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A POETICS OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY; THE CREATION OF “VIRGINIA WOOLF’

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree of Docotor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Julia Irene Keller, B.A., M. A.

*****

The Ohio State University 1996

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Marlene Longenecker, Adviser Approved by

Professor Frank Donoghue Adviser Professor Debra Moddelmog Department of English UMI Number: 9710591

UMI Microform 9710591 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.

This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ABSTRACT

After a long period of critical neglect, biography of late has come into its own as a genre, becoming the focus of an increasing number of critical studies. Yet too many current theorists of biography overlook critiques of specific biographies in their haste to generalize about the genre.

Using five biographies of Virginia Woolf, I explore the ways by which literary biographers create their respective images of an author. While the various tenets of contemporary critical theory that are grouped under the general heading “postmodernism” have, in many ways, made studies such as mine inevitable, as we now recognize the constructed nature of all biographical portraits, I believe that a poetics of biography must be grounded not only in theory, but in an analysis of the specific rhetorical strategies employed by biographers.

I analyze Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972) by Quentin Bell; Woman o f Letters:

A Life of Virginia Woolf (1978) by Phyllis Rose; Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (1984) by Lyndall Gordon; Virginia Woolf: The Impact o f Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (1989) by Louise DeSalvo; and Virginia Woolf (1995) by James King according to how each work embodies Virginia Woolf; how each presents her as a woman; how each deals with her literary output; and how each manifests a self-consciousness about the inherent artificiality of all biographical portraits.

Close readings of biographies — in particular, multiple biographies of an individual

— suggest ways that postmodern critics might approach the genre of biography, acknowledging its artistry while recognizing its provisionality.

Ill Dedicated to the memory of my father. Dr. James Richard Keller

IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my choice of members for a dissertation committee (and their choice of me). Professor Marlene Longenecker is that rare blend of conscientious scholar and connoisseur of literature; she tempers a keen critical acumen with a passion for fine writing. Her insights and generosity have strengthened, deepened and sustained this project.

Professor Frank Donoghue added an invaluable perspective about the history of literary biography. Professor Debra Moddelmog kindly shared the fimits of her own profound explorations of biography. Both brought their formidable critical intellects to bear upon their readings of these pages.

It is a pleasure to thank Cartha Sexton, administrator extraordinaire, who enables

English graduate students to concentrate on literature, not bureaucracy.

Finally, I must thank Susan Phillips and Carolyn Focht, two dear fiiends whose encouragement was essential. VITA

November 1, 1956 ...... Bom - Huntington, West Virginia

1976 B.A, English, Marshall University

1981 M.A., English, Marshall University

1980 - 1981 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English Marshall University Huntington, West Virginia

1981 - present...... Staff Writer, The Cobtmbus Dispatch Columbus, Ohio

1993 - 1996 Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English The Ohio State University

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field; English

VI TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication...... iv

Acknowlegments...... v

Vita...... vi

Introduction...... I

Chapters:

1. A History of the Criticism of Biography ...... 23

2. Claiming the Biographical Body ...... 67

3. Feminist Literary Biography and “Virginia Woolf’ ...... 112

4. Work and Life in Literary Biography ...... 170

5. Self-Reflexivity, Literary Biography and “Virginia Woolf’ ...... 221

Bibliography ...... 269

Vll INTRODUCTION

Certain literary figures, like certain works of literature, endure. The reasons why this is so — why, that is, one literary figure becomes such a familiar icon that her or his face adorns T-shirts and bookbags, and the image becomes the centerpiece of innumerable biographies, doctoral dissertations and learned societies, while other figures, perhaps equally worthy, sink into oblivion — is a mystery, very like the mystery of why one person falls in love with another: who knows what inscrutable alchemy occurs? Why one person and not another? In the case of a literary icon, it is as if an entire culture, or generation, or sometimes many generations, has fallen in love. “The power of certain lives to draw endlessly repeated reassessments - Johnson, Byron, Napoleon, Queen Victoria, D.H.

Lawrence, Plath — is a peculiar mystery,” writes Richard Holmes in “Inventing the Truth”:

It suggests that they hold up particular mirrors to each succeeding generation of biographers, almost as the classical myths were endlessly retold by the Greek dramatists, to renew their own versions of contemporary identity. Each generation sees itself anew in its chosen subjects. (19)

Perhaps. We will never know just why certain artists and their images captivate while others do not; yet it may provide some comfort that, even if reasons are beyond our ken, results are not. We are able to track the tangible impact of our literary obsessions. For where they manifest themselves most frequently and ostentatiously is in biographies, those

“endlessly repeated reassessments” to which Holmes alluded, and it is to biography that

we can turn for confirmation of what intrigues us as a culture, what challenges us as

scholars, what haunts us as readers.

On the short list of British and American authors whose images may be said to represent twentieth-century literature in the popular imagination, Virginia Woolfs name surely would appear, along with, perhaps, that of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Sylvia

Plath and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Some might quarrel with the list, and claim that other authors have produced superior work, but that is beside the point; these authors would be instantly recognizable both to literary scholars and the general public. ‘ Virginia Woolfs

“significance as a cultural icon” (viii), as Julia Briggs phrases it in an introduction to a collection of essays on Virginia Woolfs novels, is irrefutable. Photographs of Virginia

Woolfs long, mournful face, a face that seems to drop from her cheekbones like a sheet hung from a cliff, are part of the essential iconography of the twentieth century. People who have seen her picture think they know her — and, more to the point, think they know her work: “The delicate face suggested refinement, esthetic withdrawal, a commitment to the contemplative rather than the active life,” writes Alex Zwerdling, comparing her image to Tennyson’s Lady o f Shaloit. “Add to this the vision of Bloomsbury as a literary fortress and the awareness of Woolf s madness and suicide, and all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle seemed to fit together” (9). Growing up, writer Susan Isaacs told The Wall Street Journal, she didn’t think she could be a writer because she wasn’t a “haunted dame” (Kaufman,

A ll) such as Virginia Woolf. It wasn’t so much the prose that intimidated Isaacs; it was. rather, the image, the tragic persona that seemed to demand a sacrifice — of happiness?

Serenity? Normal life? — on the altar of high art.

The present work is not, however, about Virginia Woolf. It is about biographies of

Virginia Woolf, and it is about how those works “create” the image that we now recognize as uniquely Virginia Woolfs; the preoccupied writer in the droopy clothes, the tormented chronicler of her own complicated past. I began this introduction with a contemplation of Virginia Woolf because her life story serves as a compelling window through which — after we have rubbed at the glass with a sleeve — we can peer in and see, working away, the image-making machinery known as biography.

Dealing with a series of biographical treatments of a single individual is, I believe, an effective way to explore how biographers do what they set out to do, or fail to do what they set out to do, and the reasons why. These evaluations will be informed by — but not, I hope, limited to — the central tenets of contemporary critical theory, most of which can be gathered under the rubric known as postmodernism. However, as I will discuss later in this introduction, in Chapter 1 and throughout this work, I did not want to deal with biography in the way that many critical theorists do; biography has become, in effect, a clearinghouse for all sorts of interesting but, to my mind, somewhat overworked, theories about subjectivity and objectivity, authorial identity, representations of reality, and the transparency of language. I wanted to find a way to deal with biography that would require close readings, that would not, as do many studies, simply summarize biography as a genre, because I believe that what biographies actually say at a sentence level is meaningful and relevant. I will explore in detail five biographies of Virginia Woolf; Quentin Bell’s Virginia

Woolf: A Biography (1972); Phyllis Rose’s Woman o f Letters: A Life o f Virginia Woolf

(1978); Lyndall Gordon’s Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (1984); Louise DeSalvo’s

Virginia Woolf: The Impact o f Childhood Sexual Abuse On Her Life and Work (1989);

and James King’s Virginia Woolf (1994). Also, I will consider other biographies, group

studies and critical studies that deal with Virginia Woolf. “More than in the case with any

other writer,” says John Mepham, “it is impossible to keep the literary analysis of Virginia

Woolfs fiction separate from the study and interpretation of her life” (Criticism in Focus,

3). In other words, no one can offer an exact number of biographies of Virginia Woolf,

because different works are apt to contain bits and pieces of both biography and criticism.^

I chose the five biographies because they are the ones most often cited by Virginia Woolf

scholars, and because they represent different approaches to the presentation and

interpretation of her life.^ Each biography is, I will argue, an attempt to rewrite (either

covertly or overtly) previous Virginia Woolf biographies; thus biographers are akin to the

poets who manifest what Harold Bloom calls “anxiety of influence”: i.e., biographers deliberately misread their forebears, and justify their biographies as correctives to what they perceive as inaccurate or incomplete portraits of the original subject. The misreading enables biographers to “clear imaginative space for themselves” (10), as Bloom claims it does for poets.

Put simply, I want to study these biographies qua biographies, not as glosses on other inquiries. Toward that end, I will explore a poetics of biography, a means of interpreting and evaluating the genre. Peter Brooks defines a poetics as “an overall structural framework that articulates its grounds and identifies features of pertinence” to create “a progressive, continuing enterprise that is significant, that can be shared, taught, transmitted and made the subject of an intelligible dialogue” (510). He adds, “One should generally try to work from specific textual instances to the general condition and project of literature that they imply” (511). And so I shall.

Before I explain more fully the parameters of this study, and further articulate my justification for selecting Virginia Woolf for this type of project, 1 want to pause for a moment and talk about my own relationship to biography, for it is a genre about which I have passionate feelings. In 1984,1 wrote a brief biography of Phil Ochs, 1960s-era activist and folk singer, for a magazine.”* Only after the biography had been published did I step back and analyze the process of circumscribing another’s life in words; the retrieval of fact from published sources and first-person interviews; the shaping of those facts into a plausible, pleasing narrative; the jamming of that narrative into an overarching framework that I selected as my central thesis - namely, that the times had doomed Ochs, that when the social activism of the 1960s gave way to the lassitude of the 1970s, his contribution of fiery, driven protest songs was no longer relevant and Ochs committed suicide. This thesis informed my interpretation of major events in Ochs’ life and my summary of his persona.

The process seemed very clear — in retrospect. During the composition of the

Ochs biography, however, 1 was blissfully unaware of the concepts that would later seem so obvious in the light of postmodernism and its attendant theories, theories that have systematically dismantled our notions of the stability and reliability of unassailable truths. I simply (or so I thought) wrote. Had I been aware of such theories, and their irrefutable power over my actions, my hand would have been stilled, my brain a busy furnace of

possibilities and counter-possibilities. I was proceeding naively, as if the discovery of fact

were indeed “discovery” and not invention, as if my thesis were not guiding, at every turn,

my selection and presentation of those facts.

Such a recognition began to influence my reading of biographies. Having been, in a

rather limited sense, a biographer, I could recognize the shaping devices employed by my brethren, could watch (read) with satisfaction as those devices resulted in a smoothly written, intriguing and persuasive portrait. This feeling was reinforced by my occasional discovery of biographies of authors with whom I had little or no acquaintance.^ My pleasure in the texts had nothing to do with any body of knowledge I possessed about the subjects, alongside which I could place the biographies and search for discrepancies; such a pleasure was, I began to note, equal to my pleasure in works of fiction and poetry. It was the shaping, not that which was shaped (i.e., facts) that drew me to biography.

Richard Ellmarm captures this emotion perfectly:

We caimot know completely the intricacies with which any mind negotiates with its surroundings to produce literature. The controlled seething out of which great works come is not likely to yield all its secrets. Yet at moments, in glimpses, biographers seem to be close to it, and the effort to come close, to make out of apparently haphazard circumstances a plotted circle, to know another person who has lived as well as we know a character in fiction, and better than we know ourselves, is not frivolous. It may even be, for reader as for writer, an essential part of experience. {Golden Codgers, 16)

However, once I entered the academic world as a graduate student in English Literature, I noticed that biographies were not accorded nearly the same prominence as were other genres, media and discourses. There was no regularly scheduled course on biography at Ohio State University; biographies were rarely included on syllabi, except as optional, or

supplemental, reading/ Ironically, while most literary biographies are written by

academics, academics by and large do not include biographies on the student reading lists

they compile for relevant courses/ I can offer, perhaps, a few preliminary, speculative

reasons why this is so: biography is regarded as a fun and popular genre, maybe too

popular for its own good, and certainly too popular to engage the professional sensibilities of professors who pride themselves on burrowing into obscure and difBcult texts.*

Biography has gone largely unstudied because its composition has been deemed “just a bit unscholarly,” according to one academic observer.® Resting uneasily somewhere between art and history, a product of dreamy creativity and roll-up-the-sleeves research, biography has always challenged our notion of genre, has thwarted the neat housekeeping impulse that demands to know just where, precisely, we shall put it. Witness the exchange between

Olywn Hughes, sister-in-law of Sylvia Plath, and the many biographers who sought the blessing of the Plath estate (controlled by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, and administered by Olwyn Hughes). Ms. Hughes had read several of the projects and was quite annoyed, she told Janet Malcolm; the proposed biographies included interpretation and analysis.

“Biography,” Ms. Hughes fumed, “isn’t a poem, it isn’t a novel, it’s a docum ent (102).

Biography, in other words, ought to know its place, and to stay there.

Indeed, the relationship between biography and other genres, with biography often dismissed as the lesser “stepchild of the literary arts,” sheds an interesting light on the development of criticism of biography. Herbert Lindenberger notes as much in his essay on literary texts as historical events: Ever since the institutionalization of literary scholarship a century ago, a certain distinction . . . has prevailed between the literary work and what has often been labeled its surrounding context. The work itself has enjoyed a privileged status.. . . The privileged status that the canonical texts have been given often manifests itself with what we are meant to experience as a magical aura, an aura that supposedly is lacking in texts of a not specifically literary sort. Thus, according to the institutional conventions of literary scholarship, the so-called context surrounding the great literary text, the documents attached to the author’s biography, the earlier texts (some themselves canonical) that have influenced the great text under consideration, the intellectual and social milieu that the author somehow absorbed, must perforce occupy a secondary status. (113)

Valerie Ross believes the prejudice against biography in the academy is a political move more than an aesthetic judgment;

What seems to me to be at stake in the many debates about the author — within the institution in which our professional discourse is implicated — is not so much the status of the individual but rather the production, management and maintenance of our professional authority. In that light, debates about whether or not it is “sound” or “humanist” to take an individual subject as the object of study — which continues to be the most prevalent theoretical strategy deployed to repress and delegitimate biographical inquiry — may be something of a philosophical distraction or, unwittingly, an essentially conservative gesture that keeps our circles small and our discourse elevated. (158)

As I will trace in Chapter 1, that “outsider” status for biography has been alleviated of late by the attentions of contemporary critical theory, whose practitioners have shown an admirable willingness to expand the scope of critical inquiry to include traditionally marginalized genres and discourses." However, despite a dramatically increased level of attention to biography in the academy (and in academic publishing) over the past several years, I am still not satisfied.

It seems to me that, on their way to conferring fiill membership to biography in the pantheon of topics appropriate for scholarly scrutiny, many critics have skipped over an important phase: the phase during which specific biographies are reoof. The

8 preponderance of recent critical studies of biography deals with many important issues that attend its composition and reception. However, many of these studies fail to engage the texts of specific biographies, as opposed to a lofty consideration of the implications of the genre of biograpy, or to look at biographies in the same ways that critics have traditionally looked at novels, poems and plays. I have observed the kind of criticism of biography that I have in mind on only a few occasions, either in scholarly books and articles or in popular periodicals: Dennis W. Petrie’s Ultimately Fiction: Design in

Modem American Literary Biography, which analyzes selected biographies of four authors (William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James) in an attempt to establish some aesthetic principles for biography; “The Hemingway Circle,” an article by Richard Ellmann that is included in his collection a long the rivemm and which critiques Carlos Baker’sErnest Hemingway: A Life Story, and “Versions of the Life:

George Eliot and Her Biographers,” a chapter in Ira Bruce Nadel’s Biography: Fiction,

Fact & Form. These studies do not fall into the trap of many scholarly studies of biography, which tend to exploit the genre as a means to an end, the end being an investigation of the nature of reality and agency, or that of most popular studies, which routinely critique biographies on the basis of how many new “facts” are revealed instead of how those facts are deployed.

Through the biographies of Virginia Woolf, I will explore the ways biographers tell their stories and construct the identities of their subject. How are words employed in the service of imagined actuality? How do biographers create a portrait of character, simulate the passage of time, impose coherence and verisimilitude on the puzzling abstraction we call the past? Leon Edel writes, “Biography is . . . the organization of human memory”

{Writing Lives, 93), a phrase I like very much - but how, after all, is that organization accomplished? And is not such organization a function of the conscious or unconscious political agenda of the purveyors of memory, i.e., the biographers? By what rhetorical means do Virginia Woolfs biographers persuade us to accept their particular versions of the reality of her existence and the effect of that existence on her friends and contemporaries, and what are the implications of that acceptance for future biographical portraits of Virginia Woolf?

In Chapter 1,1 trace the history of the criticism of biography through the centuries.

As Petrie notes, “It took the English-speaking world [a] long [time] to become concerned with the more formal elements of biography — style and structure, for example” (12). For centuries, biography’s ostensible grounding in mere fact relegated its critiques to the ascertaining of historical accuracy rather than the determination of literary worth. In the scraps of criticism that do emerge, however, I observe a distinctive trend: biographers initially were regarded, and regarded themselves, in a positive, even exalted light, as they were entrusted with the preservation of cultural memory. By the twentieth century, however, biographers had been thoroughly demonized, regarded as vultures who plucked greedily at famous corpses, revealing the biographical subjects’ secrets and exploiting their celebrity, so much so that Richard Ellmann could write, “The biographer is necessarily intrusive, a trespasser even when authorized” {Golden Codgers, 1).

In Chapter 2 ,1 discuss the techniques by which Virginia Woolfs biographers engage in what I call the “réanimation fallacy”: the attempt to render the physical reality of

10 the biographical subject on the page. Analyses of these attempts force us to ask whether, indeed, there is such an entity as an essential sel^ and if so, whether it can be reproduced or even persuasively suggested in prose.

Chapter 3 is an exploration of feminist literary biography. Crucial to a depiction of

Virginia Woolfs life story is her sex. However, her biographers must decide how much to foreground her sex; the decision necessarily has, of course, social, cultural, educational and psychological implications. Chapters 4 and 5 contend with, respectively, the treatment of Virginia Woolfs works in an account of her life -- that is, how literary criticism functions in literary biographies — and the extent to which biographers reveal the essentially created nature of their enterprise. As Lyndall Gordon writes in Charlotte

Bronte: A Passionate Life, biography is “a lasting imaginative truth based on a selection of the facts” (329). Biographers of Virginia Woolf acknowledge, to varying extents, the selectivity and provisionality of their portraits, a concession that is directly attributable to the insights of postmodernism.

For reasons cited earlier — her status as a cultural icon, the range of her interests and achievements, the sheer number and variety of biographical treatments — Virginia

Woolf constitutes an ideal subject for this sort of study. Seen another way, however, she is distractingly atypical; the availability to scholars and biographers of vast quantities of her diaries, letters and notebooks adds a special burden, as well as a special privilege, upon those who seek to chronicle her life. Because we have Virginia Woolfs personal versions of so many events in her life, biographers must decide how much credence to

11 afford the biographical subject’s perspective, amid competing perspectives, without unwittingly turning the enterprise into autobiography.

Speaking of autobiography, why is that genre not a part of this study? Why, that is, do I perceive that biography is fundamentally different from what the editors of Seductions o f Biography call its “cousin” (x), autobiography? Earlier, I alluded to my pleasure in beholding the shaping mechanism that biography required from the biographer; it seems to me that shaping the events of one’s own life into a coherent narrative is a different challenge from shaping the events of another’s life — not a greater or lesser challenge, but a different one. As Ellmann writes, biography introduces “an alien point of view, necessarily different from that mixture of self-recrimination and self-justification which the great writer, like lesser men and women, has made the subject of his lifelong conversation with himself’ {Golden Codgers, I).

While it may be true that, as Bell Gale Chevigny writes, autobiographies are as much “imaginative constructions” (83) as biographies are, the nature of that construction is altered when the subject is inside, rather than outside, oneself. Even the whimsical distinctions seem, to me, to hold much truth; as Rebecca West wrote in a 1975 newspaper article, “Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other.

But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves” {Rebecca West: A Life, x). Added Paul Murray Kendall; “The autobiographer

. . . knows more but tells less” (30).

Another attribute of Virginia Woolfs life and career that might tend to make her less representative for a study of this sort, which seeks to explore techniques of

12 biographers on its way to some general insights on the art and craft of the genre, is the

fact that Virginia Woolf herself was a sophisticated critic, theorist and practitioner of

biography. As Julia Briggs notes in “Virginia Woolf and the ‘Proper Writing of Lives’ ,” biography was a constant preoccupation for the fledgling writer who was Virginia Woolf:

“Her earliest work paid homage to it, and accepted it as a literary yardstick even as she sought to modify its influence” (246). (Her interest in biography was, perhaps, partly a legacy from her father. Sir Leslie Stephen; as I will discuss in Chapter 1, he was a seminal figure in the history of the criticism of biography because of his editorship of the

Dictionary o f National Biography.) Virginia Woolf revealed her preoccupation with biography in virtually every novel she wrote (especially Orlando and Flush), along with two influential essays, “The Art of Biography” and “The New Biography,” in which she acknowledged the limitations of fact and anticipated postmodernism. In the former, she wrote: “But almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders” (197). In the latter essay, she wrote that facts “must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integrity” (230). Truly, I have had to struggle not to allow Virginia Woolfs ideas about biography to, in effect, “take over” this work, to influence it unduly. The present work is, once again, about biographies of “Virginia Woolf,” not about Virginia

Woolf. (Similarly, in an early draft of this work, I began each chapter with a quotation about biography, culled from Virginia Woolf s works. I cut these, however, because they were misleading, suggesting that what followed was an analysis of Virginia Woolfs

13 work.) This issue sounds like a minor one, but it nonetheless proved to be occasionally

irksome; many times, when I described this project to friends and colleagues, the response was, “Oh, I love Virginia Woolfs work!" I would then explain, with a trace of impatience, that I wasn’t writing about Virginia Woolfs works; I wasn’t writing about works about

Virginia Woolfs works; I was writing about biographies of Virginia Woolf.

Throughout this study, I refer to the task of critiquing biography as “the criticism of biography” (instead of “biographical criticism”) and to Virginia Woolf as “Virginia

Woolf’ (instead of “Virginia” or “Woolf’ or other variations). The distinction regarding the former is important because, as I will discuss in Chapter 4, the term “biographical criticism” typically denotes literary criticism that is informed by a knowledge of the author’s life story.

Naming, too, is important, because names matter. They matter in families, and they matter in biographies.How biographers refer to their subjects might seem like a rather pedestrian and unimportant aspect of a biography, little more than stylistic housekeeping, but it plays a crucial role in determining the biographer’s position in relation to the subject and, by extension, to the task of biographical writing itself. Naming, while it does not reveal fully the attitude of biographer to subject, does reveal the beginnings of such an attitude. Moreover, names have the power almost of incantation; this is probably what

Daniel Hofiman means to suggest by the interesting title he chose for his study of Edgar

Allan Poe; Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Hoffman seems to be acknowledging the way a name can, all at once, define — that is, pin down and frx — an identity, while it also suggests worlds of possible interpretations, evoking the very opposite of fixedness.

14 Similarly, Elizabeth Bowen wrote that Virginia Woolfs name, isolated from any other identifying aspect of her person, sparked the imagination of her readers: “When I say, ‘She was a name to us,’ remember — or if you cannot remember, try to imagine — what a name can be, surrounded by nothing but the air of heaven” (217).

Much of the naming of Virginia Woolf by her biographers is necessitated by, or seems to have been necessitated by, the tradition of a married woman’s adoption of her husband’s surname. Still, even when that practice is taken into consideration, the biographer’s decision about what to name the subject is never automatic, never simple, never without its implications, as Martin Stannard, author of Evelyn Waugh: The Early

Years, comments:

But even in naming one’s subject one suggests an uncomfortable authorial ‘attitude’ of patronage/approval/disapproval. Auberon Waugh, reviewing Sykes’s biography [of Evelyn Waugh], explained that he had once considered writing his father’s life himself. The task was abandoned, he said, because he could settle on no satisfactory title for someone so close. Should it be ‘Evelyn’, or Mr. Waugh’, or ‘Waugh’, or ‘my father’ or ‘papa’? A similar problem arises here. I have, for convenience and clarity, generally settled on ‘Evelyn’ for the early years and ‘Waugh’ for the period of adulthood. This connotes no more than a literary device, (viii)

The act of naming the biographical subject is certainly a literary device; it also can be much more.*® In Virginia Woolfs case, her name has come to be identified with a certain extra-literary sensibility, one that implies frequent and usually perilous self-examination; hence Edward Albee’s employment of her name in his play about bitter, battling spouses.

Who's Afraid o f Virginia Woolf? The use of the name “Virginia Woolf,” as opposed to

“Virginia” or “Woolf’ or even “Virginia Stephen,” is closely associated with aspects of

Virginia Woolfs personality and public image that apparently, to Albee and his audiences,

15 requires no explanation. Certainly Roger Poole, author of the virulently polemical The

Unknown Virginia Woolf, believed that the name has passed into the popular as well as the scholarly imagination bearing a cumbersome weight of associations; furthermore, he perceives the name itself as symbolic of the life’s ultimate meaning and mystery:

I frequently write in this study ‘Virginia,’ not ‘Virginia W oolf.. . . This is not mere affectation, but represents a decision taken in the face of a real problem. Anyone who reads widely in the literature about Virginia Woolf will become aware, after a while, that the convention of writing the full name ‘Virginia Woolf every time a reference is to be made to the author, irks everyone who writes about her. There is a sense, discernible in the writing of many critics, that the appellation ‘Virginia Woolf represents some kind of existential oxymoron, a sense that there is an act of force involved in constantly and consistently linking these two parts of the name together. ‘Mrs. Woolf is sometimes tried as an alternative, but that obviously militates against something important. ‘Woolf is occasionally tried too, but that looks very odd indeed. There are those who have tried to cut the knot by writing VW’, but this, while it undoubtedly saves printer’s ink, does not solve the incongruity. So I have had recourse to using simply ‘Virginia’. . . . It may be that the difficulty we experience in trying to find a correct nominal designation for this author is due to a deeply buried, but real, lived fact, which is, that the two names did in life stand for two antithetical realities, and that these two realities never could, and never did, fuse. (6)

Gordon, too, acknowledges the problem of what to call the subject of the biography: “It is difficult to know what to call a writer whose name was changed by marriage and who shares surnames with men who were well known in their own right. It is therefore often convenient to use her Christian name but all references to her as an author will use the name on her books” (3). Yet even this ostensibly clear, logical split proves considerably more complicated in practice; naming becomes a way of delineating the subject’s psychic progress. For instance, Gordon offers this critique of Virginia Woolfs first novel. The

Voyage Ont. “Virginia Stephen wrote this book, not Virginia Woolf’ (98). This is

16 factually true, since Virginia Woolf wrote the majority of the book prior to her marriage,

but Gordon is looking past chronology. Gordon uses the name “Virginia Stephen” to refer

to her subject in childhood and “Virginia” to describe her personal life in young adulthood;

the mature literary career belongs to an entity known as “Virginia Woolf.” Indeed, the five

biographers whose works are under consideration follow the same general pattern of

naming: Virginia Woolf, the child and adolescent, is “Virginia” or “Virginia Stephen,”

while the adult author is referred to as “Virginia Woolf.” Only King chooses the

paternalistic “little Virginia Stephen” (3) and “young Virginia Stephen” (23).

Naming becomes significant for critics of biographies as well. In his review of

Richard Brookhiser’s Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, Harvey

Mansfield writes: “Only a third of the book is on Washington’s ‘career’ (I cannot call him

‘George’) ; Brookhiser relates that John Marshall in his biography spoke of the birth of

‘Mr. Washington’ ” (63).

Throughout this work, I have called Virginia Woolf by that name and no other.

This is an attempt (doubtless a doomed one, but necessary nonetheless) to detach myself, to affect a neutral, apolitical, purely informational designation. The fact, however, that a conscious decision about naming must be made by anyone writing about an historical figure — is the first name alone too familiar, the surname too formal, the full name too lengthy? — and that the decision remains consistent throughout the work, is evidence of the significance of this task. Naming is a way of indicating the degree of intimacy one has achieved with the named; it is as fi-aught with clues about the biographer’s agenda as are other, seemingly more prominent elements, such as selection of incidents, quotations and

17 perspectives to include in the biographical portrait. Moreover, the naming of women is a political act, as Carolyn Heilbrun notes: “Women have long been nameless. They have not been persons. Handed by a father to another man, the husband, they have been objects of circulation, exchanging one name for another” (121).

Perhaps the most striking use of naming the biographical subject for what appears to be deliberate and dramatic rhetorical effect occurs in the first sentence of Bell’s biography; the sentence is echoed, perhaps even consciously mocked, by DeSalvo in her opening sentence in turn. “Virginia Woolf was a Miss Stephen” (1), Bell writes. DeSalvo’s challenging reply: “Virginia Woolf was a sexually abused child; she was an incest survivor” (l).Thus the biographers seem figuratively to square off across a terrain created by their respective works: Bell will deal with Woolfs placement in a family, with heritage and lineage; DeSalvo will deal with the psychological wounds inflicted by that family. The biographical subject is situated, by means of the naming process, in relation to the biographer’s ends, another important component in the biographical agenda.

The comparison between the opening sentences in Bell’s and DeSalvo’s biographies is emblematic of the project that will follow in these pages: I will explore the ways each biographer, in the context of the other four biographies, creates her or his portrait of Virginia Woolf, a process which sometimes involves a negative judgment of a particular biography. Some portraits are frankly more persuasive than others. Moreover, the savvy (or perhaps, as we shall see below, the most humane) biographers realize this instinctively; they concede, either overtly or with the tendencies of their prose, that no portrait is a final one, that all biographies are dependent upon, even as they quarrel with or

18 refute, every other biography. Bell, ruefully surveying what he called “the growth

industry” (Marriage o f True Minds, xiii) in biographies and academic studies of Virginia

Wool^ cheerfully acknowledges that potential obsolescence of his own work;

In an area of history such as this, no one can ‘do’ a subject. The story of Leonard and Virginia is something many-faceted, elusive, susceptible to many different kinds of explanations. It is altogether right and useful that the work of a biographer who comes to this task with the insights, but also with the prejudices, of a nephew should be supplemented by those who come from different backgrounds.. . . History is something too complex to be written by any one person, it is built — at least one hopes that it will be built — by historians who approach the facts from different points of the compass and are united only by a common interest and a common integrity, (xiii)

That amiable and humane spirit is, finally, what keeps me interested in biography. For biography strikes me as one of the most generous art forms we have. Biographies of even the most heinous individuals are tolerant, even understanding, because distance invariably lends absolution. Holmes calls biography “the most lovable of modem English literary forms” (“Inventing the Truth,” 25), and that is as good a way as any of describing this quality of large-heartedness that one can perceive in virtually all biographies, even those specifically aimed at restoring a hero to human scale or revealing some embarrassing truth about a beloved figure. Holmes continues: “If I had to define biography in a single phrase,

I would call it an art of human understanding, and a celebration of human nature” (25).

As a final gloss upon my selection of Virginia Woolf as a literary figure worthy of a sustained inquiry into the construction of biographies, I must share my experiences during multiple readings of the biographies selected for this study, an experience that relates, emotionally if not intellectually, perhaps, to the whole nature of the biographical project.

19 While engaged in this work, I read each of the biographies that forms its core a

minimum of five times; I also read numerous other biographies of Virginia Woolf as well

as group biographies and the biographies of fiiends and colleagues in which she featured

prominently or peripherally. I began to feel as if the events of Virginia Woolfs life were

more familiar to me than the events of my own. (They were certainly more interesting.)

This experience, I gather fi-om the reminiscences of biographers who have spent long

periods of time investigating a single life, is not uncommon; however, what was most

striking to me was the vigor and clear-mindedness with which I was able to approach biographies I had read many times before, or biographies that promised to cover material with which I was intimately familiar.

No matter how many times I embarked upon a version of Virginia Woolfs life story, I would begin each biography anticipating a different ending. Perhaps this time, I would tell myself, she won’t do it; she won’t drop that rock in her pocket and drift into the river. Maybe this time, there will be a different conclusion.

That sense of fluidity, I think, that sense of infinite possibilities in a life, even a life that, in terms of corporeal presence, is “over,” underlies our fascination with biography.'^

In one sense, of course, we know that Virginia Woolf walked into the water on that spring day; her body was recovered, there was no question about the identification. But in another sense, she is still approaching the water, still walking, her fate still in flux. As long as biographies of Virginia Woolf continue to be produced, she is suspended between land and water, between life and death, poised on the blank page of the biographer’s imagination.

20 ' In his review of a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Updike notes that Fitzgerald’s life “has become more celebrated and paradigmatic than any of the lives found in his fiction” (186). Similarly, Hemingway has become “a culture hero to millions. . . not all of them intellectuals or even readers of books” (Raeburn, 1). ^ John Mepham offers a useful survey of the biographies, including a review of what he calls “psycho- literary speculations” (Criticism in Focus, 3-24). ^ The biographical interpretations became so voluminous and various in the 1970s, in fact, that Hermione Lee begins her 1977 critical study with a defensive-sounding disclaimer “This is not a book about Bloomsbury, lesbianism, madness or suicide It is literary criticism of her nine novels, written in the hope o f turning attention back firom the life to the fictional work”(The Novels o f Virginia Woolf, 1). “Phil Ochs: A Rebel’s Roots.”Capitol: The Dispatch Magazine 8 July 1984: 8-15. ^ The two I recall most readily are Willa Cather by E.K. Brown and Leon Edel, and Malcolm Lowry by Douglas Day. Cather was familiar to me, because I had Kad My Antonia for a high school class; Lowry, however, was an utterly new name. I read the biographies voraciously, with no ability (or desire) to independently verify the biographers’ facts or interpretations. I was but a humble, wide-eyed reader of the biographies. ® Oliio State offered a special topics biography course in 1992, taught by Visiting Professor Deidre Bair, but according to a syllabus that I obtained (and the accounts of participants), it was geared toward the writing, rather than the reading, of biography. This would be the equivalent of signing up for a course in twentieth century literature and then being told that one is expected to produce as well as critique it. New York University plans to ofier a master’s degree in Literary Biography, with the first class to be eruolled in the fall of 1997; again, however, notice the hierarchy implicit in this description of the program, as provided by the university: “Students develop their own writing projects in biographical narrative or criticism and study the history and theory of the gerue in England and America.” I have been unable to persuade some people of the significance o f this distinction. The following illustration, however, may help. In an essay defending Joe Klein, the political columnist who wrote a bestselling novel under the pseudonym “Anonymous,” Leon Wieseltier analyzed the outcry fi:om Klein’s colleagues — who have called him a liar — this way: “One morning the ornithologists woke to find that one of their company was a bird” (42). ^ See “Close to Home” by Valerie Ross, a perceptive article in which she notes that references to authors’ biographies in literature classes often are dismissed as “humanist, essentialist, referential” (136). She goes as far as to identity “the repression of biography in literary studies” (137). Ross’ article will be cited again in Chapter 1, when I explore more fully the issue of biographical studies within the academy. * A decade ago, Stephen B. Oates wrote, “Biography is enjoying irrunense popularity in the United States. The number of biographical titles published each year has virtually doubled since the 1960s.... Biography may now be the preferred form of reacfing in America” (ix). ^ The phrase occurs in a summary of recent academic attitudes toward the composition of biography, “Seductions of Biography,” inChronicle o f Higher Education 27 Oct. (1993): A6. The phrase comes from “Seductions of Biography,” A6. " The prejudice is not completely gone, however, Hermione Lee, who has written a biography of Willa Cather and is now completing a biography of Virginia Woolf, told me in a telephone conversation from her home in Leeds, England, on Nov. 20, 1995, that her colleagues at the University of York are not especially encouraging: “When I tell them what I’m working on, they sort of flinch slightly.” In his bibliography, Mepham notes that several scholars, using the letters, notebooks and diaries, have been able to construct chronologies of “her activities almost on a day-by-day basis [including] her social life, her travels, her journalism, her work for the Hogarth Press, her fnendships, family life, marriage and illnesses” (23). A similar distinction must be made about the term “literary biography.” I ascribe to Dennis Petrie’s definition that literary biography is “biography that has as its subject a person who is an imaginative writer himself [or herself]” (17). Other definitions sometimes are proposed, as Justin Kaplan notes: “A strong case should be made for enlarging the term ‘literary biography’ to include books that have literary 21 qualities and not necessarily literary subjects” (70). However, for the purposes of this stu

22 CHAPTER 1

A HISTORY OF THE CRITICISM OF BIOGRAPHY

While gathering inscriptions from tombstones in parish churches in 1673 for use in his biographies, John Aubrey reflected on what he called a “wearisome Taske”: “But, methinkes, it shewes a kind of gratitude and good nature, to revise the Memories and memorialls of the pious and charitable benefactors long since dead and gonne” (67).

Approximately three centuries later, “gratitude and good nature” were rarely found among attitudes ascribed to biographers; in fact, greed, insensitivity, cunning and even criminality were included in descriptive lists of biographers’ characters. In her 1993 essay comparing biographies of Sylvia Plath — actually a thinly disguised gambit for vilifying the biographical enterprise — Janet Malcolm writes: “The biographer, at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing the loot away” (86). Contemporary biographer Phyllis Rose agrees:

[A]t the heart of the biographer’s motivation is some act of personal appropriation, some sort of psychic exploitation.. . . [T]he enterprise of the literary biographer is equally transgressive, equally a metaphoric theft, equally suspect. In some sense each biographer in a different way exploits his or her subject. {Confessions, 136)

23 The contrast between the biographer’s reputation in Aubrey’s time and in ours is striking; more to the point, it provides an interesting approach to the history of the criticism of biography, a genre that has suffered first fi"om a relative neglect by the critical establishment and now, I will argue, suffers from a benign exploitation by that same establishment.

The image of the biographer has, in the late twentieth century, undergone a significant change from what it was in centuries past. The profession’s reputation has tumbled from a great height - biographers were, in the popular imagination, caretakers of historical memory, guarantors of cultural and religious tradition — to the biographer’s current status as “homicide, murderer or grave-robber” (Stallworthy, 33).

Here is Aubrey, using natural phenomena from the physical universe as analogies to his praiseworthy calling:

One sayes that when a learned man dyes, a great deal of Learning dyes with him. He was a flumen ingenii (a river of talent) never dry. The recrementia (Remaines) of so learned a Person are valueable. Amongst innumerable Observables of him which had deserved to be sett downe, thus few (that have not scap’t my Memory) I humbly offer to the Present Age and Posterity, tanquam tabulam naufragii (like fragments of a shipwreck) and as plankes and lighter things swim, and are preserved, where the more weighty sinke and are lost. And as with light after Sun- sett — at which time clear; by and by, comes the crepusculum (dusk); then, totall darkness — in like manner is it with matters of Antiquitie. Men thinke, because every body remembers a memorable accident shortly after ‘tis done, ’twill never be forgotten, which for want of registring, at last is drowned in Oblivion; which reflection haz been a hint that by means many Antiquities have been reskued and preserved (I myselfe now inclining to be Ancient) — or else utterly lost and forgotten. (83)

Diametrically opposed to Aubrey’s exalted concept of his work is this blunt appraisal offered by Hillary Spurling, biographer of Ivy Compton-Bumett, who sighs and

24 acknowledges “the sensational popular view of biographers as literary scavengers, jackals or carrion crows, disgorging what had much better be hidden, dismembering their subjects, sucking them dry, gathering in droves round their death-beds, flaying them sometimes even while still alive” (114).

The dramatic transformation of characterizations of biographers, fi-om noble scribes to notorious thieves, has occurred against the larger backdrop of what was, until recently, the absence of a tradition of criticism of biography. This lack of sustained critical scrutiny toward biography (or, more accurately, critical scrutiny that revealed a level of theoretical sophistication) has been remarked upon by a number of commentators, increasing and intensifying in the late twentieth century. ‘ Indeed, many contemporary theorists of biography introduce their works by alluding to the relative scarcity of criticism of biography; it has become almost a trope of such criticism, the necessary disclaimer that must precede the introduction of biographical edicts and analyses. How this widely acknowledged lack of a history of criticism of biography accounts for and illuminates the shift in attitude toward the biographer, from preserver to debunker, from memorialist to vulture, is, I think, an aspect of the criticism of biography that has yet to be fully explored.

Some might claim that the shift was caused by a change in the nature of biographies themselves, that the genre has gone from a genteel, discreet rendering of a subject’s life to today’s biographical products, in which scandals, sexual peccadilloes and all manner of private shortcomings are not only included, but highlighted. This analysis, however, is rather superficial: while rhetorical styles and the degrees of inclusiveness of

25 biographies indeed have evolved, reflecting society’s changing conceptions of biographical propriety, many aspects of biography have remained remarkably consistent across the centuries. Lytton Strachey’s great complaint about the nineteenth-century biographies he sought to displace with Eminent Victorians, for instance, was not so much their willful neglect of the personality and behavioral flaws of the subjects, but the lack of artfulness and distillation revealed by those Victorian biographies. He railed against the common run of biographies “with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design” (10).

Strachey argued for, and created, biographies “compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men” (10). It was, in large part, the dreary, workaday style of earlier biographies, not their prudery and selectivity, against which Strachey was rebelling.

Indeed, the notion that biographies themselves have changed substantially, from morally uplifting panegyrics to muckraking exposés, prompting a somewhat cynically inspired reappraisal of the biographic enterprise, is belied by an examination of well- known biographical projects from previous centuries. From flatulence to constipation, from fornication to gluttony, Aubrey dutifully recorded potentially embarrassing anecdotes from his subjects’ daily lives. This ribald, but nonetheless titillating, moment from his biography of Sir Walter Raleigh would fit nicely in any twentieth-century biography:

He loved a wench well; and one time getting up one of the Mayds of Honour up against a tree in a Wood . . . she cryed, sweet Sir Walter, what doe you me ask? Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cryed in the extasey, Swisser Swatter Swisser Swatter. (318).

26 Among the unfortunate consequences of a lack of a critical tradition for biography, I believe, is the encouragement it has supplied to certain ill-informed yet heavily opinionated onlookers: only in a field such as criticism of biography, a field which “lacks both an

Aristotle and a Northrop Frye” (Nadel, 151), would a non-scholar such as Malcolm have dared to enter, wielding prescriptions, judgments and condemnations/ It is the absence of a tradition of criticism of biography that has allowed some discussions about the genre to degenerate into a narrow focus on biographers’ motives, an area that is, to my mind, the least interesting, because the least knowable, aspect of the criticism of biography, yet which is the aspect that is most likely to engage commentators such as Malcolm, because it requires little knowledge or insight, only hunches. Thus the difficulty in discerning a history of the criticism of biography has implications beyond the academy; the absence has permitted a suspicion of biographers and the biographic enterprise to grow in the public mind until subjectivity, the very subjectivity that enables biography, is regarded with mistrust for the pervasiveness of its alleged malevolence.

In his preface to The Lines o f Life: Theories o f Biography, 1880-1970 (1986),

David Novarr describes a common finstration:

I had set out to write a critical study in biographic techniques, based largely on a structural analysis of each of [Izaak Walton’s]Lives, on Walton’s use of his sources, and on his revisions.. . . I read and re-read what was at hand — Carlyle, Strachey, Maurois, Virginia Woolf — but it was a struggle to put together a bibliography of the theory and criticism of biography. I looked in vain for a systematic study that would give me easy access to the field.. .. (x-xi)

Novarr, who seeks to rectify the situation with his book, goes on to note that criticism of biography, where it does exist, “has been impeded in two ways. First, most of the work

27 has been informal, discursive and journalistic, causerie rather than treatise, and much of it has been infinitely less sophisticated than critical discussion about other genres. Second, much of the work exists in isolation and seclusion” (xiv). Dennis Petrie chimes in:

“Biographical theory is still in its adolescence” (15). In Writing Lives (1984), Edel concurs: “Biography has been the wayward child of individual talents; it has suffered, through three centuries, from a lack of definition, a laxity of method” (24). He continues:

There exists, I am sorry to say, no criticism of biography worthy of the name. Reviewers and critics have learned how to judge plays, poems, novels — but they reveal their helplessness in the face of a biography. They reflect their uncertainty about the facts, which they can’t immediately verify, and so they discuss their own interest in the details or gossip of a life rather than in the art of representation which a biography must be — and it is this art which is truly their concern.. . . Up to the present, biography has been an art little aware of itself and mixed up too much with ad hoc rules of thumb, personal superstitions and personal prejudices. (31-2)

Nadel echoes Edel’s concern: “For too long criticism has centered on the content rather than the form of biographical writing, undermining its literary properties” (1). Critics of biographies, that is, have been distracted by the settling of issues of fact and not sufiBciently interested in the calculation of literary merit.^ “Biography deals with so much human stuff that the interest of both the critical and lay reader has resided in the materials and not in the form or manner of presentation” (Edel, 27). A recent review of the 1996 biography Pursued by Furies: A Life o fMalcolm Lowry is emblematic of this practice: in a review spread across two full pages, the reviewer, Mark Rudman, devotes all of three sentences to a consideration of the biography itself. The rest of the piece simply retells

Lowry’s life story, creating a mini-biography in lieu of a consideration of the biography ostensibly under review."* Likewise, in a recent review of Muggeridge: The Biography,

28 Bruno Maddox lavishes 19 lines, in a 98-line article, on an actual consideration of the biography, and the critique itself is rather unenlightening, as can be gleaned from this sample line: “[The biographer] succeeds in making Muggeridge a poster boy for the growing ranks of those trapped between greatness and importance” (11). Once again, a summary of the biographical subject’s life occupies the critic’s attention, at the expense of a consideration of how the life was conveyed in prose.

This mistaken emphasis has, some observers maintain, relegated biography to an almost amateur status in the world of letters, systematically marginalized by those who have been anointed to decide what constitutes meaningful objects of literary study. As

Michael Holroyd complains: “Literary biographers have felt themselves to be outside the family of literature. That family now lives in academe. There are departments of history but no departments of biography at our universities; there are departments of English, but biography is not on the curriculum” (“How I Fell Into Biography,” 100). Valerie Ross agrees: “What is clear is that biography . . . has since the formalization of departments of literature been granted no legitimate place in academic literary discourse” (156).^ Paul

Murray Kendall made essentially the same point twenty years earlier, in 1965, which means that the situation has changed very little: “Biography is a genuine province of literature . . . but a province which that kingdom has generally tended to ignore.” (4). He continued:

Our formal institutions of learning have paid scant attention to life-writing. In the United States the ubiquitous ‘survey courses’ in English and American literature will yield a few pages of Pepys, a passage of Colley Cibber’s autobiography, a little more from Johnson’s Lives o f the Poets, a prudently ample selection from Boswell’s Johnson, something from Franklin’s autobiography, a bit of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Henry Adams and — to balance the

29 autobiographies — a chapter from Strachey’s Queen Victoria. .. . American universities offer courses in ‘creative writing,’ nonfiction writing, even the writing of criticism.. . . But universities do not offer coursesin... the history and appreciation of biographical literature. (4-5).

Literature departments, moreover, are not the only places in which biography has been shunned; as Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff write in their introduction to The Seductions o f

Biography: “Yet in the past few decades biography as a genre has suffered from a lack of legitimacy in the worlds of contemporary critical theory, social historiography, and even highbrow journalism” (1). Robert Skidelsky muses: “There’s something inescapably second-rate that seems to cling to biographers and practitioners.. . . [There is] a feeling that it has not yet fully won its intellectual spurs. And this feeling is justified. Biography is still not taken entirely seriously as literature, as history, or as a cogent intellectual enterprise” (2). He offers this succinct appraisal of the history of the criticism of biography: “We have produced great biographies; but no important theorists of biography” (14). Nicholas Pagan complains: “Although we are now presented with a superabundance of theory and criticism of literature, theater, film and architecture, and so on, there is a marked paucity of critical theory of biography, and the quantity of biographical criticism is minuscule compared with the quantity of literary criticism” (9).

Critics have offered many reasons why this might be so, but most center on fundamental (and still unsettled) questions as to what biography actually is. James L.

Clifford observes that critics often are uncomfortable working with an ill-defined genre:

“Is writing a life a narrow branch of history or a form of literature? Or may it be something in between, a strange amalgam of science and art?” (x). As William Epstein

30 notes: “Biography has never really had a generally accepted terminology and protocol, a poetics that could be upheld and resisted” {Recognizing Biography, 6). Biography, then, has no place in the academy because it lacks the sophisticated critical apparatus that accompanies other genres — or does it lack such an apparatus because it has been denied a place in the academy? Is the problem that biography is too many things — history rendered with fictional techniques, or fiction rendered with an historical gloss — or not enough of a single, accessible thing? Little wonder that Richard Holmes calls biography “a brilliant, bastard form” (“Inventing the Truth,” 15); little wonder, further, that the muddled multi­ facetedness and resistance to definition that characterize the genre have brought forth not only the dubious work of intellectual pretenders such as Malcolm, who exploit its volatility to make thunderous, pseudo-definitive pronouncements on its efiBcacy and worth, but also a long history of slyly deliberate attempts to imitate the genre, to produce thoroughly fi-audulent (but fascinating) faux-biographies that employ techniques of the genre to whimsically explore complex issues of truth, authorial authority and the vicissitudes of memory. These include works such as Virginia Woolfs Orlando and Flush, Carlyle’s

Sartor Resartus and Jeffrey Cartright’s Edwin Midlhouse. Such uses of biography are inventive reminders that the lack of a tradition of criticism of biography needn’t be all bad: a genre with a definition perpetually in flux is a genre that can be playfully exploited for imaginative purposes. Because few can agree on precisely what biography is, there is little that it isn't. If no one can define what biography must be — and, alas for Malcolm’s heavy-handed attempts, that is the present (and, some might argue, preferred) state of criticism of biography — then no one can set a limit on what biography can be.

31 What, though, has constituted criticism of biography through the centuries? Such criticism has scarcely been criticism at all; what mostly emerges under that rubric are

“brief historical surveys, printed lectures, collections of miscellaneous writings on the subject, and random general critical comments appearing at the beginnings and/or ends of newspaper, magazines and journal reviews of newly-published biographies” (Petrie, 15).

Indeed, many books that purport to offer a survey of the critical reception of biography instead concentrate almost exclusively on definitions of biography, which are then gently folded into prescriptions for the writing of new, or categorizations of existing, biographies.® Perhaps because it rests at the intersection of other genres, incorporating bits and pieces of history and fiction, of mythology and cultural criticism, among other things, biography challenges its critics first to attempt to define, and then and set parameters for, the genre.’ The prescriptive impulse, which often seems like an attempt to wedge biography into a rigidly scientific frame, by dictating steps for what sounds like a chemical experiment, has been a serious concern among those who have mused on biography through the centuries.* In 1560, Thomas Wilson offered these precise instructions in his Art o f Rhetoric: the biographer was to follow two sets of strictures, first chronicling “before his life, in his life, after his death” and then considering the subject’s life before his birth and “the realm, the shire, the town, the parents, the ancestors” (quoted in Clifford, 6). In 1865, Sir Leslie Stephen set forth the protocol for those who wished to write for The Dictionary o f National Biography, a project that would offer a volume four times a year until 1900. Felicity of phrase, sophistication of approach, were valued far less ■ than ruthless condensation: “ ‘Wordiness must be sternly excised . . . Be sternly concise’ ”

32 (quoted in Nadel, 54), was Stephen’s advice. Stephen complained to a correspondent about the “ ‘insane verbosity of the average contributor. I never knew before how many words might be used to express a given fact’ ” (quoted in Nadel, 54). In the twentieth century, rules and standards for biography grew even more intense. In his 1927 study The

Development o f English Biography, Harold Nicholson divided biography into two categories; pure and impure. Pure biography adheres closely to historical fact and exhibits a soundness of reason. Impure biography relies on subjective insights and is sometimes employed only to honor the dead. Other critics of biography have advocated their own systems: Edel’s three kinds of biography outlined in Writing Lives (chronicle, portrait and novelistic); Andre Maurois’ five rules of writing biography, presented in a 1942 article, which included among its edicts the right to “suppress all duplicate evidence,” “distill the essence of a diary,” “tell the truth” and “suppress a fact for ethical reasons” {Biography as an Art, 166); Clifford’s five types of biography (objective, scholarly-historical, artistic- scholarly, narrative, subjective) in Puzzles to Portraits: Problems o f a Literary

Biographer, Kendall’s eight types of biography (novelistic, fictionalized, interpretive, literary and scientific, scholarly, research, life and times, source materials) in The Art o f

Biography, Petrie’s five types (objective, subjective, monument of famous writer, portrait of artist, vision of artist) elucidated in Ultimately Fiction: Design in Modem American

Literary Biography, and William Kimbrel’s four types (objectivist, subjectivist, psychoanalytic and ironist) in a 1992 unpublished doctoral dissertation. Necessary

Illusions: Biography and the Problem o f Narrative Truth. The desire to create categories and rules for biographies is not in itself problematic; however, given the aforementioned

33 scarcity of criticism of actual biographical texts, the categorizations seem to be yet another

avoidance of actual engagement with those texts, motivated, perhaps, by a lingering

discomfort with a literary form that still hovers on the margins of various genres, neither

this, nor that, nor quite the other thing, either.

Another common subgenre that passes for criticism of biography is the

biographer’s reminiscence: In lieu of criticism — that is, the consideration of the rhetorical

techniques or literary properties that may be exhibited in a particular biography — many

anthologies of alleged criticism of biography include essays recounting the travails of

biographers as they pursued their subjects’ lives. These essays are interesting and

informative but they do not supply insights on specific biographies.^ For example, in

describing his work on a biography of Delmore Schwartz, James Atlas recalls “what it was

like to sit in a frigid air-conditioned library in Syracuse and have dinner alone in the local

Roy Rogers for weeks at a time; to pore through old telephone books until my hands were grubby and call up nine people named Horowitz in Columbus, Ohio, hoping to find the one who shared a cabin with Delmore Schwartz at the Pocono Camp Club in 1924; to crawl around on the floor day after day, pawing through files and notecard boxes and disorderly piles of Xeroxes ...” (23).*“ In Seductions o f Biography, the most recent anthology of essays that purport to be criticism of biography, five (out of sixteen) are first-person accounts of how the author researched and wrote her or his biography.** In a

1995 anthology. The Art o f Literary Biography, seven (out of seventeen) of the essays are about the writing of individual biographies, rather than analyses of those or other biographies or biography as a genre.

