a complete assessment, I have made these stories available as appendices II and III of this thesis, and included Virginia Woolf's lone children's story as appendix IV since it too is of the early period}. This phase of creation utilized one primary technique—that of evolving an apparently iii random stream of impressions from a usually inanimate and tiny focussing object, and was generally optimistic about the "adorable world." The second phase of her short fiction (those stories appearing in magazines between 1927 and 1938) illustrates a progression in both technical virtuosity and in personal discipline: the fictional universe is now peo• pled, and the randomness of the early sketches has given way to a more selective exploitation of the thoughts inspired by motivating situations. But vacillation is here evident in the author's mood, and while optimism at times burns as brightly as before, these stories as often presage Mrs. Woolfs abnegation of life. The third group, posthumously published by Leonard Woolf in 1944 without his wife's imprimatur (and recognizably "only in the stage beyond that of her first sketch"), still reveals a desire in the author to pursue her original objective suggested in "A Haunted House"--the unlayering of facts to bare the "buried treasure" truth, using imagination as her only tool. In one respect, and one/Only, the critics who have neglected these stories are correct: the pieces are often too loosely knit, too undisciplined, and too often leave the Impression of a magpie's nest rather than one "with twigs and straws placed neatly together." In this the stories are obviously inferior to the novels. But by neglecting the stories the critics have missed a mine of information: herein lies an "artist's sketchbook,H which, like A Writer's Diary, provides a major avenue into the mind of one of the most remarkable writers of our age. CONTENTS Chapter Page I. THE SHORT STORY GENRE AND VIRGINIA WOOLF . 1 II. MICROCOSM TO MACROCOSM 26 THE MARK ON THE WALL 33 KEW GARDENS 40 SOLID OBJECTS 46 A HAUNTED HOUSE 51 MONDAY OR TUESDAY 55 BLUE AND GREEN 57 THE STRING QUARTET 61 III. THE MACROCOSM PEOPLED 75 AN UNWRITTEN NOVEL 78 THE SHOOTING PARTY 85 NURSE LUGTON'S GOLDEN THIMBLE . ; . 94 A SOCIETY 100 LAPPIN AND LAPINOVA 106 THE NEW DRESS 110 MOMENTS OF BEING 115 THE LADY IN THE LOOKING-GLASS 120 THE DUCHESS AND THE JEWELLER 125 IV. POSTHUMOUS PIECES 132 THE SEARCHLIGHT 134 THE LEGACY 138 THE MAN WHO LOVED HIS KIND 143 TOGETHER AND APART 146 A SUMMING UP 151 V. THE SUM RETOTALED 157 WORKS CITED 168 APPENDICES I. CHRONOLOGY 171 II. "A SOCIETY" 173 III. "BLUE AND GREEN" . 197 IV. "NURSE LUGTON'S GOLDEN THIMBLE" .... 199 KEY TO SYMBOLS IN THE THESIS PROPER MOW The Mark on the Wall KG Kew Gardens UN An Unwritten Novel SO Solid Objects HH A Haunted House MoT Monday or Tuesday SQ The String Quartet TND The New Dress MoB Moments of Being LiLG The Lady in the Looking-Glass SP The Shooting Party DaJ The Duchess and the Jeweller LaL Lappin and Lapinova TMWL The Man Who Loved His Kind TS The Searchlight TL The Legacy TaA Together and Apart ASU A Summing Up 1 CHAPTER I THE SHORT STORY GENRE AND VIRGINIA WOOLF But what are stories. Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passes through another and sometimes I begin to doubt if there are stories. —Bernard in The Waves The short story, as we have come to know it, is an amorphous entity. Despite the many attempts to define and categorize the genre no one has ever succeeded in bounding it and Virginia Woolf's short fiction in particular defies prescriptive analysis. However, it is necessary to begin any explication of "stories" with a working definition of the medium to be mined if a conclusion is to be reached. It is too easy though in our technically oriented world to over-specify, to quest beyond the knowable, unable, in Keats' phrase, to rest in "mysteries, doubts and uncertain• ties without an irritable reaching after facts". It is hoped that this thesis will escape the pitfall of over- prescription, while achieving a useful critical synthesis of the Woolfian canon. The short story, as Hugh Kenner points out in Studies in Change^ sprang from oral tradition—"a tale is a thing 2 told; tale and tell are nearly the same word." By the same, perhaps dubious, etymological argument, he describes 2 the roots of story, as "nearly the same word as history; a 3 methodical record, something with system to it." However, exactly what constitutes the short story's system is, as we shall see, far from simple. In the early part of this century, before writers like Virginia Woolf had obfuscated the issue, critics were in the habit of thinking that the story had evolved from Poe and Maupassant with a definite, predictable structure. Esenwein's "seven characteristics" of the short story will do to represent this definitive approach popular in the 1920's. He claimed that the story is always marked by: "1) a single predominant character; 2) a single pre-eminent incident; 3) imagination; 4) plot; 5) compression; 6) or• ganization; and 7) unity of impression."4 At first glance this seems precise and encompassing but on reflection it is obvious that these aspects of the story do not allow for the magic of such "pieces" (since they cannot be"stories) as "A Haunted House" which has no characters in the 'real' sense, no definite incident, no relatable plot, and certainly the impression left upon readers polled by this author is diverse. Nor can one, in evaluating Virginia Woolf's stories, answer in the required affirmative to H.T. Baker's list of questions designed to cull the real story from imposters. Baker's "Practical Manual 3 of Short Story Writing" rejects stories which cannot answer these test questions with a resounding yes: "do the opening paragraphs clearly indicate the nature of the story? . 5 and is there a genuine climax". How does Virginia Woolf fare with such criteria? Surely "Monday or Tuesday" can hardly even be said to have a tangible beginning, let alone a climax, and even at the "end" of the -fragment one, would be hard-pressed to "clearly indicate the nature of the story." Yet critics and laymen alike persist in tying the story down, in making it fit the restrictions they insist it work beneath. Sir Hugh Walpole voices this conventional view of the old guard most emphatically when he states: A story should be a story: a record of things happening, full of incident and accident, swift movement, unexpected development, leading through suspense to a climax and a satisfying denouement. In recent years, however, critics have been forced to admit that such prescriptions of the story genre cannot define many experimental vignettes recognized as effective literature. If these "stories" work, yet cannot be cast into any existing mold, -surely the molds are wrong. Henry James perhaps expresses the sanest viewpoint in urging readers to forswear the urge to classify, and* to accept the author's offering, unlabelled though it might be. What he 4 says of the novel is no less true of the short story: "a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and . our 7 only business with it could be to swallow it whole." James, then, subjugating his critical tenets, is urging us to be more inclined to trust our own senses as to what constitutes merit and to be less dependent on outmoded templates against which to compare tentative short stories.