Canonicity and Commercialization in Woolf's Uniform Edition
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Marshall University Marshall Digital Scholar English Faculty Research English 1-1-2000 Canonicity and Commercialization in Woolf 's Uniform Edition John K. Young Marshall University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://mds.marshall.edu/english_faculty Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Young, John K. “Canonicity and Commercialization in Woolf’s Uniform Edition.” In Proceedings of the 9th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference: Virginia Woolf Turning the Centuries, eds. Bonnie Kime Scott nda Ann Ardis (Pace University Press, 2000): 236-243. This Conference Proceeding is brought to you for free and open access by the English at Marshall Digital Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Research by an authorized administrator of Marshall Digital Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. VIRGINIA WOOLF: TURNING THE CENTURIES Selected Papers From the Ninth Annual Conference on Vuginia Woolf University of Delaware June 10-13, 1999 Edited b)' Ann Ardis & Bonnie Kirne Scott New York Pace University Press 2000 Pressing the Public Sphere Young can never be "authentic" objects in his sense. But while books may exemplify Willis,J. H., Jr. Leonard and VirginiaPublishers: IVooifas TheHoganh Pnss, 1917- 41. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1992. Benjamin's maxim that "the work of an reproduced becomes the work of an Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. Vol. 2 Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth, designed for reproducibility" (224), publishers still manufacture some markof 1967. originality in first. and especially limited, editions.2 A book that appears in 1925. --. Tire CommonReader: FirstSeries. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York; "only" 100copies, for example, creates in its consumers a sense of authentici Harcourt, 1984. ty, if on a smaller scale than other an objects. Since allWoolf's books from --. The ConurwnSecond Reader: Series. 1932. Ed.Andrew McNe illie. New York: Harcourt,1986. Jacob'sRoom on bore the line "Publishedby Leonard & VirginiaWoolf at the -- . The Diary of VLf8inia \i'<loif.Ed. Anne OlivierBell. 5 vols. New Yorlc.: Hogarth Press," by investigating theWoolfs' publishing decisions we can also Harcourt, 1977-84. interpret her texts' material codes. The Essays of VLf8iniavo \i'<loif.4 ls . to date. Ed.Andrew McNeillie. London: The Uniform Editionmade Woolf's works more accessible than ever Hoganh, 1986-. before, creating a textual aura that manifests itself in the books' own com Mrs. DaJJoway. 1925. SanDiego: Harcourt,1981. modification. Hogarth historian J. H. \VIllis, Jr., explains: A Room of One's Own. 1929. San Diego: Harcourt, 1981. '"What is a Good Novel?"' The Highway:A Journalof Adult Education, 16.3 To put a living novelist's works into a standardedition is to make a claim 1924): 109-10. (Summer for the permanence and importanCe of the writer's work, to establish a canon. suggestthe classic. All the more interestingand revealing is such a development when theOO\'elist is in mid-career, forty-seven years old, anda partneri n the publishingfirm. By theireditorial decision, the Woolfs John Young seem haveto declared publicly the commercial value ofVi rginia's novels and their claim to artistic(156). greatness Canonicityand Commercialization in Woolf's Hogarth's Autumn 1929 catalog announced five new publications from its Uniform Edition most prominent author: the first four Uniform Editions (The Voyage Out, Jacob'sRoom, Mrs Dalloway, and The CommonReader) and A Roomof One's This paper considers VirginiaWoolf the publisher alongside Virginia Own. Perhaps surprisingly (from our contemporary perspective), the catalog Woolf the author. While the Hogarth Press bas long been known for making lists the reprint series first. The Uniform Edition appeared with this blurb Woolf "the only woman in England free to write what I like," it alsomade her (probably written by Woolf hersel£)3: "The Hogarth Pressbegins this autumn free to be published as she liked. Hogarth,Jane Marcus argues,"gave Woolf a the publication of a cheap uniform edition, of small and convenient size, of the way of negotiating the terms of literary publicity, and a space somewhere works of Virginia Woolf. Of the four volumes now published Jacob's Room between the private, the coterie, and the public sphere" (144-5). I will exam and MrsDalloway have been out of print for some time." At 5s. each, the ine one such negotiation, the Uniform Edition of Woolf's works, a series Uniform Editions were the same price as th.e regular first edition of Room, a designed to capitalize on her growing recognition and markelability. Once the reduction designed in response, we can assume, to that book's £2 2s. special Woolfs had become, in Leonard's words, "more or less ordinary publishers" edition,limited to 100 copies and signed by the author. (Rosenbaum, 7), they began marketing their