34 Another substitute for critiquing the actual biography is recounting the biographical subject’s life; as Edel notes, many reviewers of biographies in newspapers and popular journals lavish space upon their own mini-biographies of the subjects’ lives rather than concentrating on critiques of how the biographers in question constructed the lives: “Critics fall into the easy trap of writing pieces about the life that was lived, when their business is to discuss how the life was told” (“The Figure Under the Carpet,” 10).

Terry Eagleton has usefully differentiated between these forms of critique:

Reading a zoology textbook to find out about giraffes is part of studying zoology, but reading it to see how its discourse is structured and organized, and examining what kind of effects these forms and devices produce in particular readers in actual situations, is a different project. (205)

It is almost as if critics of biography, perhaps because the genre lacks the critical tradition as noted by so many commentators above — a lack, moreover, that may be ascribed to biography’s superficial reliance on “facts” — still cannot quite bring themselves to trust biography to stand on its own as a literary entity, the subject of full-scale critical appraisal divorced from issues of fact, propriety or the ordeals of its practitioners. The problem in tracing a history of criticism of biography, then, lies in identifying and isolating criticism as opposed to definition and categorization.

Another problem, and this is perhaps an even more daunting one than the slippage that attends any attempt to place biography in a stable genre and critique it accordingly, is what might be seen as a kind of bewildered, philosophical hand-wringing that sometimes accompanies a consideration of biography. It is possible, I think, to be too much in thrall to a genre to be able to analyze it effectively. Because biography ostensibly deals with

35 truth, a word that has challenged humankind since time immemorial, it can seem too vast, too overwhelming, too complex, too ontologically perverse, to yield up its secrets and significances to humble critics. Samuel S. Vaughan’s attitude is typical: “It is quite possible that the question of biography and of history are a nagging part of that larger backache, ‘What is life?’ or, worse, ‘What is truth?’ ” (14). He goes on to question, as do others, whether biography indeed is even possible: “Is biography impossible? Perhaps biography is one of the tragic arts, like the translation of poetry or writing about music, doomed fi'om the start.. . . Think of the impossibility of capturing a life on paper, in one or two or twenty volumes” (25). Indeed, Kendall defines biography as “the craft of the impossible” (153).’^ The reasons for this alleged impossibility become clear when one encounters the first line of Petrie’s study Ultimately Fiction: Design in Modern American

Literary Biography, a sentiment which is emblematic of a great deal of contemporary criticism of biography: “Truth — both the word and the idea — must be the point of departure in any serious discussion of biography” (l).Yet if indeed we must contend with the issue of truth before embarking on a discussion of biography, the trip will be delayed indefinitely.

Another stalling tactic in the history of criticism of biography has been a discussion of biography’s status, or lack thereof, as art. “The art of biography we say — but at once go on to ask. Is biography an art?” (187), Woolf asks in her essay, “The Art of

Biography.” Such ultimately unanswerable questions are effective starting points for theoretical discussions about a genre; however, often they serve as clumsy substitutes for earnest engagement with actual biographies. The conflation of issues of the criticism of

36 with issues of “truth” (the insights of postmodernism occasionally cause quotation marks to practically aflBx themselves around the word) or art is simply the latest impediment to such critiques, another reason for critics and theorists to treat biographies as irredeemably

“other” and permanently exiled from the pantheon of genres that are unhesitatingly enshrined in the academy.

Yet this critical retreat in the face of biography’s problematic linkage with issues of truth and art has changed, more recently still, into an advance: the vast theoretical sweep and lack of definition that characterize the biographical impulse have made the genre appealing to many contemporary scholars, scholars who are challenged, rather than intimidated, by biography’s uncertain status in the academy and its claims to membership in many genres. As Epstein writes, “Biography is a contemporary ‘arena of dispute’ in which important issues can, indeed cannot avoid being, contested” {Contesting the

Subject, 2). Among those issues are “objectivity and subjectivity, body and mind, self and other, the natural and the cultural, fact and fiction” (2).

Indeed, if the history of the criticism of biography first reflected a reluctance to consider biography, at present the situation is almost the reverse: in the past few years, criticism of biography, or what passes for it, has accelerated, spurred by critical theorists’ recognition of biography as a perfect laboratory for exploring complex questions about culture and literary theory. Where once biography was, as many commentators have concluded, not taken entirely seriously by critics, at present there is almost too much critical attention to biography -- or, less combatively, attention of a different sort. For many critics, biography is not an end in itself, but the means to an end, the end being an

37 investigation of the nature of reality. Lost in the theoretical shuffle is an appreciation for biographies as literary entities in their own rights, exhibiting specific techniques and achieving certain effects, able to be elucidated by, but not made the mere tool of, the postmodern critical sensibility that has called into question previously inviolate concepts such as fact, authority and identity. That intensely topical sensibility, while important in the history of literary criticism, has once again deflected the attention of critics of biography; this time, the attention has gone from a concern with biographies qua biographies to biographies as emblems of identity politics. In a 1993 article in The Chronicle o f Higher

Education that trumpeted a new interest in biography in universities, Karen Winkler wrote, “Today, in the postmodern era when identity seems increasingly fractured, how can anyone hope to write a biography?” (14). Her article records the reluctance many contemporary scholars feel when they attempt to write biographies whose subjects do not match their own gender, race, sexual orientation, political philosophy, or any one of myriad individuating factors. How, these worried would-be biographers wonder, can anyone really “know” the facts of another’s life, in all of their jumbled complexity? How can anyone purport to offer conclusions about that life, without experiencing first-hand its twists, its peculiarities, its midnight fears and secret joys? These troublesome — yet, one must add uncharitably, perfectly obvious and somewhat primitive — queries recall a remark attributed to Tennessee Williams: “We are all trapped in solitary confinement inside our own skins.” Yet, alas for these theoretical stumbling blocks, biographies have been written; they continue to be produced, published and snapped up by the reading public in record numbers, a fact that makes Winkler’s question, while admittedly

38 rhetorical, a trifle silly. Clearly, even while the issues raised by postmodern thought surround, and to some extent problematize, biography, the genre has continued to flourish, engaging writers and readers. While attention from critical theorists may be welcome, especially after biography’s long exile from the academy (if not the marketplace), those who would traffrc in the genre must resist being co-opted by critical theory, a fate that would relegate biographies to the approximate status they held before: studied not as literary entities, but as texts that chum with a compelling variety of special complexities.

The reason that the present state of criticism of biography is in flux may lie in the lack of a consensus on an historical tradition of criticism of biography, or with postmodernism’s usurpation of biography as a site upon which to launch its attacks on the historically entrenched fiction of a stable, unified identity, or, as is surely the case, a combination of both forces. This uncertainty provides a perfect opportunity for a Malcolm to appear, eagerly demonizing the biographical enterprise in lieu of exploring its contradictions and permutations.

Certainly, it is necessary to place the development of biography in an historical context, a process that involves, in some measure, definition, in order to understand the evolution of the relationship between biographers and biographical subjects, as well as biographers and the critical and popular audience for their works. One should, however, also be mindful of Nadel’s timely warning: “We must begin by looking less at the historical development of the genre and more at the formal properties of individual texts” (153-4).

We must, that is, keep in mind that the general problem with criticism of biography as it has been practiced for centuries is that it consists of global prescriptions, tedious

39 overviews and totalizing summaries, rather than critiques of specific biographies. Only by engaging in the latter, which is the primary focus of this work, can we observe the living, fimctioning organism, if you will: a biography as it is written and received, rather than the fossilized version that simply slides into its allotted slot in an historical survey.

In contemplating the reasons why biography has failed to sustain a tradition of criticism analogous to that of other genres, yet has fascinated historians, social commentators and ordinary readers, we must first recall salient aspects of the history of biography, paying particular attention to how biography came to be regarded almost as a

“natural” entity, a cultural artifact, one that straddles genres and exists somehow “outside” the realm of created objects that can be critiqued and evaluated.The existence of the genre, in fact, predates the coinage of the word “biography,” according to many historians. As Anna Makolkin notes in her article comparing the origins of English and

Russian biography, “the genre itself existed long before the word biography^ She continues:

Bios existed long before graphe — people lived, died and spoke about the dead long before they were able to write down stories for future generations.. . . The funeral songs sung by hired mourners or grieving relations in various cultures support the idea of a funeral as the birthplace of oral life-telling and later biography. Hired mourners or weepers may thus be regarded as the predecessors of professional biographers. (88)

Reed Whittemore writes that tombstone inscriptions were “probably the first form of biography” {Pure Lives, 4). Because biography apparently began as a cultural ceremony, a community ritual, rather than as a specifically literary entity accomplished by an individual, the concept of critiquing it probably would have occurred neither to practitioners nor

40 audiences. Moreover, even if one accepts the view of other historians that the legitimate origin of biography lies not with common memorials but with eulogies granted great rulers and military leaders, a critique would have been even more unthinkable; the posthumous tribute was regarded as an extension of the ruler’s power, thus an inquiry into the construction of that tribute might have been construed as a challenge to the ruler’s authority.Biography, in its infancy, apparently was not regarded as an art form, but as the communal acknowledgment of passage from life to death.*® Biography fulfilled a number of social needs and public functions; it was a corrupted genre — half factual record of name and birth and death dates, half encomium; half history, half song — from its beginning, whether that beginning is traced to exalted or humble places.

That corruption, that straddling of genres, has continued to the present day, as I have noted above. The result has been a reluctance to engage biography as a genre at all:

“Because of the uncertainty as to the very nature of biography there has been a tendency to ignore it as a major division of history.. . . Critics have shied away from what seemed to them the province of the historian, and historians have been interested in broader problems” (Clifford, x). Biography was simply a record of the world’s truth, that is, not an imaginative chronicle ripe for analysis. Still, though, some attempts have been made through the centuries to examine biography as a literary entity. “At various periods of the past there has been intense interest in the writing of lives and some curiosity about the diflBculties faced by the author” (Clifford, x).

Tracing that interest through the history of biography, compiling a history of the criticism of biography, requires constant vigilance, to ensure that the survey does not slip

41 back into a mere definition of the genre and includes attempts to critique, rather than simply refine the definition of, biography. Moreover, such a survey suffers fi'om an inevitable confusion: should a history of the criticism of biography focus on how biographies of a particular period were critiqued in that period, or how such biographies have been critiqued by subsequent periods, including a contemporary vantage point?

Some combination of perspectives seems the best course, although every interpretation of past critiques is informed, in some sense, by that contemporary vantage p o int,Just as it is impossible to “know” what another person's life experience “felt like” when one is writing a biography, it is equally impossible to know how a certain work was actually perceived in a period other than our own. We are as trapped in our own time, in the cage of our cultural prejudices, as we are inside our own skins.

Another peril is the almost inevitable entrance of social and cultural criticism into the mix. While it is probably impossible to understand the reception of particular biographies at the times of their creations without reference to significant issues such as how certain historical periods regarded the souL, or the individual’s place in society, still it is far too easy for critiques of specific biographies to be overwhelmed by the totalizing claims of social and cultural histories. How biographies were used hy the cultures in which they were created — as models of correct behavior, as attempts to muster support for a religious or political cause, as public relations — also threatens to distract attention from a consideration of the biographies themselves. Yet, undeniably, definitions and cultural histories have their place in exploring the criticism of biography as it has been practiced throughout history; indeed, the ever-changing notions of what biography is have always

42 influenced the ways in which it was written: “To come at biography by writing dozens of

related biographies and giving them a common ideological and cultural context is a very

different act from taking on an individual in isolation. The early biographers (Plutarch,

Aelfnc, Vasari, Holinshed). . . had in mind nobles, saints, kings, painters and poets first,

individuals second, and their emphasis was that of their times. Boswell and his successors

reversed the emphasis” (2), Whittemore writes, heralding a great change in the history of

biography. How the biographer, and the biographer’s milieu, conceived of the genre

decidedly influenced how she or he wrote the biography; thus it is impossible to separate

completely definition and product, conception and execution, or, for that matter, past and

present.*®

Biography as we have come to understand the term, a written description of an

individual life, generally is traced to the ancient world, to fourth and fifth centuries B.C.*^

Obviously, to enable biographies, individuals had to be recognized, and to recognize themselves, as distinct from a group or tribe; such a recognition would have constituted a shift in cultural thinking. The degree of that shift, however, still is being debated by

scholars.^® The best-known ancient biographer surely is Plutarch, whose Lives o f the

Noble Grecians and Romans influenced not only the plays of William Shakespeare, but the picture of the ancient world as it was passed down to subsequent centuries, as well as the development of biography: “He saw history in terms of human character; and interpreted Antiquity to the modem world as a state of existence in which outstanding men moulded events by their personal decisions and by the inevitable tendencies of their characters” (Spencer, 7). As many commentators have pointed out, Plutarch championed

43 the notions that individuals could shape events to their wills (and were not the helpless pawns of fate) and that character influenced their choices of action.^' Plutarch began “a tradition in which the shape of a written life was determined by something beyond chronology” (Whittemore, 12). What contemporary critics most admire about Plutarch is a technique that has remained standard in biographies: the use of anecdote to illustrate character.^ Among the first true critics, as opposed to practitioners, of biography, however, was Aristotle, who believed that action — how an individual caused or reacted to events — was a more significant inclusion in a record of a life than a mere list of personal characteristics (Garraty, 38). These aspects of ancient biography are important because they are the precursors to contemporary biographical practices and attitudes toward biography which have, to a remarkable degree, remained consistent across the centuries, and which provide a focus and framework for critiquing biographies ancient and modem.

Indeed, as biography moved into the next principal phase of its history, the saint’s life, it exhibited even more techniques that would be familiar to contemporary readers, particularly readers of so-called “thesis” biographies.^ Some critics have begun to explore sacred biographies not only for historical content, a traditional reason for such study, but also for the sophistication of their rhetorical techniques, and discovered that while the referents may change, the structures remain intact:

Of all the genres that survive from the Middle Ages, only the lives of the saints, arguably the richest in terms of extant records, are still treated by literary historians as documents for source studies and little else. The genre has until recently fallen through the net of scholarly research, avoided by the historians because saints’ lives are rarely works of art. We live, moreover, in a pluralist age ruled by a post- Marxian secular materialism, in an age when fear of the avenging angel of the Lord has been replaced by a fear of microorganisms. We have replaced the awe-full reverence for the Almighty with a minute examination of the specific. Microbes

44 have replaced devils. Our literary language has followed this transference of belief. (Hefifeman, 17)

The trouble with ancient as well as sacred biographies, as seen by some critics of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who hold that biography should be a matter of record, a factual reckoning, was this issue of conscious manipulation, of selection, of propagandizing. The ancient biographers and sacred biographers had clearly delineated, obvious aims in their work; for the ancients, such as Plutarch, the idea was “a dream of virtue” (11), in Whittemore’s phrase, and for the sacred biographers, such as Reginald of

Canterbury, the goal was the propagation of “a theological system which presumed the indivisibility of divine truth, one whose most profound truths sanctioned the possibility of transcendence through an enactment of the life of Christ” (Heffeman, 136). Even when biographers have been quite open about their agendas, and neither the ancient nor the sacred biographers would have been at all interested in concealment, since the agenda was the justification for the writing of the biography, the proselytizing element in these early biographies resulted in their placement outside the mainstream of the history of biography, cast as primitive, lesser, hopelessly infected with the taint of moral and religious zealotry.^ Yet, as Hefifeman notes, the broader views that accompany many prominent strains of contemporary literary criticism have enabled a re-evaluation of the qualities of sacred biography: a willingness to stretch the definition of “fact” and a desire to include historical context, have proven liberating for conversations about the genre.

Accounts of the life of St. Thomas More, Hefifeman says, often have been dismissed as

“fictional Mores,” while non-sacred biographies are “historic Mores.” He continues:

45 There are two antipathetic poles in this argument: the fictional More and the historic one. The fictional one is the product of pious and perhaps designing individuals, who wove this cloak of sanctity about him for a variety of reasons, perhaps none of whom was interested in telling the ‘true’ story.. . . Of course, there was another More, the historic man whom the autonomous, objective historian can discover. But such thesis/antithesis positions . . . make for too easy a generalization. What I would propose is that the tradition that developed shortly after More’s death, indeed during his life, may be didactic, may be fabrication, but it is nonetheless the reality which a large number of his peers chose to believe and write about, which he abetted — dare I suggest believed — in some circumstances and which is thus historic. (65)

Attempts to dismiss the version of More offered by the sacred biographer, Heffeman argues, are nothing less than an attempt “to free him from his context” (65). Some strains of criticism of biography as they developed in the late nineteenth century, as I will review below, centered around an insistence on an “actual” historical figure, which the biographer was charged with revealing in prose untempered by any agenda save the diligent desire for

“truth.” That there are many truths, that many of those truths are revealed in a portrait of the subject’s historical, social and cultural surroundings, and that truths about a subject may be flexible and even contradictory, are concepts that have energized and illuminated the history of the criticism of biography; indeed, they are the only basis upon which it is possible to compare biographies of the same individual, without resorting to a doomed attempt to designate one such biography as “true” and the others “false.”

Sacred biography dominated the genre until the seventeenth century; the reasons why, many historians agree, seem to fall into the slightly cynical-sounding (if not sinister) category of “public relations”: the church employed biographies to promulgate that major symbol of religious devotion, the saint, in order to make the church, and by extension its followers, appear heroic and charismatic. (Many of the saints of the period, tellingly, were

46 kings and military chieftains.) Indeed, as a number of historians have recorded, there was

little choice for those who sought out heroic individuals to emulate: it was a saint or

nothing.^® “A biographical subject could only become heroic via sainthood” (Makolkin,

91). The church maintained this stranglehold over the biographical enterprise, Waldo

Dunn reported in The English Biography, because monks typically were the only writers

in a given area. Self-interest dictated that these religious scribes would select biographical

subjects “whose example assisted the Church in its search for stability and influence”

(Makolkin, 92). Yet, as noted earlier, to recognize that sacred biographies were created

for the specific purpose of propagation of the faith is not to denigrate or dismiss these

efforts. Indeed, all biographies are written with agendas in mind, either implicitly or

explicitly; the only problem occurs when certain biographies are designated as somehow

free of bias, as based solely on “facts,” as above the fray of evangelization for one cause

or another. Such “pure” biographies, as we know, do not exist; often, though, a

consideration of the noisily explicit agendas in sacred biographies reminds us of the more

subtle agendas at work, quietly and eflBciently, in other biographies.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the secular hero was returned to the

stable of potential biographical subjects, most criticism of biography consisted of rather

rigid and generalized prescriptions for the writing of the genre, rather than critiques of

specific biographies. Yet these prescriptions did, at least, constitute at attempt at criticism of biography: “The first glimmerings of a critical theory of biography did begin to show up

in the seventeenth century” (Petrie, 8). In 1623, Francis Bacon called for more and better biographies:

47 With regard to lives, we cannot but wonder that our own times have so little value for what they enjoy, as not more frequently to write the lives of eminent men. For, though kings, princes, and great personages are few, yet there are many other excellent men who deserve better than vague reports and barren eulogies, (quoted in Garraty, 7-8)

Thomas Fuller, author ofThe History o f the Worthies o f England (1662), seemed to look ahead skeptically at the staunchly empiricist tradition that will overtake biography in the latter half of the nineteenth century; “ T confess, the subject is but dull in itself, to tell the time and place of men’s birth, and deaths, their names, with the names and number of their books: and therefore this bare skeleton of time, place and person, must be fleshed out with some pleasant passages.’ ” Fuller advised that such details should be included “not as meat, but as condiment” (quoted in Garraty, 10). One man’s condiment, however, is another man’s poison: in his introduction to a 1683 edition of Plutarch's Lives:

Translated from the Greek by Several Hands, John Dryden complained that such personal details doom biography to a second-rate status when compared to history and “annals”:

But there is withal, a descent into minute circumstances, and trivial passages of life, which are natural to this way of writing, and which the dignity of the other two will not admit. There you are conducted only into rooms of state; here you are led into the private lodgings of the hero: you see him in his undress, and are made familiar with his most private actions.. . . The pageantry of life is taken away; you see the poor reasonable animal, as naked as ever nature made him; are made acquainted with his passions and his follies... . (quoted in Garraty, 18-19)

More than three centuries later, Allison Booth would make much the same complaint as she scanned the many biographies of Virginia Woolf: “We know almost too much about

Woolfs most private life” (99).

The eighteenth century occasioned the production of several great biographies, including Samuel Johnson’sLives o f the English Poets and James Boswell’s Life o f

48 Johnson, as well as some insightful criticism of biography, or, at least, criticism that looked past biography’s factual underpinning to consider the architecture of its construction. In his Idler essay published March 29, 1760, Johnson satirically, and with an obvious dash of self-pity, equated the lure of reading literary biography with the excitement provided by a hero’s chronicle;

Nothing detains the reader’s attention more powerfully than deep involutions of distress, or sudden vicissitudes of fortune; and these might be abundantly afforded by memoirs by the sons of literature. They are entangled by contracts which they know not how to fulfill, and obliged to write on subjects which they do not understand. Every publication is a new period of time, from which some increase or declension of fame is to be reckoned. The gradations of a hero’s life are from battle to battle, and of an author’s from book to book. (390)

Earlier, Johnson had written more seriously about the genre; he argued that any life, no matter at what profession it had been spent, would supply material for an entertaining and instructive biography: “ T have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful’ ” (quoted in Whittemore, 148). The problem with many biographies, Johnson believed, is that biographers rely on chronology, not imagination: “ ‘But biography has often been allotted to writers who seem very little acquainted with the nature of their task, or very negligent about the performance. .. They imagine themselves to be writing a life when they exhibit a chronological series of actions or preferments. . . . If now and then they condescend to inform the world of particular facts, they are not always so happy as to select the most important’ ” (quoted in

Whittemore, 149). Again, an eighteenth-century critique of biography — Johnson’s belief that biographers lack a discriminating touch with materials — is echoed in the twentieth century: “Biography now usually walks amongus... with little visible shape except

49 chronology. No other literary form has been so plagued by the obligation to include”

(Whittemore, 10).

As many historians have recounted, the nineteenth century marked a veritable explosion in the production and consumption of biographies in Great Britain. Peter Gay quotes several Victorian scholars who refer to “ ‘the modem madness for biographies’ ”

(152). Thomas Carlyle stood in awe of what he called “ ‘the biographic appetite’ ”

(quoted in Gay, 152). Kendall called the era “too exuberant for biography” (95) and a

“whirlwind” (102) of biographical activity. Exploring the reasons for this mania involve, as do all such complicated missions, delving into stratified layers of social, economic, literary and cultural history; most of that excavation lies beyond the province of this study. Several points about the uses of biography in the Victorian era, however, are significant to a consideration of criticism of biography.

Gay cites two factors that pushed biography to the fore: “The nineteenth century was intensely preoccupied with the self, to the point of neurosis. During the decades of the most sustained campaign for mastery of the world ever undertaken, bourgeois society devoted much delightful and perhaps even more anxious time to introspection” (3).

Victorian society, then, had both the impulse to explore personalities, a mass journey that

Gay calls “the pilgrimage to the interior” (5), and, by virtue of that world mastery, the economic prosperity that created enough leisure time to enjoy the proliferation of biographies.^* The nineteenth century witnessed “the institutionalization of biography”

(66), as Nadel notes: group biographies and large-scale projects such as The Dictionary of

National Biography, which occupied lengthy shelves in solid, respectable, leather-bound

50 splendor, gave the genre a dignified, disciplined, scientifically detached air, and fed that

ravenous public appetite for lives.

Criticism of biography played a large role in the ascendancy of the genre; in fact, as

Gay notes, many biographies were written specifically to demonstrate, with an arrogance that only the Victorians, perhaps, could manifest wth such cheerful obliviousness, that earlier biographies had, in effect, gotten the thing all wrong. “They were disposed to carp at their precursors for having inadequately appreciated the distance that divides bygone days from their own time, for having skimped the vital differences that alone made earlier ages the subject of truly historical understanding” (150-1). Nineteenth-century biographers. Gay relates, were convinced that they could “grasp the past in all of its pastness” (151), a goal that doubtless strikes the contemporary reader with the truly grand scale of its naivete. Yet many nineteenth-century biographical theorists believed that biography could depict the past and its inhabitants with pinpoint accuracy and thoroughness, a conviction that gave rise to the positivist tradition, which sought “to see the subject in and of his time, related to history and conscious of the effect of social and economic forces” (Nadel, 39).

Another influential factor in the development of nineteenth-century criticism of biography, which often degenerated, as such criticism is wont to do, into mere prescriptions and invective, was the conviction that biographies were, ideally, portraits of heroic characters who had overcome terrible odds to achieve a great goal (which represented, of course, a great good).^ Such portraits would, or so the theory ran, inspire readers to undertake similarly heroic endeavors in their own lives. Moreover, the

51 individual biography was perceived as a microcosm of history, as that which could reveal the distilled essence of civilization. Biography could summarize and sermonize, could symbolize and uplift. In his seminal lecture series, later turned into a book. On Heroes,

Hero-Worship, & the Hero in History, Carlyle neatly encapsulated the world’s history within the biographical enterprise: “The History of the World is but the Biography of great men” (26). Noble pronouncements about biography seemed endemic to the age. In 1813,

James Field Stanfield declared:

The leading object of biography should be to hold in view to the student or reader one faithful, perspicuous, and continued LIFE. The aim is to recommend a regular and uninterrupted detail of individual action, and a perfect and full delineation of individual character. But, to accomplish this end, it is also submitted to the attention of the biographer, that action should be concatenated, and character developed; that where an interesting process occurs, it should be pursued through the links of purpose, progress and attainment, shutting out, for a time, the synchronous incidents, which would divert the attention to confused objects, and break the clue of rational investigation; that it is his province not only to describe, but connect; not only to narrate, but philosophize, (quoted in Biography as an Art, 65)

Many contemporary critics have decried the Victorian biographers’ earnest mission to improve humanity, and tell the history of the world, to boot, through the writing of lives

(manifested in Stanfield’s commands to “connect” and “philosophize”). More wickedly still, according to some, biographies of the period openly attempted to inculcate their readers with certain carefully chosen “virtues,” which involved a readily apparent political dimension: the shaping of mass consciousness and, by extension, behavior. Biographers

“importuned, they bullied, they pleaded” (Gay, 160). This political dimension, that desire on the part of the biographer to have her or his way in interpretive strategies, thus influencing the reader’s perception of events and opinions about the subject’s personality,

52 actually is present to some degree in all biographies. The Victorians simply attached flags

to it for easy visibility.

By the end of the century, however, the flags had ostensibly been rolled up and

stowed in the attic; the didactic impulse in biography had given way to a record-keeping

imperative. Biographies, according to this crisp new edict, were repositories for important

national history, scholarly resources for libraries; they were not imaginative exercises and

not, according to some theorists, moral tracts whose contents could be tweaked slightly to

make a better story (Nadel, 13-66). Firm and forthright prescriptions for the writing of

biography were forthcoming fi'om Sidney Lee, who wrote the majority of entries for The

Dictionary o f National Biography, and Edmund Gosse; these biographical theorists

argued on behalf of concise, elegant biographical portraits, although Gosse’s advocacy of

a positive portrayal, at the expense of the inclusion of perspectives that might dramatically

alter the established portrait of a public figure, made Lytton Strachey sniff with disdain.

Strachey countered by writing Eminent Victorians (Petrie, 12).

Strachey’s contributions to biography, and to criticism of biography, often are

overstated or misstated.^ In many ways, he simply extended a biographical tradition that

had been in effect for centuries. Thus Edel’s claim that Strachey “overthrew the obsolete

model, James Boswell” to become “an eccentric father of modem biography” (82)

indicates that Edel has fallen into the same trap against which he warned other critics: he is judging Strachey and his influence according to the content of his work — in this case, the

introduction of debunking revelations about prominent Victorian figures such as Florence

Nightingale and Cardinal Manning - instead of the form, the art, the style, of the

53 biographical writing. Indeed, as Makolkin noted, “The Plutarchan approach would later be appropriated by Carlyle, perfected by Strachey, diversified by Sartre, and modified by

Nabokov” (92). Despite superficial differences, then, there is a remarkable consistency among biographers across the centuries. Plutarch, that is, would have been quite at home with Samuel Smiles’ Lives o f the Engineers, an 1861 group biography that sought to inspire readers by the positive moral example of its eternally striving subjects.^' Smiles would have understood the work of Richard Brookhiser, author of the 1996 self- proclaimed “moral biography” Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington.

Such a similarity of aims and methods is, despite the attempts by each age to proclaim its independence from biographical ills that previous ages were heir to, highly relevant to this study.

Indeed, the insights of contemporary critical theory allow us to review the criticism of biography (in effect, each age’s conception of what biography has been and ought to be) with a lofty disdain that sometimes rivals that celebrated Victorian obtuseness. The very precepts that gird our critical thinking — truth is invented, not discovered; meaning is endlessly deferred; language does not reflect the world but constitutes it — are every inch as arbitrary as the prescriptions for proper thinking that guided Victorian scholarship (and before that, the prevailing scholarship of ever-receding ages), biographical or otherwise.

The Victorians, after all, were as convinced of the intellectual propriety of their view as we are of ours. The critics of each age, it seems, believe that they have perfected (or at least improved) the biographic ideal, the “proper” way to write and appreciate biographies; yet each age ends up recycling many of the assumptions and techniques of its

54 forebears. Consider, for instance, the current vogue for the aforementioned “moral biography,” for biographies designed to chronicle an exemplary life in hopes of inspiring similar actions on the parts of readers. In Founding Father: Rediscovering George

Washington, Brookhiser lets his didacticism ring forth in the introduction;

Moral biography has two purposes: to explain its subject, and to shape the minds and hearts of those who read it — not by offering a list of two-hundred-year-old policy prescriptions, but by showing how a great man navigated politics and a life as a public figure. Plutarch’sLives o f the Noble Grecians and Romans was very popular with eighteenth-century Americans; they knew something about the power of example that we have forgotten. (12-13)

Brookhiser’s mildly hectoring tone aside, his introduction evokes antecedents other than just Plutarch: the saint’s life, perhaps, or the sort of earnest, improving biography that emerged constantly in the Victorian era. Ironically, then, some twentieth-century biographers have returned to a form of biography and criticism of biography that is many centuries old.

Yet it is the twentieth-century, more than any other, that has brought, if not a new method of critiquing biography, a self-consciousness to the old methods of critiquing biography. It might be noted that we do just about the same kinds of things that critics of biography and biographers themselves have done in centuries past; we are just more aware that we are doing it, and — witness the disclaimers that litter the introductions of most contemporary biographies — conscientious about announcing the temporary nature of all biographical insights, the murky inscrutability of all souls, the notoriously fickle judgment of history.^^

55 Even the insights of Freud, which, according to many critics of biography, radically transformed the writing and consideration of the genre, must be viewed against the background of the tradition of biographical writing and criticism already in place, meager though that tradition may be/^ Certainly it would be foolish to underestimate the influence of psychoanalytic theory on the creation and criticism of biography, or any other literary genre, but surely it is not improper or heretical to suggest that psychoanalytic theory is, after all, an hypothesis about personality and behavior; that it is one of many such theories; and to recall that Freud himself was unenthusiastic about the application of his theories to the writing of biographies (Gay, Sigmund Freud, xv). The rise of the so- called “psychobiography” in the early and middle twentieth century, and the inevitable backlash, bring to mind similar disputes in earlier centuries about the biographer’s reliance on certain materials, from social environment to the testimony of valets/'* Thus when

Edel writes, “More and more biographers are learning to read the inner message of an artist’s words and to see that the emotions translated into images and symbols are in reality biographical statements” {Writing Lives, 140), he is really just recalling that most venerable of biographical techniques; the suggestion that uniqueness of character can be discerned in action or, in some cases, the action of writing. This is a concept with which neither Plutarch nor Boswell nor any sacred biographer would have felt it necessary to quarrel. Indeed, Edel himself seems later to recognize that what he has been calling “new” about the contributions of psychoanalytic theory are not especially revolutionary - just packaged differently: “We have for decades used general psychological concepts in criticism and biography without question. When we discuss the motivations of Hamlet, is

56 this not psychology? When we try to understand and speculate upon symbols in a poem, are we not ‘psychologizing’ ? ” {Writing Lives, 153).

Even Richard Ellmann, who likened Freud’s influence across the twentieth-century literary establishment to a “long shadow” {a long the riverrun, 256), conceded that

Freud’s contribution to literary biography was, in efifect, the cultivation of another source of raw material for biographical speculation and conclusion. “Traditional biography has relied upon two kinds of information; documents such as letters, and written or oral reminiscences” (257). Freud’s theories offered a third: the unconscious. Ellmann noted the effect of this new source:

In the last [nineteenth] century it was assumed that literary works came into being because their authors willed them to. The modem biographer would question the anatomy of that will. He would be likely to see the writer as a victim of internal compulsions, or familial and extra-familial complications, bursting into literature, willy-nilly. (263)

The current backlash against Freud demonstrates that tastes and techniques in biography come and go, but the “biographic appetite” continues unabated.^^

If biographies have, throughout the genre’s history, exhibited a similarity of methods and aspirations, and if criticism of biography has, for its part, advanced but a short distance over a long period of time, then what has twentieth-century critical sensibility contributed to the study of biography, besides the aforementioned self- consciousness about the biographer’s prerogatives? In other words, when it comes to criticism of biography, where are we now and how did we get here?

We are, as I mentioned at the outset, in a time when the biographer is routinely vilified in the public eye. Critics of biography in previous times questioned the operations

57 and achievements of biographers; biographical subjects in previous times have complained about the exasperating nosiness of those who sought to chronicle their lives/^ Rarely, if ever, before, however, have critics and, in many cases, biographers themselves, arrived at such a curious consensus that the genre is vaguely fraudulent, its practitioners faintly seedy, and its readers ultimately culpable because of their fondness for biography.

James Atlas, who plans to follow up his biography of Delmore Schwartz with a biography of Saul Bellow, confesses that he feels somewhat shabby in following Bellow around, eager to scurry for crumbs of information that might drop from the subject’s table.

“B (Bellow) takes me in with that keen, appraising look of his, the wide saucerlike eyes suspicious:Who is this guy? It’s beginning to dawn on him: I’m really going to exhume his past, unearth and reconstruct it in every detail. I’m going to write his biography” (76).

Atlas’ shame at his undertaking meets him at every turn: “I shift the subject, insisting that

I’m interested not in gossip but in the manner of the times.. . . An awkward moment for me, since I am interested in the gossip” (79). Finally a kind of glee overtakes Atlas, as he realizes the alleged freedom that he enjoys, no matter how Bellow feels about it:

I’m shouting in the car, ‘It’s fun! Fun!’ I don’t feel rejected by his refusal to let me see these papers. It is, after all, just legal stuff; I already know the lineaments of the story. I also realize I don’t need his permission — the creative part, the original part, is my interpretation. That’s what biography is.. .. It can’t be accurate, it’s too messy, there’s too much one can’t know. (80)

Atlas sees himself, quite consciously, as a user, an exploiter, a groupie. The same attitude is reflected in Ian Hamilton’s 1988 article about his attempts to write a biography of the notoriously reclusive J.D. Salinger. Hunting metaphors proliferate: Hamilton uses words such as “quarry” (199) when referring to Salinger; he hopes to “lure” (200) him into the

58 open; he speaks of compelling Salinger to “leave his lair” (209). In letters that he wrote to

Salinger proposing to write the biography — letters that went unanswered, as Hamilton had thoroughly expected — the biographer tries to clean up his motives:

I was trying to make myself sound ‘decent’ — not just to Salinger, but to myself. On the one hand, I really didn’t see why I should extinguish my curiosity about this Salinger phenomenon: I was by no means alone in wanting to know more about him. On the other hand: at what point does decent curiosity become indecent? (202)

Potential biographers of Thomas Pynchon also regard themselves, and are regarded by others, as stalkers, as criminals, as thieves of someone else’s reputation and achievements.

In an article about attempts to track down even the smallest snippets of information about

Pynchon, Scott McLemee makes an astonishing admission: “There’s a fine line, sometimes, between scholarship and stalking” (42). Humphrey Carpenter, who has written biographies of J.R.R. Tolkien, W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound and Benjamin Britten, traces his interest in biography not to some exalted search for truth, not to some high- minded and selfless quest for a wisdom and insight he will then pass on to the waiting arms of future generations, but to petty nosiness: “My particular agenda is that of a rather naughty small boy who was discouraged by his mother from a natural tendency to open other people’s drawers and read their letters.. . . I’m always looking for idols to demolish” (268).

In her 1995 review of the first of two new biographies of Edmund Wilson,

Elizabeth Hardwick conceives of the biographical enterprise as so much grubby grave- robbing: “In this field of study [biography], each new digger needs to explore the previously looted pharaonic tombs in search of an overlooked jewel in the stone eyes

59 prepared for eternity. . . . Perhaps there is an unpublished letter or two, an untapped acquaintance, a peculiarity belatedly recalled by a passing stranger” (83). Her comments are an obvious echo of Malcolm’s contemptuous account of what biographers are “really” up to, according, of course, to Malcolm:

Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world... . [T]he voyeurism and busybodism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity.. . . The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. (86)

Biographer and reader, Malcolm charges, are engaged in “a kind of collusion. . . in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole” (86). Furthermore, biographers do not acknowledge any discomfort about the project, or doubts about the “truths” they unearth, Malcolm says, just as “a burglar should not pause to discuss with his accomplice the rights and wrongs of burglary while he is jimmying a lock” (87). These are curious sentiments: because of the self-consciousness that pervades virtually every area of contemporary scholarship, critics and biographers express more doubts and disclaimers about their projects and subject positions than perhaps they have ever done before. (The articles cited above are just a sampling of the hand-wringing that accompanies many ongoing biographical projects.)^’

While it might be argued that Malcolm’s position is not truly representative of the state of the criticism of biography, particularly as it is practiced in the academy, a glance at recent anthologies of scholarly essays about biography proves otherwise: the positing of

60 an adversarial relationship between the biographer and the biographical subject (as well as between the biographer and a deceased subject’s heirs) is a given. In her introduction to a section of Seductions o f Biography, historian Barbara Johnson writes; “There are always two people competing for control over the story of a life. Sometimes they are the biographer and the subject, sometimes the biographer and the guardians of the subject’s estate” (119). The biographer’s task of interpreting a life is far from harmless: “To interpret is to treat as dead, perhaps even to kill” (120).

Because criticism of biography has consisted mainly of definition and prescription, of pronouncement and demarcation, there has been little to counteract the negative image of biographers and the biographical project, little to combat the present-day disdain for biography, which has arisen, I believe, to fill the void left by a lack of a critical tradition for biography. No one quite knows what to make of biography, even after all these centuries; is it truth or fiction, testimonial or exposé, moral instrument or debunking weapon? Are biographers required to include all they know about a subject, or are they obliged to exercise decorum and sensitivity? The uncertainty has helped to ignite controversies about biographical ethics, such as the imbroglio precipitated by Diane Wood

Middlebrook when she employed information from Anne Sexton’s psychiatric sessions in her 1991 biography of the poet. Middlebrook had the permission of both the psychiatrist and the Sexton estate, yet her inclusion of the material was widely criticized. Middlebrook recalls:

I was not personally charged with ethical misconduct, but it seems that not much by way of ethical conduct is expected of biographers anyway. Or so I gathered from an editorial in The New York Times, in which the biography of Anne Sexton was held up as a cautionary example. The psychiatrist was condemned for

61 releasing the tapes, but allowances were made for the author. ‘Middlebrook did what any biographer would do,’ said the Times', “[she] rose to the opportunity as the trout to the f l y ’ {Telling Secrets, 124)

Instead of defending herself and the biographical enterprise, however, Sexton says the editorial contained “the barb of truth” (124). Biographers are as accusatory toward themselves as is the harshest critic of biography.

The perplexity that attends the conception of the biographical enterprise, the confusion over biography’s place in scholarship and in the popular imagination, has had the peculiar effect of making biographical inquiry seem motivated primarily by voyeurism and acquisitiveness, by meanness and greed. Out of that same perplexity, however, another kind of criticism may arise to fill the void: one that acknowledges the constructed nature of all truths; the plausibility of a multiplicity of portraits of an individual; the utter inability of a biographer to know, with any conviction, herself or himself, much less the biographical subject, yet the determination to continue, nonetheless.

Despite the crudity of many of her assertions, Malcolm did make a interesting point: an effective way to critique biography is to look at specific biographies of an individual, not the genre as a whole. Malcom sees “the Plath biographical situation as a kind of allegory of the problem of biography in general” {The Silent Woman, 94). All biographical “situations” are allegories of the problem of biography; the key is to discover how each biography attempts to create its portrait, and what those attempts tell us about what we regard as crucial elements in constructing a personality.

‘ As James L. Clifford notes, “But not until our day has there been any widespread discussion of the complex psychological and artistic problems involved in the re-creation of character^ (x). ■ In her study of Virginia Woolf biographies, Malcolm offers a series of cranky, scattershot pronouncements about biography which are crafted to sound as if they are being uttered ex cathedra — but 62 which are really nothing more than rather sloppily contrived opinions: “The genre (like its progenitor history) functions as a kind of processing plant where experience is converted into information the way &esh produce is converted into canned vegetables” (73). To begin with, it is nowhere near a settled idea that history predates biography, biography, some would argue, is the progenitor of history. Malcolm, however, fails to flesh out her argument with any details about this most crucial historical debate. Also, whose experience does Malcolm mean when she writes “where experience is converted into information” — the biographical subject’s or the biographer’s? Later in the essay, Malcolm complains that biographical narratives that do not refer constantly to letters or diaries of the subject are ineffective: “Taken from its living context, and with its blood drained out of it, the ‘information’ of biography is a shriveled, spurious thing” (73). This sentiment is directly opposed to the prevailing opinion of many biographical theorists — including me — who believe that it is the narrative aspect of biography that renders the genre intriguing. The copious use of letters and diaries, in fact, interrupts the narrative flow and sometimes creates a portrait less convincing than the biographer’s construction. Nowhere does Malcolm deal, moreover, with the problematic issue of letters and diaries themselves, and with the question of why we should privilege an individual’s perspective on her or his own life more than we do, say, anyone else’s perspective, including a biographer’s. As Malcolm notes in her essay on Plath biographers, “We do not own’ the facts of our lives at all” (8). ^ As late as 1992, it was possible for a critic to believe it necessary to argue on behalf of “the acceptance of biography as an art form worthy of the same serious critical attention shown the novel or the lyric” (KimbreU, viii). Nadel, too, believes that emphasis on the factual side of biography has resulted in short shrift for its artistic elements: “The goal is to show that biography is a complex narrative as well as a record of an individual’s life, a literary process as well as a historical product” (1). ■* The sentences are: “In Gordon Bowker’sPursued by Furies: A Life o f Malcolm Lowry... there is scarcely a page in which Lowry is not in danger” (80); “Bowker draws a convincing and chilling portrait of the two main relationships in Lowry’s life” (81); and the note that the Bowker book provides “a decidedly darker view than that given in an earlier Lowry biography, by Douglas Day” (81). The review is typical of many reviews of biographies, but I chose it for another reason as well: Day’s biography of Lowry has long enchanted me, and so I had hoped for a comparative analysis of the two biographies when I began reading the review. Alas, the reviewer was less interested in critiquing the biography than showing the reader how much he knew about Lowry’s life. ^ The theme of Ross’s essay — that the academy has rejected biography for many of the same reasons that it has rejected feminist theory — is sophisticated and well-wrought, and will be examined in more detail in Chapter 4. ^ Admittedly, it is not surprising that most criticism of biography has focused on definition; as Clifibrd says, “Because of... uncertainty as to the very nature of biography there has been a tendency to ignore it as a major division of literature” (x). That does not, however, mean that mere definition is acceptable as criticism. ' The focus on definitions, even after centuries of the writing of biographies, reminds me of a group of kids who gather at a vacant lot to play each Saturday morning — but the game never gets under way, because they are never able to decide which game they are playing; some say football, others basketbalL still a stubborn few hold out for soccer. So it is with biography; No one can decide precisely what biography is or should be; hence the criticism of the genre never advances past an argument over definitions and prescriptions. * Sidney Lee, co-author ofThe Dictionary o f National Biography, employed the same analogy when he wrote in 1911; “Biography may be compared to chemistry, the science which analyzes substances and resolves them into their constituent elements” (NadeL 60). ® Stephen B. Oates, displaying a bit of anti-academic bias, brags about this feature of his 1986 anthology. Biography as High Adventure-. “This volume. . . compris[es] essays by ten people who have actually practiced the form. No academic theorists, these” (xii). Oates’ attitude is curious; one can hardly imagine, for instance, an anthologist of essays about fiction or poetry bragging about the fact that the contributors were practitioners, not critics. Moreover, the aspect of his anthology that he proudly highlights — the fact 63 that leaL live biographers wrote for it — actually renders the volume less distinctive, more mundane and familiar than it would have been had he restricted it to “academic theorists.” Why such tedious details are equated with thoroughness in a biography — why, that is. Atlas believes that he would need to find Schwartz’s bunkmate — is another puzzle. Additionally, all such “how-l-got- that-story” stories aren’t superfluous and self-pitying; Kathryn Kish Sklar’s account o f her long years of research on a biography of social progressive Florence Kelley actually relates to her subject’s interests; “Each morning the mile walk fiom my rented apartment to the Library of Congress took me past the haunting and hopeless gaze of unemployed black meiL At night on my bus ride home the graphic talk of Afiican-American women who cleaned federal office buildings in the evening jolted me out of my archival compulsions.” Such encounters were “daily reminders of the persistence of social injustices that Kelley had combated eighty years earlier” (24-5). ‘ ' Seductions o f Biography was published in Fd)ruary, 1996. '* See also William C. Dowling, who alludes to “the impossibility of the biographical enterprise” (80), and Sigmund Freud, who, as Peter Gay notes in his biography of Freud, wrote to a fiiend: “Biographical truth does not exist, and even if it did we could not use it” (2). Hence William Epstein’s observation that “biography has been (and in many respects, continues to be) such a deeply ingrained cultural activity that it has been taken for granted” {Contesting the Subject, 2). See Braucfy’s The Frenzv o f Renown: Fame and Its History, pp. 29-32; also, Whittemore’sPure Lives, 5-6. ' * Nor did it have to be a literary form; as Brandy notes, other artifacts often served to preserve and to transmit the reputation of a life to fiiture generations. He mentions “the face of Alexander the Great on a coin” (5) and tombs: “In Egypt particularly evolved the extraordinary exaltation of a single man, the pharaoh, the ultimate ruler whose giant image gazed down at his subjects through the centuries. In their tombs, like those of the earliest emperors of China, were the objects and images of their power, including the bones of servants and the statues of retainers - testimony to the future of the greatness that once was” (29). Garraty agrees: “Their [Egyptian kings and their elaborately appointed tombs] purposes were biographical — thty sought to preserve, on earth and in heaven, the reputations of individual men” (31). It might be argued that the history of biography, like all histories, breaks down along class lines: the earliest biographies of ordinary folk were songs and etchings, while those of the wealthy and powerful were material objects. Moreover, non-literary entities that serve biographical functions, such material objects, also prefigure the images and iconography that will come to represent people in twentieth-century biographies. In both cases, something other than a text performs the functions ofbiography. Indeed, in this chapter, 1 move fieely between a survey of how biography was critiqued in a particular century, and how biographies within that century are critiqued by contemporary critics. Such a strategy will, 1 hope, begin to suggest the interdependency of past and present criticism ofbiography, the way that its history can be lifted out of the stream of chronology. This brings to mind Thomas Hefiernan’s lovely statement about oral biography, an efibrt in which “an understanding of the past is contingent upon present circumstance wherein the past is continually reconstructed by the present The past and the present are in a dialogue within the individual consciousness” (24). See KimbreU 16-17, Brandy 29, Garraty 31-53 and MakoUdn 89. As Whittemore chronicles, the pronouncements o f Jacob Burckhardt, once pervasive and unquestioned, now are coming under intense scrutiity, and in some cases have been positively refuted by. many contemporary scholars; Burckhardt believed there was no “self” as we understand the term, before the Renaissance. No self, no true biography; hence Plutarch is no great shakes, in Burckhardt’s valuation. The debate, and its relevance to the history ofbiography, reveals how invariably issues of historical scholarship creep into, and influence, the development of the biographical genre. For his part, Whittemore attributes the great change in the notion of selfhood, and its obvious influence on biography, to Christianity: “With the arrival of Christianity the self simple but willfid, began to assert its centrality in Western thought” (55). Makolkin agrees: “Christianity added new dimensions to English and Russian biography by creating new biographical subjects and new heroic portraiture” (90). 64 Plutarch’s contemporary, Suetonius, also bids fair for recognition; see Garraty (49) and Whittemore ( 12). “No other biographer, not even Boswell, has excelled him in the masterly handling of anecdotal material” (47), Garraty writes. Whittemore clarifies, however, that Plutarch probably was an “anecdotalisT against his better judgment: “Unlike modem biographers, he had little liking for entering upon private life — what the heroes ate for breakfast, how they dressed, and what th ^ thought about when they were not plotting against the Persians — but he was a confirmed anecdotalist so the private details crept in anyway” (26). ^ The terms “saint’s life” or “sacred biography” are now preferred to the familiar term “hagiography” because, as Heffeman notes, “The term ‘hagiography’ is virtually impossible to read except as an epithet signifying a pious fiction or an exercise in panegyric” (16). ^ As M akol^ notes, “Plutarch regarded biography as a moral and spiritual guide, a source of improvement of human character, and an incentive to the betterment of life in general” (91). Indeed, Heffeman believes that the sharply positivist convictions of critics ofbiography such as Edward Gibbon and Burckhardt has resulted in a “legacy of misreading sacred biography” (64). ^ See also Donald Stauffer’s The Art o f Biography in Eighteenth Century England, which cogently explains the shift ftom sacred to secular biography that occurred between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “ I use the terms “nineteenth century” and “Victorian” interchangeably, as is the habit of most of the authors I consulted for this section; it is interesting to speculate, however, on what the euphemism might have been had William IV had his way in 1831. As Cecil Woodham-Smith recounts in her biography of Queen Victoria, the monarch - who knew, to his dismay, that the young princess was to succeed him on the throne — requested that her name be changed fiom the Germanic-sounding Alexandrina \rictoria to names more familiar to the British ear, such as Elizabeth or Charlotte. Yet, “The nation was not anxious for a change of name, people had become accustomed to Victoria, it was a high-sounding name” (Queen Victoria, 85), not to mention the fact that no archbishop or bishop would confirm the changing of a name that had been given at baptism, so the change did not occur — and the Victorian era safely assumed its moniker. As Gay notes. “Reading biographies had become a major indoor sport for the educated middle class” (154). ^ The period between 1838 and 1882 was, except for the work of Carlyle and Stanfield, a “vast wasteland for biographical writing” (11), according to Petrie. Tellingly, however, when Petrie says “biographical writing” he means criticism ofbiography, not the writing ofbiography. These endeavors — different as they are — often are confused in surveys o f the history ofbiography and its critique. ^ Critiques of Strachey’s achievement often slide unnoticed into critiques of late \rictorian society in general; just as critics ofbiography sometimes end up critiquing the life itself and not the presentation o f the life. For instance, Edel writes that Strachey’s targets in Eminent Victorians and Elizabeth and Essex were “the British establishment. . . Victorian hypocrisy, the combination of British strength and creativity, which made England and its empire an instrument of power, privilege and piety, neurosis and conquest, presided over at two poles of history by Elizabeth, and a ruthless aristocracy, and Victoria and m idie-class domesticity” (Writing Lives, 76). At some point in the midst of that sentence, a critique of Strachey’s achievement slid almost imperceptibly into a social history of Great Britain. “ Smiles declared his principle of biographical writing in a pamphlet called Self Help: “Good rules may do much, but good models far more, for in the latter we have instruction in action — wisdom at work” (Nadel, 21). This self-consciousness has resulted in the ongoing investigation of what Clifford calls “the complex relationship of the biographer and his subject. . . [T]he scrupulous modem biographer carefully studies his own motives at the same time as he is describing the other’s”(Biography as an Art, xviii). This stud)' has resulted in, among other things, the notion that all biographies are essentially autobiographies. (It should be noted that many crucial issues in contemporary criticism ofbiography will be dealt with in

65 subsequent chapters, as the topics of those chapters ivarranL This section is meant simply to suggest some broad outlines for the development of the criticism of biography in the twentieth century.) See Edel’s chapter on “Psychoanalysis” (42-58) in Writing Lives: “Freud and his successors opened up biography to new modes of perception” (43) and “his readings of the role of the ‘unconscious,’ projected through dream and fantasy, provided an entire new province for biographical research and a quest for the psychological evidence residing within much other evidence confronting biographers” (42). The use of psychoanalysis in biography was on display in the penetrating portraits o f Gamaliel Bradford, called “psychographs.” The most famous attack on the use of psychoanalysis in biographies was launched by Bernard DeVoto in his 1933 article, “The Sceptical Biographer”: “ Psycho-ana^s has no value whatsoever as a method of arriving at facts in biography. No psycho-analytical biography yet written can be taken seriously - as fact’ ” (quoted in Biography as an Art, 146). Ina 1993 article titled “The Assault on Freud”, Paul Gray writes: “But what if Freud was wrong? This question has been aroimd ever since the publication of Freud’s Grst overtly psychoanalytical papers in the late 1890s. Today it is being asked with unprecedented tmgency” (47). An irritated James Joyce called biographers “tiografrends,” Richard Ellmann recoimts in the introduction to hisJames Joyce. Also odd is Malcolm’s conviction that the written voice of the biographical subject is always more interesting, and truthful, than other perspectives that might be incorporated in a biography. In both The Silent Woman and A House o f One’s Own, she lauds letters at the expense of all other sources: “Letters are the great frxative of experience____ They are the fossils of feeling. That is why biographers prize them so: they are biography’s only conduit to unmediated experience. Everything else the biographer touches is stale, hashed over, told and retold, dubious, unauthentic, suspect”{Silent Woman, 23). Why, though, would letters, which are self-consciously stylized to reach a particular reader, be regarded as “unmediated”? Moreover, secondary sources of the kind that Malcolm dismisses so casually as “dubious” and “suspect” often are the most fascinating aspects of a biography, the biographical subject’s effect on others can supply a rich fund of material.

66 CHAPTER 2

CLAIMING THE BIOGRAPHICAL BODY

Virginia Woolfs face, wrote Frances Partridge, “bore the stigmata that are to be seen in many who have been gravely mad - a subtly agonised tautness, something twisted; the way she held herself, turned her head or smoked a cigarette struck one as awkward even while it charmed and interested one. As Julia Strachey said of her, she ‘was not at home in her body’ ” (80).

Many critics of biography have not been “at home in her body” or the bodies of other biographical subjects. Critics often have overlooked the specific rhetorical strategies by which the biographical subject is constituted: physical descriptions. Because disputes continue to simmer about issues such as the possibility of reconstituting an individual and a past by means of prose, biographical texts often have not been read as literary entities that operate in unified, explicable ways. Entanglement in theoretical conundrums, that is, has distracted many critics from a basic engagement with the biographical text, from an examination of the language used to confer the illusion of selfhood on a constructed entity known as the biographical subject. (Visual language ~ i.e., photographs — also confers the illusion.) First, however, let us review a few other descriptions of Virginia Woolfs physical presence, as it made itself felt upon certain observers. Leonard Woolf saw his wife, most memorably, in terms of the effect of her physical appearance on others:'

Yet to the crowd in the street there was something in her appearance which struck them as strange and laughable.. . . In Barcelona and in Stockholm nine out of ten

67 people would stare or stop and stare at Virginia. And not only in foreign towns; they would stop and stare and nudge one another ~ ‘look at her’ — even in England, in Picadilly or Lewes H i^ Street, where almost anyone is allowed to pass unnoticed. They did not merely stop and stare and nudge one another; there was something in Virginia which they foimd ridiculous.. . . There was something strange and disquieting, and therefore to many people ridiculous, in her appearance, in the way she walked — she seemed so often to be thinking of something else,’ to be moving with a slightly shufiling movement along the streets in the shadow of a dream. The hags and harridans and bright young things could not restrain their laughter or their giggles. (Beginning Again, 29)

He hastens to inform us that “she was also extremely beautiful when, unexcited and unworried, she sat reading or thinking. But the expression, even the shape of her face changed with extraordinary rapidity as the winds of mental strain, illness, or worry passed over its surface. It was still beautiful, but her anxiety and pain made the beauty itself painful” (28).

The novelist Rosamond Lehmann offered her brother, John Lehmann, one of the more compelling and evocative portraits of Virginia Woolfs physical appearance for inclusion in his autobiographical memoir:

She was extremely beautiful, with an austere intellectual beauty of bone and outline, with large melancholy eyes under carved lids, and the nose and lips, the long narrow cheeks of a Gothic madonna. Her voice, light, musical, with a throaty note in it, was one of her great charms. She was tall and thin, and her hands were exquisite. She used to spread them out to the fire, and they were so transparent one fancied one saw the long fragile bones through the live skin. (24)

Spreading her hands out to the fire must have been a characteristic gesture; Gerald Brennan mentions it as well in his memoir, excerpted in Virginia Woolf: Interviews and

Recollections:

Although her face was too long for symmetry, its bones were thin and delicately made and her eyes were large, grey or greyish blue, and as clear as a hawk’s. In conversation they would light up a little coldly while her mouth took on an ironic and challenging fold, but in repose her expression was pensive and almost girlish. When in the evening we settled under the hooded chimney and the logs burned up and she stretched out her hands to the blaze, the whole cast of her face revealed her as a poet. (45)

68 Sir Osbert Sitwell spoke of her “beauty of bone and form and line that belonged to the stars rather than the sun” and her “beautiful, clear, gentle speaking voice” {Interviews and Recollections, 50-51). But the voice could alter; David Garnett recounted that, as

Virginia Woolf talked, “excitement would suddenly come as she visualized what she was saying, and her voice would crack like a schoolboy’s, on a higher note. And in that cracked high note one felt all her humour and delight in life” (Lehmann, 24).

Consider what the foregoing has disclosed (or attempted to disclose) about

Virginia Woolf: we learn that others saw her as tall and thin, with large, grey eyes and a voice that could change from gentle and clear to high-pitched and excited. Consider, too, how some of the descriptions contradict one another: Partridge found her awkward,

Leonard Woolf, shufiling; while Sitwell perceived a beauty of “form and line” that would be inconsistent with such clumsiness. These descriptions, and others like them, attempt a rhetorical rendering of a physical body; they seek to establish and delineate (and in some sense validate) the subject’s physical actuality at a specific moment in time. Indeed, the traditional task of a biographer was and is twofold: to reanimate the subject, bringing her or him “back to life” before the eyes of present-day observers (readers); and to present the times in which the subject lived and worked.^ Biographers, then, are called upon to reinvigorate two absent entities: the biographical subject and the past.^ The mission remains the same, moreover, even for biographical subjects who are still living, and living in a time simultaneous to the writing of the biography; at the instant of recording context and subject, both are automatically displaced by the time required to record and to read them. One cannot, that is, observe, write and read at the same time. An act of rhetorical

69 retrieval — sometimes from across centuries, sometimes from last week or yesterday — is

necessary.

The myth of reanimating the dead, dead times as well as dead people, has long

haunted the biographical project. As Sharon O’Brien points out, biographies are

routinely critiqued on the basis of whether or not their portraits are convincing as life-

substitutes, since many critics and readers “want to believe that when they pick up a

biography they are touching a man (or woman), not a book (certainly not a text). The

traditional biographer must make the subject’s spirit manifest in language, performing the

miracle of incarnation” (124).^ Samuel Schoenbaum, who traces the various versions of

Shakespeare’s life, acknowledges the impulse on the part of both biographer and audience

“to finger the hard bone of the master’s skull, to confront his material presence” (342).

Justin Kaplan, biographer of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, writes, “We continue to

expect biography to render not only the public and private events of a life but its intimate

existential and perceptual textures, all adding up to the whole sense of a person.. .. We

tend to believe implicitly that biography ccm deliver the essential person and that there is a

core personality, the “real Me,” which we will find if only we dig deep and long enough”

(70-1). The best biographers, writes Samuel S. Vaughan, “bring them back alive. They

stir the draperies, open the drawers, let us feel the fire, smell the smoke, listen to the sound of another breathing in the room” (26-7). Likewise, John A. Garraty sets for the biographer a high task indeed: “The biographer’s responsibility is large. He assays the role of a god, for in his hands the dead can be brought to life and granted a measure of immortality” (28). Not a job, therefore, for the faint of heart or small of ego.

70 The prevailing fascination with what Nicholas Pagan calls “the flesh and blood” biographical subject and, as the very existence of biographies demonstrates, the conviction that such an entity is capable of being rendered in coherent verbal form and that such a rendering can be significant and meaningful, is evident not only in the work of biographical theorists, but also in the interests of the culture at large. ® Under a large headline, “The

Sound of Great Ideas!,” an advertisement in a recent issue of The New Criterion announces the sale of audio cassettes featuring “the actual voices o f’ a series of writers, including W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Robert Lowell. At first glance, the advertisement seems innocuous, little more than an attempt to capitalize on literary celebrity. Then the questions gradually arise: why would someone want to purchase recordings of writers reading her or his own work, when the writings themselves are readily available? What is the appeal? The advertisement anticipates the question and pounces upon it: “The author is able to provide his or her unique emphasis in ways impossible to accomplish in print. Pauses and tonal changes become meaningful and create insights and increased understanding.. . . Today’s audio cassettes capture the inflections, nuances and flavor of the original speaker.”^ Inflections, nuances, flavor: these are made significant by the notion that there is such a thing as an “original speaker,” a physical body existing in a time as real as, but other than, our own time, whose voice is no longer available, and that such a speaker is accessible through the medium of sound (just as she or he might be accessible through, say, a photograph, videotape or biography).

Such a notion is commercially inspired but important testimony that we, as a culture, still are in thrall to the concept of a deceased subject’s accessible physical reality, as delivered

71 to us through a record of conversation, observation, anecdote and artifact. * Nor are

scholars immune to this lure: at the Fourth Annual Virginia Woolf Conference in 1994 in

Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, a brief tape of Virginia Woolfs voice, recorded during

a 1937 radio broadcast (and identified in a handout as “the only existing record of the

voice of Virginia Woolf’), was played over a public address system for the conference

participants.® Yet another example of the fascination with artifacts suggestive of physical

reality is the recent public opening of Charleston Farmhouse near Lewes, England,

longtime home of Clive and Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, as well as other members of the Bloomsbury group. Wandering amid the restored furnishings — “the white lamp shade in Grant’s studio, adorned in bucolic swirls of black, blue and pink paint; Vanessa Bell’s fi-esco of dots and circles surrounding the fireplace in what was once Clive Bell’s first- floor studio; gray and ochre curtains depicting extravagant leaves and lilies in the garden room” — prompted a visitor to remark, “... One expects to come upon ghostly predecessors: Grant, paintbrush in hand; Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell’s sister, reading in the library, or John Maynard Keynes, reclining in a deck chair, spouting some economic theory” (Goodman, B3). Objects, like physical details, like the sound of a voice, are direct links to a corporeal presence that has disappeared.^®

Evoking the vanished entities of a biographical subject’s physical presence, and the times in which that subject lived and worked, is the implicit or explicit task of every biography." Moreover, that attempted evocation marks one of the sites in which contemporary critical theory has influenced the debate about the efficacy of, even the possibility of, biography as a genre.Pagan, for instance, refers disdainfully to “talk

72 about reanimating dead bones, breathing fresh life into the author, or of capturing or recapturing that life,” homilies he dismisses as “the cliches of traditional biography” (10).

Yet what might be called the réanimation fallacy, the idea that a life indeed can be recovered through words, does persist, despite the best efforts of some contemporary critical theorists to discredit it as hopelessly quaint and fanciful. On one hand, we have

Michael Reynolds advising us that, “We are all up against the crannied wall of the absurd, knowing that we can never know the past, never reconstruct Ernest Hemingway. Suspend what disbelief we will, words on paper can never become more than what they are: words on paper” (177). Conversely, we have Frank E. Vandiver’s declaration that the task of biography is to “evoke a person into being” (51), to be successful in “wringing a human being from the mists” (54). The réanimation fallacy is present in a great deal of criticism of biography written before the widespread application of contemporary critical theory, as well as criticism written for general audiences: “The greatness of Boswell’s biography,” wrote Richard Ellmann, “[is] the sense it imparts of a man utterly recognizable and distinct” {Golden Codgers, 3). Réanimation was very much on the mind of John Aubrey when he wrote in the 1680s:

So that the retrieving of these forgotten Things from oblivion in some sort resembles the Art of a Conjuror, who makes these walke and appeare that they have layen in their graves many hundreds of yeares: and to represent as it were to the eie, the places, Customes and Fashions, that were of old Times. (110)

Nor is more recent criticism exempt from this romantic ideal; Nadel states, “Biography is the genre that has its assignment the réanimation of life” (182). Peter Davison, who edited

Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography of Anne Sexton, writes that the biographer’s skill

73 “lies in having the sympathy and imagination to create the story of a life about which the subject’s ghost would say. That’s as close to me as anybody else could be expected to get’ ” (99). Again, note the assumptions that lurk so casually in that seemingly light­ hearted dictum: in order for there to be a ghost qualified to pass judgment on attempts to rekindle the life, there had to have been an essential subject — a tangible standard, a physical benchmark, a unique original with the potential for reproduction in prose.

Likewise, Gerald Clarke offered what he considered to be lavish (and unproblematic) praise to Edel’s Henry James, a praise incorporating resurrection of both biographical subject and historical context: “The writer has unlocked a door and led us into the subject’s world. By the time we leave . . . we not only feel that we know the subject, his fiiends and enemies but also that we’ve lived, laughed, and sometimes suffered with them.

We have the impression that we were there” (42). The biographer, then, is conjurer of lost worlds, rescuer of departed souls.

Debates about the réanimation fidlacy are paradigmatic of the theoretical disagreements that have constituted a great deal of criticism of biography in the past several years: can the past be known? Is there an essential self? Young-Bruehl’s term for the réanimation fellacy is “biographical essentialism”: it is “the temptation to try to capture the subject as the subject really was” (125). As she acknowledges, the effort is contingent upon two problematical concepts: first, that there is such a thing as a “real” self, and second, that such a thing, were it to exist, could be unearthed by a biographer and disclosed in text. Those are worthy, challenging queries; however, they have been dealt with extensively — if not, of course, “solved” — in other forums. My project in this

74 chapter is to pose a third set of questions; how do Virginia Woolfs biographers go about

the business of trying to reproduce this essential sel^ this sense of a life being lived out in

time? How is the physicalhy of a biographical subject made plausible? How does the

language of physical description simulate the inefiable mystery of “one being created in

vast geometries of time” (130), in Young-Bruehl’s marvelous phrase? These questions

are not commonly considered by critical theorists, who, as we have seen, prefer to discuss biography’s ends rather than its means/"

An example of the work undertaken on the theoretical issues involved in an examination of the biographical body is William Epstein’s essay, “(Post)Modem Lives:

Abducting the Biographical Subject.” Biographers, he argues, engage in a systematic

“abduction” (218) of their subjects; thus biographies are “written over the bodies” (219) of the subjects. “Traditional biographical narrative,” he argues, “habitually repeats the scene of an abduction because, in order to discursively repair the biologically irreparable fracture (the alterity, the otherness, the discontinuity) between any two human individuals

(reified generically as biographer and biographical subject), biography recesses the broken parts and causes the gaping of a wound” (218). I have no quarrel with Epstein’s “trope of abduction” (221); it is, in fact, an inventive way of mediating the relationship between the body of the biographical subject and the intentions of the biographer. However, like many other theorists of biography, Epstein fails to ofifer examples that demonstrate how the biographical subject’s body is “abducted” by the biographer’s prose. Once again,

“biography” is evoked as an abstraction, put into the service of a theory, with little or no grounding in the actual mode of transport — i.e., rhetorical strategies — by which

75 biographers attempt their appropriation of the body. (Epstein does allude to a specific biography, Norman Mailer’s biography of Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn, but focuses his attention on Mailer’s stated reasons for writing the biography, not on Mailer’s practices.

Thus the lofty, theoretically inclined Epstein is content to cite the lofty, theoretically inclined Mailer, and the actual contents of the biography - or any biography - are not part of the discussion.) This perceived lack of attention to the practical workings of biographies, to the ways by which language is employed to replicate (as best it can) flesh and time, is the focus of my chapter.

Any discussion of attempts to reanimate biographical subjects, to restore the sense of a physical body in time, must include a consideration of the image-making iconography that attends the biographic enterprise. As Marita Sturken notes in her article, “Memory,

Reenactment and the Image,” “The fiagments of memoiy that cohere in biographies come to us not only through the written text, but through camera images, as stories evoked through photographs or told through cinematic narratives” (31). In the modem era, the iconography that sometimes serves as a substitute for (or enhancement of) biography has meant primarily photographs (and, even more recently, videotape), but in earlier times the same impulse yielded paintings, sculpture, profiles stamped on coins. This impulse is relevant to the present study because, if photographs are available to biographers, they would seem to render physical description of the subject irrelevant and superfluous.

They would seem, that is, largely to relieve the biographer of the responsibility of using prose to create a felt sense of the biographical subject as a physical entity, mired in a specific point in time other than the present moment, because photographs seemingly

76 perform that function eflfortiessly, unproblematically. As Jean Baudillard writes, “There is a kind of primal pleasure, of anthropological joy in images, a kind of brute fascination unencumbered by aesthetic, moral, social or political judgments” (194). Lyndall Gordon concurs: ‘Thotographs, portraits and places are sources at least as suggestive as books”

(331). That we consider photographs, and other artistic representations of physical presence, significant to a telling of an author’s life, constituting another sort of biography, is obvious: Joyce Images, for instance, contains 90 varied likenesses of James Joyce, fi-om photographs to paintings, sculpture and cartoons; Willliam Faulkner: The Cofield

Collection includes photographs of Faulkner taken by his hometown photographer over the span of the author’s career; Hemingway’s Spain and Hemingway and His World are, in effect, picture-books that valorize authors’ images.

Like other well-known authors such as Sylvia Plath, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and cultural icons fi"om other spheres such as Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy and Monroe,

Woolfs physical image has become both familiar and symbolic: her slender body, wide, sunken eyes and ethereal expression are icons as well known in the annals of literary culture as, say, Presley’s sideburns and dark glasses or Monroe’s blonde locks and swirling skirt are in popular culture. Woolfs physical image has become a symbol of the artist, the intellectual, the deep thinker. Photographs, familiar from having been often reproduced on posters and postcards as well as book jackets, reinforce the image.

Compared to the apparently overwhelming persuasiveness of photographs, prose indeed can seem like a second-rate medium for the task of reifying a subject’s physical reality.

77 Indeed, Cynthia Ozick believes that the secret of the appeal of Virginia Woolf and her

circle lies at least partially in the evocative photographs that chronicled it;

It is the photographs, most of them no more official than snapshots, of the side of a house, two people playing checkers on an old kitchen chair set out in the yard, three friends and a baby poking in the sand.. . . Goblets of brightness wink on eaves, fences, trees, and wash out faces in their dazzle; eyes are lost in blackened sockets. The hem of a dress is likely to be all clarity, but the heads escape — under hat brims, behind dogs, into mottled leaf-shade. And out of the blur of those hopeless poses, cigarettes, hands on knees, hands over books, anxious little pups held up to the camera, walking sticks, long grotesque nose-shadows, lapels, outdoor chairs and tables, there rises up — no, leaks down — so much tension, so much ambition, so much fake casualness, so much heartbreaking attention to the momentariness of the moment. (28)

A photograph somehow seems closer to “reality,” less mediated by representation, more

trustworthy. The poet James Dickey recalls having seen a snippet of film of Hemingway

and Fitzgerald sitting and talking. Such a resource, if available on behalf of other writers

about whom we have little or no visual representations, would instantly entice anyone interested in that writer, Dickey declares: “ ‘My God, suppose we had something like that of Keats reading Ode to a Nightingale'^. Wouldn’t that be stupendous? You’d crawl on your knees a hundred miles to see that if you were really interested in Keats — and who isn’t?’ ” (quoted in Ultimately Fiction, 114). The implication of Dickey’s desire (beyond a simple curiosity to see what someone looked and talked like, someone who is, historically, beyond the reach of photograph or videotape) is that such a glimpse might yield some crucial bit of information about the person or the work. Yet the lack of a photographic representation of an author also is sometimes evoked as a positive attribute. In an appreciation of Virginia Woolfs Orlando, Elizabeth Bowen wrote:

78 Most of us had not met Virginia Woolf; nor did we (which may seem strange) aspire to do so.. . . Exist she must (or writing could not proceed from her), but we were incurious as to how she did. What she looked like, we had not a remote idea; author’s photographs did not, then, ornament book jackets, nor were ‘appearances’ found to be so advisable as to be, in the author’s interest, all but obligatory. Our contentment with not knowing Virginia Woolf today would appear extraordinary, could it even be possible. We visualised her less as a woman at work than as a light widening as it brightened. (217)

Bowen’s belief that it is necessary to argue against having an image of the author is even more substantial proof that such images achieve dominance over other forms of representation; were it not so, she would not be wasting her words. Bowen’s sentiment also is rare, for as Leo Braudy traces in his book The Frenzy o f Renown, the rise of photography in the nineteenth century brought with it a conviction that photographs were the ideal way to memorialize a person or event: “The photograph was the midwife of a moment’s meaning” (493). Prose was distinctly inferior to photography’s ability to reanimate the past and its inhabitants. With photography, “The absent as well as the dead would be present again, and, in a manner only aspired to by writers and artists, the immediate and the eternal promised to be made one” (493). Moreover, most of us will acknowledge an insatiable hunger to thumb through the photographs that typically adorn the midsections of biographies. There is something compelling, and perhaps refreshingly blunt and swiftly communicative, about the photographic image, an ostensible simplicity for which even the most sophisticated mind yearns. Susan Sontag captures this longing in her book On Photography. “What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation.... Photographed images do not se jm to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality” (4). She adds, “A photograph passes for

79 incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened” (5). Photographs have such power, such associative muscle, that they can sometimes overwhelm mere words. While reviewing a biography of Djuna Barnes, Loma Sage notes that photographs of the author can be obstacles to, rather than refinements of, attempts to tell the life story;

Some portraits of the artist are so dramatic and satisfying that they make writing a plausible Life absurdly difficult.. . . Witty, bisexual, savage, self-immolating, Barnes presents a problem of definition [in biography] precisely because she is excessively defined already. Look at her lipstick smear, the perfect turn of her slim ankle. (4)

Yet photographs are, in a crucial sense, simply compacted emblems that go about the same business as do biographies. They seek to present the subject in some static, preserved, aboriginal state. “A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence,” Sontag writes. Photographs are “attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality” (16), a reality that is otherwise inaccessible to the observer of the photograph, because the observer, quite simply, wasn’t “there.” As Sontag and other theorists make clear, however, photographs are no more tokens of an unproblematic reality than are

“facts” selected for and deployed in a biography: every attempt to represent reality is mediated through experiences and perceptions (of both presenter and audience), be that attempt photographic or rhetorical. “Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images” (153), Sontag reminds us. Photographs, which would seem to enjoy a privileged status in the reconstitution of the biographical subject and of the past because they are artifacts, not opinions, differ in no essential respect fi-om prose attempts to reconstitute the subject and her milieu; history itself, says James Wilkinson, is “an artifact historians have created” (90). Far fi-om rendering verbal portraits superfluous,

80 photographie portraits simply join the storehouse of persuasive techniques upon which biographers are able to draw to create the benign illusion of a living subject. Tellingly, each of the five biographies of Woolf that are the subject of this study includes photographs as part o f its presentation of “Virginia Woolf.” For reasons of space and focus, I have not chosen the photographic image as one of the techniques of biographical portraiture that I am examining, but not because the photographic image is any less a subjective construction as is a portrait in w ords.Indeed, from a theoretical standpoint, in function (if not in form), they are indistinguishable from each other; word portraits, like the photographic portraits whose history Braudy traces, are able to “furnish memory with precise visual details of face, dress, posture, and all the ways one appeared to others”

(493).

Exploring the means by which Virginia Woolfs biographers “furnish memory” with specific physical details that attempt to recall her and her times to “life” requires a procedure that, as Heather Dubrow notes in her article “The Status of Evidence,” has fallen into disrepute in this theoretically overdetermined age: close reading. She points out that “the widespread repudiation of New Criticism. . . is often interpreted to mandate a repudiation of detailed scrutiny of any literary text” (13). She adds, “This is guilt by association: though the term close reading was sometimes used synonymously with New

Criticism, one can attend to the nuances and contradictions of a text without accepting

New Critical principles about, for example, the autonomy and unity of literature” (13).

Yet the lingering prejudice against close reading has meant, among other things, that biography has been studied closely as genre, but not closely enough as text. When we do

81 turn to the texts, we can see the ways in which biographers structure their work and select their language in order to approximate the reality of a lived life.

Without repeated and diverse attempts at physical description, moreover, biographers would fiilfill rather too well John Updike’s disgruntled definition of the genre;

“great scholastic mounds of summarized writings, faded gossip, and reconstructed travel schedules.” Indeed, it might be argued that the guileless pretense of physicality present in a biography — the biographer’s admittedly doomed, but doomed in interesting ways, attempt to reanimate the subject — is ultimately what distinguishes biography as a genre.

Physical description of the subject is not simply an affectation or embellishment; it is the stylistic essence of embodiment. In her study of the concept of the body in Christian and

Hebraic scripture, Elaine Scarry writes, “To have a body is, finally, to permit oneself to be described.”*® To have lived (or to live) is to possess a body, and the possession of a body indicates an accommodation to enclosure by, and reproduction in, words: “The consent to have a body is the consent to be perceived and the consent to be perceived is the consent to be described” (217). As Scarry elaborates, the tradition of conferring a body on God is perhaps the most familiar manifestation of the primacy of the desire, throughout history, to represent the immaterial — an abstract deity or, to extend the idea, a physically absent biographical subject — in material form through physical details. Without a concerted attempt to resurrect a physical body by means of language, a biography becomes little more than a list of events. Again, we turn to Updike: “The trouble with literary biographies is, perhaps, that they mainly testify to the long worldly corruption of a life, as documented deeds and days and disappointments pile up, and cannot convey the unearthly

82 human innocence that attends, in the perpetual present tense of living, the self that seems the real one” (187).

To create that “perpetual present tense,” the sense of a life being lived rather than merely a story being told, biographers may employ one of two strategies that testify to the significance of the task: either they describe an attempt to undergo physical approximations of the experiences which their subjects endured; or they avoid the attempt

(or the description of it) and concentrate on the subjects’ recollections of experiences.

“We must try to measure the world through the subject’s eyes and to penetrate into what those eyes saw,” Edel writes. David McCullough, biographer of Theodore Roosevelt,

Washington Roebling and Harry Truman, faithfully observes Edel’s dictum, an interviewer reports:

When David McCullough was writing The Great Bridge, his chronicle of how the Brooklyn Bridge was built, he grew a beard, the better to look and feel like one of the book’s heroes, engineer Washington Roebling. While working on Truman . . . he would begin each day with a brisk early morning walk, just as Harry S. Truman did. To learn the rhythms of speech and of life in Truman’s hometown. Independence, Mo., Mr. McCullough lived there for a while. In Washington, he raced through the Capitol, retracing the path Truman ran when he was summoned to the White House on April 12, 1945, to be told that Franklin D. Roosevelt had died and that he was now President of the United States. (Fein, 1)

Likewise, for his Lyndon Johnson biography, Robert Caro believed he needed to touch the same soil that Johnson had touched:

Often, during the seven years I was working on (the) book, I would be in New York one day, and the next day I would fly to Texas.. . . The culture of the (Texas) Hill Country was so diflferent from the one in which I was raised that one day I said to my wife, ‘I’m not really understanding these people, or Lyndon Johnson. We have to move to the Hill Country.’ We moved to a house on the edge of the ffill Country, and for parts of three years I lived there, driving to lonely

83 ranches and farms to interview the people who grew up and went to college with Lyndon Johnson and helped make his first political machine. (203)

Yet for her biography of Isak Dinesen, Parmenia Migel had the opposite ambition, encouraged by Dinesen's instructions: “I did not go to Afiica only because Tania

(Dinesen) asked me not to do so. T want you to reconstructmy Afiica out of my memories and your own imagination,’ she said. ‘If you go there now and see a modem

Nairobi and my farm which has become a golf club, you will only get a false impression’ ”

(x).

What is significant about these contrary ideas about how best to apprehend the subject’s life, and thus be able to translate that knowledge into prose from which the subject’s person(ality) will flower, is the faith the biographers have in their ability to do just that: to reconstruct a time, a place and ultimately a person, based on the biographer’s presence or absence from the subject’s personal geography. Indeed, Hermione Lee, who is presently at work on a biography of Virginia Woolf, says that she was motivated to undertake the project partially because as a child, she (Lee) walked the same path to school as did Virginia W oolf.W hile the finished text rather than the method of its production is the focus of this study, methodology is significant because it reveals the extent to which biographers believe they must attempt to evoke specific physical embodiment.

Virginia Woolfs biographers attempt to accomplish that embodiment of their subject through various rhetorical strategies, some of which seem to become metaphors for the réanimation itself. In 1936, according to the King biography, Leonard and Virginia

84 Woolf were driving from their home in Rodmell to London. With Leonard at the wheel, they soon were engulfed in excessively thick fog. Consequently, “Virginia got out of the car and walked along beside him” (545-6), guiding Leonard and the car through the ghostly fog. The picture is highly evocative and suggestive, in the same way that, as

Epstein notes, certain incidents in Izaak Walton’s Life o f Donne mark occasions when the narrative itself becomes an agent of réanimation. These moments not only situate the physical body of the subject in an historical moment, but also serve as flashes of symbolic transference. This strategy on the part of biographers, Epstein says, is able to “initiate a procedure by which life converted into text can become text reconverted into life”

{Recognizing Biography, 24). The narrative is more than a means of conveying information; it is the place wherein “language can convert life-made-text into text-made- life, can transform human death into biographical life and biographical death into a discursive existence continuously renewed” (Epstein, 27). The moment when Virginia

Woolf is walking slowly through the fog, with the solemn architecture of London rising around her in massive invisible rows, the homes and offices only emerging as she is immediately alongside them and then, just as suddenly, retreating once again into the murky grip of the fog, is emblematic of techniques employed by biographers to attempt to reanimate the physical body: the body emerges active and whole only (and only momentarily) in precise physical descriptions and specific anecdotes, before receding once more into the disheveling embrace of the past. The anecdote not only places Virginia

Woolf in a specific physical context, but also serves as a symbolic agent of the implicit biographical quest for réanimation. King’s narrative reinscribes the physical reality of

85 Virginia Woolf both by summoning her to appear in the biographer’s drama of recapitulation, and by embodying, in the incident itself, a metaphorical rendering of the biographical task; the biographer (and by proxy, the reader) move slowly and painstakingly through a fog of unknowingness, searching for a glimpse of the solid and verifiable, a touch of the tangible, by which to gain their bearings while immersed in the biographical subject’s “life” story/^

In another instance of the text itself fimctioning as a self-generative agent of biographical revelation. Bell describes butterfly-collecting, the favorite pastime of the

Stephen family when Virginia was a child:

As blood sports go, the killing of lepidoptera has a good deal to recommend it: it can offend only the most squeamish of humanitarians; it involves all the passion and skill of the naturalist, the charm of summer excursions and sudden exhilarating pursuits, the satisfaction of filling in gaps in the collection, the careful study of text books and, above all, the mysterious pleasure of staying up late, and walking softly through the night to where a rag, soaked in rum and treacle, has attracted dozens of slugs, crawly-bobs and, perhaps, some great lamp-eyed, tipsy, extravagantly gaudy moth. This again was something Virginia never forgot.. .. (I, 33-4)=

The activity described so compellingly in Bell’s narrative — the trapping, killing and displaying of butterflies — can be read as obviously emblematic of the biographical mission itself, with the biographical subject in some sense made the victim of the biographer’s curiosity, acquisitive maneuvers and desire to preserve.^ At specific points in a biography

(King’s description of Virginia Woolf s journey through fog. Bell’s depiction of the delights of butterfly-hunting) the narrative itself is able both to embody the subject and to reflect the task of embodying the subject. Thus biographical narrative circumscribes atid symbolizes; it conveys and constitutes.

86 Similarly, in his 1996 biography of William Blake, Peter Ackroyd links an aspect of

Blake’s life with the task of biographical writing. This metaphor functions in much the same way as does King’s evocation of the foggy walk. Bell’s of the butterfly expeditions.

Blake was by trade an engraver, Ackroyd notes:

For the rest of his life he was surrounded by iron pots for the boiling of the oil, pans for warming the copper plates, tallow candles, racks of needles and gravers, fine linen cloth to strain the varnish, vessels for mixing the aqua fortis used in ‘biting in’ the plates, old rags for wiping the ink off the plates, pumice stones to polish the plates, feathers for smoothing the ground of varnish on the plates.. . . Words were for him objects carved out of metal, and it could be said that the technical requirements of his trade — the need for strong outline, for example, and the importance of minute particulars — helped him to formulate an entire metaphysical system. (43-4)

Biographical life emerges, moving through a fog or impaled on a pin or cooling like a delicate pattern on a copper plate, through physical anecdotes and details.

We learn, for instance, at various points in the Virginia Woolf biographies that are the focus of this study, that she was “rosy and chubby as a child” (King, 27), clumsy (or

“prone to accidents” [I, 24], as Bell diplomatically puts it) and that her bodily existence apparently was a perpetual “surprise” to her (Rose, 251). We discover that her stockings often fell down, a source of irritation to the fastidious Leonard Woolf (King, 581); that she once endured an embarrassing ordeal when a chocolate cake she was carrying to a tea with T.S. Eliot melted and ran down her legs while she sat on a crowded subway (King,

559); that she “kept her underclothes pinned together by brooches” (King, 247). These anecdotes of physicality, as opposed to biographers’ ruminations about Virginia Woolfs psychological or emotional state at particular points in her life, are deployed at strategic

87 intervals throughout the biographies; they are touchstones of text-generated actuality that

simulate the experience of encountering the “real” Virginia Woolf.

Gordon is the only one of the five Virginia Woolf biographers under consideration

who specifically eschews a focus on the physical. She pronounces herself reluctant to engage in a recapitulation of the physical essence of Virginia Woolf not because such a task is impossible — Gordon does not take a stand on the issue — but because she believes there has been entirely too much fuss made about Virginia Woolfs physical self: “Virginia

Woolfs visible life in Bloomsbury, her famous, wild flights of fancy and withdrawals into sickness, and the associated legends of an invalid lady, a firigid body, a precious aesthete withdrawn from the world, have been endlessly repeated” (5-6), Gordon complains. She, the biographer, will concentrate instead on “the invisible events that shaped her work: the memories of childhood, the odd education, the volcanic matter of her madness, the unusual marriage” (6). This high-minded disdain for the physical side of Virginia Woolfs life is interesting on two fi"onts: first, Gordon clearly equates anecdotes with gossip, and gossip with irrelevancy. She wishes, she says, “to see a Virginia Woolf not as she appeared to others but as she appeared to herself’ (6). Gordon seems indifferent to the paradox: there is no way to “see” another person except as she appears to others. The act of interpretation is ongoing and omnipresent. There is no “pure” access to another’s perspective, no untainted vantage point fi-om which one can view a consciousness other than one’s own. Even if a biographer fails to quote fi-om a great many secondary sources, the very act of presenting the subject’s life in text is necessarily shot through with interpretation.

88 Second, and for my purposes, more significantly, Gordon, in fact, relies upon

Virginia Woolf s physical reality to provide two crucial metaphors in the biography. Her disinclination to include the subject’s physicality is belied by her own narrative strategy; the persistence of the physical is evident in Gordon’s work even as she disowns it.

The first incidence of Gordon’s enfolding of the physical into a larger symbolic weave occurs during her description of the aftermath of the death of Virginia Woolfs mother, Julia, in 1895. Virginia Woolf and her siblings are eager for their father’s embrace but he is too wrapped up in his own grief to console them. To express this situation,

Gordon uses a physical metaphor — and a highly effective one; “Virginia, aged thirteen, stretched out her arms to this man (Leslie Stephen) as he came stumbling fi’om Julia’s deathbed but he brushed impatiently past” (27). The image of a child hungry for affection, and a father so preoccupied with his own suffering that he can provide no sustenance, might have descended into melodramatic cliche, were it not for the vividness and power of the physical image of outstretched arms and outright rejection. The moment is, according to what we know of the Virginia Woolf “story” — the life-chronicle that has passed into the fund of popular knowledge, as surely as has the physical image of a thin, nervous- looking woman with deep-set eyes — symbolic of the childhood endured by Leslie

Stephen’s children, forced as they were to cope simultaneously with the loss of their mother through death and their father through his inability to recover from that death.

Reference to the physical world of body parts and motion limns the metaphor, anchoring it in the reality of Virginia Woolfs daily existence. Similarly, Gordon develops a neat parallel between Virginia Woolf s rambles through Cornwall in 1905 and the budding

89 author’s growing sense of a potential writing style: “As though she were tracking a metaphor for her future work, she followed natural paths which ignored artificial boundaries. The padlocked gates and farm walls were deceptive barriers for, when she climbed over, the path would continue quite happily” (78). Again, the physical image of

Virginia Woolf gamboling across the countryside, the landscape mirroring the tangle of her thoughts, is suggestive because of its reference to the physical world: a young girl on a walk, a rugged, mysterious topography.Physicality is enlisted in the service of characterization and plot.

Virginia Woolfs biographers employ different methods for promulgating her physical presence, but all share two techniques: the pronouncement, or declarative sentence at the beginning of a chapter or subsection of a chapter that serves as a summary of Virginia Woolfs physical state at that moment in time, fixing her at a precise point of specific recollection; and the reference to a “typical day” — a list of activities in which

Virginia Woolf indulged during a proscribed period of time, in which various scenes are described. Gordon, for instance, begins a section this way:

October 1904 marked the beginning of a new life. Virginia Stephen, aged twenty- two, no longer had to look out on old Mrs Redgrave washing her neck across a narrow street. She looked out on trees which seemed to fountain up in the middle of Gordon Square. More important, she now had a separate work-room with a very high desk where she would stand to write for two and a half hours each morning .... Just before lunch she liked to “dash” down the Tottenham Court Road, poking into old furniture shops, and then to loiter in old book shops in Oxford Street. (116)

The sentence beginning, “October 1904” brings the narrative to a full stop, creating an instant cameo of Virginia Woolf at twenty-two as she looked out across trees or enjoyed

90 her first private work-room. The verbs “poke” and “loiter” also are not idly chosen; they are highly evocative, suggesting a restless, nervous energy and the intense physicality of the young Virginia Woolf. DeSalvo uses a similar technique — the sudden pronouncement to open a section or chapter, which serves both to summarize the subject’s physical state

(age, year, location) and to foreshadow a coming event or psychological revelation — at the beginning of Chapter 8;

On [a] Sunday, [in] January 1897, just before her fifteenth birthday, Virginia Stephen, an angular, ungainly adolescent, picked up her favorite pen (and she was passionate about pens), the one with the thin sharp nib that bit into the paper as it crossed over it (but without leaving ink trails — a trait that was unforgivable in nibs). And she picked up her diary, a brown leather one, trimmed with gilt, which had a lock and a key, a diary a little larger than the palm of your hand. And she headed for an empty comer of the teeming Stephen family house in Hyde Park Gate in London, where she could have some solitude away fi’om the peering, penetrating eyes of servants and family, all of whom were always on the lookout for some sign of deviance, some sign of anxiety in this girl who had been, since her mother’s death in 1893, given to rages and depressions. (233)"

Physically descriptive adjectives such as “angular” and “ungainly” are employed to suggest the physical demeanor of Virginia Woolf. Moreover, the phrase “picked up her diary” gives the moment (an imagined moment, of course, since DeSalvo obviously wasn’t present) a cinematic quality; the fact that Virginia Woolf began keeping a diary in the winter of 1897 goes from a simple point of information to an epiphany. DeSalvo uses physical description within the pronouncement to dramatize the moment, to set it off from the chain of mere chronology.

Bell employs a pronouncement at the outset of Chapter 9 (I): “On the morning of 10 February 1910, Virginia, with five companions, drove to Paddington Station and took a train to Weymouth. She wore a turban, a fine gold chain hanging to her waist and

91 an embroidered caftan” (I, 157). He is describing the Dreadnought hoax, a lark

engineered by Virginia Woolfs brother, Adrian, and several friends who, disguised as

visitors from an unspecified country, hoodwinked the ofiBcers aboard the H.M.S.

Dreadnought into offering the impostors lavish hospitality. The immediacy of the chapter

opening, the sense of an imminent adventure, is conveyed by Bell’s prose. Adding the time of day (morning) as well as the date, and bringing the reader along for the ride, as it were, is in contrast to much of the rest of Bell’s biography, which is told in retrospective omniscience: “Thoby’s death was a disaster from which Virginia could not easily recover,” he writes to begin Chapter 6 (I). Elsewhere in his narrative, he states: “We may think of Virginia at this period as a rather tall, rather thin overgrown girl reading or writing in a back room at Hyde Park Gate” (I, 51). The biographer acquires an almost pontifical tone, setting forth physical description as a line of demarcation in the narrative: at this point, things were that way. Rose employs fewer pronouncements than the other four biographers of Woolf, yet she begins her biography with an almost impressionistic moment: “Her earliest memory was of red and purple flowers on a black dress. She was sitting on her mother’s lap, returning from St. Ives, in Cornwall. Then, the sound of waves breaking on the beach as she lay in the nursery” (3). King employs the pronouncement to describe Virginia Woolfs reaction to the prospect of World War H:

“On 28 August 1939, Virginia wondered if the nine o’clock broadcast would bring news of a declaration of war and thus an end to life as they had known it. That day, she walked the downs, lay under a cornstalk and looked at the empty land and pink clouds in front of her” (592).

92 Another technique, the list of daily activities, enables the biographers to place

Virginia Woolf in the midst of the ordinary, a backdrop against which her extraordinariness — that is, her suitability as a biographical subject — will stand out in sharp relief. Even when the quotidian reality is based upon “slender evidence,” as Bell admits is the case with his description of the Stephen family on its annual journey to St.

Ives, the list is fortifyingly familiar:

Mr and Mrs Stephen, the girls, Adrian (Thoby might come later from school), Stella and perhaps her brothers . . . and all their luggage in surely no fewer than two four-wheelers, the children bubbling with excitement as they made their way to Paddington Station to catch, let us say, the 10.15.. .. And then the long journey, starting in high spirits as the Cornish Express bustled from Paddington to Bristol, reaching Temple Meads at 12.45; here there was an opportunity to get a luncheon basket unless, of course, they had their own sandwiches; then followed the long, hot, sticky and increasingly quarrelsome journey, nature relieved into a chamber pot, papers, books.... (I, 31)

Specific details — sandwiches, chamber pots — shade the anecdote with verisimilitude. The pell-mell, tumbling rush of the clauses, moreover, mimics the hectic nature of the journey;

Bell’s language is a reflection of the messy odyssey he wants to relate. Here is Bell describing a day in Virginia Woolfs adult life: she “took an afternoon train into town from

Richmond, went to the National Gallery and there met Clive, who, as his habit was, took her to eat ices at Gunter’s, where she observed her fellow patrons with fascinated interest.

Then she dined with Vanessa at Gordon Square” (II, 73). Similarly, Rose suggests young

Virginia Woolfs daily routine with this brief portrait: “Up in her room, Virginia could spend the mornings reading, writing, translating Greek, but towards four-thirty she had to transform herself into a well-bred young lady and participate in the rites of polite society”

(21). Because Virginia Woolf left long, detailed diaries and other autobiographical

93 writings, DeSalvo relies on that material to place the subject in the midst of a “typical” day: “On a typical Monday, 25 January 1897, Woolfs fifteenth birthday, she records a walk around the Round Pond after breakfast with her father, a trip with Stella to see about a book for Jack Hills, Stella’s fiancé; a trip to Regent Street for flowers and finit.. . . ”

(212). Gordon, dependent on the same diary, brings her narrative to full stop to accommodate the glimpse of daily routine: “It is quite easy to reconstruct fi"om the diary a sample day in Virginia’s life at fifteen. It would begin with the morning walk, followed by two hours of instruction in classics - some Livy or two Greek exercises. She might, alternatively, do a little German with Stella. Later in the morning she and Stella might go shopping to get stuff for the drawing-room chairs.. . . ” (76). King decides to abandon the pretense of paraphrase and simply quotes the diary fi"om 1939: “ ‘Breakfast in bed. Read in bed. Bath. Order diimer. Out to Lodge. After rearranging my room (turning table to get the sun: Church on right; window left; a new very lovely view) tune up, with cigarette: write till 12’ ” (604). These lists of daily activities, juxtaposed as they are with the biographers’ meditations on abstract psychological and cultural issues as they relate to the life “story” (i.e., a compendium of events, decisions and consequences fashioned into narrative) of Virginia Woolf, serve to situate the body, the physical presence in a time other than the present, in the midst of the biographical project.

Physical descriptions in biographies are never “pure”; they are never detached from the narrative agenda planned by the biographer. Strategies of physical description, that is, conspire with the biographical project itself to create the desired portrait, a portrait that must be at odds with previous portraits, or else the biography-in-progress could not be

94 justified. (Why repeat someone else’s work?) First, a biographer determines the prevailing image of the subject, then seeks to slyly undermine (or openly compete with) that image with her or his own, updated version. I have chosen to call this biographical strategy

“double subjectivity”; Virginia Woolf becomes first a subjectivity in the biographer’s gaze, by the very nature of the biographical project and its attempt to circumscribe the life in the biographer’s words; Virginia Woolf then becomes a subjectivity a second time, by the biographer’s determination of a thesis to explain and contextualize her life. This double subjectivity operates to some degree in all biographies, whether or not the biographer presents a specific thesis that admittedly is guiding the selection of material and the tone of the narrative. The act of choosing a biographical subject implies one subjectivity, while the writing of the biography necessitates a second.^® Physical description, the words by which biographers create the illusion of a physical body, is the discernible link between the competing subjectivities, the realm in which it is possible both to theorize about the nature of the biographical project (i.e., the subject cannot escape the biographer’s imprisoning gaze) and to observe the prose manifestation of that theory (i.e., the subject likewise cannot escape the biographer’s imprisoning rhetoric).^’

The DeSalvo biography is perhaps the clearest example of the competition between subjectivities, between the clashing biographical perspectives on Virginia Woolf, that makes multiple treatments of the same individual viable as an intellectual pursuit. As the subtitle of her work suggests {The Impact o f Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and

W ork\ DeSalvo believes that Virginia Woolfs molestation by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth was the most significant event in her life, drastically altering her

95 psychological development and, by extension, her writing.^ DeSalvo’s thesis, her view of

Virginia Woolf as a living body who underwent certain ordeals, and her view of Virginia

Woolf as the creator of literary texts about those ordeals that she, DeSalvo, will purport to critique, is rendered through the deployment of physical description, of words that will specifically denote Virginia Woolf as a physical body. These are the “subjectivities” to which I allude; Virginia Woolf is subject to DeSalvo’s decision that previous biographers have given short shrift to certain physical ordeals; Virginia Woolf also is subject to

DeSalvo’s use of these ordeals to explain her (Virginia Woolfs) work. Each biographer, I maintain, selects her or his own second, or competing, subjectivity (one which competes with the established view, the “status quo” version of the biographical subject); that competition then becomes the rationale for her or his own biographical project. Physical description, which fixes that subjectivity for the reader of the biography, thus is implicated in this strategy.

Using partial quotations from Virginia Woolfs diary entries to give the incident what she (DeSalvo) must perceive is the automatic verisimilitude of a first-person account, the biographer describes the origins of Virginia Woolfs “looking-glass shame” — a repulsion at viewing her reflected image:

. . . [A]t age six or seven she was sexually abused by Gerald Duckworth. . . . She wonders why she feels shame about her body, so in contrast to a positive sense of self, a pride in one’s body, that she has seen and admired in other people. . . . But while exploring that she was “ashamed or afraid of my own body” (68), she writes of “the shame” of “being caught looking at myself in the glass” at St. Ives, which leads to another memory of the looking glass in the hall, the memory of how, at six or seven, she was sexually assaulted by Gerald Duckworth on a ledge in the same hall in which that mirror hung [DeSalvo’s italics], outside the dining room door. The ledge was usually used for stacking dishes. But Gerald lifted her onto it and “as I sat there he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand

96 going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too”(69). No more significant a place could exist for sexual assaults that this — being fingered by someone on a ledge where plates of food were placed on their way to and fi"om the dining room. Can there be any mystery about why Virginia Woolf had trouble eating later in life?.... I strongly suspect that what intensified the horror of the experience was the fact that Virginia was able to see herself in the mirror; she was watching herself being assaulted. No wonder that she developed a dread of looking at herself in that mirror, in any mirror. (104-5)

Consider the competing subjectivities created by DeSalvo’s description of the incident, of the physical body of Virginia Woolf at this moment in time: Virginia Woolf is assaulted and, by virtue of a nearby mirror, is able to watch herself. The reader, by virtue of

DeSalvo’s biography, is able to watch Virginia Woolf being assaulted, and to watch

Virginia Woolf watch herself being assaulted. DeSalvo uses a concise description of the violation visited upon Virginia Woolfs body — “being fingered” — to place the biographical subject in the context most conducive to the confirmation of the biographer’s thesis. Similarly, DeSalvo writes of another incident in which the dark world of adult sexuality is allowed to shadow Virginia Woolfs childhood, as revealed through a depiction of a specifically physical predicament. Jack Hills, who is ardently courting

Virginia Woolfs half-sister, Stella, is apparently trying to rid himself of Virginia and

Vanessa so that he can be alone with his beloved: “Virginia and Vanessa were sent out for a bicycle ride in the country, without a map, carrying biscuits and chocolate as emergency rations. .. . They were soon covered with mud and soaked to the skin -cold, miserable, and angry. They were jeered at by a group of schoolboys marching along” (228). The physical details of the ordeal that DeSalvo provides (alas for unfortunate clichés such as

97 “soaked to the skin”) once again place Virginia Woolf at the scene of a dual subjectivity: first, she is the focus of DeSaivo’s attention as a biographical subject; second, her physical body, the body that rode a bicycle on muddy country roads because a thoughtless, selfish man wanted his own way, is the site of yet another subjectivity, as it serves DeSalvo’s agenda that Virginia Woolf was repeatedly victimized as a child. (Curiously, too, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the mirror incident, Virginia Woolfs physical discomfort and humiliation once again are witnessed, this time by a “group of schoolboys”; again, the reader watches Virginia Woolfs body as it is watched by others, including first, of course, the biographer.)

The four other Virginia Woolf biographies under consideration also exhibit the tension of competing subjectivities, as manifested in the physical descriptions of Virginia

Woolf. Each biography is predicated upon the inherent subjectivity of the biographer- biographical subject relationship; that is, Virginia Woolf is subject to the particular prejudice of each biographer. Beyond that, each biography creates its own competing subjectivity, in the guise of a thesis about the subject, a thesis chosen by the biographer.

Just as DeSalvo posits Virginia Woolfs subjectivity as a victim of incest. Rose posits her subjectivity as a feminist martyr; Bell, as a member of his family whom he must reinstate in the family fold; Gordon, as a misunderstood literary stylist whom she must reintroduce to the world; and King, as a sort of Everywoman who, despite the remarkable achievements and circumstances of her life, can be revealed as indistinguishable fi'om everyone else. In King’s odd sentence, “She is one of us” (xv). These “extra” subjectivities become, in some sense, the justification for each subsequent biography of Virginia Woolf;

98 they constitute each biographer’s stated or unstated reason for attempting a biography of a subject whose life already has been amply chronicled. Physical description, moreover, is one of the rhetorical strategies by which the biographer presents a second subjectivity, the perspective unique (it is hoped) to each biography that exists in creative opposition to the original subjectivity implied by all biographies. Rose, for instance, employs a physical description of the young Virginia Woolf toward a very different end than does DeSalvo, although it derives from the same source: Virginia Woolfs diary. While DeSalvo sees

Virginia Woolf s repulsion at viewing her own body as a result of sexual molestation, a position that, of course, reinforces DeSalvo’s thesis. Rose perceives the same bodily discomfort on Virginia Woolfs part in terms of gender stereotypes:

Virginia inherited this [her mother’s] beauty, but from early on her relationship to it (for her beauty seems, when she talks of it, a thing detached from her) was complex and difficult. She could not simply accept it or rest easy with it. Another of her early memories focuses on the looking-glass in the hall at the house in St. Ives. She was six or seven, and already she could scarcely bring herself to look in the mirror. Why? She offers explanations: she was a tomboy, and it violated the tomboy code. More searchingly, she says that something in her made her reject whatever in herself gave her pleasure. (5-6)

The “looking-glass shame” is, to DeSalvo, an inevitable result of the power relations that made young girls subject to the dark sexual yearnings of their half-siblings; to Rose, it is a corollary to the disparity between the genders when the issue is ease with one’s physical body. In any case, physical description, the instant when young Virginia Woolf turns away shyly from the hall mirror, is the flash point for each biographer’s interpretive strategy, the moment that initiates the life-into-text-into-life sequence that distinguishes the genre.

99 For Bell, physical descriptions of Virginia Woolf are closely allied with her status as a member of a family, the family of her father, the renowned author Leslie Stephen, and later the family collected under the heading “Bloomsbury,” a geographic location that came, of course, to represent a group of artistic friends. Bell is Virginia Woolfs nephew, a fact he takes no pains to hide; his depictions of her physical essence are almost always offered in terms of a family situation with family members as witnesses (or, less charitably, as judges). Of the infant Virginia Woolf, he writes;

In appearance she was, like Vanessa, remarkably pretty; a plump, round-faced child with they eyelids and the mouth of a Buddhist carving, deeply sculpted but exquisitely smooth. She had rosy cheeks and green eyes — thus her sister remembered her, impatiently drumming on the nursery table for a breakfast that she had not yet learnt to call for in words. (I, 22)

The most strikingly unusual physical description of Virginia Woolf that Bell provides is an observation made by Vanessa: “ ‘She reminded me always of a sweet pea of a special flame color’ ” (I, 23). Other moments in which the young Virginia Woolf is presented in an explicitly physical context similarly are rendered in terms of their effects on others — not, as was the case in the biographies by Rose and DeSalvo, in terms of their effects on

Virginia Woolf: “Virginia used her nails and, at a very early age, discovered that she could torment her sister by scratching a distempered wail — a thing which set poor Vanessa’s teeth dreadfully on edge. ...” (I, 23-4). Virginia Woolf, along with her siblings, finally recovers from a bout of whooping cough in 1888: “Soon they all made a complete recovery — all save Virginia. When they returned she was no longer so round and so rosy as she had been. She was marked, very gently but still perceptibly, by that thin, fine, angular elegance which she kept all her life” (I, 25).

100 The subjectivity in which Bell places Virginia Woolfs body thus is benign and familial; her famished-looking adult frame and haunted expression are depicted as the results of a common illness shared by her siblings, not the consequences of a private nightly mauling at the hands of her half-siblings, fumbling assaults which Bell decorously calls “bedtime pettings” (I, 43). In Bell’s rendering of Virginia Woolfs physical body, even illnesses with appreciable physical manifestations are, in effect, ritualistic bonding mechanisms, the application of marks of similarity that indicate kinship and shared ordeals.

Moreover, just as DeSalvo presents the double (and even triple) subjectivity of Virginia

Woolfs physical body in the incidents during which the reader is watching Virginia Woolf watching herself, Bell, too, offers a portrait of Virginia Woolf in 1935 as she imagined she

“must have appeared” to a younger generation of writers. She saw herself. Bell believes, as “an angular, remote, odd, perhaps rather intimidating figure, a fragile middle-aged poetess, a sexless Sappho and, as the crisis of the decade drew to its terrible conclusion, oddly irrelevant - a distressed gentlewoman caught in a tempest and making little effort either to fight against it or to sail before it” (H, 185). Even in this imagined self-critique, devastating in its detail. Bell echoes the circumstances of Virginia Woolfs high birth: she is a “distressed gentlewoman.” The view that Bell imposes upon Virginia Woolfs physical body, that she is not simply a biographical subject, but also a biographical subject who is a permanent member of a family and that family’s class, is the salient characteristic of Bell’s biography, presenting, as it does, a carefully circumscribed image of Virginia Woolf as a physical entity of a particular time, place and genealogical cultivation.

101 Gordon employs Virginia Woolfs physicality to correct what she, the biographer,

sees as misinterpretation of Virginia Woolfs literary achievements, misinterpretations

based on parallels between Virginia Woolfs physical image (the frail, trembling artist) and

the ephemeral flights of her prose. Virginia Woolfs record of her physical activities,

Gordon scolds, “contradicts her reputation for being fragile and nervy. She inherited her

father’s spartan toughness, could tramp endless miles, and, on journeys, put up cheerfiilly

with daunting conditions” (54). To demonstrate this strength and pluck, Gordon offers

portraits of Virginia Woolf that are rooted in physical realities and details. In 1905, for

instance, Virginia Woolf and her fnends would chat “until two or three in the morning,

fortified by whiskey, buns, and cocoa, in their large, ground-fioor sitting room with Gurth the sheep dog, as sole chaperone” (121). The chatting, moreover, did not consist of timid remarks from a shy young woman: “Her voice seemed to preen itself with self-confidence in its verbal facility as she leant sideways, a little stiffly in her chaif’ (176), Gordon writes.