books in "more or lessordinary" In this catalog, we see Hogarth's twin engines of literary commodifi ways,and includedthese a construction ofWoolf through the Uniform Edition cation at work: the Uniform Edition, frequently advertised as "New and as both canonical and commercial, a crucial combination, I will conclude, for Cheap," capitalizes on Woolf's growing marketability and recognition to modernist women writers.' encourage theconsumption and collection of all her works. At the same time, Focusing on the publishing dynamics of Woolf's books offers a more the limitededition of Room motivates a differentconsumer response, the desire fully historicized portrait of her career. I address the Uniform Edition through to own a specialliterary object, signed by the author herself. By no smaU coin what George Bomstein calls the '"'textual aura" (226), a version of Walter cidence, 1929 was Woolf's second-most profitable year as an author,earning Benjamin's aura updated to include the notions of textual materiality empha her nearly £3000 (or enough for six rooms of her own), and surpassed only sized by Jerome McGann and Peter Shillingsburg. Reproductions which slightly by the enormous success of The Years (Lee, 550). Woolf's new read ignore a book's textual aura, Bornstein demonstrates,"tend to set the text free ers, who had discovered her in To rhe Ughrlzouse or in the very popular from its original time and place, locating it in our own principally as an aes Orlando, could now easily and inexpensively begin retracing their steps thetic rather than historic.ized object''(225). There is a certain irony in apply through herca reer. Asthe ca1alognotes, Jacob :r Roomand Mrs. Dalloway, the ing Benjamin's original notion of aura to mechanically printed books, which two mostdesirable entries so far, were then out of print, thus making them par- 237 236 Young Pressing the PublicSphere ticularly appealing to readerswho had comelately to Woolfs work. By issu together alone for the longestperiod of time in the novel. It is the one glimpse ing the Uniform Editions as part of an expanding set-the back jacket for each provided of the kind of life they might have shared had Rachel lived long publication tists both those titles already published in the series and those that enough to become Terence's wife" (344). Rachel and Terence agree to call were "In Preparation"-Hogarth fosters its consumers' desire to own an entire each other by their first names and discuss the gendered division of societal collection. roles, including Rachel's anxiety over prostitution. This version of Chapter "VuginiaWoolf" the brandname thus becomeslegible as both canon XVI.as several critics have noted,is a more overtly feminist one in contrast to ically andcommercially significant: aesthetically important enough to merit a the more muted novel which crossed the Atlantic. "permanentedition" (LA 68) as Woolf calledit, and popularenough to sell well In 1929, Hogarth bought bothof sets sheets from Duckworth and sold in both limited and "cheap" editions. This authorial image stands in marked two different copies of the novel: first in its American version as a "Third contrast to the one Woolf cultivates in A Room of One'sOwn, her other publi Impression," and then with the cut sections restored for the Uniform Edition, cationof 1929. 1bere, Woolf portrays herself in an ongoing dialogue with her set from the sheets of the original Duckworthpublication and tisted as a "New audience, the opposite version of textual authority from CharlesLamb's image Edition" on the copyright page. According to Woolf bibliographer B. J. of Milton. As Christine Froula concludes, texts like Room "actively invest Kirkpatrick there were apparently 500 copies available of the 'Third authority in the audiences they both mirror and hail into being"(525). But the Impression"(and 100 sold), compared to 3200 copies published for the "New implicit claim of the Uniform Edition shifts its author back into a more Edition" (6). This switch has beenthe source of some confusion among Woolf Miltonic mode: Woolf represents herself hereas thekind of stable authority for scholars; Willis, for example, finds it "curious" that "the text so care fully whom Lamb could think "changing the words in that poem seemed to him a reworked by Woolf was never reprinted by the Hogarth Press" (155). In kind of sacrilege" (AROO 1). Just as Woolf knows Milton's poem and Hogarth's 1990 edition, Elizabeth Heine speculates that Woolf may have Thackeray's novels in their public, stable forms, so too can her audience now "decided that thechanges she had made for the American edition ... reflected engage a uniform version of her texts. Readers interested in TheVoyage OuJ, not what she hadacc omplished in publishing the novel in 1915, but the rejec for example, which had appeared in different English and American editions, tion of everyday detail and thedevelopment of new formswith which she was now have one text stamped by the authorand publisheras the standard edition. experimenting five years later"(400 ).