In 1917, the biographer says, “Virginia Woolf went up to London more frequently, sometimes to parties and concerts, but often simply to lope the streets” (171); “lope” serves as an especially physically evocative verb. While Gordon states that Virginia

Woolf s literary achievements are the true focus of the biography — “This book will rock back and forth between the life and the work, coming to rest always on the work” (8) — and lengthy critical analyses of each work are juxtaposed with biographical details,

Gordon’s physical description of Virginia Woolf at work in 1924 is a powerful attempt at réanimation: “She wore a blue overall and steel-rimmed glasses and sat hunched in a distended wicker chair with a board across its arms to which she had glued her inkstand, in

102 imitation of her father. A home-rolled sh% cigarette drooped from her lips, her hair hung across her forehead” (179). Gordon positions Virginia Woolf as a subjectivity in need of release from the very physical details necessary for a biographical rendering; inevitably, perhaps, Gordon’s work seem to magnify that which it ostensibly seeks to marginalize:

Virginia Woolf as a physical entity.

King’s biography is replete with physical details about the circumstances of

Virginia Woolf s life that seem designed to reduce her to an ordinary, more accessible scale; the details create a “Virginia Woolf’ who accommodates King’s thesis: “Virginia

Woolf is ours because she speaks to us of life as we experience it.. .. The great writers embrace life in all its complexity; we find ourselves and each other in their pages” (xv).

Because he posits Virginia Woolf as “ours,” King selects incidents with which all can seemingly identify: ordinary errands, familiar dilemmas. Virginia Woolf “could become distraught at the prospect of buying hats or especially clothes,” King writes. “The search for the latter was a dangerous and potentially embarrassing activity for a person who kept her underclothes pinned together by brooches” (247). King employs physical details as correctives to any notion of Virginia Woolf as special or different from the average nm of humanity; he presents images of a Virginia Woolf suffering after the extraction of a trio of teeth (307), sleeping under a table during air raids in World War H (257), and even searching for the culprit in a most annoying bodily problem: “Who was spreading head lice

— Leonard or Lottie (a servant)? Virginia preferred to catch it from Leonard” (282). Few physical details cut a subject down to size more persuasively than the presence of parasites.

103 Evocation of the physical body is particularly significant in the case of biographies of Virginia Woolf; more so, it may seem, than in biographies of many other subjects. This is because the body, as physical entity and symbol, figured so prominently in Virginia

Woolfs life and thought. As biographers have noted, abuse of her body when she was a child, by the two half-brothers, was a recurrent theme in Virginia Woolfs private writings and, some have argued, were the cause of her unwillingness, as an adult, to engage in sexual relations with her husband.^ The body — Virginia Woolfs own, as well as the issue of physical presence versus spiritual essence - interested her as much as did any other single subject. Virginia Woolf was, it might be theorized, obsessed with the body. As her biographers have chronicled, she had difBculty eating — i.e., sustaining the body — for what may have been a variety of reasons, including a disgust with defecation.^® She may have suffered fi'om anorexia, that supreme emblem of body-obsession, among the symptoms of which is a severely distorted body image.^‘ Body-image issues, therefore, are present throughout Virginia Woolfs work, studies of her work, and, of course, biographies of Virginia Woolf.

Yet whether or not the biographical subject ever manifested an interest in the body, the body of that subject becomes an important site of contestation in the biography.

Biographers “create” the body of the subject in words, using calculated prose devices detailed earlier, and then assert ownership of this reanimated body, this (literally) copyrighted version of the subject, by insinuating an aura of inevitability about the interpretation. The subject is this way, hence the subject rm/st be this way. That this is so much rhetorical sleight-of-hand does not diminish its effectiveness. Roger Poole, for

104 instance, believes that Virginia Woolf was manipulated and abused by a nefarious Leonard

Woolf; thus Poole offers a raft of details about fluctuations in Woolfs body weight and

food intake, which was supervised by Leonard Woolf, throughout his biography. The

cumulative presentation of these facts, at the expense of others, results in precisely the

portrait of Virginia Woolf — dazed victim of force-feedings by a maniacally spoon-

wielding Leonard Woolf — that Poole desires. Likewise, the subjectivities preferred by

other biographers (King’s ploddingly domestic Virginia Woolf, Gordon’s memory-haunted

Virginia Woolf, Bell’s slightly loopy gentlewoman. Roses’s feminist heroine, DeSalvo’s

hapless victim) all place the physical body in the service of a specific thesis.

The body, moreover, also is re-created by critics as they wrangle over the meaning

and influence of a subject’s work. Evoking the body is not limited to biographers; critics

do it, too, however strenuously they might claim that they are restricting their comments

to “the work.”^^ Consider the famous feud between Virginia Woolf scholar Jane Marcus

and Bell; while the quarrel purports to be about image and reputation, about literary

legacy, it is really a tug-of-war over the “body” of Virginia Woolf. Both Bell and Marcus

want to possess that body. Reading the essays that flew back and forth in scholarly journals between the adversaries in the mid-1980s, in fact, is akin to watching two people

each grab a wrist of the woman in the middle, and yank in opposite directions.

In 1979, Marcus complained about Bell’s biography:

He has given her an extended family setting that branches out a bit beyond Bloomsbury. But where is that solitary strange antisocial woman who valued privacy so highly that she made it the first principle of her aesthetic? One sees all her nests, their fiimiture in detail with learned labels on every stick and straw. But where is the Virginia Woolf who wrote novels — the great blue heron of a writer, in flight, alone? (145-46)

105 Bell responds that the family setting indeed is important to an understanding of Virginia

Woolfs life and work. Marcus’ next salvo, which begins with a long discussion of

Virginia Woolfs use of the term “bogey” to describe the patriarchal God in Paradise Lost, a figure which Marcus appropriates to delineate Bell’s biographical prerogative, is to announce that she must “explain yet again to Quentin Bell how his Virginia Woolf is different fi’om our Virginia Woolf. His Woolf is a bogey which fiightens American women readers. Our Woolf is a bogey that fiightens British male readers. Perhaps the next generation of Woolf critics is sharpening even now the stars and swords which will rip away the veils and give us a real Virginia Woolf’ (488). “Our” Woolf? “His” Woolf? A

“real” Woolf? These references offer specific acknowledgment that it is virtual ownership of the body, not the interpretation of the body, which is at stake in the debate. Marcus rails against the version of Virginia Woolf “created by Quentin Bell in his 1979 biography

[which is] a modem madwoman in the attic, a fi-agile, unstable, hysterical suicide, a minor

British novelist. .. historically important because she was Leslie Stephen’s daughter and a member of the Bloomsbury group” (488-89). Bell has created “an Ophelia of the Ouse, a woman who is a failure as a woman” (489); he has created “a fiigid snob, invalid lady, mad witch.” Nowhere in Bell’s portrait, Marcus argues, is there mention of “the intellectual, the voracious reader, the original thinkef’ (490). Bell’s reply is to chide

Marcus for her “failure to use the evidence of the diaries and letters” (“Critical Response,”

499) to create “hef ’ Virginia Woolf.

106 A similar battle occurred over the biographical “body” of Sylvia Plath. The combatants were not only competing biographers, but editors as well, as Linda Wagner-

Martin describes in “Notes from a Women’s Biographer.” A male editor “was sure he knew what story I was trying to tell. ‘His’ Sylvia was a neurotic if talented (and he wasn’t so sure about that) American whose early sexual experiences would be better if left unmentioned and whose death should be the focus of the entire book” (266). “His” Sylvia,

Wagner-Martin’s Sylvia — thus the interpretive and rhetorical battles for possession rage over the prone body of the biographical subject.

Other bodies, too, are implicated in the fray. A review in The New York Times

Book Review of a 1995 biography, Katharine Hepburn, by Barbara Leaming, provoked several angry letters from the authors not of competing biographies of Hepburn, but of biographies of Hepburn’s associates who are mentioned in Leaming’s biography. The letter-writers, who included Dan Ford, grandson of director John Ford, and Selden West, a biographer of Spencer Tracy, are eager to assert authority over the bodies of their subjects; in the first case. Ford denies that his grandfather ever had a physical relationship with Hepbum, while in the second. West complains about Leaming’s characterization of the Tracy-Hepbum physical relationship. Tellingly, in both cases, the biographers seek to claim the bodies of their subjects and return them to the protected grove of their respective interpretations.

What is interesting and illuminating about these battles is that, while rhetorical, they are battles for and about the body; they are battles to assert ownership, which means, of course, control — control over how the biographical subject will be remembered. The

107 weapons in these battles over interpretations of a biographical subject are words, the words used to reanimate the subject, and to place it in a plausible context. Biographies, as

Epstein notes, are “written across the bodies” of their subjects and of those with whom the subjects associated. What is at work in the claiming of the biographical subject is not just the rhetorical techniques used to create the subject, but the way those techniques appropriate the body, refuting or displacing other creations of the same subject. Biography is the secular theater of the word made flesh.

’ A similar experience is recalled by Rebecca West, as recounted in King’s Virginia Woolf: “In the Crush Bar at Covent Garden I once heard a man say to his wife, ‘Look at the fimny-looking woman. ’ His wife peered through her glass and objected, ‘Ssh, you shouldn’t say that about her’ ” (539). ■ Leon Edel’s remarks are representative of the sentiments of a number of biographical theorists: “No lives are led outside history or society, they take place in human time. No biography is complete unless it reveals the individual within history, within an ethos and a social complex”(Writing Lives, 14). ^ Elisabeth Young-Bruehl calls the former a “recapitulation of the subject” (130) and the latter “reacquiring the past” (133). ■' For the choice of the word “myth,” my apologies to Christians and to Mary Shelley fans. ^ O’Brien goes on to complain that her biography of Willa Cather was critiqued on this basis, although she had no intention of delivering a reanimated Cather to the readers: “Given these assumptions, I can understand [critic] Marc Pachter’s disappointment when he failed to find the “real” Willa Cather living and breathing in the pages of my biography, regretfully observing that ‘Miss O’Brien has not delivered to us the presence of Willa Cather.’ But Ms. O’Brien, who was writing fi’om a different set of assumptions about theory, gender, biography, and the self, never intended to deliver the real Willa Cather to the reader” (124-5). ® Pagan, by way of Roland Barthes, juxtaposes the “flesh and blood” author with “a paper-author.” The “flesh and blood author is inaccessible; or, at leasL is knowable only as a function if discourse, not as a pre-linguistic entity” (10). ’ The advertisement appeared in the Sept. 1995 (Vol. 14, No. 1) issue. It also has appeared in several literary magazine and scholarly journals. * Indeed, Richard A. Hutch argues that the public has forged ahead of biographical scholars in recognizing the importance of beholding the biographical subjert as a physical entity. “Bodies are biological capsules which contain individuals, out of which issue stories of lives” (132), he writes, arguing for a “body-biography: What happened to a subject’s body during living?” (136) Like others, including Sven Birkerts in his article “Losing Ourselves in Biography,” Hutch believes that embodiment leads to a sense of life’s fullness, a sense that contemporary critical theory (and contemporary life itself, for that matter) has somehow stolen fiom us. Biographies that embody their subjects effectively show that those subjects are, “at the core, that recognizably scaled-down thing, a self’ (25), Birkerts writes. Hutch agrees: “The postmodern condition of knowledge itself prompts the public to flee to testaments about the fullness of life” (126) — testaments that arise when “the mortal body [is] restored to biographical studies” (128). ® Details were provided in a conference handout; the tape was described as “the only existing record of the voice of Virginia Woolf.” The conference was held June 9-12, 1995, at Bard College. Richard Holmes, biographer of Thomas Chatterton, Percy Shelley, Samuel Coleridge, et al, verified this to interviewer James Atlas: “Physical objects - Thomas Hardy’s steel-tipped pens, Shelley’s guitar, 108 Coleridge’s, laudanum-stained notebooks — hold a talismanic power over the biographer [Holmes], ‘When you’re at sea, on this tremendously rough sea,’ Holmes said . . there’s this sense it gives you that you can get one foot down to something that’s historically authentic’ ” (63). ” Historically, for such writers as John Aubrey and James Boswell, the idea of preserving the subject through prose almost seemed like literary embalming. As Epstein reports inRecognizing Biography, Boswell presented images “in which monumentalizing is directly associated with preservation as the prevention of bodily decomposition” (125). *■ As O’Brien notes, “ . . . [N]ew challenges to the notion of the self now coming from a variety of theoretical directions — primarily deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis — question the very existence of biography as a genre” (125). A helpful analogy may be drawn to contemporary architectural theory, according to architectural critic Paul Goldberger, “In most architectural theory, the physical object of a building is but a vehicle to some less tangible end” (5). Goldberger concurs with his colleague Keimeth Frampton, author ofStudies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics o f Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture: “Yes, architecture is an idea, as all art is an idea... but it is not only an idea, and it is not necessarily an idea first. It is a constructed object first, and let us remember that.” O f actual brick-and-mortar buildings, Goldberger has this to say: “Meaning should derive from these things, not precede them.” Likewise, biographical theory has a way, I think, of getting ahead of the brick-and-mortar stuff of biographies. There are many contemporary studies of biography as a gerue, but precious few studies of how specific biographies try to make the past and their subjects “live” for the reader, which is the purpose of this chapter. Photography became generally available in the mid-nineteenth century, as Leo Braudy relates in The Frenzy o f Renown: Fame and Its History. Prior to that, biographers included engravings and painted portraits with their works, but such portraits were only commissioned by and for the wealthy and those in positions of authority. The widespread availability of photographic techniques throughout the late nineteenth century, however, democratized photographic portraiture: it took “the art of imaging out of the hands of those skilled enough to paint or engrave as well as those rich enough to buy it and place[d] it at the disposal of virtually everyone” (492). Had photography not come along, though, Woolf and her contemporaries, as members of the middle and upper classes, doubtless would have been the subjects of painted portraits, and questions about the need for prose descriptions would still, consequently, have arisen. On an episode of the television situation comedyMurphy Brown, in which the middle-aged Brown (Candice Bergen) returned to her college dormitory, a poster of Virginia Woolf adorned the back of the door. No explanation was offered, but clearly the poster was intended to symbolize youthful rebellion and feminism. The poster caption, in fact, wasn’t visible; yet the Woolf profile is so familiar that it is instantly identifiable. The episode aired May 27, 1996, on CBS. In the editions selected for this study. Bell includes thirty-four photographs of Woolf and her family and colleagues (including two painted portraits and a photography of a sculpture of Woolf); DeSalvo, eighteen (including two portraits painted by Vanessa Bell); Gordon, ten; King, forty (including two portraits, one by Bell); and Rose, fourteen. Each biography also reproduces a photograph of Virginia Woolf on its cover. (A 1995 paperback reprint of Bell’s biography bears on its cover, instead of a photograph, a reproduction of Vanessa Bell’s portrait of \firginia Woolf.) Critics have been willing to consider photographs that appear in biographies as fit subjects for analysis; in a 1992 article, Roger Poole, whose biography of Virginia Woolf does not include photographs, critiques the photographs in Louise DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf: The Impact o f Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Of a Work. photograph of Stella with Jack HiUs and George Duckworth, Poole writes, “There is . . . a certain tragic dimension to her smile” (173). How does one know, however, if a facial expression in a particular photograph was staged or genuine? A pose or a candid moment? This seems to me to be excessively slippery critical terrain. Moreover, several Woolf biographers use descriptions of photographs of her and her associates to illustrate points about W oolfs physical (and, by inference, psychological) state at a point in time, even 109 when the photographs are present in the book. Gordon writes, “There is a photograph of Virginia at the age of nine or ten, chin in hand, intent on Leslie and Julia Stephen as they sit quietly reading on the sofa at St Ives. There, grave-faced in dark Victorian clothes, sit the living subjects who, as Mr and Mrs Ramsay, were to be recomposed and preserved in the artifice of fiction” (28). Note the double activity inherent in the use of this particular photograph: the biographer is watching Woolfi who is watching her parents for (the biographer speculates) later inclusion in a novel. King, too, employs descriptions of photographs almost as short cuts for physical description, and alludes to the same photograph that mesmerized Gordon — although he sees Woolf not as a budding novelist, but a forlorn outsider “Photographs of Virginia as a child reveal a deeply observant girL one who studies he 6ces of adults for clues to inner moods. This can be seen in the snapshot of her with her parents at Talland House. Hand on chin, she gazes intently at the couple, who are absorbed in their reading. For her the tragic lingered close below the surface of existence” (43). DeSalvo focused on the same photograph, and echoes Gordon’s interpretation: “In a photograph of \lrgirua Woolf taken in that same summer of 1892, at Talland House, St Ives, when she was ten years old, she sits behind her parents, chin in hand In the photograph Virginia looks at them intently . . . as if to capture the moment as completely as the photograph has captured her in the act of regarding them” (134). Some biographers, moreover, use descriptions of photographs to bolster their conclusions about the subject’s mental or physical state even when the photograph itself is not included. In his biography of Anton Chekhov, V.S. Pritchett writes, “The photographs of Anton at this time show him to be a talL energetic young man with tlie broad face of the Russian peasant His brown hair is thick and wavy. The fine long eyes have a steady thinking gaze. He is eager for responsibility and to get his family out of that Moscow slum and into decent quarters, especially for the sake of his mother” (18). “The Man Within,” 182. The Body in Pain, 216. The comment was made in a telephone conversation between Lee and the author Nov. 20, 1995, from Lee’s home in Leeds, England. King was probably unaware of the potential this incident held; given the unsophisticated nature of his biography, it is unlikely that he considered the inclusion of \firginia Woolf s journey through fog as “a reflexive gesture of metacritical self-awareness” (217), as Epstein terms such strategies in his “(Post)Modem Lives.” “ Bell’s biography, originally two volumes, has been condensed into one; however, each volume is numbered separately within the biography. I will designate respective volumes‘T and “IT before relevant page numbers. ^ This is similar to Epstein’s point about Walton’s narrative: “The biographical narrative comes to describe the ‘implication o f signification’ (yet another coimotation of the term) of its own employment: that is, in Walton’s Donne biography itself becomes, variously and simultaneously, special errand or commission performed in the service of the biographicalsubject... an implement devoted to the purpose of enclosing and signifying a life” (16). Gordon might very well have borrowed this technique — using physical descriptions to make abstract, metaphorical points — fiom Virginia Woolf, the biographer quotes a diary notation made by the author at 17: “The Stephens, with their big bodies, moved awkwardly as though they resented conventionalities at every step” (24-5). ^ This is incorrect Julia Stephen died in 1895, not 1893, according to all other published sources, including other references in DeSalvo’s book. “ In the space between the two subjectivities, the gap between “Virginia Woolf” the standard biographical subjecf and Virginia Woolf the subject as rendered by this particular biographer, lies the “competition” aspect to which I allude: biographers, that is, make fiie case for the uniqueness and worthiness of their project in the space fixim which they have displaced the original subjectivity of the “traditional” biographical interpretation. lam defining subjectivity as the state in which one is “subject to” another’s interpretation. Being a subjectivity, then, like being a subjecf is to be enlisted in (and defined by) another’s rhetorical strategy. no As Brenda K. Marshall writes, ‘To be a subject is also to be ‘subject to’ and as such is positioned in terms of ideology as well as language” (82). She adds: “The poststructuralist critique of subjectivity is wide- ranging and multifarious, but is most consistently an impulse to look at the historical, philosophical and cultural construction of the subject” (82). Virginia Woolf (or any other person) becomes a subjectivity at the moment when she is chosen by a biographer as the subject of that biographer’s work. “ All biographies have agendas, whether or not they are as explicitly stated and forthrightly developed as DeSalvo’s. To paraphrase Terry Eagleton’s remark about literary theory — “[T]hose who disliked theory, or claimed to get along better without it, were simply in the grip of an older theory” (vii) — if a biographer does not state an agenda, that, too, is an agenda. ^ This is discussed throughout Poole’s biography. See Bell: “She became convinced that her body was in some way monstrous, the sordid mouth and sordid belly demanding food — repulsive matter which must then be excreted in a disgusting fashion; the only course was to refuse to eat” (II, 15). Such a disgust seems related, as many Woolf critics have speculated, to Septimus Smith’s problem 'mMrs.Dalloway. “ Even taste (Rezia liked ices, chocolates, sweet things) had no relish to him He could not taste, he could not feel”(132). As many Woolf biographers have noted, a precise definition of her mental illness is impossible at this remove. King’s attitude is typical: “In my opinion, Virginia Woolfs frequent depressions and rare bouts of psychotic breakdown derive from a mixture of frailties, not a single source” (xvii). Gordon writes: “In the absence of any real facts (for her husband recorded only physical symptoms: how she slept, how many pounds gained or lost) and in view of the inadequacy of psychiatry in those early days either to diagnose or to help her, her illness will remain a mystery” (57). In his excellent, unsettling study'All That Summer She Was Mad': Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors, Stephen Trombley makes a compelling case that Virginia Woolfs illness was exacerbated by outrageously primitive medical treatment Bell Gale Chevigny specifically equates “claiming” the body with the réanimation fallacy when she writes about her discomfort with such biographical arrogance: “The notion ofclaiming [Margaret] Fuller [the subject of Chevigny’s biography] had become deeply obnoxious to and...me, taking responsibility for ‘bringing her to life’ was a trespass or usurpation” (93). This life-work dichotomy, as manifested in biographies, will be explored in Chapter 4.

I l l CHAPTERS

FEMINIST LITERARY BIOGRAPHY AND “VIRGINIA WOOLF’

In her biography of Charlotte Bronte, Lyndall Gordon writes, “What is the nature of women?. . . . Pause, and pause again; how are women’s lives to be defined? That question echoes beyond her time, and beyond ours” (341).* This acknowledgment that a biographer must be aware of the subject’s sex, and how that sex both creates and confuses expectations for the life story, is a relatively new phenomenon. As William Epstein points out in “Milford’s Zelda and the Poetics of the New Feminist Biography,” the notion of a specifically feminist biography — what he calls a “developing subgenre” (336) — arose alongside “the appearance or reappearance of a new feminist movement, the political, social, and cultural projects of which, it is commonly agreed, were energized by the student and worker ‘revolutions’ in America and Western Europe during the pivotal year

1968” (336-7). Feminist biography, he says, which was “an effort to reconstruct the life experiences of women,” found its first real expression in the publication of Zelda, the

1970 biography of Zelda Fitzgerald by Nancy Milford.^ Because feminist literary criticism has had, in Jonathan Culler’s estimation, “a greater effect on the literary canon than has any other critical movement and . . . has arguably been one of the most powerful forces of renovation in contemporary criticism” (30), feminist ideology must be acknowledged in critical readings of biographies. Indeed, Carolyn G. Heilbrun believes that it necessitates

112 nothing less than a new way of reading (and writing) women’s lives; the traditional paradigms, she argues, are based on “the patriarchal text” (20) and must be undermined.

She continues; “When biographers come to write the life of a woman. . . they have had to struggle with the inevitable conflict between the destiny of being unambiguously a woman and the woman subject’s palpable desire, or fate, to be something else” (21). Because

“there still exists little organized sense of what a woman’s biography. . . should look like”

(27), as Heilbrun declares, an analysis of biographies of Virginia Woolf must examine the means by which each biographer presents its subject as a woman, and delineate the specific challenges, limitations and privileges necessitated by Virginia Woolfs sex, as perceived by the respective biographers. Indeed, Jane Marcus, who believes that criticism of Virginia Woolfs work must involve “re-think[ing] the ofiBcial biography” {Languages o f Patriarchy, xi), also contends that savvy critics are motivated by “the conviction that gender determined Woolfs relationship to language and form” (xiii). If that is true, if it even might be true, then a consideration of gender should be a part of any criticism of biographies of Virginia Woolf

Yet such a consideration is fi-aught with complication. Epstein says that a poetics of feminist biography must “posit a new ‘grammar’ and new language which can assimilate the lives of all women as it accommodates or dislodges the ancient poetics of biographical narrative” (350), which is quite a tall order. Moreover, the very definition of “feminist biography” is unclear: does it refer to biographies of women that are informed by a feminist perspective? Does it refer to biographies of women written exclusively by women? If, as Heilbrun states, a crucial part of feminist thought is the study of power

113 relations (17), then would not biographies of men written from a feminist perspective

(examining, perhaps, the way male achievement is tacitly enabled by the existing power structure) qualify? Should feminist biography refer to biographies of well-known women whose stories are re-told from a feminist point of view, whose images are re-made and in a sense “rescued” from the prevailing patriarchal perspective? Or does the term feminist biography more accurately denote the writing of the lives of obscure women who also have been “rescued” — this time, from years or centuries of neglect, by a biographical establishment that has decided, by its choice of subjects, which lives are noteworthy and who will be remembered?** Is feminist biography, as some have suggested, a fundamentally new way of writing and apprehending biography, one that focuses on the interior, on the private, on the subject’s mind, as opposed to what has been the traditional model of biographies of men with its emphasis on the public record, on conspicuous worldly achievements, on the exterior? Moreover, should feminist criticism of feminist biography involve a critique of how the female subject fulfills her destiny in furious opposition to — or as a helpless co-conspirator in — the patriarchy? One may wonder if there even is such a thing as an independent, self-directed destiny for a woman, if, as Chris

Weedon points out, female subjectivity is examined:

Feminists . . . take as our starting point the patriarchal structure of society. The term ‘patriarchal’ refers to power relations in which women’s interests are subordinated to the interests of men. These power relations take many forms, from the sexual division of labor and the social organization of procreation to the internalized norms of femininity by which we live. Patriarchal power rests on the social meanings given to biological sexual difference.. . . The social institutions which we enter as individuals . . . pre-exist us. We learn their modes of operation and the values which they seek to maintain as true, natural and good. (2-3)

114 Indeed, an excess of theorizing threatens at times to nudge the very possibility of women’s biography off the page, as the concept of a specific woman, mired in time and circumstance, is overwhelmed by axioms of contemporary critical theory that insist on the constructed nature of the category labeled “woman.” As Mary Poovey writes in

“Feminism and Deconstruction”:

To take deconstruction to its logical conclusion would be to argue that ‘woman’ is only a social construct that has no basis in nature, that ‘woman,’ in other words, is a term whose definition depends on the context in which it is being discussed and not upon some set of sexual organs or social experiences. . . . This renders the experience women have of themselves and the meaning of their social relations problematic, to say the least. . . . The challenge for those of us who are convinced both that real historical women do exist and share certain experiences and that deconstruction’s demystification of presence makes theoretical sense is to work out some way to think both women and ‘woman.’ (52-3)

Writing about feminist biographical theory, then, in all of its simultaneously ill-defined and over-defined complication, calls to mind Victoria Glendinning’s summary of the task of writing a biography of Rebecca West: “There are several ways of explaining her, and none” (xvi). There are several ways of defining and critiquing feminist biography, and none: because the genre is, as Epstein and others have noted, still emerging, its meaning is unsettled, its applications various. “Biographies of women pose additional problems unique to the genre” (12) write the editors ofThe Challenge o f Feminist Biography.

Along with the problems, however, feminism also has brought new vistas to the study of the criticism of biography. Indeed, feminism has, in a rough sense, performed for biography the same function as did postmodernism: it suggests that there is always another story to tell, that “many different books are possible under one set of describers” (Wagner-

Martin, 266). It suggests as well that there is no “norm,” no objective standard against

115 which to judge, measure or even position lives; feminist theory has insisted on removing these standards that “everyone” presumably shared, as Heilbrun writes: “There is no

‘objective’ or universal tone in literature, for however long we have been told there is.

There is only the white, middle-class, male tone” (40). In biographies as in other kinds of literature, both feminist and postmodernist theory require us to overthrow simplistic (and, for women, often imprisoning) notions of a cultural mean.^ “Now, neither author nor subject in a biography is uninfluenced by points of view that structure the cultures that fostered them. Of great significance are ideas about gender differences so fundamental in any culture that they seem natural,” writes Diane Wood Middlebrook in her article,

“Postmodernism and the Biographer.” The editors of The Challenge o f Feminist

Biography add: “Feminist biography not only expands our knowledge about women’s lives, but alters the frameworks within which we interpret historical experience” (13).

Prior to these insights, it was difiBcult to critique biographies of women, many observers noted; even the most well-meaning of biographers sometimes told only a portion of the story, and that portion invariably skewed a consideration of the woman’s life and achievements — often, more by what the biographers left out than by what they included.

Kathleen Barry, a biographer of Susan B. Anthony, charges that the distortion is premeditated and malevolent:

Patriarchal society will not accept any woman who refuses to be dominated. If she persists thus, it rewrites her history and reshapes her character, punitively twisting her will, bending her image, and distorting her identity until her defiance appears as a deformity — an aberration of nature. But over time it has proven impossible to completely suppress the lives of independent, self-defined women such as Susan B. Anthony. They periodically re-emerge from behind the historical deformation of their lives to defy patriarchy once again. In traditional history, a life like Anthony’s seems to be an anomaly; but to feminists, the anomaly suggests that this kind of life

116 story has more to say about all women. In feminist research, the anomaly — the ‘rupture of history’ — is often the point where we begin to look for women’s reality. It is there that we comprehend the fuller extent of what patriarchy had distorted or excluded in its domination of women, (xiv)®

Phyllis Rose, while a bit more charitable than Barry, makes essentially the same complaint about biographies of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot:

What I hold against Standard Biographies is not that they are unreadable . . . but that they are not, as they pretend to be, impartial.. . . Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf and Gordon Haight’s George Eliot [are] good books by any standards. Both are filled with invaluable information. Yet, full as they are, both inevitably leave things out. That is why this kind of biography, which purports to be so fair and objective, is more deceptive than the most flagrantly partisan biography. Quentin Bell leaves out a treatment of Woolf s writing, which is to say that he omits much of her inner life apart from her madness, leaving us with the impression of a sick woman who depended extravagantly on a supportive husband. Gordon Haight.. . rarely speculates about her [Eliot’s] iimer life, favoring the done, the said, the written.. .. Both Bell’s biography of Woolf and Haight’s of George Eliot are books about women writers by men whose assumptions about women are so deeply assimilated as to have for them the force of truth, self-evident truth. {Writing on Women, 76-7)

Both Barry and Rose are making a case for feminist biography as the place in which a story other than the “official” one — a story that has been suppressed or ignored by the patriarchy — finally is able to emerge. Yet it seems to me that still another definition is possible. A feminist biography can be more than Just a story of what happens to a woman; it also can be the story of what doesn't happen, because the subject is a woman.’

Compare, for instance, the general chronicle of Virginia Woolfs life to Henry James: A

Life by Leon Edel. When James was thirty-three years old, he moved to London to set himself up as a professional author, and to escape from the suffocating embrace of his family. Edel memorably evokes this period:

Henry James fell into London during the winter of 1876 as if he had lived there all his life. ‘I took possession of it,’ he said; and it took possession of him. . . . He

117 moved into his lodging on 12 December, and the next morning awoke to his first domestic breakfast — bacon, eggs, slices fi-om an ‘exquisite English loaÇ’ cups of tea, served by a dark-faced maid with the voice of a duchess. ‘You may imagine the voluptuous glow in which such a repast has left me,’ he wrote to Alice.. . . He took long walks in the rain. He brought home armfuls of books fi’om Mudie’s Library and read them by his fire.. . . For him the doors of London opened ‘into light and warmth and cheer; into good and charming relations. ’ He walked a good deal, ‘for exercise, for amusement, for acquisition and above all I always walked home at the evening’s end.’ (204-6)

Edel paints a compelling picture of a young man confident of his place in the world, enjoying (and profiting as an artist from) long walks, long hours of reading by firelight, invigorating conversations with London’s intellectual elite. The life it describes, a life of independence and self-exploration, of the scrupulously thorough arrangement of life so that it best suits the person living it, is delightfully serene. It is all quite charming — and for a woman, quite impossible.

Few if any women would have been able to walk home alone after late suppers, or to indulge, without a companion, in leisurely book-buying expeditions followed by ravenous reading sessions by the fire.* Some observers may cite the economic inequalities between men and women as the reason for the discrepancy in expectations for a life, but there is a deeper disparity as well: call it a cast of mind, if you will, or a certain sensibility

— a way of thinking about the world as one’s own, as a place filled with possibility, that is disproportionately present in the recountings of the lives of men. When a woman attempts to appropriate this attitude, the result often is disastrous, as Heilbrun notes: “1 have read many moving lives of women, but they are painful, the price is high, the anxiety is intense, because there is no script to follow, no story portraying how one is to act, let alone any alternative stories” (39). Most women choose a safer path, and most biographers of

118 women choose a safer path, too. They write about what was, instead of what might have been. “Marriage is the most persistent of myths imprisoning women, and misleading those who write of women’s lives” (77), Heilbrun says. As the biographers of Virginia Woolf extrapolate from her diaries and letters, Virginia Woolf felt (and society reinforced) that she had to marry in order to enter what Phyllis Rose calls “the mainstream of life” (89). In terms of living arrangements — she never lived alone, except for brief periods on vacation

— Virginia Woolf went from being a daughter to a sibling to a wife. The “wife” label was a necessity if Virginia Woolf hoped to achieve the kind of life that James (who never married) could take for granted; even though Rose puts the marriage decision into the context of other factors as well, it is clear that Virginia Woolfs life was circumscribed by social expectations in a way that James’ never was: “She wanted the usual things women want from marriage — status, companionship, children, sexual experience.. .. [S]he longed for the normal experiences of women, and marriage promised her that” (82).

Marriage was not just a social necessity. Rose adds; it was crucial to Virginia Woolfs very self-definition: “Marriage to Leonard allowed her to join what she saw as the mainstream of life, and to assert that she was a woman, and not a defective being” (89).

The debate over Leonard Woolfs role in Virginia Woolf s life — villain or savior, manipulator or saint? — begs another, deeper question: what sorts of books might Virginia

Woolf had written \îshe could have enjoyed James’ fine breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast and tea, alone in a firelit chamber, with all of London outside her door, awaiting her eye and her pen to tell its variegated story? What if Virginia Woolf had been able to join the young men of Cambridge who, as Leon Edel tells us in Bloomsbury: A House o f Lions,

119 “read a great deal, wrote a great deal, formed societies, charged into the Great Court in the rainy dawn declaiming Swinburne” (43)? For women, such splendid autonomy was simply beyond imagination, even an imagination as fecund as Virginia Woolfs. That, I propose, ought to be a central theme of feminist biography: it is an art form whose pages should echo with the stories never told, whose margins should be thronged with the ghosts of the women who never were.

How, then, can an awareness of feminist issues and concerns be employed in a critique of biographies of Virginia Woolf? It can be so employed by exploring how

Virginia Woolfs sex figures into the portraits created by her biographers. Heilbrun, for her part, argues that existing critical strategies are inadequate to deal with women’s biography: “It all needs to be invented, or discovered, or resaid” (19). Indeed, the works of several feminist biographical theorists deal extensively with the notion of creating new selves, new identities, with uncovering the “real” person buried beneath the patriarchal myth. These new life stories will, in turn, serve as what Heilbrun calls “exemplars” for young women seeking mentors and life-models, the kinds of mentors and models that young men traditionally have found in the biographies of men.

This idea is problematic on two fi-onts: first, if we heed the standard postmodern interrogation of “the self as a unified, knowable, and recoverable entity” (123), as Sharon

O’Brien puts it in her essay, “Feminist Theory and Literary Biography,” then we cannot turn around and claim that, whilepast versions of a woman’s life may have been distorted and misrepresented by patriarchially-inspired interpreters, this new version — informed by feminist revision — is, suddenly, shining and true. All interpretations, the ones we like as

120 well as the ones we don’t, are just that: interpretations/ We can examine the various biographies of an individual woman with an eye toward how each one either reflects or ignores the cultural norms that often are used to measure female achievement in the private and public spheres — a process which is one of my goals in this chapter — but we cannot conclude that any single image, even one that claims to correct the faulty assumptions of past interpretations, constitutes the “real” Virginia Woolf. For there is, of course, no “real” Virginia Woolf; there are only competing constructions, which manifest, explicitly or implicitly, the biographers’ attitude toward Virginia Woolfs sex (or other individuating aspects such as race, class, ethnicity and sexuality).

The second problem with some aspects of feminist biographical theory is a quaint and irrelevant insistence that women’s lives, as rewritten by feminist scholars, can serve as inspirational models for female readers. Perhaps they can; but that possibility should not be the concern of critics of biography, and ventures rather too close to the Victorian idea of moral biography, of biography as didactic teaching tool. Heilbrun is probably correct when she says, “Only the female life of prime devotion to male destiny had been told before; for the young girl who wanted more from female biography, there were, before 1970, few or no exemplars” (26), but positing a biography as an “exemplar” is itself a political decision.

It is a decision to critique a biography not according to the persuasiveness of its rhetorical techniques, but according to how closely the image it creates matches Heilbrun’s (and others’) idea of an acceptable female “role model.”

As a corollary to this problem, many feminist scholars have commented on the psychic tie that links female biographer and female biographical subject, a tie they regard

121 as unique to such projects: “It is nearly inevitable that women writing about women will

symbolically reflect their internalized relations with their mothers and in some measure re­

create them” (80), writes Chevigny. Kathryn Kish Sklar reports on a variation of that

identification during her research for a biography of Florence Kelley, as she confused

herself with her subject: “I had allowed myself to become absorbed to a psychologically

dangerous degree into Florence Kelley’s life and its continuing ramifications in the

present” (25). Sklar, in fact, maintains that the chief difference between the feminist and

non-feminist biographer lies in “the degree to which a feminist biographer is willing to

connect her work with the vulnerabilities and struggles associated with her (the

biographer’s) own life” (32). Yet as Chevigny notes, such personal identification carries its

own dangers and paradoxes: “What was troubling was the sense that, for feminist

biographers, the new engagement with feminist theory, with our subjects, and with

ourselves might produce a fi'esh mode of distortion, might introduce a specifically feminist

fallacy” (7-8). Moreover, this identification between biographers and their subjects hardly

began with women writing about women; it has long been an aspect of the writing of biography by and about both sexes, of the scholarly consideration of lives other than our

own. As Cynthia Ozick, looking back on her immersion in the life and work of Henry

James, whimsically recalls:

From that time forward, gradually but compellingly — and now I yield my scary confession — I became Henry James.. . . When I say I ‘became’ Henry James, you must understand this: though I was a near-sighted twenty-two-year-old woman . . . I was also the elderly bald-headed Henry James. Even without close examination, you could see the light glancing off my pate; you could see my heavy chin, my watch chain, my walking stick, my tender paunch. I had become Henry James, and for years and years I remained Henry James. There was no doubt about it: it was my own clear and faithful truth. (294)

122 Indeed, a standard trope of the criticism of biography, as practiced by theorists as well as biographers themselves, has been the notion of identification between biographer and subject. “The biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it” (xiv), wrote Paul Murray Kendall. Leon Edel declares, “To write a good biography, we must identify ourselves with our subject”

(WritingLives, 64). Muses Catherine Drinker Bowen, “Something in the subject’s life has touched the biographer’s own experience.. . . The biographer is himself puzzled at how completely he can identify with diverse and seemingly unsympathetic characters” (67).

Many biographers, moreover, have written about the identification they begin to feel with a subject about whom they know so much: “I identified powerfully with the Lincoln of my story,” writes Stephen B. Oates, author of With Malice Toward None: The Life o f

Abraham Lincoln. “I became so involved in his life that I got depressed when he did; I hurt when he hurt. When I left my study after a day’s writing in his world, with brass bands playing Civil War music in my head, I was stunned to find myself still in the twentieth century” (133).“’

For feminist theoreticians to claim that the identification between biographer and subject began with, or has been especially problematized by, women writing about women is to display an incomplete knowledge of the history of criticism of biography. Moreover, as Chevigny notes, feminist scholars must be wary about imposing a kind of feminist determinism on their work as biographers, of assuming that feminist scholars can replicate the sins of previous researchers — of assuming that their particular prism isn’t a prism at all, but a clear, true view — without consequence: “Since a precipitating cause of feminism

123 was our indignation about misuse of women and distortion of their reality, it would be

profoundly ironic if feminists should find a new way of abusing their subjects” (8).“

If the female biographical subject is a writer, as Virginia Woolf was, those facts

make her life story instantly (and regrettably) the most hospitable of environments for the

hoariest of biographical clichés : a woman’s books are her children. This cliché,

moreover, is regarded as particularly apt when the female writer in question is childless.

Some biographers find the parallel, which trivializes both actual childbirth and parenting

and writing, too tempting to resist. They imply that female authors choose — indeed, often

must choose — books or children, literary achievement or oftspring, not because of

economic necessity, a realistic consideration that might actually make the theory less

objectionable, but because of female psychology: “Between children of the mind and

children of the body she [Virginia Woolf] was clear as to which she wanted, but now and then one detects regret” (Rose, 165).*^ King concurs: “Her books were her real children”

(407); “Symbolically her books were her offspring” (211). He alludes to her having “given birth to The Voyage O uf (535). The biographers’ depiction of an inevitable choice between (or frustrating compromise to accommodate) both tangible worldly accomplishments and children seems to me to be unique to biographies of women; as

Heilbrun suggests, childbirth and childrearing, like marriage, are part of “the categories our available narratives have provided for woman” (131).

All biographers deal with their subjects’ sex, whether or not they admit that they are dealing with it. Some, such as Emily Sunstein in her biography of Mary

Wollstonecraft, meet the issue head on. Sunstein’s opening paragraph begins:

124 Mary Wollstonecraft was bom in mid-eighteenth century England into a society that believed women to be inferior morally and intellectually, and into a class whose ideal women were the sheltered, submissive, lifelong wards of fathers or husbands — decorative, domestically useful sex objects. The system, maintained by church and state law, normally protected and rewarded its dependents. However, it did not work for Mary Wollstonecraft. She could not depend on her family, which failed her in every way; she would not marry for security; she had intellectual ambitions; she rebelled against injustice and defied the presumption of inferiority. (3)

Other biographers more subtly encode their works with assumptions about sex and society. When the subject is as identified with certain tenets of modernism and feminism as is Virginia Woolf, the issue of her sex becomes even more charged with the savage politics of these most contentious areas of inquiry.*^ “This is an interesting chapter in American literary history and in the development of feminist criticism and theory. . . for Virginia

Woolf was often at the center at the most spirited critical debates” (xi), Marcus writes.

Marcus, in fact, draws parallels between Virginia Woolfs life and the struggles of critics and biographers who seek to rescue her fi"om the grip of patriarchal interpretation: “So

Woolf herself emerged fi-om battles with Bloomsbury men, and feminist critics fi-om battles with the academy” (4). Marcus interprets Virginia Woolfs career as a rejection of the patriarchy represented by her father, and her father’s literary achievements: “There were volumes and volumes of the father’s text and the family’s text to write against, the many languages o f the patriarchy (8). Indeed, the biographer of Virginia Woolf must be a critic, and the critic a biographer, Marcus declares; she offers “a reading of Woolf s life in relation to a community of women rather than Bloomsbury” and hopes to “counter the deplorable method of Woolf s oflBcial biography and the editors of her letters and diaries in which her biography is constructed backwards from her suicide and her ‘madness’ is the

125 determining factor in all judgments, leading to the projection of a weak, apolitical figure”

(xiv). Marcus makes fi-ank and unabashed connections between Woolf, the biographical subject, and Woolf, the writer of certain texts that are studied by critics; Marcus also notes that biographical portraiture is the unofficial battleground for the interpretations of

Virginia Woolf: “There are many portraits of Virginia, the butterfly, in the ivory tower of class and social privilege; this [Marcus’ book] is a portrait of Woolf, the rebel, a study of those sentences which hold their own against the male flood” (5). Again, note how

Marcus equates biographical portraits (“the butterfly”) with the objects created by the biographical subject (“those sentences”). The fight over Virginia Woolfs image is, to

Marcus’ way of thinking, a microcosm of the battle of the sexes.

In other studies of Virginia Woolf and her circle, however, the assumptions about gender are more subtly embedded in the text. One must be constantly vigilant to catch the subtexts and allusions; the things that “go without saying” often are the most interesting things said in a biography. In David Gadd’s elegant, succinct cameo of the Bloomsbury circle. The Loving Friends: A Portrait o f Bloomsbury, the references to Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell are sweet and gallant, tinged with the courtly condescension that only reveals its insidiousness upon close examination. Describing the Stephen family in 1904,

Gadd refers to the “beautiful Stephen sisters” (2). His descriptions of the men who flutter about the same scene (Thoby Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf) focus on their intellectual interests and educational achievements. Moreover, evoking a moment in 1906, when Virginia Woolf was twenty-four years old and Vanessa Bell, twenty-seven, Gadd refers to them as “the Stephen girls” (3). These “girls” had a function

126 in Bloomsbury, Gadd concedes; they “provided the feminine element essential to any healthy human community” (3). What is the “feminine element”? Gadd does not elaborate, which is, of course, most demeaning of all, because it means that Gadd assumes we know: the feminine element is a constant, even when provided by women as extraordinary and differentiated as Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

The idea that the male story is the only one worth telling, the only one worth taking seriously, is the subtle subtext of Edel’s Bloomsbury: A House o f Lions. His study of Bloomsbury is weighted heavily toward the male members of that oft-chronicled group, even though Virginia Woolf is arguably its most prominent member. Edel begins; “If we seek the beginnings of our story, we might start in various parts of England or Scotland or

Wales, or in Cambridge, where the Bloomsbury males were educated, or even in some ghetto of Europe” (19). Why? Why start, as Edel does, with a long description of the patriarchal roots of the men of Bloomsbury? Not only does Edel delay a mention of

Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell until Part El ofHouse o f Lions, seventy-three pages into his story — after he has presented lengthy essays on Desmond McCarthy, Lytton Strachey,

Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell and Maynard Keynes — but he does not feel the need to explain this curious hierarchy. Moreover, his initial description of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa

Bell concentrates, naturally, on their physical appearance; they are “wearing their white muslin, with grass-green ribands around their slim waists, their hats bunched with bouquets on the crowns and tied down with black velvet bows at the back” (73). Edel’s initial description of Leonard Woolf, by contrast, recalls the latter’s fierce intellectual

127 devotion to social justice (20). Thus the Bloomsbury men are described in terms of what

they are thinking; the women, in terms of what they are wearing.

Subtle, casual misogyny is present as well in Virginia Woolf: The Major Novels, a

critical study by John Batchelor that begins with a biographical portrait. His first sentence is a clue to his stance; “Virginia Woolf has been well served by her biographers, especially

Bell and Gordon, and the evidence available about her life, which now includes her diaries and her letters, is massive” (1). What does Batchelor mean by “well served”? By ending the sentence with a reference to the copious amount of source material that can attend a consideration of Virginia Woolfs life, he appears to mean that her biographers generally get the facts straight. He proceeds to dismiss in short order those treatments of the life which take views other than a sensible, straightforward appreciation of Leonard Woolfs sacrifices and a cause-and-efiect progression between Virginia Woolfs psychological traumas and her adult behaviors, and provides a thumbnail sketch of the various interpretive camps that have sprung up around Virginia Woolfs life:

I cannot believe that Leonard Woolf was in any sense a tyrant who blocked and deformed his wife’s talent (Poole), that her insanity is in some sense Quentin Bell’s invention (Trombley) or that her grief for her dead mother is the key to her writing (Spilka). It seems to me that the factual evidence given by Bell and by Leonard Woolf overwhelmingly supports the view given by, for example, Phyllis Rose that her marriage greatly helped her creativity, and that she was psychologically disturbed for most of her life. She was subject to unwelcome sexual advances fi'om her half-brother, George Duckworth, and this traumatic early experience may be related to her adult sexual orientation. (1-2)

There, in a neat package, is what might be called the Ur-narrative of Virginia

Woolfs life as a woman, the master mythology against which all other versions must juxtapose themselves: the amount and accessibility of autobiographical material means that

128 biographies of Virginia Woolf have been thorough and correct; a helpful husband was crucial to her creative achievements; and a childhood trauma — what Batchelor calls with gentle discretion “unwelcome sexual advances” ~ readily accounts for what he terms, again with genteel reserve, “adult sexual orientation.”^'* Nowhere in this brief, tidy summary of major biographical renditions of Virginia Woolfs life does Batchelor question why (or indeed, if) a biographer should grant special consideration to autobiographical perspectives in a biography, since self-presentation can be among the most distorted of perspectives; or why he is so swift to characterize Virginia Woolfs friendships with women — some of which were sexual, some of which were not — with the dismissive, clinical-sounding diagnosis, “adult sexual orientation.”*^

Batchelor’s attitude toward the creative implications of a writer’s sex is narrowly essentialist, and examining it will provide a segue into the issue of essentialism and feminist biography. Indeed, the continuing dialogue between essentialism and feminist biography must be joined before we can explore, in terms of their presentation of Virginia

Woolf as a woman, the five biographies that are the basis of this study. The definitions of feminist biography that were presented at the chapter’s outset, which generally maintained that the existence of social conditions antithetical to women’s achievements and self- actualization must be acknowledged in the biography so that a “new self’ fi'ee of patriarchal assumptions can emerge, are themselves essentialist arguments on behalf of constructionist aims: feminist biographical critics often claim that traditional biographies of men and women are exclusionary of women, and that a more valid criticism of biography

129 would undermine that tradition with the introduction of, to paraphrase Heilbrun, an invention, a discovery, a reformulation of the female life story.

Batchelor follows a traditional line of gender-inspired bifiircation in his exploration of the origins of Virginia Woolfs creativity: men are thinkers, women are feelers.*® He writes:

It seems to me that her sensory and intuitive self is indeed connected with her mother’s ghost but that her literary intelligence, the part of her that ensured that she became a writer and thus ensured that we find ourselves in the late twentieth century reading and writing books about her, comes from her father. (7)

In other words, her writing style - the loose-limbed, luxuriant sentences that, in critic

Joan Bennett’s marvelous phrase, “seem to feel their way from point to point” (vii) — derives from her mother, while the discipline and desire to turn those fancies into books, and thereby provide employment for future generations of grateful scholars, can be attributed to the masculine side of her heritage.

Indeed, the simplicity of essentialism is difiScult for a biographer to resist.

According to Diana Fuss, essentialism is “a belief in true essence — that which is most irreducible, unchanging, and therefore constitutive of a given person or thing.. . . In feminist theory . . . essentialism can be located in appeals to a pure or original femininity, a female essence, outside the boundaries of the social and thereby untainted (though perhaps repressed) by a patriarchal order” (2). As Fuss notes, essentialism requires that “ ‘man’ and ‘woman’ . . . are assumed to be ontologically stable objects, coherent signs which derive their coherency from their unchangeability and predictability (there have always been men and women)” (3). Constructionism, by contrast, “insists that essence is itself a

130 historical construction . . . [in which] ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are not stable or universal categories” (2-3). Fuss points out, however, that these concepts, which are crucial to a consideration of feminist biography, are inextricably linked; if essentialism is fiction, then how does constructionism come up with its categories? To put it simplistically, contructionism needs essentialism; “It is difiBcult to see how constructionism canbe constructionism without a fimdamental dependency upon essentialism.. . . Social constructionists do not definitively escape the pull of essentialism” (4-5).

The essentialist-constructionist debate in regard to sex is one that must be engaged, explicitly or implicitly, in the writing of every biography and, ultimately, by every critic of biography. Indeed, there is virtually no way to critique a biography without discussing the biographer’s attitude toward gender roles and how those roles — be they, according to the biographer’s lights, culturally imposed or biologically inherent — influence the life-story as it is shaped into narrative by the biographer, as well as how that life-story was understood by the subject and the subject’s contemporaries.^’ As Susan

Bordo states in her article, “Feminism, Postmodernism and Gender-Scepticism,” gender is virtually a given: “One cannot be ‘gender-neutral’ in this culture” (153). Yet, she adds,

“Gender never exhibits itself in pure form but in the context of lives that are shaped by a multiplicity of influences, which cannot be neatly sorted out” (150). Biography cannot definitively answer questions of gender, but it can deal with them more thoughtfully and provocatively, perhaps, than can many other genres.

There is no possibility of “solving” or “answering” the essentialist-constructionist question in this work, or in any other; but there is also no possibility of escaping its

131 implications for the criticism of biography. As an examination of the five biographies of

Virginia Woolf will reveal, each biographer must decide whether a woman is bom or

made; that is, she or he must decide whether Virginia Woolf is the repository of an

essential feminine nature (and victim of society’s culturally constmcted, institutionalized,

anti-female proclivities), or whether Virginia Woolf is the embodiment of a cultural

construction known as femaleness, which is subject to those same proclivities, and the

degree to which the choice, or some variation of it, affects the presentation and reception

ofVirginia Woolfs “life.”

What follows are readings of the five biographies upon which this work is focused,

based on their presentations ofVirginia Woolf and her female contemporaries as women.

What I want to suggest with these readings, readings that employ Virginia Woolfs sex as

an organizing category, is that biographies should be critiqued for what they say and don’t

say, for what they include and leave out, for the elements with which biographers chose to

conclude the inconclusive: a biographical portrait. Biographies become, in effect,

analogous to one ofVirginia Woolfs working methods, as a servant recollected it,

observing that “Virginia had the habit of leaving bits of paper everywhere, especially on the floor of her bedroom — these scraps would sometimes contain variants of the same

sentence” (King, 504). Different biographies of the same subject indeed are like variants of the same sentence: they restate the same basic information in what can seem to be an

infinite number of ways, until even the familiar seems strange, and no portrait is without its

counter-portrait. When the framing device under review is as dense and significant as the

132 crucible of sex roles, the effect on biographies may be profound yet subtle, monumental

but essentially covert.

Bell’s biography is probably the most notorious of the five in terms of its

presentation ofVirginia Woolfs sex, for it rings throughout with a perhaps unintentional

but quite devastating condescension toward Virginia Woolf, her female fiiends and the

aspirations of women in general.W omen, for Bell, are (apparently by birth) chatty and

emotional, flighty and dithering; also, childish, fickle and manipulative. IDs work is the

supreme exemplar of what Louise DeSalvo has called “Bloomsbury’s virulent if unconscious misogyny, masquerading beneath the veneer of a sexually liberated, enlightened humanism” (92). Chauvinism disguised as hearty male gallantry is the defining characteristic of Bell’s presentation. His attitude seems to be shot through with the faint but perceptible disdain of a superior position. At no point does he question the traditional sex role stereotyping endemic to the Victorian era: unmarried women were “old maids”; women, in times of stress, wept uncontrollably and were useless; women had no head for politics or figures. While it is true that many of these attitudes were deeply ingrained in late Victorian culture. Bell does not distinguish between society’s attitudes andhis (that is, the biographer’s) perspective, so it is impossible to know if he personally espouses these views or considers himself merely a conduit for reporting them. His biography reads like the ultimate essentialist treatment ofVirginia Woolfs life, trapped inside the misogynist syllogism: women are this way, as a matter of nature; Virginia Woolf was a woman; hence

Virginia Woolf was this way. Other women’s destinies reflected the same sad but inevitable reality, according to Bell; consider his summary of the life of Caroline Emelia,

133 Leslie Stephen’s sister. She was “an intelligent woman who fell, nevertheless, into the role of the imbecile Victorian female. She fell in love with a student. . . but the young man went to India and nothing more was heard of him. Her heart was broken and her health was ruined; at the age of twenty-three she settled down to become an invalid and an old maid” (I, 6-7).*^

Bell continues the drumbeat of negative, stereotypical portrayals of the women in

Virginia Woolfs life as Leslie Stephen’s sister-in-law, Anny Thackery, is damned with faint praise;

At the age of seventy Aunt Anny, as she was called by all Leslie’s children, could impress a child by her extraordinarily youthful, vigorous and resilient optimism; when she was young, not only in spirit but in years, her ebullience must have been overwhelming. It is not hard to believe that such cheerful impetuosity could sometimes be exasperating. Leslie found it so; he loved silence and she was for ever talking; he loved order, and she rejoiced in chaos; he prided himself on his realism, she was unashamedly sentimental; he worried about money, she was recklessly extravagant; he prized facts, she was hardly aware of them. (I, 11)^°

Gender bifurcation is on bold display here, in the guise of personality portraits of Virginia

Woolfs contemporaries. Bell employs gender stereotypes once more when he writes of

Stella, Leslie Stephen’s stepdaughter and Virginia Woolfs half-sister, that she was “not very clever, but with a certain feminine wisdom, kind, gentle, quiet and beautiful” (36); women, it seems, have an intuitive intelligence while men possess the worldly, useful kind.

Stella, Bell decides, was “so obviously formed for matrimony and motherhood” because of her “kindness and beauty” (I, 46), but are polite, handsome men “formed” for marriage and fatherhood? Bell decrees, as Batchelor has decreed subsequently, that male-female stereotypes pack the force of biological inevitability. In the following passage. Bell adds

134 two rather timid disclaimers — this was how things seemed to Virginia Woolf, and labels are inherently trivializing — but the cautious notes pale alongside the cheery certainty that precedes them;

Here then were the two sides ofVirginia Woolfs inheritance, an inheritance which was, at all events, real enough in her imagination. It is not hard to find labels for the paternal and maternal sides: sense and sensibility, prose and poetry, literature and art, or, more simply, masculine and feminine. All such labels are unsatisfactory but they suggest something that is true. (I, 20)

Bell, like all biographers, stacks the deck: in desiring to persuade the reader of his version ofVirginia Woolfs personality and essence, based on her sex, he chooses particular

“facts,” as well as cultural truisms that “everybody” knows, to create a Virginia Woolf who is feminine (beautiful, helpless, scatterbrained, yet artful), surrounded by men who are strong and level-headed, and willing to rescue her fi’om her befuddled muddlings through life. To those who would argue that the events Bell musters on behalf of his portrait are truthful, and cited as well by other biographers, an obvious reply is that biographers choose fi'om among many events those particular ones that will illustrate the biographer’s vision of the subject, a vision influenced by the biographer’s attitude toward (among other things) sex-role stereotyping. There is nothing especially diabolical about this process of selection, but it is a process, a series of willful and premeditated distortions, and not simply an unproblematic transcription of a neutral “reality.”

Considered as a whole. Bell’s portrait rings with chronic goofiness. Virginia

Woolf, he says, was “a vague, undecided and exasperating shopper” who “must have reduced many poor shop assistants to the verge of blasphemy or tears, and not only they but their companions suffered intensely when she found herself brought to a standstill by

135 the difference between that which she had imagined and that which in fact was offered for sale” (I, 149), causing one to wonder if indeed Virginia Woolf were able to read a sign or a price tag. His subject. Bell charges, exhibited typical feminine ficideness: “There was no-one whose stock did not rise and fall in the uncertain market of her regard” (I, 59). She blurted indiscriminately: “Indeed she had an alarming tendency to say whatever came into her head” (II, 60-1). Women’s driving habits, which have provided fodder for comedians for decades, amuse Bell as well; after an accident, he says, Virginia Woolf discovered the restful delights of feminine helplessness: “Leonard at once became a skillful and knowledgeable driver; Virginia also took driving lessons and, as she considered, made good progress. But after taking their Singer through a hedge she decided (although no substantial damage was done) to let herself be driven. This indeed she found most enjoyable” (II, 129). Note the subtext in this passage: Leonard Woolf “becomes” a good driver, as if by instinct, while Virginia Woolf must take lessons, and makes a hash of it, to boot. The selectivity of the details in this anecdote are especially illustrative of the fact that biographers construct their portraits out of the materials that best will reflect their suppositions: As King notes, but Bell does not, Leonard Woolfalso had a car accident in the Singer; “he “bumped the back of the car on the gatepost at Rodmell” (400). Bell is content to leave the impression that Virginia Woolf fulfilled the stereotype of the preoccupied, uncoordinated woman driver, while her husband fulfilled the equally pervasive stereotype that men are careful, competent ones.

Virginia Woolfs helplessness extended to politics as well. Bell says: “The machinery of politics exasperated and bewildered her” (H, 188). His portrait of a simple-

136 minded twit continues apace; Virginia Woolf was prone to dithering over things that should not have given her concern; “She had worries. She made the most of them. She invented others” (H, 146). Moreover, Virginia Woolf had no sense of proportion. Bell relates; she could not distinguish between the moral significance of a small object and an event that could potentially cause the death of millions:

Virginia’s mind was so constituted that it is very hard to know what would have been supremely important to her and, although it may sound ludicrous, her acquisition . . . of a green glass jar fi'om a chemist — one of those great flagons that glow or used to glow in pharmacy windows — was for her, it having been coveted perhaps since childhood, an event possibly as important as Katherine Mansfield’s friendship, or the German air raids. (II, 46-7)

Many of the events and tendencies upon which Bell reports may have happened as he describes them; the point is, however, that biographers make choices, and he repeatedly chooses to emphasize those aspects ofVirginia Woolfs life and character that reinforce what appears to be Bell’s own view of the correctness of the prevailing gender stereotypes.

Those stereotypes are more difficult to decode, however, in the case ofVirginia

Woolfs marriage to Leonard Woolf. Here the traditions, such as they are, are reversed.

Instead of a supportive woman who enables the achievements of a talented man, the relationship between Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf is depicted as the opposite: a supportive man takes care of a talented, needy woman. In her review of Bell’s biography,

Cynthia Ozick claims that it is a medical case study, not a biography: “Bell’s Woolf is not about a writer, in fact; it is about the smell of a house. It is about a madwoman and her nurse” (31). Bell, Ozick says, makes Leonard Woolfs sacrifice all too vivid: “Without him

137 — Quentin Bell’s clarity on this point is ineffaceable — Virginia Woolf might have spent her life in a mental asylum” (31). Indeed, Bell summarizes his view ofVirginia Woolfs marriage to Leonard Woolf with a chapter-ending sentence whose very brevity, occurring as it does amid all of those other leisurely, rambling sentences in the biography, seems to strain to convince the reader of its unassailability, its grandly irreproachable rightness: “It was the wisest decision of her life” (L 187). It is a sentence that brooks no dispute. Yet

Ozick, like any good critic of biography, recognizes that, for all the persuasiveness of

Bell’s portrait of an incapacitated Virginia Woolf and a caretaking, essential Leonard

Woolf, it is, after all, a portrait, a compendium of selected details, a relentlessly prejudiced

(as all portraits are relentlessly prejudiced) perspective that contains the seeds of the opposite view within it:

Quentin Bell’s biography — the subversive strength of which is Leonard — demands an antidote. The antidote is, of course, in the form of a reminder — that Virginia Woolf was a woman of letters as well as a patient; that she did not always succumb but instead could be an original fantasist and fashioner of an unaccustomed way of seeing; that her dependency coincided with a vigorous intellectual autonomy.. . . (49)

These aspects ofVirginia Woolfs life and achievements, Ozick says, are subordinated in

Bell’s biography to his carefully drawn portrait of a symbiotic relationship: Virginia Woolf needed Leonard Woolf and Leonard Woolf needed to be needed by Virginia Woolf. What begins as a role reversal from the social norm — the man as support, the woman as grateful recipient of that support — becomes, in the length of Bell’s study, simply a replication of the “natural” order that inculcates his biography: a woman is dependent upon a man, a man who, through his goodness and intellect, makes all things possible.

138 Perhaps the areas ofVirginia Woolfs life most affected by Beil’s attitude, and his

decision to present that attitude as merely espousing the “normal” and “natural,” is the

incest she endured as a child. As Peggy Orenstein writes in Schoolgirls: Young Women,

Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap, adolescence is a crucial time in female development,

a time in which, even without the burden of an incestuously inclined half-brother, girls are

prone to “patterns of low self-image, self-doubt, and self-censorship of their creative and

intellectual potential” (xvi). It is a passage “marked by a loss of confidence in herself and

her abilities.. . . It is marked by a scathingly critical attitude toward her body and

blossoming sense of personal inadequacy” (xvi). Those observations come in 1994; things

can only have been worse for a young girl in a late Victorian household, pursued by a

family member who counted on the society’s complicity.

Bell, like Batchelor, chooses words that curiously underplay the effect ofVirginia

Woolfs ordeal, and that serve, whatever Bell’s intentions, to offer an excuse for the

perpetrators’ actions:

After their mother’s death his [George Duckworth’s] kindness knew no bounds; his was an emotional, a demonstrative nature; his shoulder was there for them to weep on; his arms were open for their relief. At what point this comfortable fraternal embrace developed into something which to George seemed no doubt even more comfortable although not nearly so fraternal, it would be hard to say. Vanessa came to believe that George himself was more than half unaware of the fact that what had started with pure sympathy ended by becoming a nasty erotic skirmish.. . . With the easy assurance of a fond and privileged brother, George carried his affections from the schoolroom into the night nursery.. . . (I, 42-3)

Bell suggests that, because Virginia Woolf and her sister did not voice objections

strenuously enough, George might not have known that his actions were repugnant to them:

139 For how could they [Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell] speak out or take any action against a treachery so covert that it was half unknown even to the traitor? Trained as they were to preserve a condition of ignorant purity they must at first have been unaware that affection was turning to concupiscence, and were warned only by their growing sense of disgust... . George was always demonstratively emotional, lavish and irresponsible in his endearments and embraces; it would have taken a very knowing eye to perceive that his caresses went perhaps further than was proper in even the most loving of brothers, and the bedtime pettings may have seemed no more than a normal extension of daytime devotion. It would have been hard for his half-sisters to know at what point to draw a line, to voice objections, to risk evoking a painful and embarrassing scandal.. . . (43)

There is an insidiousness in Bell’s presentation of the incest, arising out of sexual stereotypes; the immorality of George Duckworth’s conduct is “half unknown” to him, which tacitly exonerates him. Moreover, the victims themselves were unwilling “to draw a line, to voice objections” — that is, to say, ‘'No.” In the universe of Bell’s biography, women are victims, but only because they allow themselves to be, and only because a man’s affections have gone “perhaps further than was proper” (a rebuke that sounds almost like a compliment, as if the problem were an excess of noble passion and not carnal rapacity).^^

Later, Bell renders George Duckworth’s emotional blackmail over Virginia Woolf comically rather than tragically, vivid proof that a biographer’s perspective can alter the tenor of any situation. George Duckworth has tired of taking Vanessa Bell out to dances and parties, so he turns his attention to her sister:

He gave her [Virginia Woolf] a brooch and told her that Vanessa’s unkindness was such that it would drive him from home and — this was emotionally implied rather than said — he would find consolation in the arms of whores. It was for Virginia to rescue him fi'om this awful fate by being a good sister and venturing into high society. (I, 76)

140 Bell recounts an hilarious (to him) episode at a ball at which Virginia Woolf embarrasses the proper young man, and the evening ends as all such evenings did; “That night, in her bedroom, she had once more to withstand the ardent embraces of George” (I, 78). Again, the choice of words is telling: “ardent embraces” sounds romantic, not disgusting.^

Moreover, Bell fails to question the social system that required women to be responsible for maintaining the virtuous behavior of men by complying with male wishes, in order to keep them distracted from the lure of prostitutes.^

Bell routinely dismisses Virginia Woolf s friendships with women, employing a devastatingly casual tone that is ultimately more dismissive than the strongest censure.

Toward four women for whom Virginia Woolf conceived a significant intellectual, physical or emotional passion. Bell demonstrates an attitude of worldly superiority, and a willingness to engage in amateur psychiatry. Because Bell traces any attachment to women as a rejection of men — men are somehow at the center of everything — Virginia Woolfs female fiiendships represent not the fulfillment of her desire to be with women, but the fear of confronting male desire for her. His description of Virginia Woolfs relationship with Madge Symonds is typical:

Virginia was in fact in love with her. She was the first woman — and in those early years Virginia fled altogether from anything male — the first to capture her heart, to make it beat faster, indeed to make it almost stand still as, her hand gripping the handle of the water-jug in the top room at Hyde Park Gate, she exclaimed to herself: ‘Madge is here; at this moment she is actually under this roof’ Virginia once declared that she had never felt a more poignant emotion for anyone than she did at that moment for Madge. . . . It was the passion of a girl in a junior form for a dashing senior, not a passion based on intimacy. (I, 60-1)

141 The influence of the second woman with whom Virginia Woolf formed a close attachment, Violet Dickinson, similarly is downplayed by Bell’s description; “Like Madge

.. . Violet Dickinson fiilfiUed a need. She provided sympathy and stability at a time when it was badly needed. I do not think that she made any very great contribution to Virginia’s intellectual development.. . . When other more remarkable people came into Virginia’s life, passion slowly faded into kindness” (84). Bell’s ambivalent attitude toward the possibility of Virginia Woolfs lesbian desires is revealed in his somewhat confused rendering of her fiiendship with Lady Ottoline Morrell; on one hand. Bell refers to rumors that Ottoline was in love with Virginia Wool^ yet on the other, he claims that the latter appreciated Ottoline’s heterosexuality:

I don’t think that anyone ever suggested that Virginia returned her love; but in sober truth, she liked Ottoline, found her comic, fascinating, improbable, like Royalty or the Church, a portent rather than a woman, a character from the fiction of another age.. .. Certainly she contributed something new the life of Bloomsbury — a mundane glamour and a very strong heterosexual element which Virginia welcomed. (I, 145)

Bell’s firmest disapproval, however, is reserved for the woman who was perhaps Virginia

Woolf s most significant female fiiend. Vita Sackville-West; his discomfort at even dealing with this relationship is palpable in his prose: “Of her [Sackville-West], something has to be said, for at this time and for some years to come she was the most important person — apart from Leonard and Vanessa — in Virginia’s life” (115). With a brave sigh, then, he sets himself to the task:

There may have been — on balance I think that there probably was — some caressing, some bedding together. But whatever may have occurred between them of this nature, I doubt very much whether it was of a kind to excite Virginia or to satisfy Vita. As far as Virginia’s life is concerned the point is of no great importance; what was, to her, important was the extent to which she was

142 emotionally involved, the degree to which she was in love. One cannot give a straight answer to such questions but, if the test of passion be blindness, then her affections were not very deeply engaged. (H, 119)

As proof that Virginia Woolfs passions were “not very deeply engaged,” Bell quotes several letters in which she disparages Vita Sackville-West’s novels and poetry. Because

Virginia Woolf was unwilling to temper her judgment about another writer’s abilities. Bell says, she could not have been “in love,” a curious and not altogether convincing test.

Moreover, despite Bell’s disclaimer that their sexual intimacy (or lack thereof) is “of no great importance,” clearly it is the fulcrum upon which the biographer has balanced his understanding of their relationship; as Emma Donoghue notes in Passions Between

Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801, many observers have difiBculty acknowledging “a wide spectrum of interpretations of passion between women” (1).

Bell finds other reasons to dismiss the composer and social activist Ethel Smyth, a woman with whom Virginia Woolf had a fiiendship in the 1930s: her age and forceful personality. Virginia Woolfs attitude toward Ethel Smyth was mixed. Bell says: “There was something fine and tried and experienced about Ethel besides the rant and the riot and egotism. . . . As for Ethel, she, I think, was in love with Virginia before she even met her”

(n, 153). Thus another of Virginia Woolfs fiiendships with women is dismissed as simple- minded hero worship, as the groveling of a supplicant before a cool, detached subject.

Gordon’s biography in many ways exhibits the same attitudes as does Bell’s, but those attitudes are far more difficult to discern, because they are more carefully embedded in the text. She implies fi’om the outset that Virginia Woolfs feminism — or, in Gordon’s more subtly dismissive phrase, “the feminist Virginia Woolf’ (4), which suggests that this

143 interpretation merely reflects biographers’ wishful thinking — was but a phase, a stunt, a passing fancy, one of a number of images applied to the author;

The insistent modernity of the early 1920s was the image Virginia Woolf imprinted on the public until, in the 1960s, this image shifted to another partial truth: the feminist Virginia Woolf who underpins the struggle for women’s rights. Now that it is possible to see these images in the perspective of the complete works, published and unpublished, it is clear that her phase as high priestess of the modem novel was quite short and her feminist polemic was an attempt to rewrite rather than discard the Victorian model of womanhood. (5)

While Gordon acknowledges that Virginia Woolf occasionally was irritated at “the image of staunch Victorian womanhood which was to dog her longer perhaps than other women of her generation,” an image that demanded women be “angels of mercy” (8-9), the biographer also believes that Virginia Woolf secretly adored that image and those sacrifices, a notion that edges uncomfortably close to the odious axiom that women, despite their protests, enjoy domination by men: “To Virginia the social manner of the

Victorian lady had a beauty founded on restraint, sympathy, unselfishness — all civilized qualities” (11). Gordon, then, recognizes the constructed nature of sex-role stereotyping, but maintains that women, particularly “civilized” women such as Virginia Woolf, are not the victims of it. Similarly, Gordon interprets another symbolic erasure of women’s experiences — silence — as a positive, not a negative; while other biographers (especially

DeSalvo) declare that silence is the refuge of the wounded woman, Gordon claims that silence was, for Virginia Woolf, a conscious choice, an artistic decision. Woolf sought that which was “purified of the artifice of language itself’ (34), Gordon writes. Her art expresses “zones of silence which reverberate with unstated suggestion” (93).

144 On yet another front, Gordon attempts the same reversal: she presents an area in which women have been traditionally frustrated — education — and claims that instead of feeling cheated, Virginia Woolf actually benefited from her exclusion from the great universities at which her brothers matriculated. “But if Virginia Stephen was denied the advantages of a proper education, she was given, in a random way, an ideal training for becoming a writer” (68). Formal education is not really desirable, anyway, Gordon continues: “What kind of education makes a writer? She [Virginia Woolf] observed that the training of writers is less definite than a training in music, art, or architecture; for a writer, reading, listening, talking, and leisure are all as important as formal instruction”

(68). Virginia Woolf, Gordon says, was actually more fortunate than those silly chaps who went to the universities: “She grew up surrounded by books and with the sound of good talk in her ears” (69) — never mind the fact that men were privy both to the educationand the books and good talk. Gordon runs into difiBculty when she is forced to acknowledge Virginia Woolfs own complaints about being denied a formal education, but the biographer dismisses these sentiments as an outward pose, designed to hide her secret delight in her superior position: “Openly, she expressed envy of Thoby’s training... . Yet she had her father to talk to, not the same as a contemporary, but probably better. So she built up the plaintive, self-deprecating image while privately she fattened herself on the

‘big books’ and consorted only with minds ‘of the first order’ ” (8 3 -4 ).Gordon applies a positive gloss even to the length of time required to pick up knowledge piecemeal, as

Virginia Woolf was forced to do; Gordon says Virginia Woolf “deliberately drew out her

145 education” over a “twenty-year apprenticeship” (91). The biographer gently excuses Leslie

Stephen for the deeply ingrained misogyny, even contradicting herself in mid-sentence;

There was in Leslie Stephen a characteristic blend of contradictory attitudes toward women’s learning. In theory, there was to be no double standard (though he sent only his sons to school and to Cambridge). In practice Leslie could not restrain his irritation at the unexpected obtrusion of a woman’s ideas.. . . In principle, Leslie Stephen wanted his daughters to exercise their talents to the best professional standards; in practice he seems to have taken it for granted that no proper woman would encroach on male preserves. (74)

Leslie Stephen espouse a double standard? Certainly not — but his sons went to

Cambridge and his daughters did not. In Gordon’s curious compensatory view, however, this surely did not bother Virginia Woolf; indeed, Gordon repeatedly alludes to problematic aspects of Virginia Woolfs life (the lack of formal education, the imprisoning image of Victorian womanhood) as if Virginia Woolf had chosen them. For the central thesis of Gordon’s book is that Virginia Woolf created her image, her life, as well as her works: “Her diary testifies to the way that she created her life. It was not a background to her work, it was a creative work itself’ (178). Gordon, however, fails to account for the number of ways in which women’s lives are created fo r them, by society’s expectations.

Praising Virginia Woolfs restraint in political matters, for instance, Gordon writes,

“Virginia Woolf did not preach fi’om a lofty eminence” (182). This, however, was not a choice-, Virginia Woolf could not do so because womenhad no lofty eminence from which to speak, no political power on which to draw.

Indeed, on the issue of women’s struggles for political and social equality in

Virginia Woolfs day, Gordon’s attitude is one of barely concealed disdain. Virginia

Woolf, she claims, was preoccupied by much higher, more important goals than the

146 “straightforward hopes of women’s rights” (92). Virginia Woolf “examined the hidden moments and obscure formative experiences in a life, rather than its more public actions”

(94). Gordon’s analysis of the literature produced by Virginia Woolf may or may not be correct, but its presentation is distinguished by a marked antipathy toward political activity on behalf of women’s equality, an antipathy that surely must influence Gordon’s critical judgments. Her summary of Virginia Woolfs achievement is a calculated denigration of political activism; “By concentrating on domestic acts too common to be noticed she would frame a voice never heard before, a distinct woman’s voice which would be an alternative to the power-hungry rant of political demagogues” (251). Elsewhere, Gordon employs typical sex-role characteristics to further dismiss feminist concerns; Virginia

Woolf was fortunate to have Clive Bell as a brother-in-law, Gordon says, because with his entrance into her life she “knocked up against a more worldly, more masculine point of view” (90). Gordon terms his misogynist remarks, including a particularly nasty, sexist put-down, as “teasing”: “He teased her with anti-feminist remarks (‘the average woman is inferior to the average man’); at the same time exhorted her to write something about women ‘before your sharp edges get blunted in the bed’ ”(90).

Gordon, like Bell, renders perhaps the most harrowing moment in Virginia

Woolfs life — the incest perpetrated by George Duckworth — in almost slapstick fashion, which alters the picture of Virginia Woolf as a helpless young female, victim to a predatory male, into a family comedy: “ ‘Kiss me, kiss me,’ George terminated all argument. She felt like an unfortunate minnow shut up with a turbulent whale” (118).^

147 Gordon also implies, as do Beil and Rose, that Virginia was not entirely displeased with

George Duckworth’s fumbling overtures:

It is impossible to know what truly happened. After Julia and Stella died and Leslie Stephen withdrew, an adult offer of emotional warmth — however uncontrolled and ill-judged — may have been irresistible to a girl like Virginia. George was thought very handsome and his combination of sensual lips and considerate manners made him the pet of society ladies. (119)

Louise DeSalvo, in her summary of the treatment of Virginia Woolfs incest in previous biographies, terms this passage an “appalling account” (5), because it suggests that

Virginia Woolfs written recollections about the event should not be trusted. When written accounts jibe with a view that Gordon holds, however, the latter is quite willing to trust

Virginia Woolfs perspective. Moreover, one of the more subtle, yet telling, ways in which

Gordon dismisses the incest claims is embedded in the structure of her work: when discussing the pressures that preyed on Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell after the death of

Stella, Gordon presents a trio of men who made demands. They were forced to endure

Leslie Stephen, who was “ravenous for sympathy” (44); Jack Hills, Stella’s husband, who

“played on their emotions” (44); and George Duckworth, whose “embraces .. . went beyond the bounds of decency, but which he masqueraded, even to himself, as overmastering brotherly affections” (45). The casual juxtaposition of these acts — Leslie

Stephen’s and Jack Hills’ pleas for emotional attention, and George Duckworth’s insistence on sexual intimacy — attempts to lighten the severity of George Duckworth’s crime, making it roughly equivalent to the sad pleadings of a fragile father and a shattered brother-in-law for time and attention.

148 Like Bell, Gordon matter-of-factly presents Leonard Woolf as the savior who enabled Virginia Woolfs art to flourish, an attitude that strips her of her autonomy as an artist: “Leonard’s vigilant eye and quick action whenever symptoms, like headaches, appeared, kept her sane fi’om 1915 to 1941” (269). This is an interesting perspective, because some might claim that Virginia Woolf kept herself sane, that through a supreme effort of will she managed to keep her illness at bay in order to write great imaginative works. The image of Leonard Woolf, the caretaker, occasionally — and apparently unbeknownst to Gordon — slips into a more sinister register: in 1915, “Leonard was given control of her health which he exercised with minute thoroughness . . . ” (156). Indeed,

Gordon goes even further than did Bell in assigning Leonard Woolf his crucial role in

Virginia Woolfs life: he was to “fill the gap left by the dead past of her youth” (159).

Another aspect of the presentation of Virginia Woolfs sex in which Gordon and

Bell adopt a similar tone is Virginia Woolfs female fiiendships. Like Bell, Gordon traces

Virginia Woolfs attraction to women not to an actual appreciation for women, but to her disgust with men: “Her need of women’s love was encouraged, too, by the growing distrust of men,” Gordon writes, and she characterizes these relationships as “a mix of chivalric crush and immature clinging” (50). Discussing Virginia Woolfs intense connection with Vita Sackville-West and her lesser, but still significant, kinship with

Katherine Mansfield, Gordon sounds almost defensive in her dismissal: “It is usual to comment on Virginia Woolf s attraction to women, but it is well known that neither case remotely matched her love for Leonard” (184). Gordon underplays the relationship with

Vita Sackville-West by implying that it represented a minor stage in Virginia Woolfs life,

149 an unimportant interlude: “Her flirtation with androgyny was short-lived” (184) — a comment that reduces Vita Sackville-West almost to a non-entity. In Virginia Woolfs letters to Vita Sackville-West, Gordon says archly, “Virginia’s sighs were put on, as though she were trying out a category and, as usual, not quite fitting it” (188).

Every biography of a woman must either accept or reject, explicitly or implicitly, the idea that sex roles exert an irresistible influence on the course of the subject’s life. The biographies by Bell and Gordon, while they do not overtly express an anti-feminist view, do seem, in their codings of misogynist attitudes and amused dismissals of efforts to correct political and social inequities between the sexes, to reject the idea that Virginia

Woolfs sex, or anyone’s sex, is a defining characteristic. Conversely, two biographies of

Virginia Woolf — DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf: The Impact o f Childhood Sexual Abuse on

Her Life and Work and Rose’s Woman o f Letters: A Life o f Virginia Woolf — use the term

“feminist” to introduce their perspectives, although the feminist perspective is interpreted in different ways in each work.

DeSalvo declares that the traditional Victorian family arrangement into which

Virginia Woolf was bom had pernicious implications for women:

I believe that the experience of Woolf s life is an example of the negative consequences of a system which largely excludes the father from nurturing or from the work attending child-rearing; which overworks the mother; which uses poorly paid working-class girls for child care; and which invites the father, because of his powerful position within the household, to co-opt any and all nurturing within the family if he chooses to .. . . My thinking on Woolf has changed over the course of these years largely as a result of the insights fi'om the disciplines of feminist inquiry, the history of the family, Victorian studies, and the changes in psychoanalytic theory that stress personal history rather than internal drives as causative factors in neurosis, (xvi)

150 DeSalvo’s thesis guides her interpretation of the events that shaped Virginia Woolfs life and the lives of the other women in her family:

Without exception, all of the women within the family were victims of abuse or sexual violence — Virginia herself, her sister Vanessa, her half-sisters Laura and Stella, her mother Julia. But their stories were hidden, and rationalized, revised, and recast, both in the versions which the family told themselves and each other, and in the versions of their lives that were written after their deaths. (2)

Many of those revisions and recastings, as DeSalvo points out, come from biographers such as Bell, Gordon and even Rose; for the latter, while announcing that she is motivated by a feminist perspective, demonstrates some attitudes that clash with DeSalvo’s.

A feminist perspective figures prominently in discussions of incest, DeSalvo believes: “Incest enacts profound hostility to all women, but chooses girls in the family because they are least likely to retaliate” (9). She uses the experience of one woman —

Virginia Woolf — as a window on “the treatment of daughters within a middle-class

Victorian family” (20). There is a danger of distortion, of course, in DeSalvo’s treatment; to cast Virginia Woolfs life as representative of a class or an era is to risk filing down the very edges that render her significant as a literary figure. Her uniqueness as an artist would seem to make her an unlikely candidate to be an effective symbol. DeSalvo’s technique, however, is refreshing because she identifies it as just that: a technique, a reading, an interpretation, a way of approaching both the author and the foul social system that imprisoned her and others. Of Virginia Woolf and her sisters, DeSalvo writes, “Taken together, their lives vividly demonstrate that squelching of the spirit that was at the very heart of how Victorians raised their daughters” (20). Moreover, that perspective enables

DeSalvo to evoke perhaps the best-known feminist literary metaphor of the late twentieth

151 century: because Laura, Leslie Stephen’s daughter from his first marriage, was confined to the attic when she engaged in emotional outbursts of which he disapproved, “the Stephen family had its very own madwoman in the attic” (35)/^ The allusion places the context of

Virginia Woolfs life story, as DeSalvo perceives it, in the tradition of women’s literature and its persistent imagery of silence and exile.

On a more mundane level, but one that could be construed as the simple bedrock of a feminist biography, DeSalvo traces the inequity of treatment between the males and females in the Stephen household; unlike Gordon, she sees the inequity as unfair and destructive. The most obvious implication of that inequity was the lack of educational opportunity from which women suffered, even if they demonstrated intellectual ability:

Of all the children in the Stephen household, she [Virginia Woolf] was the one who would have profited most from a formal education; all of the young men in the family — the Duckworth boys as well as the Stephen sons — never distinguished themselves at school, and often did very poorly. Yet simply by virtue of their gender they were given an education and she was deprived of one. (282)

Clearly, DeSalvo does not share Gordon’s view that being Leslie Stephen’s daughter should have sufiBced for Virginia Woolfs education. The educational double standard had an even more insidious implication, DeSalvo continues; Laura did poorly in school and was rude and unruly at home, DeSalvo notes, and was punished and ultimately banished.

Yet “the treatment which Laura received was reserved for a girl within the family” because

“[wjhen the boys did not do well, or when they behaved bizarrely, their behavior was either overlooked, or excused, because they were growing” (35). The double standard was obvious: “The behavior of girls, whatever it consisted of, was far more likely to be considered perverse than the behavior of boys, whatever it consisted of’ (36).

152 The inequities in expectations for male and female behavior extended as well to adult life, DeSalvo states: “Leslie, like so many other Victorian men, thought nothing of leaving his wife in the most desperate straits and going off on jaunts of his own with his male cohorts” (43). Indeed, the behavior of Leslie Stephen, the privileges which he assumed by his having been bom male, might have given Virginia Woolfs tormentors

(George and Gerald Duckworth) implicit permission to have their way with her: “Both

George and Gerald had learned, from watching Leslie, that self-control was not a watchword for male behavior” (114). Virginia Woolf has virtually no say in the matter because, as DeSalvo gleans from her diary, “She is continually having to remind herself that anger is not appropriate in a young woman” (241). Just as men are allowed to do as they please, because of their sex, women are forbidden to show their feelings, which might include a repugnance at male behavior, because of their sex. It is, perhaps, the crudest, simplest, most primitive sort of feminist analysis — boys and girls, men and women, are treated differently — but it is also, according to DeSalvo, the prevailing idea in

Victorian households such as the Stephens’.

The drama in some biographies of women is the story of a rebellion, the tale of a woman who alters her life story by re-creating herself in new image. Gordon suggests that

Virginia Woolf was able to do this through her writing; DeSalvo, however, intriguingly speculates that Virginia Woolf was able to do this, if she did it at all, through her reading-.

Reading in effect became her refuge, her solace in grief, her substitute for the friendships she did not have. It was the way she carved out an identity for herself as a human being, the way she secured her privacy, the way she began to determine the life she would choose for herself as a woman. (221-2)

153 Writing, the writing of novels intended for publication, is a public act, reading a private act. Writing is an expression of the self; reading is a search for the self, for portraits that resemble the reader’s self-image. The competing perspectives offered by DeSalvo and

Gordon arise from the same constructionist base: a woman can create herself, can construct anew sel^ independent of social or personal expectations or the past, either through public accomplishments or private explorations. One is able to choose. The only variable is the activity used to accomplish this act of self-creation. These two biographical portraits, while superficially opposed to each other, actually are similar, because they assume the individual autonomy of a woman who, in other biographies, is depicted as the passive embodiment of a tradition of female subservience and victimhood.

Rose’s biography. Woman o f Letters: A Life o f Virginia Woolf, is an interesting case; often it is referred to as a specifically feminist biography of the author, yet in many ways it undermines the idea of an autonomous Virginia Woolf. In an article recounting her decision to undertake the biography. Rose writes, “I took her feminism seriously, as almost no previous writer had done. My very simple idea was that being a woman was important to Virginia Woolf and that this had affected the writing of her novels”

(“Confessions,” 132). Yet Rose’s belief that Virginia Woolfs sex influenced the nature, quality and even the very existence of her literary output proves to be almost irrelevant when Rose turns her attention to the construction of a biographical portrait of Virginia

Woolf. Indeed, Rose’s central thesis — that Virginia Woolf used feminist myths as the raw materials for her art, myths that arose from the author’s life story — serves almost to

154 undermine Virginia Woolfs veracity when she speaks of that life sto ry .In other words.

Rose on many occasions calls Virginia Woolf a liar.

Rose says that Woman o f Letters is a response to “the recognition that life is as much a work of fiction as novels and poems” (viii). If that is so. Rose continues, then the circumstances of one’s life are as likely to be false as true, including traumatic events that previous biographers have interpreted as central to Virginia Woolfs psychological development. Thus Rose presents her infamous thesis that Virginia Woolf either embellished, if not invented out of whole cloth, the incestuous episodes with George and

Gerald Duckworth. Minor inconsistencies in Virginia Woolfs accounts of childhood episodes are seized upon by Rose as evidence of sly evasions of truth. Rose will trust to the overall shape of the memoirs, not the import of any specific occurrences; “The narrative structure of these [Virginia Woolfs] memoirs. . . seems to be more significant than any particular facts they reveal. Indeed, the details vary; there are inconsistencies”

(ix). Between two incidents of incest that Virginia Woolf recalls in various memoirs. Rose discovers an admittedly “trivial” inconsistency, but uses the discrepancy to dismiss the profundity of the episodes outright. Traumas — real, imagined, or some creative cross between the two — become excellent fodder for a good storyteller: “Woolf cannot resist telling a good story, or, on the next go round, telling it even better” (be). In a perverse echo of Heilbrun’s idea that feminist biographies may have discovered “no significant new facts but only new stories” (25), Rose says she has “returned to the original sources used by [Quentin] Bell, but [will] employ them in a rather different way, as evidence of myth rather than fact” (xi). To justify this rather dubious enterprise. Rose curiously conflates the

155 positioning of Virginia Woolf as a victim of sexist social forces with the designation of her as normal and ordinary:

It would be easier for me, and in some ways more pleasant, to portray her as a feminist heroine, the victim of social and cultural forces which every woman who sets high standards for herself in a society like ours must face, and to this extent a model for us all. But the danger exists of overly normalizing a unique and complicated person, (xiii)

Why, however, would a decision to take Virginia Woolfs word for certain childhood traumas that arose from her powerlessness as a woman necessarily involve “normalizing” her? We are, all of us, both like and unlike others; we are at once unique and representative. Rose’s logical leap, which effectively erases the experiences which define

Virginia Woolfs sex, ends up being the opposite of feminism: in her desire not to present

Virginia Woolf as a feminist martyr. Rose strips her of valuable portions of her life as a woman. It may indeed be true that, as Rose states, “Woolfs feminism [was] the crux of her emotional as well as her intellectual life” (xiii), but that conviction bears only marginally upon a depiction of how that life was lived in the context of the subject’s time, as she faced the challenges specific to her sex.

The myth-making aspect of Virginia Woolfs life is the touchstone of Rose’s biography, the point to which she returns repeatedly in her assessment of the “story” aspect of the phrase “life story.” Indeed, the story-creating activity is employed to exonerate George Duckworth’s behavior:

Her [Virginia Woolfs] description of these events is vague... . His physical gestures seemed to him, no doubt, proper expressions of family feeling, but not to Virginia. Although she never accused him of anything more than ambiguously erotic gestures, never, that is, accused him of actually raping her, she regarded his behavior as sexually criminal and called him (with relish) her ‘seducing half- brother.’ (8)

156 The parenthetical phrase is telling: Rose obviously is implying that Virginia Woolf savored these tales of her childhood ordeals, just as one might enjoy the telling of a particularly exciting adventure story or compelling romance, adding details to entice the listener. In

Virginia Woolfs pantheon of family yams. Rose says, George Duckworth “is a fully developed character, a villain, albeit a family comic” (9). To further discredit Virginia

Woolf s account of her disgust with the sexual liberties taken by her half-brothers. Rose notes that Gerald Duckworth later published two of Virginia Woolfs novels. “She never, so far as I can tell, mentioned the incident on the slab outside the dining room of Talland

House until quite late in her life... ” (9).^* That is precisely the point, however, Gerald

Duckworth was a figure of imperial male authority, first within the family and later in the publishing world which Virginia Woolf sought to enter. From a feminist perspective, the wonder is not that she failed to describe his abuses earlier, but that she described them at all, given the late Victorian family dynamics in which the Stephens and the Duckworths were enmeshed.

Rose serenely adopts the sex-role stereotypes that seem endemic to retellings of

Virginia Woolfs life story: women are emotional and unreliable, men are tough-minded and competent. Upon the death of Julia Stephen, Rose writes, the household was overrun with “a wailing chorus of female relations” (12), a slyly sexist swipe that originates with

Bell, who evokes the scene after Stella’s death as a hotbed of females “in constant, lachrymose attendance,” creating a “tragic chorus” (I, 58). Women, in the world Rose creates and identifies as the world of Virginia Woolfs childhood, are bookish and

157 backward, while men, represented by the likes of Stella’s husband. Jack Hills, are robust and forthright. The male-female dichotomy is rigidly developed; “Jack was a breath of fresh air in Virginia’s book-centered world” (13); later. Rose adds, “[W]hen masculine

Cambridge met feminine Kensington, what we have come to call the Bloomsbury group was bom” (32). Rose elides her own sense of this dichotomy into a critical position she attributes to Virginia Woolf; the latter’s tone. Rose says, can be seen as “a defiantly feminine response to the male domination of criticism, anti-authoritarian, abjuring omniscience” (42).

Indeed, the issue is crucial, for Rose identifies the “central anxiety of her [Virginia

Woolfs] life” as arising out of sex stereotypes: “ ‘Can one be both a woman, as women have been culturally defined, and an artist?’ ” (154). Sex provided the “inner drama” of

Virginia Woolfs formative years. Rose believes: “[T]he tradition of fictional form was, or was perceived by Woolf to be, masculine, whereas her talent was feminine” (94). To be a writer, the biographer says, Woolf believed she had to turn away from her mother, and, by proxy, femininity, and embrace the hearty masculine ethic of her father: “For Virginia

Woolf, being an artist involved the rejection of a powerfril mould of femininity, one culturally endorsed and more importantly, embodied exquisitely in her own mothef’ (158).

Yet simplistic gender stereotypes, whether attributed to Virginia Woolfs thinking or wielded willy-nilly by the biographer, are tangled in complications all the same. On two occasions, Rose’s simple male-female duality is quickly complicated. First, she strategically deploys Leslie Stephen as the representative of the hard, achievement- oriented, unsentimental, intellectual masculine mind — the one to which Virginia Woolf

158 gravitated, upon rejecting the nurturing, feminine ideal represented by her mother, Julia

Stephen — but also is forced to depict Leslie Stephen, as all of Virginia Woolfs biographers have depicted him, as the very soul of excessive emotion: weeping, moaning, gnashing his teeth, exhibiting “foolish sentimentality, hypocritical solemnity, and all the conventions of sorrow” (12). If Leslie Stephen indeed symbolized, for Virginia Woolf, the essence of masculine-inspired scholarship, the portrait is hardly as straightforward as casual dualities would indicate. Second, Rose claims that the male-female dualities that created Bloomsbury — the masculine ideal epitomized by her brothers’ Cambridge friends co-mingled with the feminine ideal epitomized by Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell — were positive, because each side recognized the need for the other. Yet as Rose concedes, the fact that most of the men in Virginia Woolfs circle as a young woman were homosexuals did not mean they appreciated feminine qualities: “[Lytton] Strachey’s homosexuality, which was so much a part of his self-definition, was decidedly misogynist” (77). The same was true of E.M. Forster, who. Rose says, tips his hand in the characters in his novels:

Not all homosexuals dislike women, of course, but Forster’s do, and the combination of their educational advantages — their university education — and their misogynist homosexuality does not seem haphazard. Where men enjoy status and prestige at the expense of women (ancient Athens, Oxbridge), only men seem worthy of being loved.. . . (77-8)

Homosexuality problematizes simple male-female dualities, and renders sex role stereotypes far more complex than Rose’s treatment suggests. Her discussion of Virginia

Woolfs lesbianism, moreover, implies that the motivation was revenge, not desire for intimacy: “ ‘Sapphism,’ and not heterosexuality, was perhaps the only equivalent response to homosexuality like Strachey’s. ...” (78), a two-can-play-at-this-game bit of emotional

159 rivalry. While Rose’s portrait of Vita Sackville-West is the most positive of any purveyed

in the five biographers (176-9), Rose, like Gordon and Bell, traces the motivation for

Virginia Woolfs numerous and often intense female fiiendships back to the dubious

simplicity of the mother-search: “Virginia sought this ideal for much of her life and found

it in a series of quasi-matemal figures beginning with her sister and including Violet

Dickinson.. . . ” (115-6). Intense feeling for other women was a either a pose and a ploy

or an attention-getting device fi'om a motherless waif: Virginia Woolfs lesbianism. Rose writes, was “a matter of political strategy as well as physical impulse” (193). Male homosexuality is based on admiration; female homosexuality, on canniness.

By announcing that her biography embodies the power and symmetry of myth.

Rose grants Virginia Woolf only a small voice in her own life story, hardly a harbinger of a feminist perspective. As we have discussed, the subject perhaps should be not granted a privileged voice — the autobiographical voice is but one voice among many — but the portrait seems incomplete when the biographical subject’s reminiscences are categorized as myth, as storytelling, while the biographer’s opinions are labeled as insight. Rose’s attitude, in fact, is oddly reminiscent of an incident she relates fi’om the married life of

Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf: “When she caught cold, he moved her bed for her and dressed her in his dressing gown” (262). Rose has dressed Virginia Woolf in her own dressing gown — a gesture that may be loving and protective, but also is distinctly proprietary.

King’s Virginia Woolf presents its female subject as a motley mosaic of previous biographers’ interpretations; that is a polite way of saying that it is derivative and

160 unoriginal. Among the great mass of daily details that it presents are many that relate

specifically to Virginia Woolfs sex, such as her menstrual periods and coming menopause

(539). For this reason, a reviewer called the biography “a loose, baggy book, filled with superfluous details and repetitious observations, just the sort of shapeless, charmless biography Woolf and her Bloomsbury compatriot Lytton Strachey deplored” (Kakutani,

B2). Yet by including angles and colors fi'om previous portraits of Virginia Woolf, King provides a virtual museum of his precursors’ attitudes toward their subject’s life as a woman: he has, in other words, done his homework.

From Rose, he is able to plot Virginia Woolfs “seemingly unresolvable dilemma: how to be both a woman and a writer” (35); fi'om Marcus, he has learned not to underestimate Caroline Emelia Stephen, Virginia Woolfs Quaker aunt, whom Marcus believes was crucial to the author’s development as a writer and thinker: “In her [Caroline

Emelia], Virginia saw what a female writer could accomplish: she could explore the plotless terrain of thought, often of little or no interest to men, who relied on an overly rigorous devotion to symmetry and closure” (114); from DeSalvo, he knows better than to underestimate the effect of the incestuous attacks of George and Gerald Duckworth:

“Virginia was permanently wounded” (44).^ From Bell’s example, he is able to characterize Virginia Woolf as a flighty gossip: “If gossip is voyeuristic and thus a modified form of sexual activity, Virginia had an active sex life” (387).

Yet in terms of the gender inequity that was so firmly ingrained in the culture as to be almost beyond comment. King states bluntly what biographers such as Bell dance around:

161 Without doubt, Julia valued sons more than daughters. For her, women found their truest selves by becoming wives, mothers and hostesses. Although women were by then beginning to attend Oxford and Cambridge, neither Julia nor Leslie set any store by formal education for their daughters.. . . Stella, Vanessa and Virginia were expected to make do with leftovers, bits of learning bestowed on them by their father and brothers. (23-3)

King, though, also indulges in descriptions that suggest a sex-based stereotype that might best be described as cattiness, characterized by female competition for male attention.

When Virginia Woolf visits Leonard’s mother for the first time, the atmosphere is tense and the conversation stilted: “Of course, the two women were sparring with each other, and the prize was Leonard” (197), King writes; why, however, must the prize have been

Leonard? Perhaps the women simply did not care for each another.^® Elsewhere, BCing offers the same interpretation when Virginia Woolf fails to get along with Margaret

Llewelyn Davies, Leonard Woolfs colleague on several political endeavors: “There is the distinct possibility that Virginia was jealous of this woman who shared so many of

Leonard’s professional interests” (223). Might one individual simply not appreciate another, without the central cause necessarily being a man?

While King’s book is carefully written, with a scrupulous eye toward offending no one, occasionally his word choices betray what appears to be an acid disdain for women who are somehow out of the ordinary. In a minor incident. King writes that an aspiring novelist named Doris Daglish visits Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, seeking career advice. King describes her as “a poor, shifty, shabby, shuffling housemaid who, in the midst of consuming a huge chunk of cake, asked Virginia, who had seen a sample of her work, if she had sufficient talent to devote her entire life to literature” (367). There is no

162 point to King’s inclusion of the incident, except perhaps to display his skill with alliterative language, and to dismiss a woman’s ambitions, however misguided and ill-conceived.

Also, in his depiction of Lady Ottoline Morrell, King seems especially to have chosen the most demeaning descriptive details possible;

Others not quite so favourably disposed called attention to her piercing nasal voice, the exaggerated mahogany red of her seventeenth-century-style curls, the fish-like way in which she took air in through her mouth, the clashing colour schemes of her determinedly bohemian costumes and the deep crisscrossing lines with which her face was etched. (143)

While King seems respectful of Virginia Woolfs fiiendships with women, in some subtle ways he undermines this apparent respect. In his presentation of Virginia Woolfs relationship with Vita Sackville-West, for instance, he juxtaposes, within the same paragraph, Virginia Woolfs relationship with a considerably more minor figure, Jacques

Raverat:

Her [Vita Sackville-West’s] lesbian impulses were also vastly different from Virginia’s: Vita wanted to become a male lover who could compete for and win her mother’s embraces, whereas Virginia’s desire was to be hugged and cared for by a maternal woman. In the first years of their fiiendship, Virginia found it difficult to discern the motherly side of Vita. At the very same time that she was getting to know Vita, Virginia was rediscovered by an old fiiend an antagonist, Jacques Raverat, one of the neo-pagans. (336-7)

Virginia Woolfs relationship with Vita Sackville-West, then, is rendered as one among many fiiendships that flared and then subsided, hardly more special or influential than any other. Moreover, King becomes tangled up in his gender roles when he attempts to describe the appeal that Vita Sackville-West held for Virginia Woolf; he alludes to the former’s distinctly masculine nature — her desire to be a “male lover,” as quoted above, and Virginia Woolfs romantic depiction of Vita Sackville-West as “he-God” (335) — but

163 he subsequently writes: “For Virginia, Vita was a cornucopia, a person whose fecundity —

the energy she gave to every aspect of her life — made her bewitching. Virginia, who felt

drained of her femininity, sought refuge in the company of a woman of abundant

generosity” (366-7). If Vita Sackville-West’s persona indeed were as masculine as King

earlier states, why would Virginia Woolf, feeling “drained of femininity,” seek her out?

What replenishment, that is, could an excessively masculine person offer to one who was

in need of femininity? Elsewhere, King’s text is marred by a certain avuncular tone, an

authoritarian, admonishing attitude that emerges as he figuratively shakes his head over

Virginia Woolf s life choices: “Virginia seemed intent on remaining childless and childish”

(165). In one of the shakiest and least convincing topical metaphors in the five biographies

of Virginia Woolf, he writes:

On 3 May, she [Virginia Woolf] and Leonard attended the inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic on 14-15 April. The fate of that liner fascinated Virginia. Perhaps the fact that the seemingly impregnable vessel had been struck on its maiden voyage by a submerged iceberg made her wonder if her own life was subject to similar, hidden forces. (193)

King seems to believe that Virginia Woolf, unlike Leonard Woolf, would not have been

able to maintain an interest in a news event of the day, without instantly appropriating it

for use in her private mythology.

Clearly, it would be impossible for a biography not to allow the fact (or social construction) of the subject’s sex to afifect the presentation of the life, be the subject female or male. Once a critic moves past the essentialist-constructionist debate, however, and likewise moves beyond the simple-mindedness of sex-role stereotyping, what truly defines the degree to which a biography may be said to be “feminist,” in my view, is its

164 acknowledgment of how much a woman’s life remains unknown — unknown, that is, beyond a verifiable list of what happened, beyond the consensus of chronology that forms the spine of every biography. A truly feminist biography of Virginia Wool^ for instance, would always harbor within its certainties a looming uncertainty, a speculation about what she might have accomplished if, like the young Henry James, she had been able to walk through the world possessed by “a kind of massive self-sufiBciency” (Henry James, 202), the kind of self-suflBciency that is granted to men and not to women. What if, instead of a life ringed by a watchful husband and anxious fnends, Virginia Woolf had, like James, enjoyed a magnificent month alone in Rome, where he “spent long afternoons on the sunny terrace, or sauntered along by a moon that threw shadows on the buildings below in the softly-scooped hollow of the hills” (213)? This is meant neither to begrudge James his experience nor to detract fi'om what Virginia Woolf was able to achieve; it would simply suggest, and keep before the reader’s mind, an image of how women’s life stories often are written for them before they have lived them. The story’s end is in its beginning, if it is begun with a woman as the subject.

As Heilbrun notes, no one really knows what a biography of a woman - if it is to be different fi'om a biography of a man or biographies of women as they were written prior to the advent of feminism — is or should be. Like the postmodern biography upon which

Sharon O’Brien speculates in her article “Feminist Theory and Literary Biography,” feminist biography ultimately may take shape as a “poststructuralist anti-biography” (126).

Yet whatever its form, “biography can be a powerful means for reinscribing women in

165 history” (128); indeed, “We may be about to see a new and exciting era of experimentation in the writing of female biography” (126).

Visionary prescriptions for writing feminist biography are legion; considered less frequently are guides for thereading of biographies of women, for the comparisons of biographical portraits according to criteria of which the biographers may or may not have been aware, but for which they still must be held accountable.

' Gordon’s words are a conscious echo of the conclusion of Bronte’s novelVillette: “Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave surmyimaginations hope”(463). ~ Carolyn Heilbrun also identifies Zelda as the watershed for feminist biography: “Its significance lay above all in the way it revealed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assumption that he had a right to the life of his wife. Only in 1970 were we ready to read not that Zelda had destroyed Fitzgerald, but Fitzgerald her, he had usurped her narrative” (12). ^ Virginia Woolf herself believed her sex to be critical to her work, Julia Briggs argues in her introduction to Virginia Woolf: Introduction to the Major Works: “She believed that the experience of being a woman was distinctive and that it had determined the forms of her writing” (xxviii). Jean Guiguet, however, disagrees; occupation supersedes gender, so that a study of her woric “shows her engaged on that passionate pursuit of her essential being which was the true meaning of her life — her life as a woman, merged into her life as a writer" (59, italics mine). ^ In their introduction toThe Challenge o f Feminist Biography, Sara Alpem, Joyce Antler, et al, write: “In its earliest days biography had been at the center of the modem women’s history movement In order to rescue fiom historical oblivion the women who had been agents of change or articulate critics and leaders of their culture and society, the first generation of modem women’s historians had spent years restoring to the record the deeds and accomplishments of ‘notable’ women” (4). ^ Heilbrun’s book is eloquently insistent on this point: “Unlike the reading of the classics — or of men’s lives, or of women’s lives in the destinies of men — which always include the frame of interpretations that have been elaborated over generations of critical activity, reading women’s lives needs to be considered in the absence of a stmcture of critical or biographical commonplaces” (19). ® Wagner-Martin makes a similar point about the “deformity” aspect of some male views of women who have lived unconventional — by male standards, that is — lives. She was at loggerheads with the editors of her biographies of Plath and dertmde Stein, because those editors persisted in their stereotyping of the writers’ lives: “Either a woman is crazy and talented (at least marginally) and in that case, beaded for sure suicide, or she is ctazj and sexually deviant (my editor thought Stein’s writing was nothing but a joke and insisted that discussions of it — or excerpts from it - not appear in the biography). In either case, the only biographies of women that will sell are those of the aberrant, the misfit, the sensationalized” (266-7). Bell Gale Chevigny, biographer of Margaret Fuller, records the same attitude toward her subject: “Her first biographers immortalized her as a harmless anomaly. What was challenging about her was muted, masked, or ignored” (79). ' Phyllis Rose tentatively explores this point when she writes that one must “imagine what she [Virginia] had been missing in the years she was educated at home” (32), most notably, “a golden moment in the university’s [Cambridge] history” (33-4). * An obvious impediment to such luxury is, of course, money, Virginia Woolf recognized the link between nutrition and literature when she wrote, “...a good dinner is of great importance. One caimot think well. 166 love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well”(A Room o f One's Own, 18). Mrginia Woolf, however, had an independent income that was equal or superior to James’. Hence the comparison between her experience and James’ is valid. ® As O’Brien writes in her introduction toWilla Gather: The Emerging Voice: “While some strains in feminist theory have helped me to see and to trace patterns in Gather’s life and work, other recent developments in feminist criticism, as well as in p^choanalytic and literary theory, make biography itself a problematic genre. For those who reject the liberal humanist view of a unified coherent self and envision in its place an unstable, shilling configuration of forces, biography — insofar as it portrays a stable, knowable self — seems to ofier the reader a deceptive certainty” (7). Richard Holmes notes the same phenomenon in his composition of the life of Shelley. Interviewer James Atlas reports, “So thoroughly does he (Holmes) invade his subject that at times he seems tobecome his subject: when he was in the throes of writingShelly, he dated a check 1772” (64). " Chevigny’s excellent article goes on to suggest a way that identification need not be reductive or distorting; biographers should, she argues, simply acknowledge the subjectivity of their endeavors, and celebrate, rather than resist, the “unresolvable tension” (97) between biographer and biographical subject Virginia Woolf is not alone in having to make the sad choice between books and kids. Rose says; she refers to “George Eliot, another writer whose books were her children ” (169). Indeed, a special problem of literary biography (which will be discussed at more length in Chapter 4) is the inevitable tug of the subject’s written work. A critic must distinguish between Virginia Woolf’s writing on feminist subjects (most notably, perhaps, Three Guineas and A Room o f One's Own) and the biographer’s rendition of\firginia W oolfs feminist thought and practice. It is always tempting to confuse the work and the life, to critique presentations of Virginia W oolfs life according to what seems to have been her attitude toward feminist subjects. Batchelor was, alas, neither the first nor the last to dismiss Virginia W oolfs experiences at the hands of her half-brothers with softening words such as “unwelcome,” a ludicrously understated designation which carries all the moral repugnance of^ say, a diimer invitation on a night that one would rather stay home. The euphemisms for incest in which biographies of Virginia Woolf indulge will be considered later in the chapter. Qmthia Ozick reminds us that \firginia Woolf knew the limitations of a writer’s self-portrait: “Virginia Woolf notes how difficult it would be for a biographer to understand her — how little biographers can know, she said — only firom the evidence of her journals” (28). Such delineations still are popular, witness the current pop-psychology tome by John Gray,Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, which, as of June 9, 1996, had been onThe New York Times best­ seller list for 159 weeks. The essentialist/constructionist debate is, of course, applicable to many other aspects of individuality in addition to sex: race, class, ethnicity and sexuality also might be examined in the context of biographical presentations that choose whether to foreground them. Many scholars, for instance, have begun to focus on Virginia W oolfs class; see “Virginia W oolf and Offence” by Hermione Lee inThe Art o f Literary Biography (129-50), which explores \firginia W oolfs alleged snobbishness as a member of the upper middle class in the complicated British class system o f the time. I am indebted to Professor Marlene Longenecker for reminding me that we tend to scrutinize whatever is not the “norm” — that is, the dominant ideology. Thus Virginia W oolfs sex (and not Leonard W oolfs) is an issue, because she is a woman; likewise, Leonard W oolfs Judaism is an issue (and not Virginia W oolfs religious heritage), because Jews were relegated to “outsider” status in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Great Britain. By focusing on how biographers deal with Virginia W oolfs sex, 1 am not suggesting that sex is the only personal attribute in biographies that is deserving of scrutiity, only that it is an intriguing one that yields interesting discoveries about biographers’ agendas. Ozick captures Bell’s tone perfectly when she writes, in a review ofVirginia Woolf, “He is not so much biographer as a later member of the circle — Virginia W oolfs sister’s son, the child o f Vanessa and Clive Bell. He knows, he does not doubt It is the note of self-recognition; of confidence; o f inheritance. Everything is in his grip” (29). 167 Ironically, Virginia W oolfs Aunt Caroline figures quite prominently in the former’s entrance into the writing life; in her will (1909) she provided her niece with an annual annuity that enabled Virginia Woolf to pursue a writing career. Jane Marcus argues that (Caroline Emelia was an inspiration to Virginia W oolfs career **1 believe that Caroline Stephen was an important (Quaker philosopher, 1 also believe that she and \fiolet Dickinson between them shaped the young Virginia Not only was the legacy of her aunt, which ‘unveiled the sity’ to the narrator ofi4 Room o f One's Own, a financial gift which assured her of income while trying to write, it was a female spiritual legacty which profoundly affected her writing” (Quentin’s Bogey, 491). (Quentin B ell ridicules tÙ s speculation: “But when we are told that Caroline Emelia Stephen shaped W ginia’s art, we are back in the realm of the imagination There is no concrete evidence to suggest that CJE. Stephen was \firginia’s literary stay-maker and there is much that makes it seem very improbable. No, I feel no contempt for that excellent lacty, nor, I think, did \firginia, but in some of her letters she comes close to it”(Critical Response, 500). Bell does not believe that one can respect and, at other times, express exasperation toward, the same person; often, that is the ver>’ nature of close relationships. Perspective is all. Heruy James’ impression o f Anny Thackery was quite different, although based on some of the same personality characteristics, Leon Edel reports: “He [James] is fond of Thackery s surviving daughter, Aime [S]he is lovable and even touching’ in her extreme good nature and erratic spontaneity’ ” (225, Henry James). The most thorough exploration of the sexual tyraimy of the incestuous Stephen household will come, of course, in DeSalvo’s book, which will be examined later in this chapter. ~ The descriptions of the Duckworths’ persistent sexual violations are routinely underplayed by the word choices of many of the biographers of Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries. Leon Edel writes, with an almost amused, avuncular disdain, of “the satyrlike performances of the Duckworth boys — their prying hands and caressing kisses” (House o f Lions, 94). ^ DeSalvo alludes to this same requirement in the life of Vanessa BeU, and notes that it was passed down from mother to daughter “Vanessa also manifested something of Julia’s belief that the presence of a good woman could transform a man; it was said of Vanessa that her presence had, among other things, curbed Duncan’s [Grant, Vanessa’s lover] drinking and somewhat quieted his emotional outbursts” (75). Gordon is basing this reading — or misreading, 1 believe — of Virginia W oolfs attitude toward formal education on a mock review that the latter wrote in May, 1906. The topic wasEuphrosyne, a collection of poetry with contributions from Thoby Stephen’s Cambridge friends: “ ‘Among all the advantages of that sex which is soon, we read, to have no disadvantages, there is much to be said surely for that respectable custom which allows the daughter to educate herself at home, while the son is educated by others abroad. At least 1 am fain to think that system beneficial which preserves her fiom the omniscience, the early satiety, the melancholy self-satirfaction which a training at either of our great universities produces in her brothers’ ” (quoted in BeU, L 205). Virginia Woolfi however, clearly was being ironic here, and not seriously declaiming that a lack of education is superior to Cambridge. ^ The imagery comes from an entry in Virginia W oolfs diary: “ Everything was drowned in kisses. He lived in the thickest emotionalhaze... one felt like an unfortunate minnow shut up in the same tank with an unwieldy and turbulent whale’ ” (quoted in King, 80). Note the efiect of Gordon’s editing of Virginia W oolfs sentiment; by cutting the phrase “in the same tank,” Gordon eliminates the feeling o f sufibcation and entrapment which was obviously important to the writer. Shorn of that phrase, the passage indeed acquires a playful, almost Disney-like aura. The reference is to the pioneering study of feminist images in nineteenth-century women’s Uterature, The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, which took its title from the plot of Jane Eyre. Janet Malcolm sirrtilarly evokes the idea of Virginia W oolfs myth-shrouded life: “The legend of Bloomsbiuy — the tale of how Virginia and Vanessa emerged fixrm a grim, patriarchal Victorian backgrormd to become the pivotal figures in a luminous group of advanced and free-spirited writers and artists — takes its plot from the myth of modernism. Legend and myth alike trace a movement from

168 darkness to light, turgid ugliness to plain beauty, tired realism to vital abstraction, social backwardness to social progress” (“A House of One’s Own,” 58). ^ This incident, which creates Virginia W oolfs ’looking-glass shame,’ is discussed at length in Chapter 2. ^ It could be argued, however, that by claiming that Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell had an intimate sexual relationship (79), a fact that King trumpets in the introduction as his original contribution to Woolf scholarship, he somewhat undermines the trauma attributed to the incestuous activities of the Duckworth brothers. In other words, it wasn’t sex at such an innocent age with a &mily member that was particularly brutalizing to Virginia Woolf, but sex with thewrong family member. King’s evidence is scanty and suspect, and he seems to willfully misread the florid, expressive, deliberately lascivious letters that passed between Virginia Woolf and her sister. ^ Among the reasons why they did not get along, in fact, may have been \%ginia W oolfs anti-Semitism and Marie W oolfs perception of it Hermione Lee discusses W ginia W oolfs “offensiveness” (132) in her excellent article, “Virginia Woolf and Offence.” To attribute the discomfort that both women felt at their initial meeting to personal characteristics (even if anti-Semitism is an accurate charge against Woolf) still is preferable, 1 believe, to the idea that they were two females squabbling over a man. At least the political incorrectness is hers — that is, W ginia W oolfs own — and not the manifestation of petty jealousy. “I feel the need to swallow her [Virginia Woolf] whole, not spit out the bits of her which I may find distasteful” (134), Lee writes, adding, “I want to praise her for her malice, and see it as a vital aspect of her energy and style” (144).

169 CHAPTER 4

WORK AND LIFE IN LITERARY BIOGRAPHY

In his 1975 biography of Samuel Johnson, Walter Jackson Bate utters a familiar lament/ For biographers of literary figures, a “radical split” occurred in the 1930s and

‘40s, he reminds us, demanding the imposition of a wide chasm between a consideration of the life and a consideration of the life’s work — which, in Johnson’s case, is literature:

This polarization is still with u s.. .. It has been taken for granted that a biographer of Lincoln will deal with the political context and the American Civil War; a biographer of Newton will try to look closely at Newton’s actual work; or a biographer of Handel or Mozart will dwell in detail on the music they wrote. This, after all, is the reason they are great. Only with writers was it assumed that there should be a division of labor: that the ‘biographer’ should stay clear of critical discussions of the writer’s works, and that the ‘critic’ should tiptoe around biography and history, and focus only on the text before him without the rich but embarrassing complexities of what it meant to be a living person, (xx)

Bate refused to knuckle under, and his biography proudly includes assessments of

Johnson’s work: “If we are to find our way into the inner life of a great writer, we must try to heal this split between ‘biography’ and ‘criticism,’ and remember that a very large part of the ‘inner life’ of a writer — what deeply preoccupied him, and made him a great writer — was his concern and effort, his hope and fear, in what he wrote” (xxi). Others have concurred, including the feisty narrator of Virginia Woolfs Orlando: “In short, every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is

170 written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other” (137).^

While Bate may have overstated the case a bit, he has identified a central complication that attends the criticism of literary biography. Twentieth-century critics have been preoccupied with the issue of the biographical subject’s life and work — are they complementary, contradictory or synonymous? — and with good reason: the unquestioned assumptions about authorship that so comfortably underlay biographical efforts in previous centuries (that authors were actual people who lived and wrote, and that a recounting of the author’s life might unproblematically shed light upon the works) were severely challenged and, to many minds, completely obliterated by the twentieth- century’s two prevailing critical movements. New Criticism and post structuralism.^ These movements urgently posed certain questions: to what extent should biography be regarded as an arm of literary criticism?'* To what degree must biographers devote their work to an examination of the subject’s work? Dennis Petrie, among others, wonders if “it [is] really the task of the biographer to delineate this important but enigmatic relationship between a writer’s life experiences and his artistic expression” (19). Finally, and most in keeping with the spirit of this study, how do Virginia Woolfs biographers weave literary criticism into a chronicle of the events of her life — and might this tapestry ultimately embody one of the sites of genuine literary artistry in a biography, as both the life and the life’s fundamental preoccupation are united into an apparently seamless whole?

I believe it is possible to divide the five biographies of Virginia Woolf — indeed, of any author who has been the subject of multiple biographies — into two general categories:

171 those which use the life to explain the work, and those which explore the work in order to justify the telling of the life. The use of literary works to help explain the life is discernible in the biographies of Virginia Woolf by Quentin Bell, Louise DeSalvo and James King, as the biographers themselves concede at the outsets of their efforts. They seek to tell the story of Virginia Woolfs life, and she happened to be a writer. Conversely, the use of

Virginia Woolfs life to explain her literary works is the primary focus of the biographies by Lyndall Gordon and Phyllis Rose; these biographers make it clear that they have come to an examination of the life almost reluctantly, that they would rather be going about their business in another way. They note, with a hint of impatience, that the life is only a channel, a conduit through which they can approach the really important subject: Virginia

Woolfs work. Rose’s coy pose of writerly naivete — “I was surprised to find that what I had been writing was biography” (“Confessions,” 132) — is typical; she and Gordon apparently hope the reader will believe that they stumbled into biography on their way to other, more significant endeavors. They want to talk about Virginia Woolfs writing, and they need the life to provide source material, a grounding context.

The issue of how the practice of literary criticism figures into the writing of biography is unique to literary biography, but not for the reasons that might seem obvious, i.e., literary figures write texts, and texts are traditional subjects for analysis. (That distinction is problematized by the postmodern axiom that lives are texts; literary texts, that is, have no special claim on a critic’s attention.) A more valid justification for proclaiming the unique status of literary biography is the theory that all texts are, to some degree, self-reflexive; thus a writer has always already written the initial biography. This

172 places an onus upon the biographer — who is always the subsequent biographer, if the

subject is a writer — to take the initial, self-written version into consideration in the

biographical portrait, a portrait that must include criticism. Michael Holroyd expresses this

well in the first volume of his biography of George Bernard Shaw:

Every text belongs to the future and is re-created by the reader, guided by his ‘minder,’ the critic. But it is diminished if renewed in ignorance of the past or at the expense of the creative bringing-to-birth by the writer.. . . Biographies of writers are written in collaboration with the posthumous subject of the biography. What is seen or overlooked, known and forgotten, comes to be shared between them. It is, like the process of reading itself, an ‘intimacy between strangers.’ (4)

Literary biographies, then, are different fi"om biographies of non-writers, because literary biographies always must grapple with the version of the subject as it was chronicled

(perhaps inadvertently) by the subject herself or himself, using the same media as that of the biographer. (Hence writers’ self-reflexive endeavors are different than, say, the endeavors of painters, sculptors or composers.) As Michael McKeon puts it, a writer’s life is one in which “the story told is replicated at the level of form” (38).Unlike biographies of non-writers, biographers of writers are never able to “start from scratch,” as it were; the biographer’s version is always second, even if it is first.

The initial complication of the relationship between biography and criticism in the twentieth century came in the New Critical doctrine, which emerged in the 1920s and held many scholars in its thrall through the middle part of the century. New Criticism held that

“the meaning and value of a work are independent of an author’s biography” (9), as

Stanley Fish writes in “Biography and Intention.” Indeed, he terms this separation of life and work a “divorce” (10), which implies, of course, that once they were a unit.

173 According to New Criticism, Terry Eagieton says, the literary work “existed as a self- enclosed object, mysteriously intact in its own unique being” (47), a stance which eliminated the need for history as well as biography;

The New Critics broke boldly with the Great Man theory of literature, insisting that the author’s intentions in writing, even if they could be recovered, were of no relevance to the interpretation of his or her text.. . . Meaning was public and objective, inscribed in the very language of the literary text, not a question of some putative ghostly impulse in a long-dead author’s head.. . . Rescuing the text from author and reader went hand in hand with disentangling it from any social or historical context. (48)

Biography is a nice, harmless pursuit, a New Critic might allow, but its practice has nothing to do with literary criticism; such an attitude would, by inference, also sweep away biography’s pretensions to equal literary status with other genres. Just as biography is irrelevant to the task of literary criticism, a New Critic would say, literary criticism has no business turning its attention to biographies as subjects for intensive analysis.

The second movement that has influenced twentieth-century attitudes toward biography and its relevance to literary criticism is poststructuralism, and the various related ideas that are generally clustered under the rubric of postmodernism, including anti-foundationalism and deconstruction. As I have traced in previous chapters, critical ideas that dispute the notion of a verifiable self are hardly hospitable environments for biography:

Theoretical developments in psychoanalysis and semiotics as well as poststructuralism and deconstruction have led many of us to question (if not discard) beliefs in the transparency of language, in the possibility of objectivity, in the explanatory powers of narrative, and in the self as a unified, knowable, and recoverable entity. (O’Brien, 123)

174 The assaults on the stability of the self — assaults which undermine the very ground upon which biography plants its ontological flag — have resulted, in many cases, in the banishment of biography fi'om the arsenal of tools that critics use to pry apart texts and attempt to discover their core meaning or meanings. For biographers, the implications of this banishment cannot be ignored, according to Diane Wood Middlebrook:

Cultural critiques developed under postmodernism have trickled into the way biographers too must now conceive the modes of representation conventional to their gem-e. These critiques condense to three fundamental questions. The first: what is an Author? The second: what is a Reader? The third: what is a Subject? (“Postmodernism and the Biographer,” 155)

For some critics, these challenges to the idea of a knowable self — the very bedrock of biography — meant that biography was useless as an aid to literary criticism. In her article

“Close to Home: Repressing Biography, Instituting Authority,” Valerie Ross describes the cumulative impact of both trends. New Criticism and poststructuralism, on literary studies:

While an undergraduate and graduate student of literature, I encountered one biography in a literature course. It was The Life o fJohn Milton, by A.N. Wilson, and it was assigned as “optional” reading. I exercised the option. When, a few weeks into the semester, a female student criticized the sexual politics ofParadise Lost and met with some resistance fi-om the professor, I eagerly contributed what I had inferred fi-om Wilson’s narrative: John Milton was a misogynist.. . . To my mortification, the professor was not only unimpressed that I had done the optional reading and applied it to the poem, he berated me for falling into the trap of the “intentional fallacy”. . . . Professors of literature were averse to discussions of writers’ lives, and New Critics and poststructuralists had their different reasons for this shared aversion. (135-6)

As Ross and others note, there has now been a third wave in the development of the critical establishment’s attitude to the linking of life and work, oC that is, the use of biography to elucidate the achievements of the biographical subject. Influenced by such

175 movements as feminism, multiculturalism and New Historicism — movements that valorize the uniqueness and even sacredness of the individual experience — biographies now are regarded as crucial contributions to interpretations of the life’s work/ To scholars trained in the anti-biography school, Ross recalls, the shock has been large;

Here not only were professors talking about the “authors” as if they were persons bora at such and such a date, and thus having endured such-and-such conditions of oppression — reflected \>y their writings — but were also uninhibitedly speculating on relationships between the writers’ personal and textual aflfairs: Was Vilette really about Charlotte Bronte’s love for her schoolmaster? I had been trained to view such discussions as, if not wrong, then certainly misguided — humanist, essentialist, referential. Yet, since I tended to find them more satisfying than some of the dryly theoretical and formal analyses . . . I would, with schizophrenic, guilty pleasure, temporarily set aside death and intention and join in. (136-7/

This new veneration, which replaces the earlier repudiation of biography as a scholarly tool, is but the latest swing of the pendulum in what has proven to be a continuous debate across the centuries about the role of literary biography in scholarship. The contemporary designation of biography as a legitimate focus of scholarship marks a return to an attitude toward biography and literary study that was prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before New Criticism and poststructuralism, each for its own reason, abandoned biography. The eighteenth century, writes Boris Tomasevskij in his essay “Literature and

Biography,” saw the “individualization of creativity” (48). Writers became public figures, not the anonymous craftspeople they had been in previous centuries, so once again, the pendulum made its wide, sweeping arc:

Before that time [the nineteenth century] the personality of the author was hidden. Bits of gossip and anecdotes about authors did penetrate society, but these anecdotes were not combined into biographical images and considered equally along with literature.. . . On the other hand, eighteenth-century writers, especially Voltaire, were not only writers but also public figures.... Following in the

176 footsteps of these eighteenth-century writers, Byron, the poet of sharp-tempered characters, created the canonical biography for a lyrical poet. (48-9)

As Tomasevskij traces, however, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the cult of

literary biography had diminished, and the critical establishment was ready once more to reject biography as an irrelevant fetishizing of personality at the expense of true scholarly

endeavor.’

Naturally, these movements are not monolithic, and while it is possible to

summarize a particular century’s attitude toward biography and literary scholarship, there are always critics who disagree with the prevailing trend. Hence the complaints of Joan

Acocella, who rails against contemporary attitudes that, as Ross notes, allow — even encourage — the use of biographical details about the author in critiques of the author’s work. In her recent article “Gather and the Academy,” Acocella accuses some Gather scholars of relying too heavily on the author’s biography for their critiques. The critic castigates her colleagues who use their speculations about Gather’s personal life — that, for instance, she was a deeply closeted lesbian, that her works thereby reflect a sublimation (if not outright rejection) of feminist concerns — as convenient fi’ames for critiquing her works:

Despite their differences, these political critics have one thing in common: an obsession with instinctual process. No tree can grow, no river flow in Gather’s (fictional) landscapes without its being a penis or a menstrual period. . . . Most of Gather’s main characters have been unmasked as homosexuals: Antonia and Jim, the Professor and Tom Outland, and, of course, the two priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop. . .. One senses in all of this a certain vengeful glee. In part, it is directed . . . at the New Gritics, with their insistent formalism. (70)

177 Acocella believes that biography, when used as a gloss upon literature, is inherently distorting, and elevates the biography of a literary figure to a status equal to that of the literature itself: “What Gather put down on the page is of almost no concern apart fi-om what it supposedly reveals about her unconscious. The subject is not literature but biography, or inferred biography” (70).*

The problem with Acocella’s diatribe is, of course, that she is quite right — we do read literature through the prism of what we know about the author’s life story — but while Acocella see this as a heinous distortion that requires correction, others recognize that it is an inevitable function of how we read. Thus Acocella is suggesting a cure for something that many other theorists do not even believe is a sickness. Fish, for instance, argues against a division between the biography and the life “not because it is inadvisable but because it is impossible” (“Biography and Intention,” 10). The New Critical notion that readings can and should be free of the taint of biography is a fantasy: “There is no such thing as a meaning that is specifiable apart from the contextual circumstances of its intentional production” (11). Indeed, one cannot “read independently of biography, of some specification of what kind of person — and with what abilities, concerns, goals, purposes, and so on — is the source of the words you are reading” (12). Moreover, Fish declares, “disputes about meaning are always disputes about biography. . . . The critic who decides to ignore Milton’s religious views and treat Lycidas as a poem has not chosen against biography but rather has chosen one kind of biography over another” (12). David

Bromwich makes essentially the same point in “The Uses of Biography”: “Whether or not we deal with biography, biography may be dealing with us” (161). He argues not for the

178 existence of a synergy between biography and literary criticism — because such synergy

already is implicit in critical readings, Bromwich believes — but rather on behalf of a

specific acknowledgment of that bond; “No matter how scrupulous we may be, somehow

biography gets in the back door. But we need not regard it as a problem. Instead of

obtaining more sensitive burglar alarms, we can open the fi-ont door” (162).

Both Fish and Bromwich, then, believe that readers need not violently eschew or warmly embrace the biographical, but should simply be aware that it is present in all

literary criticism and that the author’s image (as promulgated by her or his biographers) invariably influences readings of the author’s work. Fish and Bromwich both imply, moreover, that the nature and degree of the influence of the biographical upon the critical

is a field deserving of more study.® Lawrence Thompson’s biography of Robert Frost, a

“documentary chronicle of selfishness and conniving” (167), Bromwich notes, altered the public image of Frost, and with it. Frost scholarship:

Because of Thompson we now read Frost in a different light, as a writer of dangerous strength... . We may in consequence allow Frost’s poems more value than... before; we certainly describe them in a less hackneyed style: the poet who cheered old readers and bored young ones for decades has ceased to exist.. . . (168)

What has not been done nearly so often, I believe, is to look at the other side of the biographical/critical equation: that is, to look not at how the biography influences criticism, but at how criticism is incorporated into biography. As Bromwich recognizes, the function of both criticism and biography “is not truth but persuasion” (161), thus biographers, like critics, attempt to bring readers around to an agreement with their versions of both the life stories and the life works. Fish writes:

179 There remain many things we can do with texts, many ways in which we can construe them, but we cannot at the same time construe them and free ourselves from the considerations of biography. The choice. . . is not between reading biographically and reading some other way (there is no other way) but rather between different biographical readings that have their source in different specifications of the sources of agency. (14-15)

Exploring those “different specifications of the sources of agency,” i.e., competing biographical portraits of an individual (in this case, Virginia Woolf), and the means by which they explicitly and implicitly include critiques and evaluations of the work, is the purpose of this chapter.

A good starting point for a consideration of how Virginia Woolfs biographers deal with her work are the self-proclaimed intentions of the biographers, which are usually found in the introductions to the biographies. Naturally, the reader is not required to believe the biographer’s announcement of her or his intentions in regard to treatments of the work, or on any other issues; in fact, in many cases, as we shall see, the biographer’s stated intentions are specifically refuted in the body of the biographical text. Yet even that situation — the biographer’s declaration of one attitude toward the subject’s work, and then the manifestation of quite another attitude in the writing of the biography — is significant to an analysis of the life/work issue. Indeed, the fact that the biographer feels the need to contrive a distance between herself or himself and the subject’s work introduces another set of interesting questions: why is a particular biographer uncomfortable with engaging in an assessment of the subject’s literary output, while another biographer might seem to relish the chore? Why are the sources of “authority” seemingly different for a biographer and a literary critic; why, that is, are certain

180 biographers willing to undertake the tellings of life stories but shy away from evaluations of the products of those lives? As a corollary, why do certain biographers feel the need to justify the practice of biography by insisting that the life is important only insofar as it provides insight into the work? These are large and unwieldy questions but, once again, I believe that one way they can best be approached is through an exploration of how five biographers of Virginia Woolf — consciously or unconsciously, overtly or covertly — reconcile (or not) the issues of Virginia Woolfs life and Virginia Woolfs work.

Lest there be any doubt. Bell sets forth the parameters of his biography of Virginia

Woolf: “In no way can I contribute to literary criticism,” he declares. “Even if I had the equipment for such a task I should not have the inclination; I have found the work of the biographer sufficiently difficult without venturing in other directions.. . . ” (I, xv).

Gordon, a subsequent biographer of Virginia Woolf, gratefully acknowledges Bell’s attempt to forego an assessment of his subject’s literary achievement, because it leaves room for her work: “A new life would be superfluous if, with undue modesty, he had not declined to assess her writing” (x). Like Bell, Gordon forthrightly splits her field, or attempts to, between “life” and “work”: her biography will, she says, disclose “a writer’s life that ran parallel with but distinct from the well-known facts of her public life” (6). The split between life and work is palpable enough for Gordon to suggest that readers will be able discern upon which she is resting at a given moment: “This book will rock back and forth between the life and the work, coming to rest always on the work” (8).

Biographies of Virginia Woolf by DeSalvo, Rose and King are less insistent, ostensibly, upon this rigid demarcation between life and work, between Virginia Woolfs

181 daily experiences and the textual fruits of her creative labors. “This book is not strictly biographical, nor is it strictly a work of literary criticism,” writes DeSalvo. “Rather, it is a work which makes use of Virginia Woolfs youthful experiences, and her own writing about childhood, adolescence and young adulthood for exploring and understanding society’s betrayal of the child” (xv). Rose merges the concepts of life and work, at least in her introduction; her biography “aims to place Virginia Woolfs works in a biographical context” (viii). Rose recognizes the problems and perils of the “artificially workable gray area between the facts of a writer’s life and his fictions” (viii). Instead of using Virginia

Woolfs fiction as a gloss upon her life. Rose intends to use Virginia Woolfs life as a passageway into her fiction: “My goal throughout has been imaginative understanding of a figure who, as the years pass, seems less remote and less aloof, but whose deepest concerns — her art and her feminism — remain to be fully explored” (xv). Indeed, in a recent article that recounts the circumstances surrounding the composition ofWoman o f

Letters, Rose says she did not realize that she was writing a biography at all:

I had not really set out to write a biography, but a series of readings of the novels framed by biographical material that would support my argument. When people started reading the manuscript, however, they called it my biography of Virginia Woolf. I was surprised to find that what I had been writing was biography. (“Confessions,” 132)

King’s biography smugly assures the reader that his work is the only one that truly synthesizes Virginia Woolfs life and literary output:

Surprisingly, this is the first fiill-scale literary biography of Virginia Woolf. By design, Quentin Bell’s splendid biography of 1972 pays limited attention to her writings. Other lives have tended to be specialized. Phyllis Rose’s excellent Woman o f Letters: A Life o f Virginia Woolf (1978) demonstrates how she attempted to create a literature which is both modernistic and feminine. Lyndall Gordon’s moving and compassionate /f Writer's Life (1984) is meditative and

182 thematic, much of it being given over to To the Lighthouse and The Waves, which she considers Virginia Woolfs masterpieces, (xvi)

King’s discussions of her books “are centered on their relationship to her life” because

“the task of a literary biographer is to show the relationship between life and art” (xvi).

But is it? And if so, why? Why is not the recounting of a life justification enough for a

prose work? Why must a critique of Virginia Woolfs literary endeavors be added to the

mix in order to, as King and Gordon imply, legitimate the project, to elevate it above the

petty accumulation of personal details? Conversely, why do critics often write as if literary

criticism must hang upon a biographical fi’ame to give its insights an extra measure of

force and authority?

I will argue that a consideration of the subject’s work is inevitable in a literary biography, no matter how strenuously the biographer may argue that she or he has not considered it, no matter how cursory the consideration. Indeed, as Holroyd theorizes, the life — self-created, self-directed - is itself a text, thus the act of writing a biography becomes, in effect, criticism. Just as Fish and Bromwich claim that all criticism is essentially biographical, I maintain that all biography is essentially critical. The two roads, that is, ultimately lead to the same destination; a portrait of the subject, according to the biographer’s imagination and design. Delineating the specific rhetorical strategies that are deployed along the way for each thoroughfare, however, illuminates both the reporting of events and the critiquing of literature. “

As I have stated, the biographies by Rose and Gordon seem primarily focused on

Virginia Woolfs work; they use a recounting of the life to back up their critical assertions.

183 This type of biography is exemplified as well by several recent studies, including Illness,

Gender & Writing: The Case of Katherine M an^eldhy Mary Burgan. Just as Gordon and Rose use biography as, in effect, a delivery system for their literary criticism, Burgan uses elements of Mansfield’s life — primarily, the mortal illness that curtailed her life and,

Burgan argues, influenced her fiction more than did anything else — as the rationale for retelling Mansfield’s biography. Literary criticism provides not only the justification for writing the biography, but also a controlling metaphor for a restatement of the life:

“Mansfield’s short fiction, like her short life, has been thoroughly canvassed, but the relations between them have not been studied in the context of her illness” (xiii). She acknowledges the work of previous biographers of Mansfield, and then adds this telling note: “Although each provides more biographical detail than I do, none of these biographical studies has attempted a thoroughgoing reading of illness as a governing context for Mansfield’s fiction” (177). Indeed, Burgan purports to trace what she calls

“illness events” in Katherine Mansfield’s life, “especially as they have been textualized by

Mansfield’s narrative versions of them both in her journal and in her most essential stories” (xix). What matters is not so much what happened to Mansfield — the typical preoccupation of the biographer — but how Mansfield “used” the events in her work, and to what extent that trail can be followed by the literary critic/biographer (or biographer/literary critic, to visit the alternate camp). Likewise, by studying closely and systematically the journals of Herman Melville and the accounts of his family members and contemporaries, Elizabeth Renker is able to charge that Melville physically and emotionally abused his wife and family. This perspective is employed, Renker says, not to

184 engage in a posthumous prosecution of Melville, nor even to increase the sum of biographical knowledge of the writer, but only as a window on his work; the biographical details are presented not for their own sake, but as an aspect of literary criticism: “My argument thus tends both to call specific and corrective attention, as a biographical and historical issue, to the wife beating that scholars have either silenced or failed to confi'ont and to explore the implications of such a revelation for our understanding of Herman’s writing” (123). Renker wants to correct the image of Melville as a “hero among Melville scholars” (130), but she is not interested in creating a debunking biography, she says, only in creating a new way of regarding the author’s work. Previous scholars’ refusal to incorporate unsavory aspects of Melville’s life, she adds, is “part of a greater blindness to the absolute priority of Herman’s domestic relations for understanding his writing” (130).

Likewise, the biographies of Virginia Woolf by Gordon and Rose follow a similar pattern of critical rationalization: biographical details are, by implication, simply necessary evils that must be encountered along the way to new interpretations of the work.

However, while the two biographies are somewhat alike in spirit in their appropriations of

Virginia Woolfs life on behalf of their critical missions, as opposed to the biographies by

Bell, King and DeSalvo, which appropriate Virginia Woolfs work on behalf of their biographical missions, in practice they are quite different. Gordon’s biography consistently mingles a consideration of the life and work, often within the same paragraph, or even the same sentence; thus her announced intention to “rock back and forth between the life and work” (8) means that she shifts almost imperceptibly at times between the real and the imagined, between life and text. Rose, conversely, employs a more traditional method of

185 critiquing the work in a biographical context. In what might be termed the "full stop” technique. Rose brings the narrative to a halt at strategic intervals and begins a discussion of a particular work, followed by a return to the chronological narrative. There is an easily discernible line, in Rose’s biography, between Virginia Woolfs life and Virginia Woolfs literary output; the life and work are separate entities, as is clearly delineated in chapter titles, which vary between summaries of places and life events (“Bloomsbury,”

“Transitions and Experiences,” “The Love of Women”) and the titles of major works by

Virginia Woolf (“7%g Voyage Out,” ’’’’Mrs. Dallowqy,” “7b the Lighthouse”)}^ In the preface. Rose addresses the biographer’s dilemma about how best to render the inherent duality of an author’s life, the daily events and the creative products;

In setting itself the task of exploring what is variously called the “inner life” or the “imaginative world” of creative artists, contemporary biographical criticism may be seen — unsympathetically — as trying to create for itself an artificially workable gray area between the facts of a writer’s life and his fictions. But in fact it is moving toward a recognition that a life is as much a work of fiction — of guiding narrative structures — as novels and poems, and that the task of a literary biography is to explore this fiction, (viii)

If life indeed is, as Rose suggests, “a work of fiction,” then, like fictional episodes, its rhetorical rendering can accommodate many different strategies and techniques by various practitioners.

Gordon conflates not only Virginia Woolfs life and her work, but also Virginia

Woolfs personal writing (diaries, letters, informal memoirs) with her fiction. Gordon sometimes identifies the sources of particular quotations within the text — whether they derive fi-om letter, diary entry or passage fi-om a novel — but sometimes she does not; the effect is to suggest that Virginia Woolfs writing is all of a piece, that a portion can be

186 randomly sliced off the general loaf because each portion will contain fragments of the whole/^ This may be a convenient technique for a biographer, but it tends to distort the character of Virginia Woolfs artistry, suggesting as it does that all of her writing, despite her announced intentions for her work in different genres, is ultimately (and perhaps unwillingly) self-reflection and self-revelation, that the only task at which her writing is aimed is a presentation of the self'"* For an author who excelled in a variety of genres, including book reviews and polemical essays on topical subjects, this reduction of all of her writing to the relentlessly self-referential is potentially misleading. To suggest that

Virginia Woolf would not (or could not) deal with anything beyond the narrow range of her personal experiences — and anyone's range is relatively narrow, it seems to me — is a bit demeaning. Surely, that is, Virginia Woolfs imagination wandered beyond the limits of her personal experiences; surely all that she wrote cannot be traced back to an incident in her life.

In the paragraph that opens her biography, Gordon displays, in brief, the techniques that will recur in her biography: the reliance on quotations from works of

Virginia Woolf (generally unspecified in the body of the text, although identified in footnotes); and literary criticism that is presented so subtly and with such little fanfare that it slips by almost unnoticed:

Virginia Woolf said that ‘if life has a base’ it is memory. Her life as a writer was based on two persistent memories: the north Cornwall shore and her parents. Early one morning, lying in the nursery of her family’s summer home at St. Ives, she heard ‘the waves breaking, one, two, one, two,... behind a yellow blind.’ Lying half asleep, half awake in her warm bed, she heard that rhythm and saw a moment’s light as the wind blew the blind out and knew ‘the purest ecstasy I can conceive.’ Years later, she wanted the waves’ rhythm to sound all through her

187 greatest books. To the Lighthouse and The Waves. The rising and breaking came to represent the maximum possibilities of existence and its finality. (3)

From the passage, the reader learns that Gordon considers To the Lighthouse and The

Waves to be Virginia Woolfs finest works, and that the image of “the waves’ rhythm” is, in Gordon’s estimation, the dominant metaphor of Virginia Woolfs life and fiction.

Because Gordon intends to trace prevailing themes, and not yoke her biography to chronology, she announces that she “shall bring in books out of the order in which they were published” (6). This is significant, because for other biographers of Virginia Woolf including Roger Poole, Stephen Trombley and DeSalvo, the chronology of completion of

Virginia Woolfs novels is crucial to an understanding of the author’s psyche; after finishing each book, some of her biographers note, Virginia Woolf suffered mental breakdowns. Gordon’s decision to discuss the books “out of... order” is another indication of the biographer’s conviction that the work is, while indebted to the life, simultaneously “othef ’ than the life; the work is from but perhaps not o f the life; criticism, while it connects the work to the life, also helps clarify its status independent of the life.

That criticism can be employed to political ends, that one critic’s interpretation often is dependent upon violent opposition to a previous critic’s assessment, is demonstrated in DeSalvo’s reaction to Gordon’s interpretation of A Cockney's Farming

Experience (1892), an example of Virginia Woolf s juvenilia. Gordon dismissively calls the work “an uproarious serial about a henpecked but aspiring cockney, his bungling efforts at farming, and a comic power struggle between him and his wife” (16). In a subsequent biography, DeSalvo reads the same manuscript as an exploration “in graphic

188 detail [of] the experience of child abuse and child neglect” (134)/^ DeSalvo’s reading, of

course, is influenced by her conviction that Virginia Woolfs childhood was painful and

dark, shadowed irredeemably by the specter of sexual abuse. Therefore she interprets

virtually all of Virginia Woolfs writing as coded explications of the abuse, and scolds

biographers who do not arrive at the same conclusions. Gordon, who, as discussed earlier,

relegates the episodes of sexual abuse to positions of far less prominence in Virginia

Woolfs life, consequently interprets the literature in light of a different paradigm: the

persistent waves of memory that manifested themselves first in Virginia Woolfs mind, and

then by extension in Virginia Woolfs writing.

Gordon’s alternation between biography and literary criticism is dependent,

moreover, on the speculation — and it is speculation, no matter how persuasive Gordon’s

argument — that Virginia Woolfs fiction was an almost literal transcription of her

experiences, featuring characters culled directly (and transferred with little alteration) fi-om

Virginia Woolfs life.*® Gordon’s analysis of 7b the Lighthouse is a case in point; she

places her critical reading of the novel at the moment in her biographical narrative at which she is discussing Virginia Woolfs childhood experiences in St. Ives, the family vacation home. Virginia Woolfs parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, were “the living

subjects who, as Mr. And Mrs. Ramsay, were to be recomposed and preserved in the artifice of fiction” and the reader should note “what final shape the parents came to take in

Virginia Woolfs great novel of her childhood. To the Lighthouse’’’ (29). In alternating paragraphs, Gordon blends a reading (and plot summary) of The Lighthouse with the

steady forward march of the biographical chronicle, until the presentation of criticism and

189 the pageant of fact become almost indistinguishable from each other. Descriptions of the

lives and passions of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle slide with

apparent ease into descriptions of the lives and passions of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen, Leo

Maxse and Kitty Lushington (29-33). The sources of Virginia Woolfs art are clear;

Julia Stephen was partly unknown, extended over the large surface of her exacting family, extended even further by her nursing efforts into the alleys of London. Leslie Stephen was easier to do; she [Virginia Woolf] had known him longer and, despite the superficial contradictions of his nature, he stood clear. But the mother was a mystery, and perhaps this is precisely what drew her on. (29)

Gordon adds: “Her [Julia’s] daughter had merely to imagine a Victorian matron, with a large household of eight children and three guests” (33) in order to create Mrs. Ramsay.

“Merely to imagine” sounds a bit condescending, suggesting as it does that Virginia

Woolfs task was simple, more a function of recording than creating.'^

Gordon’s unproblematic — to the biographer, that is — equating of Virginia

Woolfs life with her work continues, as the biographer delves occasionally into psychoanalysis of the biographical subject that is folded neatly into literary criticism of the subject’s work:

Virginia Woolfs model of her sex originated with her mother, but her mother purified not only of the dramatic plot of her outward life and not only of the passing conventions of Victorian womanhood, but purified of the artifice of language itself. She sees a woman whose tables of the law are locked in their pre­ verbal state. When Lily is alone with Mrs. Ramsay in the dark bedroom, ‘she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman . . . were stood, like treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out would teach one everything.. .. ’(34)

Note how smoothly Gordon elides Virginia Woolfs life with her fiction, creating the illusion of a seamless whole that the biographer may access from either end, through the

190 work or the life; this technique is employed throughout Gordon’s biography, at times even to the point of confusion, a confusion that Gordon probably intends:

It was disastrously easy to bring Julia back. Virginia had only to read her love letters or to open her old wardrobe or to overhear someone in the family with a similar laugh, ending on three notes of pure happiness, wrung out one by one. I say ‘disastrous’ because the excitement this contact brought, as an inevitable sequel, the renewed pain of abandonment. In Lighthouse manuscript Lily’s very body felt stark and hollow with longing: ‘Ghost, air, nothingness.’ (37-8)

Gordon uses the organization and rhetoric of her biography, its constant shift between the details of Virginia Woolfs life and interpretations of her work, to advance her thesis that the life and work are interchangeable, that they are simply different media for tellling (or being told by) the same story. Juxtaposing quotations from the work with the events of

Virginia Woolfs life, Gordon implies that the work always derives from the life, and that the life can always be used as a source study for the work:

Discussing Dr. Bradshaw’s cures in the manuscripto f Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wrote sarcastically that ‘Milk is the great standby, with raw eggs beaten up in it taken every hour, oftener if possible’. . . . But were her doctors to let her starve? And how were they to cope with her spiritual rebellion against the enchainment of the flesh? ‘Disorder, sordidity and corruption surround us,’ she wrote in The Waves. ‘We have been taking into our mouths the bodies of dead birds. It is with these greasy crumbs, slobbered over napkins and little corpses that we have to build.’ (63-4)

Virginia Woolf, based on her experiences with doctors’ attempts to increase her intake of food during periods of acute mental distress, may indeed have believed, personally and with great conviction, that “disorder, sordidity and corruption surround us.” Those words were written, however, as the musings of a fictional character, a character with whom

Virginia Woolf might or might not agree on particular issues. It is a tribute to Gordon’s composition skills, perhaps, that the slippage that normally attends the life/work

191 dichotomy, the complication that arises from imposition of the intentional fallacy, seem almost superfluous, as Gordon makes the progression from life to work and back again appear somehow “natural” and inevitable/*

Gordon’s discussionoîThe Voyage Out, in which she places Virginia Woolf amid her fictional creations, illustrates this technique once again:

When dons talk academic shop, the women on board ship leave the room as soon as they decently can. Virginia’s informal education alerted her to cerebral sterility. Mr. Pepper can translate Persian poetry into English prose and English prose into Greek iambics but he is a thorou^ bore. (102)

As her analysis of The Voyage Out expands, Gordon extends her absolute equation of the life and the work, with no disclaimers about the potentially misleading character of such couplings:

Virginia Stephen’s experience of madness became ... a fable of the submerged woman. Rachel must die; her undefined spirit can find no habitation in marriage but continues to reverberate beyond her particular lifespan. Her hallucination called for a new form of narrative that was to develop into the modem novel of the 1920s and 1930s. (107-8)

This is a curious confluence. Following the logic of Gordon’s narrative, Virginia Woolf transmuted her own experience of madness into the fictive matrix of Ihe Voyage Out, the narratological device by which the madness of Virginia WoolfrRachel is rendered subsequently became an emblem of the “modem novel.” Gordon’s choice of words —

“that was to develop into the modem novel of the 1920s and 1930s [italics mine]” — is significant. The phrase is sunk in an aura of inevitability, as if the tenets of the modem novel were lurking in the experience itself, and did not represent imaginative effort on the part of Virginia Woolf. Interpreting Virginia Woolfs work in rigidly autobiographical

192 terms, in fact, often seems to rob Virginia Woolf of her achievement; the work is but

another version of the life, according to Gordon’s formulation, and all one need do is to

stand still while events unfold. Repeatedly, Gordon draws parallels between Virginia

Woolfs fictional universe and the universe in which Virginia Woolf actually lived and

worked, making only a cursory distinction between a writer’s professional decisions about

characterizations and plot points, and an individual’s crucial life choices. Even when

Gordon appears to be granting creative autonomy to Virginia Woolf the author, the

equation of life and work serves almost to trivialize both the fiction and the life; it trivializes the fiction, because Gordon’s analysis implies that it derives directly fi'om the

life, and it trivializes the life by implying that the written chronicle of that life is significant

only insofar as it provides a gloss upon the fiction:

Rachel’s elusiveness can get a bit exasperating - after all, it may signify nothing but vagueness — but her author took this risk in order to show that whatever the given language cannot express will float away, undefined. This is brought to the reader’s attention when Rachel cannot reply [to Terence’s conversation]. To inflict a discordant silence is deadly fi'om Rachel’s point of view. It signals her withdrawal although, in other such cases, withdrawal might more plausibly terminate in fiigidity or estrangement than in death. In her own life, Virginia Stephen was to find another solution. From the moment of her engagement to Leonard Woolf in 1912, they would invent a private language that would ease communication across barriers of background and sex. (109)

Indeed, Gordon’s analysis of each of Virginia Woolfs novels is predicated upon the idea that life and work are virtually synonymous, that the work always arose fi'om the life and that the life can only be understood in terms of the work:

She [Virginia Woolf] re-created Lytton first as the misogynist don in The Voyage Out and later, as she grew more fond of him, as the exquisitely cultivated but limp William Rodney in Night and Day and then, finally, as the brilliant, cutting Neville in The Waves. (124-5)

193 Perhaps the culmination of Gordon’s conflation of Virginia Woolfs life and her work occurs when the biographer attempts to summarize Virginia Woolfs literary achievement.

As the following passage reveals, the criticism of Virginia Woolfs texts slides subtly into a criticism of Virginia Woolfs behaviors:

I propose that Virginia Woolfs celebrated modernity was, in some ways, a jaunty overlay and am stressing her unbroken ties to the nineteenth century. Her scheme [suggested] a wish to blend into the novel [Night and Day] that extension of the self through the kind of dreamlike reverie to be found in Romantic poetry. She differed from the Romantics, though, in discarding the pretension of the great soul for the ‘mouse-colored’ person, a nondescript old woman in a third-class carriage or a housewife ordering the fish, and located the Romantic drama, the awakening to a moment of sublimity, in the domestic scene. (166-7)

Gordon continues: “At the same time as she planned her version of the romantic reverie, she cultivated an image of an ‘up-to-date woman’ (167). One must read carefully to note the points at which Gordon’s analysis of Virginia Woolfs work, the novels upon which her literary reputation rests, slips into an analysis of Virginia Woolfs personal style-, the cultivation of “the image of an up-to-date woman,” an image that includes, as Gordon states elsewhere, “red lipstick and shorn hair” (188). At one point, Gordon moves between the life and the work in a single sentence: Virginia Woolfi the biographer says,

“wooed people, wanting love and attention” while simultaneously “using her annihilating wit not judiciously, as Austen to educate, but callously, to expose” (167). The reader knows that Gordon is talking about written wit because Gordon compares it, unfavorably, to Jane Austen’s incorporation of the same facility in her work. Within one sentence, then, the biographer has compared Virginia Woolfs actions — wooing and wanting attention — with the character of her prose. Thus Gordon presents her subject’s life and work as an

194 inevitable and inextricable entanglement, the two sides locked in a fatal embrace that the biographer can observe but not affect, can describe but never separate.

In Rose’s version of Virginia Woolfs life, the work and the life are clearly delineated as distinct entities. Rose, of course, acknowledges that a great deal, if not all, of

Virginia Woolfs material for her fiction came fi'om her life; but in Rose’s presentation, the work can be examined apart firom its biographical context. Such a focus will, she believes, reveal the consummate artistry of Virginia Woolfs work, an artistry that consists of far more than glorified autobiographical musings. Indeed, a strictly biographical approach — championed by Bell’s biography, which. Rose says, “creates the impression of a singularly unhealthy existence” (xi) — has distorted the nature of Virginia Woolfs achievement:

In uniting a study of Woolf s life with a study of her works, I want to redress the biographical emphasis on her illness and suicide by showing the extent to which she took her life into her own hands. It is true that fi'om one point of view, her biography is an allegory of how not to live; she was intermittently insane and ended by drowning herself. But the fact that Van Gogh cut off his ear or that Woolf drowned in the Ouse, while undeniably part of the drama, is as little the point of the drama as the fact that Hamlet dies in a swordfight at the end of Shakespeare’s play.. . . Despite her illness, despite restrictions on her activity, Virginia Woolf was immensely productive, (xi-ii)

As I explored in Chapter 3, there is a danger inherent in seeking to move beyond the factual underpinning of a traditional biography and to treat the events of Virginia Woolfs life as “evidence of myth rather than fact” (xi), as Rose purports to do; the danger is that certain crucial episodes, such as Virginia Woolfs molestation by her half-brothers, will be presented as metaphors rather than as actualities, an attitude which tends to trivialize those grave and crucial abuses. Indeed, Rose’s method of halting the biographical narrative to consider Virginia Woolfs works — informed by, but not limited to, their autobiographical

195 content — at times threatens to undermine the significance of occurrences in the life that readers have been trained, by previous biographies, to regard as immensely important. Yet

Rose’s method actually is a compliment to the complexity and sophistication of Virginia

Woolfs artistry; instead of casting Virginia Woolfs works as raw transcriptions of her life experiences, as Gordon does. Rose separates them fi'om the surrounding biographical context in order to consider them as works of art. Prior to embarking upon her analysis of

Virginia Woolfs first published novel. The Voyage Out, Rose swiftly acknowledges its autobiographical antecedents, so that she can move on to a less obvious critique. The discovery and introduction of autobiographical content in Woolfs works, which brought forth chapters fi'om Gordon, merits only a few sentences from Rose:

In The Voyage Out one can see a fictionalized transformation of her liberation from Kensington and her traumatic encounter with the young men of Bloomsbury. In Mrs. Dalloway she explores, among other things, her ambivalence about the world of the Duckworths and mythologizes some of her responses to the great hostesses in her life. .. .\n To the Lighthouse she returns imaginatively to St. Ives, resurrecting her parents, exploring her involvement with them.. . . (47)

Rose returns to an elucidation of autobiographical themes, of course, but unlike Gordon, she is able to critique Virginia Woolfs novels and essays independent of their alleged origins in fact.^^

Rose offers lengthy plot summaries of each novel before setting herself to the task of critiquing it. The presence of these long, expository passages implies that Rose believes most readers of her biography will be non-specialists, because literary scholars will not, obviously, require the plot summary as background. Gordon, conversely, offers only brief plot summaries of Virginia Woolfs novels in the course of her biography; her references

196 to events and characters in the novels are strewn throughout the text, presented with the

unmistakable assumption that readers already know what “happens” in the novels. The

presence, or lack thereof, of plot summaries is a clue as to the biographer’s ideas about

her or his audience; it could also be an indication of the biographer’s assessment of the general popularity and accessibility of the biographical subject’s works.

Rose analyzes the sequence of drafts of The Voyage Out in order to trace the development of Virginia Woolfs artistry;

Changes in various drafts of The Voyage Out which clarify the portrait of Rachel as timid and vulnerable are balanced by added passages which serve to bring Terence out more strongly and to present him as concerned and positive about Rachel’s experience. In as late a version as the 1912 holograph Rachel is still ambivalent about her Richmond seclusion. For example, when Terence pities St. John’s sister for feeding rabbits all her life, Rachel replies, “ T’ve fed rabbits for twenty-four years,... and its [sic] full of marvels.’ ” “And full of marvels” is crossed out, and the reply as it appears in the published version is no longer defiant, but wistful. To find the marvel in feeding rabbits becomes Terence’s function. (66-7)

While Rose connects events in The Voyage Out, and subsequent novels, with events in

Virginia Woolfs life, the effect is to highlight not the obvious link between life and work, but the degree to which the work represents a reconstruction of the life, an imaginative reconfiguration of personal experience into a universal art:

Exclusion from Cambridge focused for Virginia Woolf all the liabilities of being a woman: being restricted, being dependent, being considered inferior. To her credit she accepted this as a challenge and not as a fate. We have seen how she responded to this challenge in the early Bloomsbury years, asserting her difference and her worth. The Voyage Out reflects this: worked and reworked over the course of years, this extraordinary first novel served as a proving ground both for Woolf s fictional art and for her personal identity. In it she speaks as a woman, confronting what seems to her the essential fact of a woman’s life, limited experience, and she offers the hope that there may be a voyage out. (73)

197 Rose’s analysis of The Voyage Out thus introduces one of the central dilemmas of Virginia

Woolfs life — how to be both woman and artist — and provides as well an ideal segue into the next chapter, marking the biographer’s return to the chronologically patterned presentation of the life story, which has moved to the point of Virginia Woolfs decision to marry Leonard Woolf. While clearly acknowledging that Virginia Woolfs fiction derived primarily fi'om her life experiences, Rose’s chapter divisions acknowledge as well that

Virginia Woolfs work was a creative rendering of those life experiences, a rendering worthy of critical scrutiny, and not merely an extension of the life.

Rose’s critiques of the novels, set apart as they are fi'om the biographical narrative, destroy whatever illusion a biography might purport to offer that the story it is telling is a seamless whole, as relentlessly progressive as a life, moving in but a single direction: forward. The biographical artifice of imposing a coherence on a life’s events is thus exposed. However, what Roses’s biography loses in terms of narrative flow it gains in the implications of its critical methodology: an avowed respect for Virginia Woolfs achievement as a literary artist. To introduce her chapter critiquing vWrj. Dalloway, Rose merges the biographical — a recitation of what Virginia Woolf was doing and thinking at particular moments in time (writing in her diary about an evolving story, in this case) — with the critical, creating not a confusion between the life and the work but a portrait of an artist at work:

On June 23, 1922, Woolf mentions for the first time the short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” as something that she will write in the future, and on August 16 she seems well into it. On August 28 she predicts that the story will be finished on September 2 and wonders what to do next.. .. By October 6 she had finished “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” and sketched out the rest of a novel, “a

198 short book consisting of six or seven chapters each complete separately,” of which the second was to be “The Prime Minister.” (126-7)

Rose’s analysis emphasizes, rather than attempts to mask, the distinction between Virginia

Woolfs life and her work; when she conflates the two, Rose’s rhetoric does so with elaborate but helpful self-consciousness: “I have argued earlier on biographical grounds that Woolfs ambivalence towards Mrs. Dalloway touches on a profound ambivalence about her mother. I turn now to the text to show how it supports such a speculation”

(146). Later, Roses’s chapter-long critique of To the Lighthouse similarly delineates the difference between Virginia Woolfs work and her life, even while tracing the autobiographical elements as they move through the works, like a beam of light threading its way through water:

But in writing To the Lighthouse part of Woolf s exorcism of her personal ghosts was to see them as cultural artifacts, monuments not only of personal history but of the history of us all. This specificity and historical perspective help raise To the Lighthouse fi'om autobiography to the more general relevance of great fiction. (172)

Thus Rose carefully and systematically distinguishes between Virginia Woolfs life and her art; her aimounced intention to rectify the biographical portraits that present Virginia

Woolf as “the artist encased in the bubble of her own art” (x) results in a kind of two- chambered analysis — one of the life, one of the work — that creates an image of Virginia

Woolf as conscious craftswoman rather than helpless victim of circumstance. Writing was

“the center of her life” (xi), Rose says, and neither a parade of daily details with no reference to writing, nor a bloodless critique of Virginia Woolfs work outside of the context of those details, will suffice.

199 In King's biography, however, the same techniques seem to make the work appear

distinctly subordinate to the life. This is made clear in King’s introduction: “As I

confronted her magnificent battle against the powers of extinction, I constantly asked

myself doesn’t her struggle to stay alive — and to be fully alive — constitute another kind

of greatness, a heroism which exists apart fi’om her considerable achievement as a writer?”

(xx). That sentiment is, on its face, an extraordinary admission for a literary biographer; it suggests that, even had Virginia Woolf never penned a single line. King would have considered her a worthwhile subject for a biography.

Like Rose, King rigidly segregates his discussion of Virginia Woolfs work and life; the life is unfurled chronologically, and at the points at which a novel is undertaken or completed. King pauses for a lengthy, if conventional and unenlightening, discussion of it

(e.g., 148-54). Virginia Woolf he adds, “was herself seesawing between extremes of pain and joy in both her writing and her everyday life” (154).

Yet King’s analyses are so pedestrian that they force one to question the point of including assessments of works if indeed those assessments are little more than plot summaries and speculative linkages between fictional characters and Virginia Woolfs contemporaries. In her review of King’s biography, Michiko Kakutani identifies the flat, derivative nature of his criticism:

For the most part, it’s [King’s attempts at criticism] a dogged, workmanlike account that gives the lay reader an easy-to-follow guide to the autobiographical sources of Woolf s art and its stylistic evolution, and that breaks little new ground. Not surprisingly, there are numerous echoes of Ms. Rose and Ms. Gordon’s scholarship in this volume. (B2)

200 Interestingly, criticism such as King’s, which consists almost entirely of plot summaries and borrowed insights, would most likely never be published on its own as scholarship; presented within the context of a biography, however, it is somehow acceptable. I suggest that this apparently lower standard for criticism of literary work within biographies of authors reflects both biography’s traditional exile fi'om the critical establishment — the establishment that requires more than mere plot summary for admission to its ranks — as well as an equally venerable confusion about biography’s ultimate aims and functions both inside and outside the academy ; is the telling of the life intended solely to illuminate and provide sources for the work, or is the story itself worthy of wide readership and close scrutiny, without detailed critical analysis? Until these questions are answered -- and perhaps they never will be, since, as has been discussed previously, biography “walks the boundaries” of many genres, in Paul Murray Kendall’s phrase — the use to which criticism is put within literary biographies will be a site of continuing debate. If all biography is criticism (and, as stated at the chapter’s outset, I believe that it is, regardless of the biographer’s disclaimers), then the quality and depth of insight revealed in the specific criticism of the biographical subject’s work (subjectively determined, of course, as are all such critiques of critiques) is as legitimate a subject of discussion as any other aspect of the biography, and equally revealing of the biographer’s intentions and positionality.

King uses the same techniques in his analysis of Mrs. Dalloway. He offers plot summary, autobiographical speculations and tentative psychoanalysis of the author:

Clarissa Dalloway is the second great Clarissa in the history of the English novel. Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, fearful of and yet deeply attracted to Lovelace, ultimately chooses chastity and death. This was a side of Virginia Woolf, but in Mrs. Dalloway, although the heroine, a married woman with a grown daughter, is

201 sexually frigid and fascinated by death, she decides to hold a party, which brings together a group of people. In her, Virginia Woolf combines portions of her own character with that of her mother. She had become more and more convinced that her talents as a writer came in large part from the French side of her maternal ancestry. Thus the character of Clarissa explores a possible meeting ground: she is an inventive, creative hostess who shows an artist’s sensibility. Like Julia, Clarissa may be wife and mother, but, like Virginia, she is sexually dormant. That paradox is central to the book. (353)

His presentation of To the Lighthouse is equally mundane, a sort of Cliff s Notes-version

of the novel (373). Reducing the novel’s intricate emotional calibrations between the

characters to simplistic labels — Mr. Ramsay is “obviously jealous of his son’s hold over

his wife” (373) — diminishes Virginia Woolfs work because it tends to focus on its least

interesting aspects: plot and character development. Virginia Woolfs contribution to

modernism is, as is evident to even the most casual reader, her style. Plot summaries, of

which King’s criticism is largely constituted, cannot begin to suggest the distinction and

innovation of her novelistic voice.

King also manages to trivialize the relationship between Virginia Woolfs work

and life by trite segues between his discussions of the work and the life: “While she was

confused about the direction her friendship with Vita was taking, she was deeply uncertain

about the form To the Lighthouse was assuming” (376). Moreover, he employs literary metaphors to pose melodramatic, rhetorical questions: “Would she be strong enough to survive this new development in the plot line of her life?” (341). That is a curious sentence simply to drop into the biography, because King never explains what is meant by “plot line of her life.” Does it mean that Virginia Woolf conceived of her life in novelistic fashion, or that the biographer thus conceives of her life? (If the former, then it would provide a

202 striking contrast to Gordon’s idea that Virginia Woolfs life is most fruitfully conceived of

as a series of rhythmic returns, the ceaseless throb of jumbled memories and suggestions,

released from the tyranny of chronology. Comparing those attitudes toward Virginia

Woolfs life, in her eyes as well as her biographers’, could have sparked a fascinating

discussion about how subjects conceive of their own lives and how that conception might best be reflected in the biography; King, however, offers only the cliché.) Does his comment suggest, moreover, a belief - within either or both the biographical subject or biographer — that lives are somehow pre-inscribed with events that must be endured, and the biographical subject has no say in the events’ unfolding, constituting a sort of biographical Calvinism?

After his discussion of each novel. King returns to the chronological narrative and to the accumulation of tedious details about Virginia Woolfs life that seems to engage his imagination much more fully than does literary analysis. The bulk of his biography, in fact, fulfills rather too well Updike’s disapproving description of literary biographies, which he finds too concerned with the life at the expense of the work:

These great scholastic mounds of summarized writings, faded gossip, and reconstructed travel schedules seem monuments in a perfect desert waste, products of the same regressively logocentric tendency that litters the walls of art museums with more and more commentary, to the point where one’s eyes are too busy ever to rest on the pictures. Creativity is no longer trusted to speak for itself; as in tabloid journalism, existence (the life) enjoys priority over essence (the performance, the works). (182)

Updike’s complaint is aimed at recent biographies of Graham Greene, but it pinpoints as well the central feature of King’s work, the "reconstructed travel schedule”:

Four days later, the Woolfs made the Newhaven-Dieppe Channel crossing. They drove through Beauvais, Troyes, Beaune, Vienne, Orange and Aix. Leonard and

203 Virginia would have a leisurely one- or two-hour lunch, visit a church or two and then motor on. Their destination was Casis, where Vanessa now spent part of each year. The Woolf stayed in rooms at the Chateau de Fontcreuse, which belonged to Colonel Teed, although they took most of their meals with Vanessa and Duncan at La Bergere. (413)

These exhaustive lists of travel details are followed by equally mundane and cliche-ridden plot summaries of Virginia Woolfs novels. Of the characters in Between the Acts, he writes, “Each piece of the jigsaw puzzle is examined, but the pieces are deliberately not joined together” (612). Indeed, there is a dogged, obligatory quality to King’s criticism, as if he realized, reluctantly, that he ought to include assessments of the work and did so only under the duress of convention. When he does try to combine a consideration of Virginia

Woolfs life and work, his comments tend to trivialize to the point of potential distortion; his interpretation of Virginia Woolf s suicide, for instance, imposes a simplistic symbolism upon an act that, for the actor, doubtless was torturously complicated; “In Virginia’s writing, water can be a destructive force, but it is also a place of tranquillity, renewal and birth” (624). In King’s primitive critical universe, it is almost as if Virginia Woolf died in order to provide undergraduate English majors with a dandy thesis for their essays.

In DeSalvo’s biography, Virginia Woolfs work is regarded as part of the evidence mustered in support of the biographer’s dominant idea about Virginia Woolfs life:

“Virginia Woolf was a sexually abused child; she was an incest survivor” (1). DeSalvo is forthright about the use to which she intends to put Virginia Woolfs works (published and unpublished, novel and memoir); it is the same use to which she intends to put

Virginia Woolfs life. Both will be appropriated as supporting material for DeSalvo’s thesis that child abuse deserves far more scrutiny than it has heretofore received; with

204 Virginia Woolf, the writer and the victim, as poster child, DeSalvo implies, the cause will

be bolstered: “It is a work which makes use of Virginia Woolfs youthful experiences, and

her own writing in and about childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood for exploring and understanding ‘society’s betrayal of the child’ ” (xv). DeSalvo thus smoothly conflates the life (“youthful experiences”) and work (“her own writing in and about childhood”);

Virginia Woolf, she says, is both a test case for the very issue that preoccupies DeSalvo, and a theorist of that same issue: “I believe that her point of view was visionary, anticipating by more than half a century the insights that researchers are arriving at today about the prevalence of sexual violence and its impact upon personality” (xv). The words by, as well as the words about, Virginia Woolf form the basis of DeSalvo’s avowed strategy.

The organization of Virginia Woolf: The Impact o f Childhood Sexual Abuse on

Her Life and Work reflects that strategy: DeSalvo divides the biography into three parts, labeling them, “A Family Pattern,” “Virginia Woolf and Childhood” and “Virginia Woolf and Adolescence.” Despite the titles, the sections actually deal with, respectively, Virginia

Woolfs life, Virginia Woolfs work, and a conflation of the life and work. Abandoning chronology, except for limited stretches within specific chapters, DeSalvo employs

Virginia Woolfs work as a gloss upon the point that the biographer hopes to make about, first, the life of an individual — Virginia Woolf — and, second, the lives of many children who, apparently unbeknownst to the majority of onlookers, have been abused.

Unlike Gordon, however, who interprets Virginia Woolfs work, be it letter, novel, memoir, diary entry, essay or book review, as relentlessly autobiographical, DeSalvo

205 believes that Virginia Woolfs work ultimately was intended to be much more than

autobiography:

She began to interpret the nature of families and the condition of childhood almost as early as she was able to record her insights. Close readings of major works of her maturity indicate that she repeatedly drew upon the facts, shape and experience of her childhood in her work, but that she used her own experiences, and those of the other members of her family, to examine the conditions under which children live out their lives in that middle class British institution, the nursery. (162)

This thesis, that Virginia Woolfs work may be put to a use other than an elucidation of

her life experiences, indeed, that Virginia Woolf herself intended it as such, guides

DeSalvo’s reading of the works and, consequently, the structure of the biography.

In Part One, DeSalvo devotes a chapter each to explorations of Laura, Virginia

Woolfs half-sister; Stella, another half-sister; and Vanessa, Virginia Woolfs sister. There is little mention in these chapters of literary works, although DeSalvo does critique the poetry of J.K. Stephen, Virginia Woolfs first cousin (son ofFitqames Stephen, Leslie

Stephen’s brother), who was, according to DeSalvo, a violent and disturbed individual:

“J.K. Stephen’s poetry not only articulated a belief in his sex’s superiority. His hatred of women often was expressed in murderous and rapist fantasies” (50). DeSalvo uses

Stephens’ poems, or, more precisely, her reading of the poems, to reinforce her contention that he was, like most of the Stephen males, contemptuous of women:

These [the poems] are the sentiments of the man who was allowed to pursue Stella, and she did not respond to his advances. Leslie Stephen was familiar with his poetry, but he did not find it terrifying, he found J.K.’s verses “humorous”; he referred to them as “playful.” Indeed, the poems were the talk of London. (51)

This negative presentation of J.K. Stephen is almost entirely dependent on the reading of his poetry. Bell, in his biography, presents an utterly different portrait of the cousin, one

206 that evokes pity rather than outrage. Significantly, however. Bell interprets Stephens’

poetry differently;

J.K. Stephen stands [in a portrait painted by Charles Furse] with a red flower in his buttonhole, gazing serenely at the dons of King’s in their Combination Room, a massive, powerful, genial figure. Having made a tremendous success at Eton as a scholar and an athlete he became a Fellow of his College; he was the author of ingenious verses which, in their day, took the town by storm and Lapsus Calami is not quite forgotten even now. Fitgames must have been enormously proud of him. a 35)

Bell adds that J.K. Stephen’s violent, even dangerous behavior toward Stella, which

DeSalvo attributes to the leniency that was routinely granted to the Stephen males when they abused women, can be ascribed to the fact that he “damaged his head” when “struck by some projection fi-om a moving train” (I, 35). Crucial to each biographer’s quite different — in fact, diametrically opposed — estimation of J.K. Stephen’s character is the analysis of his poetry: criticism is the rationale for each biographical interpretation.^

In Part Two, DeSalvo divides her analysis of Virginia Woolfs work into three chapters: the diaries, memoirs and letters; Virginia Woolf s juvenilia; and the major novels.

Unlike Gordon, who often quotes from Virginia Woolf s work without disclosing (except in footnotes) the source of the quotation, DeSalvo makes the various genres clear in her interpretations. Analyzing Virginia Woolfs memoir A Sketch o f the Past, DeSalvo writes:

Woolf explains that these sensations from childhood are still with her. Although the day that she began writing A Sketch o f the Past had been good, it was nevertheless ‘embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so’ .... Her periods of connection with the world alternate with fuguelike states.. . . She recognized the discontinuous nature of her perceptions as ‘separate,’ not connected, ‘moments of being.’ This is not an expression of Woolf s philosophy about the nature of existence; rather it is an attempt to describe her own emotional makeup, an attempt to analyze how depression interfered with her sense of connection to experience.. . . Children who have spent their lives in a state of chronic depression report precisely what Woolf describes in A Sketch o f the Past —

207 a sense of not being connected to the experiences of childhood, a feeling that life has been lived behind a screen, within an envelope which protects the child from trauma or from neglect. This deadening, a state of suspended animation, is what Woolf describes as her nearly constant state as a child. (103)

DeSalvo combines criticism with the foraging for autobiographical links — in this case, a

simple task — in order to present a portrait of Virginia Woolf and to make a larger point

about the validation of the experience of being an abused child.

In her discussion of Virginia Woolf s juvenilia, includingA Cockney's Farming

Experiences, DeSalvo draws conclusions vastly different from Gordon’s, as I noted earlier; once again, criticism is the method by which each biographer justifies her portrait of Virginia Woolf s childhood. DeSalvo believes that A Cockney’s Farming Experiences

“uses the fictional screen of a Cockney’s life to explore the economic realities and marital and filial relationships in [Woolfs] own family, to describe the Stephen household and to sketch details of her own family history” (139). Similarly, DeSalvo’s interpretations of

Virginia Woolfs major novels are put into the service of the biographer’s thesis: each novel is autobiographical not only in a narrow, limited sense, in that it records individual experience, but in a universal sense in that it seeks to link that private experience with what the writer believes must be the experiences of many others, others who may lack a voice. DeSalvo’s interpretations thus are provocative and fresh, involving few outright plot summaries and many challenges to traditional assessment of the novels’ meanings.

Thus her analysis of the initial scene in The Voyage Out, with its portrait of Helen

Ambrose’s anguish at having to leave her children behind:

Her mouth trembles; the tears roll down her face. Ridley [her husband] tries to console her, but it is clear that he doesn’t understand her grief and does not share it; he is not attached to his children at all. (163)

208 DeSalvo adds: “Woolf here challenges the unquestioned assumptions about raising children. What is childhood like for these children who are left behind?” (164).

Later, DeSalvo critiques To the Lighthouse — the novel that, the biographer states in her introduction, first alerted her to the nuanced presence of allusions to childhood sexual abuse in Virginia Woolfs work, a presence largely unexplored by other scholars — in similar terms. The biographer sees it as a veiled advocacy for the often submerged needs of children, and as a persuasive portrait of a situation in which those needs are unmet. In an early version of the novel, the depiction of a boar’s skull hanging on the wall of the summer cottage is, according to DeSalvo, crucial to an understanding of the novel’s careful composition and of the subtle sources of its imagery:

Whether Woolf had access to the memory of Gerald Duckworth’s molestations when she wrote To the Lighthouse or whether she was using an image the significance of which was not yet accessible to her, I cannot say. She had, by this time described George Duckworth’s sexual abuse and she referred to him as a pig. 1 do believe it is significant that Mrs. Ramsay engages in the act of covering over the boar’s skull with her shawl. In the early version of the story, as time passes, Mrs. Ramsay’s cover-up becomes undone. The shawl becomes unwrapped, and the boar’s head is again revealed. Time undoes what Mrs. Ramsay had tried to conceal. (178)

DeSalvo’s critique ofRoger Fry similarly is informed by a conviction that Virginia

Woolfs topic, no matter what the ostensible subject of her prose, was always the helplessness of childhood:

Her method is an early example of allowing the victim of violence to ‘speak out,’ to break the silence, without censure, without questioning the veracity of the memory. She acted as if the integrity of the child’s memory must be respected and presented. She worked under the assumption that memories of childhood are essentially accurate representations of what happened. (196)

209 What happened to Fry, DeSalvo believes, was “a system of child rearing in the Fry household that undermined the integrity of Roger Fry’s ego, sensibility, and vision” (197).

Virginia Woolf uncovered this and “refused to lie, to cover up, to mythologize, or to romanticize” (197).

In Part Three, DeSalvo employs bits and pieces of her readings of Virginia Woolfs works to sustain her reading of Virginia Woolf s life. DeSalvo applies the same serious critical scrutiny to Virginia Woolfs diary that she does to Virginia Woolfs novels and essays;

Writing the diary was the first and most defiant act of her adolescence, but she did it in a socially acceptable way. For in its most radical manifestation, a diary is a potential historical time bomb: it lies in waiting until it explodes misapprehensions about the past, misconceptions about the role of women or other outsider groups in history, misrepresentations about how a particular life was lived. (237)

Of Virginia Woolfs entry for Feb. 1, 1897, when she writes that her sister went to a drawing lesson while Virginia Woolf and her father took a walk, DeSalvo notes: “It is an extremely important entry, because it clearly indicates the power structure of the family, and the family dynamics within the Stephen household” (237-8).

DeSalvo concludes her analysis of Virginia Woolfs literary creations by noting how each one reflects the author’s views on adolescence: “In her explorations of Victorian childhood, Virginia Woolf emphasized the common experience of suffering, emotional neglect and isolation” (282). It is in the combination of biography and criticism, however, where DeSalvo’s method of using the work to reinforce the biographer’s thesis about the life, and using the life to reinforce the critic’s interpretation of the work, demonstrates its strength and persuasiveness: “Throughout the years of Virginia Woolfs apprenticeship as

210 a writer, while she was experimenting with form and trying to find her own voice and subject matter, she continued to live with the daily, insidious reality of sexual abuse”

(301). Indeed, DeSalvo’s final image is the culmination of her technique of first isolating her consideration of the biographical subject’s work and the life, then combining them, so that the biography becomes the record both of an individual life, primarily through its texts, and of that life’s significance to other lives:

Throughout her life, as we have seen, Virginia Woolf consistently examined the betrayal of the child’s right to protection with the family. Her life’s work — her memoirs and autobiography, her novels, her essays and biographies — is an invaluable missing link in the history of incest, abuse, and the effects of family violence. But we must not forget that in 1892 a terrified ten-year-old girl by the name of Virginia Stephen first picked up her pen to write a portrait of the world as seen through the eyes of an abused child. (305)

In this way, DeSalvo illuminates contexts as well as texts.

Bell’s biography is especially significant to a consideration of how criticism operates within literary biography because, as I have noted, he is the only biographer openly to reject criticism; like all literary biography, however, his work includes a great deal of it. To be sure, the criticism often is disguised as idle commentary or casual, ofthand judgment; rarely does it arrive in the tidy package that we have come to expect from literary criticism, with symbols neatly arrayed and themes carefully teased out. Yet criticism of Virginia Woolfs works and the works of others is present in Bell’s biography, despite his disclaimer. Perhaps he believes that, lacking formal training as a literary critic, his critiques are not critiques at all; or perhaps he believes that only critiques of published works count as criticism. However, in his biography. Bell’s evaluations of texts of aU kinds are frequent and spirited.

211 Virginia Woolf s maternai grandmother. Maria Jackson, was a fanatical correspondent, as Bell tells us; her letters, he adds, reflected the family’s characteristics:

“their silliness, their gush, their cloying sweetness, their continual demands for affection and with it a mawkish vein, a kind of tender gloating over disease and death” (17). His critique of the literary qualities of Maria Jackson’s letters is harsh:

Reading her one feels as though one were struggling through a wilderness of treacle. Mrs. Jackson was as good as gold; but there is not one original thought, very little commonsense and not the slightest dexterity in the use of language in all her hundreds and hundreds of letters. (17)

Later, Bell reiterates his critique of Maria Jackson’s epistles, castigating them for “the vague benevolence, the poetic gush, the cloying, infuriating sentimentality” that they exhibited.

Virginia Woolf s juvenilia also is critiqued by Bell. As he recounts, she and her young siblings composed a newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News. By the time Virginia

Woolf was thirteen years old, however, her writing style had changed:

As might be expected, the charm and fun of the earlier numbers has evaporated. Occasionally a phrase, a joke, a turn of speech anticipates her adult style; but the general impression is rather flat. She is still writing for an adult audience; but now she has reached a self-conscious age and plays for safety. She attempts a novel of manners; she writes an article describing a dream in which she was God. These are both in their way interesting, but they are also very clearly the work of a girl making a deadly serious study of English literature. (37)

Bell frequently uses the critique of a letter by Virginia Woolf to introduce a psychological nuance, creating a kind of critically informed psychobiography. Commenting on an 1899 letter from Virginia Woolf to her cousin, Emma Vaughan, Bell is insightful about Virginia

Woolfs ability to transfer her personality to the page:

212 This letter, with its pace, its mockery, its exaggeration, its flights of fancy, is already, despite some schoolgirlish remarks, not unlike the kind of letter that she was to write in later years. And those who remember her conversation will recognise certain turns of phrase, a certain impetuosity of address, which shows that at the age of seventeen she was already very like the person whom they knew. In a sense then she was precocious and old for her years, but in another way she was still very much a child and a very timid child at that. Peering out firom the edge of the nest she observed the drop below with terror, a terror that was increased by her sister’s unlucky attempts to fly. (I, 67-8)

Bell confidently pinpoints what he believes to be the autobiographical sources of Virginia

Woolfs fiction: “When in Night and Day Ralph Denham brings Katherine Hilbery to visit

his family in Highgate, Virginia is surely remembering that first visit to the Woolf family”

(II, 3). Moreover, he offers an appraisal, although he quickly hedges and couches it in

terms of Virginia Woolfs expectations for the novel:

Night and Day was, and was intended to be, a fairly pedestrian affair. Virginia wanted to see if she could achieve a perfectly orthodox and conventional novel. Also she wanted to do something which would not bring her too close to the abyss firom which she had so recently emerged. In the final chapters of The Voyage Out she had been playing with fire. She had succeeded in bringing some of the devils who dwelt within her mind hugely and gruesomely fi-om the depths, and she had gone too far for comfort. The novel and the final effort of giving it to the world had taken her over the edge of sanity and she could not yet risk a repetition of that appalling operation. Deliberately therefore she embarked upon something sane, quiet, and undisturbing. She was to use this expedient again and to follow a particularly exacting novel with something lighter and easier; thus Orlando follows To the Lighthouse, Flush follows The Waves and Three Guineas follows The Years', the heavyweight novel is succeeded by a lightweight book — what she called “a joke.” Night and Day was more than a joke, but despite its ambitious proportions it was a recuperative work. (II, 42)

Bell declares later that he agrees with Katherine Mansfield’s rather negative review of

Night and Day : “It was a very orthodox performance and Katherine Mansfield does no more than anticipate the bewilderment of many critics at finding in it none of the audacity of The Voyage Out ox Kew Garden^^ (II, 69).

213 Bell, a believer in context, questions the truthfulness of Virginia Woolfs diary:

“Despite their uncalculating sincerity I do not believe that these volumes give an entirely true picture of their author” since “she wrote in her diary when she could not read, and when she could not read it was usually because she was cross, or in some way disturbed”

(n, 45); hence the diary entries would reflect only a single mood: the oflf-kilter, exasperated Virginia Woolf. Elsewhere, he psychoanalyzes Virginia WooK based on a

1923 diary entry — which means that when it suits his purposes. Bell apparently does grant the diary credulity:

It is possible to disengage a number of connected elements from Virginia’s melancholy reflections; a perennial and incurable regret that she had no children; a natural jealousy of Vanessa in this respect and — a further source of envy — Vanessa’s ability, despite her parental commitments, to lead a freer, more adventurous life than Virginia. This again related to her feeling, as she approached her forty-first birthday, that life was slipping away.. . . (U, 89)

Bell hesitates not at all to critique Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, a literary address Virginia

Woolf delivered in 1924 at Cambridge University:

It was as near as she came to an aesthetic manifesto. She speaks to the young and for the future — ‘we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature.’ ‘We’ means the avant garde .... Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown is, in fact, Virginia’s own private manifesto. She outlines her programme for the next decade. To some extent she outlines her own life work. (H, 104-5)

Indeed, Bell’s subsequent critiqueof Mrs. Dalloway involves a sophisticated analysis of

Virginia Woolfs fictional technique, as well as an assessment of her achievement that is the rival of any such assessment in biographies that readily accept the mantle of criticism along with biography — that, in fact, consider themselves “literary biographies” in the traditional sense of the term:

214 She is claiming for herself the ability, or at least the intention, to see events out of time, to apprehend processes of thought and feeling as though they were pictorial shapes. It is possible in Mrs Dalloway to find an attempt of this nature, a desire to make literature ‘radical’ rather than ‘linear,’ to describe at once the ‘splashes in the outer air’ and the ‘waves that follow one another into dark and forgotten comers.’ It may be that she acknowledges the extreme difiBculty of such an undertaking when, in her next novel [7b the Lighthouse], she places a painter and a painting so near to the heart of her literary design and ends it with; ‘a line there, in the centre.’ (n, 106-7)

Each of Virginia Woolfs novels, in fact, is critiqued by Bell, but in subtle, seemingly incidental ways. Unlike the biographies by Rose, King and DeSalvo, in which the chronological narrative is halted to accommodate a thoroughgoing and well-delineated analysis of each literary work. Bell drops his opinions and judgments into the general well of his story, hoping, perhaps, that they will dissolve before they can be identified specifically as criticism.

Yet his literary analyses are discernible within his biography, reflecting different critical strategies. His analysis of Orlando focuses on the creation of the title character:

Orlando [is] of all Virginia’s novels the one that comes nearest to sexual, or rather to homosexual, feeling; for, while the hero/heroine undergoes a bodily transformation, being at first a splendid youth and then a beautiful lady, the psychological metamorphosis is far less complete... . Orlando is also Virginia’s most idealized creation; he/she is modelled near to the heart’s desire (and not only to the heart) - near, in fact, to he glamorous creations of the novelette. Compare Virginia’s treatment of him/her to the cool ironies of Mrs Dalloway or to the floral metamorphosis of Jinny in The Waves — a bouquet on a gilded chair — or the discreet glimpses of Jacob’s loves. (U, 118-9)

Bell instinctively traces the sources of Orlando's characters and feelings: “The book is interesting biographically, partly because it commemorates Virginia’s love for Vita, and partly because we can trace so many of its elements to the incidents of Virginia’s daily life in those years” (II, 132).

215 Moreover, he obviously enjoys the construction of original critical epigrams to summarize the appeal of certain works by Virginia Woolf; “In A Room o f One’s Own one hears Virginia speaking. In her novels she is thinking” (H, 144); Flush is not so much a book by a dog lover as a book by someone who would love to be a dog” (II, 175); “It

[Three Guineas] is the product of a very odd mind and, I think, of a very odd state of mind” (H, 204). He is everywhere concerned with Virginia Woolfs work, a concern which he attempts to put under a strictly biographical heading — does the work reflect a fictionalized version of events in her life, or her attitude toward those events? — but the critic in Bell continues to slip out and have its way in his prose. His analysis of A Room o f

One's Own, for instance, is supple and intuitive:

It is, I think, the easiest of Virginia’s books, by which I mean that it puts no great burden on the sensibilities. The whole work is held together, not as in her other works by a thread of feeling, but by a thread of argument — a simple, well-stated argument.. . . It is a serene voice, the voice of a happy woman who loves life, loves even the rattle of coal down the pavement coalhole.. . . (H, 144-5)

Bell does, however, sporadically insist that certain works are “biographical” — that is, based on actual events — and others are not, a philosophy that puts him at odds with

Gordon. For instance, he writes, “Biographically Flush is interesting, for in a way it is a work of self-revelation” (II, 175), as if this is a distinguishing characteristic.

Bell’s criticism is learned enough to enable him to place the middle-aged Virginia

Woolf among the writers and major literary trends of her time, to assess her contribution in the mid-193 Os; again, however, the critique is qualified by an assurance that the attitude described is as much Virginia Woolfs as it is Bell’s:

She had a sense at tins time that her reputation must decline, nor was it an unreasonable supposition.. . . She had reached a position the eminence of which

216 made her an obvious target for those critics who like to take a shy at the Establishment. In vm&ag Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown Virginia had seen as her natural antagonists Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy, while her natural allies were (not without reservations) E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Lytton Strachey. It was possible, in 1924, to see the party warfare of literature in those terms. Ten years later it was no longer possible. Wells was now the only major survivor of the old guard and, of what had been the younger generation, Lawrence was dead, Lytton was dead, E.M. Forster had ceased to write novels and there had been no major work from Joyce since 1922.... Having lost both her adversaries and her collaborators she stood very much alone. (II, 185)

Despite his proclamation that his work will not include literary criticism, then. Bell provides a bracingly succinct appraisal of the changing tastes of the literary world in the

1930s; “Her [Virginia Woolf s] gift was for the pursuit of shadows, for the ghostly whispers of the mind and for Pythian incomprehensibility, when what was needed was the swift and lucid phrase that could reach the ears of unemployed working men or Trades

Union oflBcials” (II, 186).

If lives are texts, then all biographies are meta-narratives. (The criticism of biography, then, is a meta-meta-narrative.) When the biographical subject is a writer, then there are texts other than the life — “traditional” texts, we might say, for want of a better term — that also require consideration by the biographer. What I want to suggest about literary biography is, indeed, that it obtains its unique status because the biographical subject produced texts that are supplemental to the life-text. Considering the life itself as a text has not eliminated the centuries-old debate about the place of criticism in biography, or biography in criticism; it has simply added another dimension to the criticism of biography. Just as all criticism is informed by biographical information about the author of the work under review, all biography is essentially critical: it positions texts composed of

217 various media — life, work, image — and seeks a temporary, because ever-changing,

consensus.

Moreover, some contemporary critics of biography have taken the concept of the interchangeability of life and text to yet another level: if life is text, and text life, then the biography itself may constitute an extension of the life (and the life’s work). In an article

comparing the various biographies of the Bronte clan, Katherine Frank writes: “In many

cases Bronte biography has become a kind of posthumous Bronte novel” (“The Bronte

Biographies,” 142). Likewise, Malcolm writes of Virginia Woolf and her circle: “The

legend of Bloomsbury has taken on the dense complexity of a sprawling nineteenth-

century novel” (“A House of One’s Own,” 64). Because literary biography tells the

subject’s life story in the same medium in which the biographical subject worked, these

sentiments suggest, the conflation of the life-text and the text of the biography is inevitable; it is a fusion remarkably similar, in fact, to the conflation of life and work that so bedeviled an earlier generation of critics of literary biography.

' The lament is familiar, that is, for a biographer writing in the 1970s; as this chapter will discuss, the situation has changed since the publication of Bate’s biography. ■ In an example of a chronic, irritating — and, 1 believe, vastly misleading — technique of some literary biographers, Lyndall Gordon transcribes this quotation fiomOrlando into her biography (6) without attributing it to the novel, thereby leaving the impression that it isVirginia Woolfs personal belief and not the utterance of a fictional character created by Virginia Woolf, which may or may not reflect the author’s sentiments. This is the equivalent of a biographer’s quotation of Satan’s lines in Paradise Lost and the attributio of them to John Milton, \firginia Woolf indeed may have believed what theOrlando narrator said, deep in her soul, just as Milton may have secretly agreed with some of the thoughts he ascribed to Satan. However, biographers have a responsibility to make the distinction clear. ^ Consider, for instance, the casuaf graceful and unselfconscious way that Samuel Johnson includes literary criticism in his portrait of Richard Savage in Lives o f the English Poets. Of Savage’s Wanderer, Johnson writes, "He has indeed taken opportunity of mentioning her [Mrs. Oldfield, a patron]; but celebrates her not for her virtue, but her beauty, an excellence which none ever denied hen this is the only encomium with which he has rewarded her liberality, and perhaps he has even in this been too lavish of his praise” (128). While many people object toThe Wanderer bâause, Johnson continues, “the design is obscure, and the plan perplexed; [and] the images, however beautifiil, succeed each other without order, and the whole performance is not so much a regular fabric, as a heap o f shining materials thrown together 218 by accident, which strikes rather with the solemn magnificence of a stupendous ruin, than the elegant grandeur of a finished pile” (154), the biographer defends its quality: “The sun that bums up the mountains, fiuctifies the vales; the deluge that rushes down the broken rocks with dreadful impetuosity, is separated into purling brooks; and the rage of the hurricane purifies the air” (155). Johnson thus gently elides literary criticism and commentary on Savage’s personality. * Richard Altick’s reference work. The Art o f Literary Research, provides one of the best illustrations of the unchallenged notion that biography is only relevant insofar as it sheds light upon the biographical subject’s literary achievement: “It [the literary work] is the product of an individual human being’s imagination and intellect; therefore, we must know all we can about the author.. . . Behind the book is a man or woman whose character and experience of life carmot be overlooked in any efibrt to establish what the book really says” (5). Altick never considers that the biography itselfi whether or not it provides insight into the work, might be valuable — that, in fact, the biograplty might itself constitute “the woric.” ^ As Paric Honan notes in his article, “Austen, Arnold, Shakespeare,” recent critical movements have enabled interesting hybrid approaches that open up whole new possibilities of biographical thought: “All in all, to its credit. New Historicism as effectively as any other theory since the time of the New Critics broke down the binary hegemony o f ‘author’ and''opus, ’ and so began to make the Renaissance much more available to literary biographers” (198). ^ By quoting these portions of Ross’ essay, which I find amusing and instructive, 1 do not mean to misrepresent her argument, which is that the “repression of biography in literary studies” (137) is symptomatic of other “institutional anxieties about such issues as gender, identity and popular culture” (156). ' Michael McKeon makes essentially the same point in his article “Writer as Hero: Novelistic Préfigurations and the Emergence of Literary Biography.” Toward the end of the seventeenth century, he says, popular culture embraced “the birth of the notion of the artist as professional writer or ‘man of letters’ ” (17). Novels of the period similarly “anticipate the modem type of writer because [they] intuit the writer’s life as a cultural model for [their] own deepest concern” (38). ^ Acocella fails to point out, however, that theuse of such “inferred biography” can lead to significant insights about Gather’s wofic and life. As Ellen Moers noted inLiterary Women, Gather was displeased with The Song o f the Lark, the novel in which the descriptions of the physical landscape are insistently sexual - and scholars carmot be blamed for wondering if the reason for Gather’s disgruntlement was related to this sexual element, an element Gather tried to repress: “The whole Panther Ganon section of the novel is concerned with female self-assertion in terms of landscape; and the dedication to female landscape carries with it the fullest possible tally of spiritual, historical, national and artistic associations. Whether (father’s later dissatisfaction with the novel included a realization of the unguarded sexuality of her canon topography there is no way to know” (258). Moers’ biographically informed criticismisa&r cry firom Acocella’s caricature of the critic/biographer who imposes contemporary political correctness upon works of a previous age. ’ Tomasevskij’s attitude is typical: he aimounces that critics must consider “how the poet’s biography operates in the reader’s consciousness” (47); how, that is, a knowledge of the biography affects the reading of the literary work. He does not consider the reverse: how, that is, a reading of the literary work affects the composition of the biography. As we have explored earlier, biography is widely considered unworthy of the critical scrutirty that is brought to bear upon so-called “creative” works, so naturally the reverse perspective is rare. Yet another gambit is to present biographical details and their relationship to the biographical subject’s work, and then to swiftly distance oneself fixrm the parallels; hence David Daiches, in Virginia Woolf (1963), draws corollaries between people in Virginia W oolfs life and her literary creations but repudiates his links with this disclaimer (that could serve as a veritable primer for New Griticism): “But an awareness of all this does not alter in any significant way the marmer in which we read her books and how we judge them” (xviii). " This conflation of the life and work — the wholesale equation of the writing subject with that which is written — is a phenomenon increasingly remarked upon by biographical theorists. In an article that 219 explores the images of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot as “great women” of letters, Alison Booth argues on behalf of “the rewards of an occasional experiment in conflating author and work in order to witness the vocational difficulties facing women writers and to challenge an aesthetics of impersoimli^ that devalues the feminine” (89). She adds, “W oolfs heroines are also incomplete versions o f their author’s own story” (95). The fuU-stop method is evident in many other (perhaps even the majori^ o f) literary biographies; in Douglas Day's Malcolm Lowry, the biographer pauses during his recitation of Lowry’s messy, complicated life to present a detailed analysis o f Under the Volcano, Lowry’s major work (300-26); “Under the Volcano is a highly dynamic work.... The dynamics are cinematic, dramatic, and most probably have their origins in die play by Jean Cocteau that Lowry saw twice in Paris in May 1934: La Machine Infemale ” (300). Likewise, in his biographyScott Fitzgerald, Jeffirey Meyers interrupts his narrative to present a cursory discussion of Fitzgerald’s novels:“The Great G atsby... is Fitzgerald’s most perfectly realized work of art. The novel reveals a new and confident mastery of his material, a fascinating if sensational plot, a Keatsian ability to evoke a romantic atmosphere, a set o f memorable and deeply interesting characters, a witty and incisive social satire” (122). Rarely do the explications of literary works included in biographies break new critical ground; Day’s analysis of Under the Volcano is unusually iimovative, especially when compared to Meyers’ pedestrian remarks on Fitzgerald’s work. This sentiment is analogous to Lytton Strachey’s remark about the task of the biographer in the introduction toEminent Victorians: “He will row out over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a litde bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen firom those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity” (9). Just as Strachty believes that the randomly chosen detail can reveal the whole person, so does Gordon believe that any passage firom any of Virginia W oolfs work was intended to convey the author’s personal convictions. This will be specifically refuted by DeSalvo, as I discuss later in this chapter. DeSalvo sternly rebukes Gordon for her interpretation in a footnote (329). To see how the critical attitude shapes the biography, compare Gordon’s attitude — that Virginia Woolf was essentially a memorialist, and her work was designed to link the past and the present — with DeSalvo’s description of the core of Virginia W oolfs literary achievement: “Close readings of major works of her maturity indicate that she repeatedly drew upon the facts, shape and substance of her childhood in her work, but that she used her own experiences, and those of the other members of her family, to examine the conditions under which children live out their lives in that middle-class British institution, the nursery” (162). DeSalvo’s reading of Virginia W oolfs literature — that it is a sociological treatise as well as a veiled account of the author’s personal experiences — enables DeSalvo’s construction of an alternative biography, one that emphasizes the physical abuse. A charge, ironically enough, that is often made about biographers as well. This sense of “inevitability” that attends certain biographies will be explored in Chapter 5. Indeed, as I will argue, one measure of the success of a particular biography could be the degree to which it persuades the reader of the utter inevitability - and, by extension, “naturalness” ~ of its version of the biographical subject, when compared to other versions. Among Rose’s negative criticisms ofThe Voyage Out, in fact, is that the young author “at times . . . falls into gratuitous autobiography” (50) and that her portrait of the protagonist occasionally exhibits “gratuitous self-description” (52). Bell, as stated previously, claims that his biography does not indulge in criticism; as I will explore shortly, however, his biography indeed includes criticism.

220 CHAPTERS

SELF-REFLEXrVITY, LITERARY BIOGRAPHY AND “VIRGINIA WOOLF’

Biographers know best. Biographers, that is, invariably possess knowledge

superior to that of their subjects, for biographers know not only how the story will go, but

how the story will end. Even when the biographical subject is still living, the biographer is

narrating events in the subject’s life from a point in chronological advance of the events, from a perspective of knowledge, a knowledge that is applied retroactively to influence the construction of the narrative.*

Dennis Petrie calls this aspect of the biographical narrative process “anticipation”

(128). Anticipation has always been a feature of biography, of course; the fact that biographies are written subsequent - rather than simultaneous - to the lives they are chronicling necessitates the imposition of anticipation.^

Among the contributions of contemporary critical theory to the study of biography has been a recognition of techniques such as anticipation, and other techniques which acknowledge that even apparently empirical endeavors such as biography are inventions, not discoveries; that meaning is conferred, not inherent; and that both the biographical subject and the past that the biographical project attempts to resurrect are fundamentally plural, flexible, dynamic and discursive. In this chapter, I will demonstrate the ways that these techniques that foreground the self-conscious presence of the biographer in the

221 narrative are employed in biographies of Virginia Woolf; also, I will widen the scope of this inquiry to include speculation about the effects of such techniques upon the criticism of existing, and the construction of new, biographies.

Armed with the tenets of postmodernism, as well as insights about the constructed nature of historical narrative from theorists such as Hayden White and historians such as

Simon Schama, critics can reexamine biography and the biographical impulse in the light of what we now concede to be the provisional status of fact and the endlessly deferred

(and richly multiple) judgments about the meaning and significance of all past events — and, most important, how biographers concede (or disguise) these concepts in their prose.

Contemporary critical theory, including concessions about the fictionality of historical narrative and the manifold possibilities raised by postmodernism, has had a twofold impact upon the genre of biography; it provides a means by which we can critique biographies, no matter when they were written, and identify the places in which the biographer forthrightly reveals or attempts to conceal the presence of a shaping hand in the biographical narrative (as I will do in this chapter with biographies of Virginia Woolf); and it has enabled the production of new biographies, self-described “postmodern biographies” that foreground rather than deny the genre’s provisionality. Ironically, biographers in previous centuries labored to craft portraits of such smooth, elegant perfection that the seams would not show; contemporary biographers, conversely, not only don’t mind if the seams show — often they deliberately draw attention to the seams themselves.^

222 An example of a self-identified postmodern biography is Tragic Muse: Rachel o f

the Comedie-Francaise, a biography of the flamboyant nineteenth-century actress. Rachel

Brownstein is forthright about the authorial stance that she will take:

My approach has resulted in what might be called a postmodern biography. That is, it is not a sequential narrative of the story of a life; it does not seek to isolate and define some inner essence of Rachel; and it is self-conscious about the position fi-om which I am writing. Locating my subject amid the clashing cultural currents of her time, I see her now as mere spume on the waves and then as riding them, sometimes brilliantly navigating for her own ends. I pay more attention to how she was seen than I do to her own subjectivity: my interest is the person in performance, the star.. . . I think the best way to know what she was and what she meant is to look at her through other people’s eyes. It is also the only way we have now. (x)

Brownstein is acknowledging the stubborn, unsettling legacy of postmodernism: we cannot “know” the past — be it ten minutes ago or ten centuries ago — thus our only recourse is to turn to other sources. We must make the best of things.

Similarly, in the introduction to The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and

Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (1993), Conor Cruise O’Brien makes a candid admission that he has manipulated his subject’s life story to serve his own ends:

About twenty years ago, I set out to write a biography of Edmund Burke. That biography, had it been completed, would have been on conventional lines, emphasizing chronology, and without a sustained thematic dimension. The project soon got into difBculty.. . . The real diflBculty was that the Burke that interested me — Burke’s mind and heart, at grips with the great issues of his time — seemed to get further and further away, the more closely I studied his career, along the lines I was then following. Also, and not merely through the usual effect of distance, Burke himself seemed to get smaller and smaller, until he became quite an inconsequential figure, hardly more significant than any of the other politicians of the time, and distinctly less significant than any of those who held major ofiBce. (xxi)

223 Consequently, O’Brien abandoned the biographical project, returning to it only when he decided to render Burke’s life thematically rather than chronologically: “The day-to-day clutter, which accumulates in the path of a strictly chronological approach, fell away” as the biographer evoked “the profound inner harmony within Burke’s writings and speeches on the four themes [America, Ireland, India and the French Revolution]” (xxv). What is so remarkable about O’Brien’s biography is not so much that he presents Burke’s life according to a highly subjective (and, some might say, distorting) frame, but that he cheerfully acknowledges both the frame and the attendant risk of distortion, and proceeds anyway: “Can this book properly be described as a biography? It is certainly not a conventional biography, but it is a complete biography” (xxviii). O’Brien plunges boldly forward: “The book is here, and the reader will make up his or her own mind, on reading it, as to whether the above claims are or are not made good” (xxv).

Thematic biographies are not new, of course; what is new is the almost swashbuckling attitude manifested by the biographer toward a situation that biographers in previous centuries attempted to ignore (if indeed they knew that it existed) or to hide beneath thick layers of information about the subject: the subjective, conditional, volatile nature of biography, or any verbal artifact, and consequently the constructed nature of biography.

Similarly, both Pagan and Sharon O’Brien have argued on behalf of a self- acknowledged postmodern biography, a biography that will not be coy about its provisionality and artificiality, that will readily concede the endless circularity of its life- text-life transformation. “In the kind of postmodern literary biography that I am

224 envisaging,” Pagan writes, “it is not a question of an author’s life finding its way into his or her language because the author’s life is always already language” (10). O’Brien suggests several “models for literary biography that could avoid the falsely unified or essential self’ (“Feminist Theory and Literary Biography,” 129), including the attempt to

“find ways of interrupting her [the biographer’s] own voice” and to “incorporate into the text a record of the shifts and developments in her own construction of the subject” (120).

Key to both Pagan’s and O’Brien’s conception of a postmodern biography is the continuous and conspicuous acknowledgment by the biographer that the biography is a construction, a way of manipulating time, characters, distance and the interpretation of events to fit a thesis.

For some time now, historians have acknowledged the use of self-reflexive rhetorical strategies to construct historical narrative. In his study of radical sects in seventeenth-century England, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the

English Revolution (1972), Christopher Hill reminds us that a knowledge of outcomes tends to sway an analysis of the past (a version, perhaps, of the old saw, “History is written by the victors”):

The various sects — Baptists, Quakers, Muggletonians — offered new religious solutions. Other groups asked sceptical questions about all the institutions and beliefs of their society — Seekers, Ranters, the Diggers too. Indeed, it is perhaps misleading to differentiate too sharply between politics, religion and general scepticism. We know, as a result of hindsight, that some groups - Baptists, Quakers — will survive as religious sects and that most of the others will disappear. In consequence we unconsciously tend to impose too clear outlines on the early history of English sects, to read back later beliefs into the 1640s and 50s. (14)

225 A knowledge of what will happen, that is, invariably shapes the narrative recounting of what happen. This acknowledgment of history’s essentially narrative character, an insight that has revolutionized both the writing and reading of history and biography, was eloquently put forth by Hayden White in “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” an essay in his 1978 collection Tropics o f Discourse. Arguing on behalf of “the essentially provisional and contingent nature of historical representations” (82), White wrote:

Events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like — in short, all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or play. (84)

Indeed, White believed that history had lost its way as a discipline “because it [had] lost sight of its origins in the literary imagination” (99).

The crucial acknowledgment that, as Joseph Epstein puts it, “biography’s truth is finally literature’s kind of truth — truth completely comprehended not by the categories of right and wrong but by the categories of more or less persuasive” (79), has enabled critics of biography to regard the genre as a creation as well as a compilation, as a product of imagination as well as research. With or without a specific acknowledgment by biographers of the presence of such techniques, biographies contain places in which, deliberately and often self-consciously, the biographer admits to the contingent nature of all biographical insight."* These places, as well as the places in which biographers, in a sense, “paper over” areas of speculation about a subject’s life with rhetorical strategies designed to disguise a lack of information or the presence of contradictory information.

226 have come to light as a result of postmodernism and related theories of the provisionality of historical reconstitution.

A brief analysis of the way anticipation, like other biographical strategies, works in terms of a specific event in the biographies of Virginia Woolf — her suicide in 1941 — will demonstrate how such provisionality can operate in the genre.

As Petrie discusses when he introduces the term, anticipation is a widely used and sometimes problematical device. At times it can even be inadvertently amusing: Petrie recalls a moment in Dreiser, a biography by W. A Swanberg, when the biographer records the initial meeting between Dreiser and his future wife, Helen Richardson, at which

Richardson “ ‘was nervous . . . with reason, for she was letting herself in for 26 years of alternating ecstasy and torment’ ” (138). Yet anticipation can also be used for tragic effect; in In Cold Blood, Truman Capote struck a jarring note in his otherwise almost lullaby-like scene-setting of a young midwestem girl’s bedtime ritual:

Nancy was invariably the last of the family to retire.. . . Tonight, having dried and brushed her hair and bound it in a gauzy bandanna, she set out the clothes she intended to wear to church the next morning: nylons, black pumps, a red velveteen dress — her prettiest, which she herself had made. It was the dress in which she was to be buried. (66)

In Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann employs anticipation for similarly tragic effect early in his biography:

At Oxford a fellow student recalled that he [Wilde] signed himself ‘0 .0 ’F. Willis Wilde’ and was known as Willis Wilde and in his contributions to the Trinity classical magazine Kottabos he initialed himself ‘O.F.O.F.W.W.’ When someone supposed, later on, that he had always been Oscar Wilde, he replied, “How ridiculous of you to suppose that anyone, least of all my dear mother, would christen me ‘plain Oscar.’ I started as Oscar Fingal O’Mahertie Willis Wilde. All but two of the five names have already been thrown overboard. Soon I shall

227 discard another and be known simply as ‘The Wilde’ or “The Oscar.’ . Eventually, in jail, he would find his simplest cognomen: C.3.3. (17)

Swanberg apparently was unaware of the effect of anticipation in biography, and the fact

that it must be carefully wielded lest it sound comic, whereas Capote and Ellmann seem to

have been in full control and had precisely calibrated its dramatic effect.

Virginia Woolf s biographers all must make a decision about the presentation of

crucial events in her life: are they to imply, by the selection and timing of details, that the

suicide was inevitable? If not, then an illusion of surprise must be created and maintained,

for, to the biographer who is writing Virginia Woolfs life story, the suicide is inevitable.

The biographer always already knows the outcome of the life that she or he has decided to

relate. The different ways that each biography engages in anticipation illustrates the

rhetorical choice implied by the narrative form; within the “life story” of any individual, there are myriad ways to deploy the elements of that story.

Lyndall Gordon’s biography treats Virginia Woolfs suicide almost as a literary event; she analyzes the suicide note as if it were an essay or short story, checking for antecedents:

On Friday 28 March, Virginia Woolf drowned herself. Both the notes she left for Leonard and another found on her writing-block urged him to believe that she owed him all the happiness of her life. These words were long rehearsed. They can be traced back to Rachel’s death in The Voyage Out: ‘No two people have ever been so happy as we have been.’ Her last wish was to console Leonard and to put his goodness on the record. She died in this civil manner, with graceful words on her lips. (282)

Rose, while criticizing others for their attempts to find symbolism in Virginia Woolfs method of suicide — “David Daiches, for example, imagines her uniting herself with the

228 flux of experience, which had so concerned her in her writing, as she disappeared into the flowing, tidal waters of the Ouse. This seems forced” (247) - then proceeds to do the same:

The sea is suggestive. And before Woolf tried to kill herself by veronal, she had tried it, in 1941, by jumping out of a window. If one recurrent image in her writing is the room, suggesting the security and limitations of individual consciousness, the other is water, particularly the sea, suggesting a unity with all life either beyond or beneath individual consciousness ~ the world without a sel^ in which individuality is dissolved into the eternal rhythms of collective life. (247-8)

Rose sets the stage for the suicide, in effect, in her introduction, when she writes that her work is designed to refute the image of Virginia Woolf created by Bell’s biography: “I want to redress the emphasis on her illness and suicide by showing the extent to which she took her life in her own hands” (xi). The reader knows, then, that Rose’s biography will veer away from presenting the suicide as inevitable.

King reaches for the symbolic and suggestive in his presentation of Virginia

Woolfs suicide; throughout his book, he has carefully discussed the more obvious symbols in Virginia Woolfs work, so his recounting of her final moments implies that her death was simply the culmination of a symbolic pattern he has been constructing fi"om the outset:

This well-known woman became invisible — had retreated behind the curtains. Her corpse was found three weeks later on the far side of the same stretch of water. In Virginia’s writing, water can be a destructive force, but it is also a place of tranquillity, renewal and rebirth. (623-4)

Like Rose, DeSalvo deals with the suicide in her introduction; however, the implication is quite different. She believes that the suicide was inevitable, and that the

229 events of the life that she intends to relate all were heading in one direction; death.

DeSalvo writes:

In the severest cases (and we must remember that Woolfs case was severe), women who have been incestuously abused are more likely than other women to disfigure themselves; to suffer severe substance abuse; to enter into relationships in which they are repeatedly physically or sexually assaulted; to be raped; to experience suicidal tendencies; to make suicide attempts; to commit suicide. (11)

Bell deals with Virginia Woolfs suicide in a relatively straightforward manner, providing few apparent clues along the way of the fate that awaits her — a method of anticipation that is just as calculated, of course, as the foreshadowings of Rose and DeSalvo:

Leaving her stick on the bank she forced a large stone into the pocket of her coat. Then she went to her death, “the one experience,” as she had said to Vita, “I shall never describe.” (H, 226)

But she does not have to, of course; that is left to her biographers.

These variations among biographical treatments of the same event demonstrate how fully biography is implicated in the postmodern provisionality of fact. Literary biography, for its part, is doubly implicated in postmodernism’s wholesale repudiation of what were the traditional assumptions about history, biography and the stability of fact.^

First, as is the case with the genre of which it is a subgenre — biography — literary biography relies (superficially, at least) on fact, and “fact” has been coolly upended by postmodernism’s systematic problematization of the previously sacrosanct conviction that facts are independent of contexts and interpretations. Facts, history, the past itself: these entities have been stripped of their special authority by the clever interrogations undertaken by postmodernism. As Linda Hutcheon writes:

History is not being made obsolete: it is, however, being rethought — as a human construct. And in arguing thathistory does not exist except as text, it

230 [postmodernism] does n o t. . . deny that the past existed, but only that its accessibility to us now is entirely conditioned by textuality. We cannot know the past except through its texts: its documents, its evidence, even its eye-witness accounts aretexts. Even the institutions of the past, its social structures and practices, could be seen, in one sense, as social texts. (16)

Second, the study of literary biography seemingly is stymied, if not outright imperiled, by the various inquiries about authorial existence and autonomy by theorists such as Roland

Barthes and Jacques Derrida that are grouped under the heading, “Death of the Author,” a concept that grew out of Barthes’ essay of the same name. If texts have no final (or original) author, then of what use or relevance is an exploration of the life of an author, i.e., literary biography? Yet as Nicholas Pagan zx^es 'm Rethinking Literary Biography:

A Postmodern Approach to Tennessee Williams, the author’s demise is metaphor, not murder:

No one is denying that authors are “real” people or that they conceive, develop, and produce books. What Barthes is questioning is the nature of the link between authors and their books. Because writers do not create out of nothing there is always linkage between one text and other texts, and this raises questions about originality.. .. Barthes is simply proposing a different way of looking at the author. As we study a text we can never be sure what authors are expressing — what sense they are making of their own experience — but we can look for authors’ inscriptions in an intertextual network. (41)

Literary biography, then, lives, even in an age in which its very purpose and foundation is relentlessly (if playfully) undermined by postmodernism.

Along with a new way of looking at how biographers employ or resist (but must always react to) postmodernism’s denial of a stable, accessible past fi-ee of the shadings of its interpreters, the implications of postmodernism also have included the establishment of

(or a new appreciation for previously misidentified or virtually ignored) subgenres of

231 biographical writing, such as the cultural or contextual biography and the pseudo­

biography. These, too, will be identified and discussed in this chapter.

Both as a theory with which to critique existing biographies and as a guide with which to compose future biographies, postmodernism energizes rather than eviscerates, challenges rather than curtails, the genre of biography, providing not fewer but more opportunities for innovation. Yet some theorists still insist on seeing postmodernism as a threat to biography; they believe that acknowledging the essentially created nature of a biographical portrait somehow robs it of its authority. In her essay “A House of One’s

Own,” Janet Malcolm warns darkly:

We have to face the problem that every biographer faces and none can solve; namely, that he is standing in quicksand as he writes. There is no floor under his enterprise, no basis for moral certainty. Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image. (75)

“Problem”? What Malcolm defines as a “problem” is, of course, the very aspect of biography that most enchants, that guarantees its continuing fascination for theorists and readers.® Postmodern sensibility has required of biographers that they acknowledge, implicitly or explicitly, this engagement with creativity as well as scholarship, with the prejudice inherent in any individual perspective. As Phyllis Rose writes, “There is no neutrality. There is only greater or lesser awareness of one’s bias. And if you do not appreciate the force of what you’re leaving out, you are not fully in command of what you’re doing” (Writing on Women, 77). In an interview with Karen Winkler in The

Chronicle o f Higher Education, Blanche Wiesen Cook says, “When we’re dealing with private lives, we can’t hope to always tell the truth. We can only hope to show how we

232 came to hold the opinions we do” (A14). The forthright concession that, as Ira Bruce

Nadel writes, “Language in biography does not record as much as it reinvents a life”

(207), that biography is as inherently subjective and provisional as any other art form, that biographers sculpt and concoct, rather than retrieve, the past and its inhabitants, does not detract from biography’s power or usefulness. It means only that criticism of biography must expand the scope of its inquiry, which, as I discussed in Chapter I, has “centered on the content rather than the form of biographical writing, undermining its literary properties” (Nadel, 1), into a consideration of how biographies deliver the illusion of a truth unmediated by representation and perspective, while simultaneously conceding the fundamentally constructed nature of any rhetorical enterprise.

For biography has always carried inside it the secret that was only revealed with the advent of postmodernism and the recognition of historical narrative’s essentially fictive character; that buried within every fact is another (and perhaps contradictory) fact, that every reality contains the possibility of an alternate reality, that, as Nadel writes, “no fact is without its fictions” (205). Biography carmot not be postmodern, no matter when or by whom it is written; biographers, however, can either acknowledge or attempt to disguise the postmodern elements that are ineluctably embedded in their project. Postmodern critics, for their parts, are charged with identifying the sites in which the biographer’s self- conscious, compensatory rhetorical strategy — employed to disguise the fact that it is strategy, and not the transparent rendering of the “the natural” or “the real” — occurs.

Postmodernism’s crucial contribution to the criticism of biography is not, therefore, the sometimes uncomfortable notion that biographies are, as they have been variously

233 described, “plausible fictions” or “authorized fictions” — in other words, constructions and

not transcriptions, creations and not representations of what is now a hopelessly compromised “real” — but rather the conviction that these aspects of biography are not only inevitable but desirable, that they can be unashamedly foregrounded and analyzed/

What Malcolm dolefully regards as a “problem” — the endless possibilities and counter­ possibilities that congregate at the end of each sentence that the biographer writes, the compelling doverleaf highway of roads not taken — are, to others, blessed evidence of the genre’s continuing vitality.

Schama is among the historical writers who have employed the conventions of storytelling, with its infinite possibilities for narrative inclusion, to convey past characters and circumstances — not as a radical new way of doing business, but as a more honest accounting of the way business has always been done. In an epilogue to Dead Certainties:

(Unwarranted Speadations), his account of the death of Gen. James Wolfe in 1759 and an

1849 Boston murder trial, Schama declares:

This is not to say that I scorn the boundary between fact and fiction. It is merely to imply that even in the most austere scholarly report fi-om the archives, the inventive faculty — selecting, pruning, editing, commenting, interpreting, delivering judgments — is in full play. This is not a naively relativist position that insists that the lived past is nothing more than an artificially designed text... . But it does accept the rather banal axiom that claims for historical knowledge must always be fatally circumscribed by the character and prejudices of its narrator. (322)

“Banal,” perhaps, but not unproblematic: as several recent articles in popular periodicals have noted, Schama’s willingness to intermix — indeed, his conviction that one cannot avoid intermixing — fact and fiction has created a bit of a stir. For some, the idea that history and biography are not monolithic edifices composed of definitive and irrefutable

234 facts is troubling and even heretical; others bristle at the suggestion that biographies,

instead of presenting an artificially smooth, seamlessly sequential narrative flow, might — according to some postmodernist-inspired approaches — rather reflect the very jumble and chaos of life as it is experienced day by unruly day, event by unforeseen event. The discipline of history, like biography, has been forced to contend with the confusing fruits of postmodernist thought, as David Samuels records:

Yet there were those [among historians] who wondered still: if there were no facts, facts, that is, of the stem Germanic variety envisioned by von Ranke, fixed, immutable facts that sat like Roman coins in the palm of your hand, waiting to be brushed clean of the dirt of accumulated centuries by the wire-hairbrush of historical truth, then what was History? If, as the new historical philosophers claimed, the facts were not like coins, which, if you collected enough of them, might sufiSce for an article or two in the reigning journals, or even for a book, then what were historians to do? (36)

What some historians did, Samuels records, is to “become writers; they could tell stories”

(36). A belief in stories, in the power and meaning of narrative, has replaced “the belief in a purely objective history” (36), he adds. Yet the sprightly experimentation necessitated by these new ways of shaping and presenting historical materials — or, perhaps, to acknowledge that they have always been so shaped, whether readers realized it or not — is hardly for every taste; in a recent essay, critic Michiko Kakutani complains about contemporary works that “mirror the discontinuities of the contemporary world [without] submitting those discontinuities to the ordering impulses of art” (18). The genre of biography, Kakutani says, has followed the postmodern trend with distressing results:

Biographies, too, have grown fat and self-indulgent: David Thomson’s new study of Orson Welles is larded with imaginary conversations, while Louise Barnett’s life of George Armstrong Custer [Touched By Fire: The Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife o f George Armstrong Cnster} devolves into one long digression about everything from the travails of army life to the plight of frontier women. (18)

235 Kakutani's complaint is peculiar, because many of the most innovative and interesting

biographies of recent years, those that bid fair to advance the biographical form and create

new frames for the genre, indulge in activities that she labels “self-indulgent.” Peter

Ackroyd’s Dickens includes marvelous imaginary conversations between Dickens and his

characters, richly resonant dialogues that add to the beauty and mystery of the

biographical form; biographies that construe the social and cultural currents through which

the subject worked and dreamed — such as Barnett’s biography, which devotes as much

attention to the question ofwhy Custer so fascinates, then and now, as it does to a skeletal

narrative of events in the subject’s life - are among the most fascinating byproducts of the

New Historicist and postmodernist movements. Kakutani is hardly alone, however, in

denigrating the effects of postmodernism upon history and biography.* Historian Gordon

S. Wood writes frequently, and a trifle hysterically, about “the threat postmodern theories

pose for history”:

History is one of the last of the humanistic disciplines to be affected by deconstruction and by postmodernist theories. . . . Postmodernism challenges all the fundamental assumptions of Western social science and calls into question everything that makes historical reconstruction possible. Postmodernists are attacking the entire Enlightenment project on which the natural and social sciences are based. They hold that there is no truth outside of ideology, and, indeed, they suggest that the search for truth is itself the central Western illusion. Truth, they believe, is invented, not discovered.. . . As one postmodernist historian has put it, “History is the Western myth.” (46)

Wood reserves particular scorn for “the postmodernist blurring of fact and fiction” and lumps Schama with those who “have become fiustrated by the constraints that

236 documentary evidence places upon their imaginations and have chosen to invent thoughts

and words for their historical characters” (46).

Responding to attacks such as these, Schama told an interviewer, ‘Tar from the

intellectual integrity of history being policed by the protocols of objectivity, distance and

scientific dispassion, its best prospects for survival lie in the forthright admission of

subjectivity, immediacy and literary imagination” (Edwards, 30). Indeed, critics who decry

the influence of postmodernism upon the production of new art (especially art that aspires

to circumscribe history and historical personages) or the consideration or reconsideration

of existing art have missed the point; postmodernism is not a narrow prescription, but a

diverse and enabling attitude toward projects old and new, familiar and unfamiliar.

Postmodernism revels in multiple biographies of a single individual — a procession that

formerly drew the complaint, “What? Another one?” — and it has sharpened the appetite

for non-traditional biographies that approach subjects in sometimes oblique and

provocative ways. The rise in the number of biographies that trace, not so much the doings of the biographical subject, but the impact of the biographical subject across the centuries, is attributable to postmodernism’s insistence that context, too, is text: one of the best examples of this technique is Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare's Lives, which follows the playwright “through a succession of different eyes and from constantly shifting vantage points” (x). It is the very lack of information about Shakespeare, the “concealling darkness of the poet’s mystery” (4), that, Schoenbaum writes, probably accounts for the towering and still ever-increasing pile of material on Shakespeare, who becomes a cipher upon which anything might be projected: “Little wonder that in time he might be regarded

237 as everything and nothing” (4). Such a sentence — indeed, as is the case for Schoenbaum’s

project itself — is steeped in the sublime limitlessness of postmodernism, in the notion that

what has been said about a biographical subject is as important as what is known about her

or him. Studies such as Lincoln and American Memory by Merrill D. Peterson and Daniel

Boone: The Life and Legend o f an American Pioneer by John Mack Faragher similarly

chronicle not simply the lives of their subjects, but the varied responses to those lives in both the subject’s own time and in subsequent generations, as reflected in traditional repositories of national memory such as books and articles, as well as non-traditional sources such as songs, poems and grafiSti. Implicit in these studies is the idea that biography — and memory in general, collective and personal — is shaped and crafted, not simply unearthed in pristine form.

In these works and others, the insights of both postmodernist thought and the narratological aspect of historical recapitulation allow us to appreciate, in John Clive’s phrase, “the crucial role played by the historical imagination in the writings of the great historians” (xi). What makes certain historians great, Clive believed, was the compelling narrative they were able to impose upon the dull arbitrariness of fate.® The quality required for truly distinguished, and intellectually challenging, writing about the vanished world of the past, Clive said, was imagination, not merely an ability to get the facts straight: “Fact alone, even when aided and abetted by the most sophisticated cliometrics, will never be sufficient to cast that spell that lingers in the memory and is conducive not just to reading, but to rereading” (xiv). Postmodernism enables, even requires, that critics of biography explore the rhetorical strategies by which imagination is brought to bear upon the “facts”

238 of a subject’s life, transforming the recitation of random events into what appears to be a

coherent whole. By what means is such coherence achieved? Clive playfully called the techniques “tricks of the trade,” and added, “Each historian possesses and uses a bagful of them, and we are in the fortunate position of being able to watch them fish the appropriate trick out of the bag” (x).‘°

Along with anticipation, one of the most significant “tricks” used by biographers is the perpetuation of the illusion that what is present on the page is necessarily the most important information, rather than simply the only information that was available to the biographer (or perhaps to anyone save the subject herself or himself), or the information carefully culled by the biographer to tug the ensuing portrait in one direction or another.

Nadel refers to biography’s “paradox of achieving completeness by selectivity” (3), although the concept might be better stated as the illusion of completeness. In any case, this method of disguising biography’s inherent selectivity is present, as we shall see, in varying degrees in each of the five biographies of Virginia Woolf — indeed, it is present in all biographies — and constitutes one of the sites in which postmodernist theory exerts most reliably its influence on the criticism of biography.

In the title of his essay exploring this biographical phenomenon, John Worthen terms it “The Necessary Ignorance of a Biographer” :

Not only do biographers necessarily remain profoundly ignorant of many things in the lives of their subjects, but the narrative of a biography is in almost every case designed to conceal the different kinds of ignorance firom which we suffer. As with all forms of knowledge we might roughly call ‘historical,’ biographical knowledge exists simultaneously with (and I believe should never be allowed to obscure) inescapable ignorance: what I call necessary ignorance. (227)

239 As Worthen explains, if information is lacking about a particular character in a

biographical subject’s life, the biographer proceeds under the assumption that the

character in question played only a minor role; however, it may be that the character

played a major role yet that role was not documented. He cites an entry in D.H.

Lawrence’s address book for a woman named “Pauline”: without a surname, she is impossible to track, hence most biographers of Lawrence dismiss her as unimportant.

What if, however, she was vitally important? Biography, Worthen complains, “imposes upon a life the story which it is to tell, and then fills in the details (like someone doing painting by numbers) with the necessarily random facts which happen to come down to us” (233).

The only part of Worthen’s formulation with which I take issue is his parenthetical observation that biographies “should never be allowed to obscure” their lack of certain knowledge; one of the delights of criticism inspired by postmodernism, I believe, is its ability to find precisely those places at which obscurity has been artfully (or inartfuUy) concealed and to expose it. Moreover, Worthen evokes this willful obscurity as a negative aspect of biography, yet the fact that biographers attempt to create a seamless narrative and paper over gaps and inconsistencies only means that they understand the genre’s deeply rooted appeal: as Sven Birkerts notes, the popularity of biography among the general public perhaps results from “the steadily depreciating sense of subjective coherence many of us are feeling” (24). Biography, in all of its grandly artificial narrative sweep and deftly contrived coherence, allows us to “believe in our lives as destinies, as unfolding narratives that take on and manifest meaning” (25). Such an acknowledgment,

240 made either forthrightly on the page, or obliquely within the biographer’s rhetorical choices, is what makes biography an art form, as it relies upon the selection and arrangement of materials that mimic, as nearly as possible, “real” life. Again, it is not that biographers did not indulge in such strategies before there was such a thing as postmodernism to inform our criticism; it is, rather, that postmodernism has enabled critics to identify the strategies and explore their implications in the biography. I like Worthen’s term — his evocation of the “necessary ignorance” of a biographer — but I don’t agree with his demonizing of the concept:

So-called documentary facts . . . in a biography may be no more than materials manipulated by the biographer into an apparently and ideally seamless web of cause and effect, of inevitable and seamless progression.. . . But, in fact, biographers are always — like Lockhart and Johnson — stuck with a fairly random survival of materials; and the story which those materials can be induced to tell is limited by what they happen to be. This unfortunate fact is one that biographers do their very best to stop you thinking about. The impression they want you to gain, of course, is that the facts which we happen to know are also necessarily the important ones. (237)

Worthen’s remarks beg for qualification: some biographers “do their very best to stop you thinking about” the fact that their biographies are creations, while others, as we have seen in the case of Brownstein’s work, readily acknowledge their “ignorance,” the partiality of their insights, the limits of their perspective, the tenuousness of all biographical conclusions." As Worthen admits later, “The random survival of facts and the willingness of certain people (but not others) to write memoirs successfully created what documentary biographical fact actually was” (238). Biographers, then, cannot not construct their portraits out of earlier constructions; biography is a record of a record, the ultimate meta-narrative. There is no original, objective “knowing” fi-ee of the taint -- if

241 taint it be — of construction, of subjectivity. Biographers, Worthen fumes, are “obliged to

make and impose a pattern where none exists” (241); yet it is in the making of such a

pattern that biographical artistry lies, and, correspondingly, in the critiquing of the pattern that the possibilities for a new kind of criticism of biography lies. Whether biographers openly acknowledge or artfully obscure their “necessary ignorance” and its implications; how biographers present the life in the sequence they do; how and at what strategic points biographers deploy certain kinds of information: these are questions that enable criticism of biography to be more than mere fact-checking.

Each of the biographies of Virginia Woolf chosen for this study manifests a different way of dealing with the available information about Virginia Woolf, as well as a different conception of the biographical enterprise itself, including the relationship between biographer and subject. Each reveals a different degree of awareness — or, rather, of willingness to exhibit that awareness — that she or he is constructing a highly prejudiced portrait and not transcribing a reality; each, consequently, creates a different version of

“Virginia Woolf.”

In Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life, Gordon constantly posits a Virginia Woolf who is the passive victim of fate, the helpless puppet of blind circumstance. Moreover, the intrusion of the biographical process, the fact that the biographer’s shaping hand has passed over all of the raw materials of Virginia Woolfs life, is everywhere evoked; rarely does Gordon seem interested in implying that the biography is unfolding gradually before the reader’s eyes, a “natural” landscape that existed, intact, prior to the imposition of the biographical gaze: “This, then, is a writer’s life” (6), Gordon declares at the outset. “I see

242 Virginia Woolfs life in three phases” (7), she adds, which is quite different from stating that Virginia Woolfs life had three phases. The self-conscious manipulation of materials is presented without hesitation or apology.

This sense of manipulation extends as well to the inevitability of circumstances that Virginia Woolf confronted; “In her fifties she was annoyed to find herself and her sister acting, with unconscious automatism, as angels of mercy when Duncan Grant languished over nothing more serious than a cold” (9). The wording — Virginia Woolf

“found herself’ in a particular situation — suggests a curious passivity, as if external pressures caused the biographical subject to be in certain places and behaving in certain ways. This evocation of passivity, in grammar and in circumstance, is repeated throughout the biography: “Throughout her life Virginia was to retain a fascination for the character of ‘that old wretch my father’ ” (17), Gordon writes, instead of what might be a more typical phrase, “Virginia retained a fascination for... ” At times, of course, the passive phrasing seems more appropriate than at other times; when Gordon writes, “It was decided at an early age that Virginia was to be a writer” (15), the reader knows, from other details, that in late Victorian households most career choices indeed were presided over by the family patriarch. However, the phrase suggests that the act of becoming a writer was, for Virginia Woolf, simply a surrender to the waiting arms of overmastering fate — instead of a conscious choice backed up by years of study and practice. Likewise,

Gordon’s evocation of the Stephen household after the death of Julia Stephen snatches the possibility of action and choice from Virginia Woolf: “During their [the Stephen children’s] unhappiest years from 1895 to 1904, Thoby, the eldest son, was away at

243 school while Vanessa and Adrian... hardened into rebels. It was Virginia who felt

painfully divided” (24). The phrasing is curious, for it suggests — as opposed to, "Virginia

felt painfully divided” — that Virginia Woolf was merely an actor in a play, fulfilling a

preordained role and not behaving according to her own volition. The passive image runs

throughout the biography: "Virginia Woolf discovered herself to be the sum of two parts;

in the process of fusion, a new being emerged” (199). “Discovered herself to be”? Again,

the impression is one of inaction, of waiting to fill an assigned slot. Later, Gordon writes:

"The year 1926 marks a change in Virginia Woolfs career, though outwardly its surface

was unbroken” (203). Tellingly, the phrase does not begin with the events that occurred in

1926. It begins with the year, as if Virginia Woolf is steadily following a script, as indeed she is: the script of the biographical narrative into which she has been cast.

The biographer’s presence is never denied in Gordon’s work, fi-om the sporadic use of first person — "I shall follow Virginia Woolfs view of lives latent in her novels” (7)

- to explanatory summaries of the biography’s goals: "I do not want to imply that there was not something wrong with Virginia.. . . [W]hat I have tried to show is that there are aspects of her illness that are open to evaluation” (61). The biographer is a self-conscious presence in the work: "This biography has followed the ‘dark’ side of Virginia Woolf, her exploratory plunges into strange pools” (280). The biographer also engages in a bit of self- congratulation: “This biography has marked the turning points that do not coincide with external events” (281); in other words, Gordon is the proper judge of what was really significant in Virginia Woolfs life, as opposed to the superficial analyses of other biographers. Gordon, in fact, often pauses in her narrative to lecture other biographers on

244 the proper presentation of the Virginia Woolf story: “It is usual to comment on Virginia

Woolfs attraction to women, but it is well known that neither case remotely matched her

love for Leonard” (184). Biographers who emphasize her attachments to women, then, are falling into the trap of amateurs and shallow thinkers. The lectures continue: “It is impossible to overestimate the advantage of being ‘bom under green eyeshades,’ as one of her characters puts it, bom that is, to the life of the mind.... Too much can be made of her social as opposed to her intellectual privileges” (69). Twice, Gordon presents the biographical lectures in the guise of discussing Virginia Woolfs apprenticeship in criticism of biography: “The problem with every biography is to see distinction, not just achievement, and to recognize distinction demands certain qualities in the biographer: decided morals, firmness of mind, and generosity of surrendef ’ (93); “She was developing a biographic theory that was to be crucial to her development as a novelist. She examined the hidden moments and obscure formative experiences in a life, rather than its more public actions” (94) — prescriptions that are, not surprisingly, followed in Gordon’s biography. Intriguingly, Gordon presents an image of Leslie Stephen in words that seem calculated to emulate the biographical enterprise: “His contemporaries stress qualities of character that fitted him to be a leader of expeditions: his nerve on the summits, his grim perseverance, his directional instinct so sure that, as Maitland claims, he seemed to his followers to subdue space and time to his will” (78). That is, of course, precisely what biographers do: subdue space and time to their wills.

The effect of Gordon’s biography is the presentation of a Virginia Woolf who is at the mercy of her fate — her fate being, in this case, the life story of which the biographer

245 maintains complete knowledge throughout the course of the work. The self-conscious imposition of the biographer’s voice and the peculiar phraseology seem to strip Virginia

Woolf of choice: "''Between the Acts is intentionally simpler and more communicative than the other novels, but when Virginia Woolf came to revise the second draft, she found it slight” (267). Again, the wording of the passage hints at the curious implication that writing the novel was, for Virginia WooK less a matter of conscious will and more of the unconscious fulfillment of the demands of patient and all-powerfiil fate.

Rose’s Woman o f Letters: A Life o f Virginia Woolf employs a different way of telling the life story. Unlike Gordon, who is forthright at the outset that her biography is a constructed portrait that has been arranged to suit a thesis, Rose’s work affects what might be termed a part-time omniscience. During recitations of the events in Virginia

Woolfs life, the writing is sturdy, unadorned and (seemingly) all-knowing; simple declarative sentences are laid down one after another, resembling Virginia W oolfs description in The Waves of the biographical style as “phrases laid like Roman roads across the tumult of our lives ... compell[ing] us to walk in step like civilised people with the slow and measured tread of policemen though one may be humming any nonsense under one’s breath” (356). When Rose turns to a discussion of Virginia W oolfs work, however, the narrative style changes; gone is the clear, wise, avuncular, almost formal voice — “Her earliest memory was of red and purple flowers on a black dress” (3) — and present instead is an informal, sometimes hesitant one that beckons the reader into the conversation: “If we step back and adopt a more analytic view of her [Virginia Woolfs] recollections, what strikes us first is their well-bred, repressed, but unmistakable

246 eroticism” (17). The informality of Rose’s prose in the sections of the biography in which she discusses Virginia Woolfs work, as opposed to her life, tends to draw the reader closer: “ ‘Pure poetry,’ if I may use an imprecise term which I think every reader of Woolf will nevertheless understand, represents one pole of Woolf s imagination, expressed most consummately in The Waves” (136). Rose is more apt to use “F’ and “we” in these critical passages, almost as if she is addressing a graduate school seminar, than in passages relating the strict chronology of Virginia Woolfs life: births, deaths, marriages, publication dates.

Rose’s intrusions into the narrative, the places in which she sweeps away any possible misunderstanding that she is attempting a recapitulation of an actual life with her prose, are interesting and seem to be fairly uncalculated; i.e., they arise out of moments of sharpened interest for the biographer: “To appreciate what the masculine component of

Bloomsbury meant to Virginia, we must leave her for a moment, while we imagine what she had been missing in the years she was educated at home” (32). The artifice of biography — “we must leave her for a moment” — is made instantly visible so that the biographer may follow any line of thought. There is no attempt at a clumsy segue, no awkward and unnatural link; the biography is more of a personal meditation than an approximation of an individual life’s in prose. Rose continues to divide her style between the chronology, which is rendered with a pedestrian lack of passion, and the analysis of

Virginia Woolfs works, which she explores with idiosyncratic zeal: “In this pivotal years I see a fascinating inner drama being played out....” (94); “Something is missing in

Jacob’s Room, and I would suggest that that something is not Jacob but women” (108);

247 “We are dealing here, I think, only tangentiaily with class hatred and class struggle; the

envy of Mrs. Dalloway’s wealth masks a deeper envy, an envy of her power as a woman”

(148); “If the implicit tension between Elizabeth and her mother is undeveloped in M rs.

Dalloway, the nature of the tension will be clearer, I would suggest, in To the Lighthouse,

in which Lily Briscoe is alternately attracted to and repelled by Mrs. Ramsay” (150); “In

To the Lighthouse Lily Briscoe, tom between her work and her attraction to Mrs.

Ramsay’s life, serves to focus, although not to resolve, I would argue, Woolfs ambivalence about her mother” (166). Compare the foregoing, which is breezy, supple and brisk, with the heavy, leaden style that overtakes the biographer who is forced to talk about the rote sequence of events in the life: “She was Adeline Virginia Stephen, third child, second daughter of Leslie and Julia Stephen, bom 25 January 1882” (3); “In 1932

Virginia Woolf was fifty years old” (195). The chilly omniscience implicit in these passages emerges in stark contrast to the admittedly personal and charmingly informal perspective that Rose employs for her discussion of Virginia Woolfs work: “I myself would prefer [inBetween the Acts] less attention to the pageant, which throws the book off balance in the direction of artificiality and exam-book cuteness” (237-8).

However, Rose’s biography is most compelling when she blends the two voices, that of the deeply engaged literary critic and that of the marginally attentive recording clerk, and describes the biographer’s response to specific incidents in Virginia Woolfs life:

“I want to emphasize that there is no falling off of powers in Between the Acts (if anything, the contrary), because on March 28, 1941, after she had finished the novel but not yet given it its final polishing, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse” (238); “I

248 want to dwell for a moment on the suicide letters in an eflfort to reconstruct Virginia

Woolfs frame of mind before she took her life" (241-2); “She was almost sixty when she

died, a fact that always startles me, for I imagine her dying young” (262). In a single,

seemingly simple, sentence. Rose combines chronological fact — Virginia Woolfs age at

the time of her death — with a personal reaction that serves as well to implicate the reader

of the biographer in her, Rose’s, catalogue of potential responses, anticipating as it does

the reader’s probable reaction. Likewise, when Rose writes, “I would give a great deal to

know what her [Virginia Woolfs] hallucinations in madness were like” (264), once again

she has artfully mingled the roles of biographer, critic and curious onlooker, &dng a gaze

upon Virginia Woolf that is simultaneously inquisitive, evaluative and empathetic.

Of the five biographies of Virginia Woolf under review in terms of the self- consciousness manifested by the biographer, the one that contains the most conspicuous, strategic qualifications among the author’s stylistic tics — the repetitions of “I believe” or

“It seems to me” that serve as verbal throat-clearings and hedges against criticism — is, perhaps predictably, DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf: The Impact o f Childhood Sexual Abuse

On Her Life atid Work. Like a forced march through the sometimes difficult terrain of a long, complicated life, the sentences move grimly, relentlessly forward. Just as Gordon is prone to gently lecturing her fellow biographers of Virginia Woolf on what she perceives were past errors, a stance that instantly demolishes any lingering pretense that the biography is a story that will unfold sequentially before the reader’s eyes, DeSalvo’s addresses to past and future biographers are similarly pointed and directive, sometimes scaldingly so.‘^ This rhetorical stance is well in keeping with DeSalvo’s announced

249 intention to use Virginia Woolfs life as, in effect, a metaphor for the powerlessness of the

majority of children raised in middle-class British households in the late nineteenth

century, and to posit Virginia Woolfs oeuvre as an oblique diatribe against the emotional

and physical abuse of children. As biographical technique, DeSalvo’s sentences are almost

punishingly persuasive; the reader is swept along on the force of her argument, even if one

is not immediately persuaded by her totalizing claims;

Every event that is described within these pages has been available for some time, either as a matter of public record, or in archives open to the public. Yet the Stephen family is not ordinarily seen as a pathologically dysfunctional family and Virginia Woolfs upbringing is not usually seen as rife with the most severe and potentially damaging problems. Instead, in the words of her latest biographer, Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf as a child, was ‘bathed in a protective love.’ (2)

Thus DeSalvo sets up the parameters of her biography: Virginia Woolfs life is the arena in

which issues of interpretation, if not of fact, will be contested. DeSalvo’s explicit purpose

is not to tell Virginia Woolfs life stoiy, but to replace previous portraits of the biographical subject with a portrait that DeSalvo believes is more accurate and, ultimately,

more helpful in proving her point about the plight of children in late Victorian households.

To call out a previous biographer as an opponent, as one would an enemy in a duel, was atypical in literary biographies, usually the most polite and courteous of genres, until rather recently, when, for instance, quarrels about the extent of Virginia Woolfs mental illness and the culpability of Leonard Woolf in his wife’s psychological difiSculties resulted in some harsh words in various introductions and prefaces.*^ Also, as I noted in Chapter 2, critics have squared off to determine the extent of Virginia Woolfs interest in and commitment to feminism. Multiple biographies of the same individual certainly build upon

250 and react to one another, as I discussed in the introduction, but typically the subsequent

biographer’s refutation of her or his biographical forebears is couched in gentility. Among

the five biographers whose works are under review for this study, only DeSalvo directly

and belligerently challenges previous biographers. Rose, for instance, deferentially calls

Bell’s biography “the definitive source of information about Woolf — and deservedly” before offering a soft, almost whispered rebuke; “And so I have returned to the original

sources used by Bell, but I employ them in a rather different way” (xi). King offers respectful tributes to virtually every previous biographer of Virginia Woolf, from the

“splendid textual work” of Nigel Nicholson to the “careful attention” provided by Gordon,

Bell and Rose, and on to the “important” works by DeSalvo and Poole. Yet DeSalvo takes issue with Gordon, Bell and Rose (her biography precedes King’s) and in fact uses her perception that their work requires correction as the avowed inspiration for her own.

She begins:

It has been commonly accepted that the Stephen family was characterized by its liveliness, its affectionate concern for the well-being of its children, its economic and emotional security — that it was, in short, the archetypal serene and secure family of Victorian ideology. (19)

Then comes the counterpunch:

The Stephen family was, in fact, from before Virginia Woolfs birth, through the death of her mother, and afterwards, a family in a nearly perpetual state of crisis and instability that had a deeply disturbing impact upon the well-being and emotional health of all of its children. (19)

Unlike other biographers, who use the phrase “I believe” as a qualification or as a verbal marker to indicate opinion, DeSalvo uses it to accuse:

I believe that Leslie Stephen shifted his description of Laura, not because it later occurred to him that Laura was, in fact, inherently deficient, but because to label

251 her in this way provided him with a more acceptable reason for his harsh treatment of her. (25)

Indeed, DeSalvo’s statements are arranged with the clear, logical order of legal briefs;

many portions of her account of Virginia Woolfs life are more argument than narrative.

She acknowledges competing or contradictory information only to knock it down with the force of her reasoning:

I do not support [Michael] Harrison’s view that J.K. Stephen was, in fact. Jack the Ripper. But I do believe it is significant that J.K. Stephen was penning his verses and publishing them in the periodicals of England’s ruling class during the same time that the Ripper murders were occurring. It suggests that the Ripper murders were not an aberration fi-om the norm of reverence of women as ‘angel in the house,’ believed to be the dominant ideology of the ruling class. (51)

DeSalvo uses repetition, a rhetorical technique common to persuasive speakers, to drive her points home: “I have come to believe that the cause-and-effect view that she [Virginia

Woolf] was struggling to maintain was seriously eroded by her reading Freud” (127); “I believe that it [Freud’s work] contributed to her suicide and there is evidence to support my view” (127); “I have come to believe that reading Freud precipitated a crisis. ...”

(128); “I believe that it eroded her sense of self’ (128); “I believe that the shock waves caused by learning this fact [that her parents had not intended to have another child after the birth of her brother Thoby in 1880] at this critical and anxious time contributed to her disintegration and to her suicide” (130); “I believe that one possible reason [for reinterpreting her childhood] was her reading of Freud” (131); “I believe that Pater-

Familias [an early story] is Virginia’s attempt to come to terms with what happened within her own household.. . . ” (154); “I also believe that Virginia was rewriting the myth that the Victorian family was a refuge and a haven for its children” (155).

252 Because DeSalvo makes no pretense that she is attempting a rhetorical

reconstruction of the lost world of a biographical subject’s lived experience, but rather is

using the events of a life, and the biographical subject’s interpretation of those events, to

argue for a well-delineated conclusion, her method of addressing the reader is blimt, not

felicitous; “It is important to pause for a moment to examine the symbolic nature of these

possibilities” (254) — not “It might be worthwhile to pause” but “It is important” to do so.

The reader will do so, for the reader has no choice.

At the conclusion of the biography, when DeSalvo again reiterates her argument, she appeals to a generous-spirited “we” in her readership, and, as well, she evokes a physical image of Virginia Woolf that is in keeping with a more traditional technique of biography : it is a portrait of the biographical subject at a particular moment in time. At the last, then, DeSalvo combines the almost hectoring tone of address that she believes is necessary to her project with a flash of rhetorical portraiture typical of virtually all biographical projects:

Throughout her life, as we have seen, Virginia Woolf consistently examined the betrayal of the child’s right to protection within the family. Her life’s work — her memoirs and autobiography, her novels, her essays and biographies — is an invaluable missing link in the history of incest, abuse, and the effects of family violence. But we must not forget that in 1892 a terrified ten-year-old girl by the name of Virginia Stephen first picked up her pen to write a portrait of the world as seen through the eyes of an abused child. And fi"om that time forward throughout her lifetime she never stopped examining why and how the abuse had happened, and what it had meant to her, and what it must have meant to others. (305)

DeSalvo leaves the reader, then, with an image of the circularity of the biographical gaze: the biographer gazes at the biographical subject, while the biographical subject gazes at the reader.

253 While the biographies of Virginia Woolf by Gordon, Rose and DeSalvo are forthright about the obvious interpretive frame that each biographer has applied to the historical circumstances of the subject’s life, the biographies by Bell and King attempt to embody those circumstances in prose, to emulate the passage of time and the development of character. They are, that is, seemingly more subtle in their acknowledgments of the highly selective and subjective nature of their biographies; as I shall argue, however, the subtlety ends up being far more conspicuous than the boldest and most overbearing of intrusions by a biographer. King, especially, appears to demonstrate the least premeditation among the five biographers in terms of exploiting an agenda and wielding a perspective; put another way, he seems the least aware of the constructed (rather than recorded) nature of biography, and his work is imbued with a kind of oafish naivete - which could, of course, simply be a disguise for a sophisticated understanding of such construction and a conscious decision to ignore its implications.

In any case. King’s biography is marked by a plethora of melodramatically phrased rhetorical questions, an abundance of cliches, repetition that seems careless rather than calculated (as DeSalvo’s was), and the somewhat sloppy and inconsistent employment of omniscient narration. The melodramatic questions are especially irritating, because they are used more as clumsy foreshadowings than as true explorations of unanswerable questions: “Why, indeed, was Vanessa the chosen one?” (34); “Shouldn’t she have had children? Shouldn’t she have opted for a less ordered style of existence?” (323); “Would she [Virginia Woolf] be strong enough to survive this new development in the plot line of her life?” (341); “Could she be a woman in her mother’s mould and yet have followed in

254 her father’s footsteps by becoming a writer? Why was she sexually attracted to women and yet married?” (405). Many of King’s rhetorical questions, in fact, sound very much like attempts to avoid dealing with some of the intense psychological conundrums that arise from Virginia Woolfs life and work. When in doubt, the biographer simply reverts to a question, and pretends that the query originated in the subject’s mind.

The omniscient perspective that King employs is grating on two fronts: his principal sources for the usurpation of Virginia Woolfs voice, among the voices of other characters, for use in his biography are her letters, and letters, of course, can reflect as much of a personal agenda as can a biography — hence should not be unquestioningly accepted as the pathway to an accurate rendition of the correspondent’s inner state; and he employs such trite, melodramatic language to render Virginia Woolfs perspective that he manages (temporarily, one hopes) to negatively alter the reader’s critical assessment of his subject, one of the most innovative prose stylists of the twentieth century. Repeatedly,

King writes that Virginia Woolf “felt herself’ or “saw herself’ particular ways: “Virginia felt herself unprotected” (25); “She felt herself very much a belated pilgrim” (120); “From early 1907, Virginia saw herself as an acolyte locked out of the temple that was Vanessa”

(130).

King engages in dully repetitive phraseology: “Without doubt, Jane Stephen pampered Leslie to an excessive degree” (16); “Without doubt, Julia valued sons more than daughters” (23); “Without doubt, Virginia had divided feelings about the arrival of

Angelica” (262); “Without doubt, her notion of herself as a woman had been badly damaged” (365). Clichés have a similarly deadening effect on the recitation of what ought

255 to be — in different hands, what is — a fascinating life: “The die was cast” (94); “Leslie

hoped against hope that her life would be spared” (53); “Bloomsbury had vanished like the

morning mist” (234); “Would she [Virginia Woolf] remain only a diamond in the rough?”

(263); “Fate had played only a cruel, harmless joke” (343); “A/r^. Dalloway was, for its

author, about the possibility of turning the clock back, of finding renewal and nourishment in the embers of the past” (360); “Virginia’s growing sureness of her stature . . . allowed her to throw caution to the winds” (400) “[E.M.] Forster.. . had penned a book which dealt openly with the love that dared not speak its name” (404); “Clive Bell proved a harder nut to crack” (406); “Sally [a dog] jumped for joy when she saw Leonard” (557).

These cliches, deployed as they are in the course of a biography that tries to replicate the experience of seeing the world, as it were, through Virginia Woolfs eyes, have a curious effect: they tend to make King’s effort — which, after all, attempts to manufacture the illusion of a life taking place before the reader’s eyes in “real” time, with events occurring sequentially — seem more contrived than do the efforts of biographers such as DeSalvo,

Rose and Gordon, who openly concede the manipulation of their materials with disclaiming sentences that often begin, “I believe” and “Now I will demonstrate.” Only rarely does King direct the reader in that way, with the biographer functioning as a self- appointed stage director, telling the reader what she or he ought to derive fi"om the recapitulation of an event or summary of a letter; “The contradictions can be seen in this query in Virginia’s letter of 12 December 1902” (78). Most often, he simply recites the events of Virginia Woolfs life and, in equally flat-footed prose, presents the thoughts and emotions of the people who moved into and out of that life, a style that might be termed

256 “novelistic.” Yet, ironically, as I have noted, the lack of an aesthetically pleasing or

narratologically innovative rhetorical style makes King’s biography appear more artificial

and contrived than those biographies that chronically spotlight the biographer’s

contrivances; the biography that purports to be most “like” life ends up being the least

“like” the experience of observing, as Edmund Gosse defined biography for the eleventh edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, the “faithful portrait of a soul in its adventures through life.”

Another particularly egregious characteristic of King’s biography is his extension of the omniscient facility to the biographer; i.e., the reader is thrust into the biographer’s mind and discovers that the biographer knows a great deal more than the biographical subject. This is not quite the same as anticipation, in which the biographer uses knowledge of future events as foreshadowings; King’s technique is, in effect, to trump the thoughts he ascribes to Virginia Woolf with his own putative wisdom. The biographer’s position of inherent superiority — she or he knows what is going to happen next, after all, and how the story will end — is used not to interpret the life or to control the speed with which details steadily accumulate within the biographical portrait, but almost as a judgment; the biographer, this technique seems to imply, is sawier than the subject. King writes,

“Virginia was often unaware of her real feelings” (222). Also: “Without being fully aware of it, she was also beginning to consider the loosely knit form of her own diary as a possible organizing principle of a long piece of fiction” (280). The somewhat ludicrous implication is that the biographer is ahead of the subject not only chronologically, but

257 intellectually; the biographer not only knows all, but, given the same circumstances, might have handled things a good deal better, as well.

Bell’s biography is perhaps the most blatantly self-conscious of the several works I have been considering; he is constantly aware, and wants to make certain that the reader is aware, of his central place in Virginia Woolfs life story — not simply as her biographer, but as her nephew. This self-consciousness manifests itself not so much in the use of the first-person singular; Bell does use it occasionally, but not to any greater degree than, say.

Rose, Gordon or DeSalvo. It is present, however, in the smug, almost conspiratorial tone in his wnriting, the sly coyness. After describing the romantic relationship between Vanessa

Bell and Jack Hills, widower of Stella, Vanessa Bell’s half-sister. Bell reminds readers of the British law that forbade men fi'om marrying a deceased wife’s sister. This law ended the relationship, and with it, of course, the chance that Vanessa Bell would have married

Jack Hills rather than Clive Bell. A law proposed at the time that would have repealed that law did not pass the House of Commons. “If it had,” Bell writes, “this story would have been very different; also, it would have been told by someone else” (I, 71). On another occasion. Bell seeks fortification for his contention that Virginia Woolfs political sense was hopelessly stunted:

I recall her during those years at the meetings of the Rodmell Labour Party, a small group of which she was, for a time, the Secretary, and I remembered my despair, when I was trying to get the party to pass resolutions urging the formation of a United Front — or something equally urgent, vital and important — and Virginia managed to turn the debate in such a way that it developed into an exchange of Rodmell gossip. In his course she was much nearer to the feelings of the masses, if one may thus describe the six or seven members of the Rodmell Labour Party, than I was. I wanted to talk politics, the masses wanted to talk about the Vicar’s wife. (H, 186)

258 Bell’s recollection of the party meeting occurs in the middle of a paragraph; the first-

person narrative apparently is supplied to bolster his assertion that Virginia Woolf was not

sufficiently serious about the political issues of the day. Bell believes, it seems, that his

personal story, the authority of an eyewitness account, will carry more weight than other

forms of persuasion.

Yet Bell’s intrusions, virtually as a character, into his narrative of Virginia Woolfs life are less significant, ultimately, than the intrusion supplied by his tone as a biographer; for he adopts a jaunty, almost breezy attitude that deeply colors his presentation of biographical materials. Momentously, Bell creates a status quo, a standard of “normal” behavior, in his prose and then measures the events of Virginia Woolfs life against this arbitrary standard. The biography becomes, in effect, a contest between the behavioral standard delineated by Bell and the events of Virginia Woolfs life. Because the contest is, of course, judged by the biographer, the outcome is never in doubt; she will never measure up.

Indeed, Stephen Trombley, another biographer of Virginia Woolf, has pointed out that Bell consistently appeals to the reader’s understanding of a sort of biographical status quo, a behavioral standard that will be universally accepted, to make his diagnosis of

Virginia Woolfs “madness”; for without the standard, the diagnosis would be difficult if not impossible to make:

It is my belief that the attribution of madness is a serious matter, not unlike a judgement of criminal guilt. Before the law, a man is innocent until proven guilty; he is entitled to representation by someone familiar with the law who is retained to defend his rights; and there is always the right of appeal. In the case of judging madness, particularly in Virginia’s day, the same safeguards did not exist to protect the rights of the individual. The medical diagnosis of insanity was made

259 under privileged conditions. It was made out of the public gaze. It was made by professionals who claimed the right to be free of any lay intervention or criticism. Even a cursory questioning of the manner in which Virginia’s madness is discussed by Leonard WooK Quentin Bell or the editors of the Letters and Diary show that their use of the term is at best uncritical, and at worst irresponsible. (3)

The diagnosis was made “out of the public gaze” but within the gaze, of course, of the

biographer; Trombley sets up the parameters of his ensuing discussion of Virginia Woolfs

mental distress:

Bell writes of Virginia that, following the death of her father, ‘all that summer she was mad.’ Sanity is discussed in the same offhand fashion when Bell writes of Leslie Stephen’s father, ‘there was something a little mad in Stephen’s self­ mortification’; but, on the other hand, his wife, Jane Catherine Venn, ‘was as sane a woman as ever breathed’. Clearly, the term ‘mad’, as Bell uses it here, can have no medical meaning, no serious significance. The term has been relegated to a popular vernacular. Of Leslie Stephen, Bell writes that he had ‘a view of the world that was essentially honest and responsible and sane.’ Already, in these early pages of Bell’s biography, we can see that the term mad is employed in two very different ways. When Bell refers to Virginia’s madness, he means that she was mad in some clinical sense. When he writes of there being something ‘a little mad in Stephen’s self-mortification’ . . . he has chosen a vernacular usage for the purpose of quick characterization. In referring to Leslie Stephen, sanity is joined with honesty and responsibility — a moral judgement, not a medical one. (3-4)

I have quoted Trombley’s comments at some length because he has so painstakingly

deconstructed the subtle way that Bell fashions this most crucial aspect of Virginia

Woolfs life: her alleged insanity. Moreover, Trombley’s critique of Bell’s biography

represents precisely the sort of criticism of biography that I advocate. Trombley

recognizes that, whether or not a biographer specifically acknowledges it, every biography

is written from a point of view that drastically affects its composition. Clearly, Bell’s position on the sources and reality of Virginia Woolfs psychological problems affects virtually every aspect of his biography, although at no time does the biographer declare his

260 position. It is left for the critic of biography to perform a close reading that will reveal the

biographer’s steady application of such prejudices upon the recitation of events, a

prejudice of which the biographer may be aware to a greater or lesser degree.

We can trace Bell’s establishment of a behavioral standard in regard to issues far

less momentous than Virginia Woolfs mental state as well. Throughout the biography, in

fact, there is an expectation of certain social behavior, an adherence to an unspecified but

discernible “norm,” that Bell exploits when constructing his portrait of Virginia Woolf. He

writes fi-om an “inside” perspective, from a position not only within the family of his

biographical subject but within a larger status quo that grants him authority to make subtle judgments and seemingly casual pronouncements; “I must now attempt to say something

about Virginia’s mother’s family. Here there is a good deal of uncertainty, of legend, and

of scandal” (I, 14), he writes, offering the clear implication that he is uncomfortable in

speculative realms, hence comfortable, and reliable, in other areas. One knows a

biographer best, it seems, more by what is resisted than by what is embraced, or so Bell’s

attitude would have the reader believe.

Thus Bell establishes himself as a chum, a colleague, a charming and whimsical

raconteur who is simply setting forth the events of Virginia Woolfs life; the conspiratorial tone is benign, not menacing: “We may think of Virginia at this period as a rather tall, rather thin, overgrown girl reading or writing in a back room at Hyde Park Gate” (I, 51); of Virginia Woolfs early mental problems, he writes, “We do not know, although we may fairly guess, that there were headaches, sudden nervous leapings of the heart, and a growing awareness that there was something very wrong with her mind” (I, 89). Of

261 Thoby, Virginia Woolf s brother, he writes, “One is inclined to wonder what role this

masterful and persuasive young man . . . would have played in the life of his sisters. Would

he have had what is called a ‘steadying influence’?” (I, 112-3). The implications of the

question are intriguing. By qualifying his remark — “what is called a ‘steadying influence’ ”

— Bell leaves the impression, first, that the lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell needed steadying (a somewhat paternalistic and condescending attitude that he, quite

understandably, did not wish to articulate), and, second, that the concept of a “steadying

influence” is one from which one ought to distance oneself, perhaps because it, too,

smacks of paternalism. The phrasing enables Bell to raise the issue without taking responsibility for it, to be both observer and instigator.

There are several points in Bell’s biography in which his presence is less subtle, in which he unmasks himself, as it were, as the voice that is directing the action, as well as attempting to direct the interpretation of the action. After their mother’s death, Virginia

Woolf and Vanessa Bell prepare to move. Bell interrupts the narrative: “Before following them thither it may be helpful to look more closely at this tragic chorus [of mourners] . . . and also at the younger generation in which Virginia was beginning to make some fiiends”

(I, 58). The “following them thither” is a amusing nod to the convention of pretending that a biographical narrative is a kind of river in which the reader is carried along. Indeed,

Bell pauses later in the biography to offer his view of the task of biography, an oddly placed justification of the text that surrounds it:

All that they [biographers] can claim is that they know a little more than does the public at large and that, by catching a few indications given here and there in recollections and writings, they can correct some misconceptions and trace, if they are very skillful or very lucky, an outline that is consistent and convincing, but

262 which, like ail outlines, is but tenuously connected with the actual form of the sitter in ail lights, poses, moods and disguises. (II, 109)

The passage is extraordinary because it prefigures precisely the kind of criticism of

biography that will be made possible, even necessary, by the influence of postmodernism.

Bell establishes the postmodern paradox of undermining his work within the work itself, of

suggesting, in a biography, the impossibility of biography.*^ It is only unfortunate that Bell

did not adopt the same sort of self-effacement in his discussion of Virginia Woolfs

psychology, that he was not willing, as he was in his conversations about biography, to

admit that all portraits are partial portraits.

Partial — but not incomplete. Indeed, among the most important influences of the

sort of postmodern thought that I have been describing is the fi*eedom it has conferred

upon biographers: the fi-eedom to revel in, rather than pretend to ignore, the subjectivity

native to the genre, to any genre.*® No longer is the requirement to be definitive in effect;

definitiveness is as much of an illusion as is objectivity.

Richard Holmes has argued, in fact, that biography is essentially a Romantic form,

not an analytical one, that a biography creates “its own emotional and artistic logic” {Dr.

Johnson &Mr. Savage, 229). He points to empathy as biography’s true grace, and sees in

the biographer’s quest a way to “pose the largest, imaginative questions: how well can we

know our fellow human beings; how far can we learn fi-om someone else’s struggles about

the conditions of our own; what do the intimate circumstances of one particular life tell us

about human nature in general?” (230-1). As Holmes notes in his book, a study of the

friendship between Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage that culminated in Johnson’s Life

263 o f Savage, the construction of the biography is a part of the biography; the biographer, far

from trying to pretend that the biography is a truth that has been pried loose like a stone

from a mountain of other truths, must demonstrate that the biography is a hunch that has

been placed among other hunches, like a flower in a bouquet. “A life like Savage’s is

mysterious in itself, but also mysterious in the way it came to be told and reinterpreted,

one version layered upon another, like a piece of complex geology” (4), Holmes writes.

The layers are as significant as the subject; the masks, worn by biographer and biographical subject, are as important as the faces beneath, for who is to say where the mask ends and the face begins?

The acknowledgment of the relentless subjectivity of all narrative forms has manifested itself in many ways, including fictional biographies such as Steven Millhauser’s

Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death o f an American Writer, along with novels such as

A S. Byatt’s Possession and Penelope Lively’s According to Mark, which feature the adventures of biographers on the trails of elusive biographical subjects, tales which generally deconstruct the illusion of certainty that formerly attended the biographical process. Another by-product, as it were, of the recognition that the line between fact and fiction has thinned to invisibility is the rise of authors who use “actual” historical characters in fictional settings. E.L. Doctorow, Robert Coover and Guy Davenport are exemplars of this trend; more recently, Jane Mendelsohn’s I Was Amelia Earhart and

Judith Farr’s I Never Came to You in White reflect a determination that fact and fiction are equally able to render an important kind of truth, and that neither kind is superior to the other in providing a plausible angle from which to view the past. Interestingly, I Never

264 Came to You in White, a novel about Emily Dickinson’s late adolescence, was written by a

Dickinson scholar and author of an earlier, more traditional scholarly biography The

Passion o f Emily Dickinson (1992) of the same subject. It is as if Farr believed she needed another way to get at the truth of Dickinson’s life, a way that transcended mere fact; indeed, in an afterword, she writes:

This fiction is based, with some variation and compression, upon actual events. In the words of Emily’s Dickinson’s poem, I have tried to “Tell all the Truth” about her inner life, especially during her formative years at school; but I have chosen to do so in the “slant,” fictional way that she herself preferred. (219)

Indeed, this sentiment, crucial to an understanding of the implications of postmodernism, is reflected as well in a statement in Ian McEwan’s short story “In the Beginning.” A character has just told an anecdote about an encounter between John Keats and William

Wordsworth. Asked if the story is true, she replies, “ ‘It isn’t true, but it tells the truth’ ”

(142).

Likewise, the still-unwritten biographies of Virginia Woolf will benefit fi-om the expansion of contemporary insights into the criticism of biography, Gordon writes in

“Womens’ Lives: The Unmapped Country”:

Future biographers [of Virginia Woolf] will have to lead themselves to what is indefinable — the imaginative reach of this woman — rather than fall back upon the well-known catalogue of abuses (sex abuse, obtuse doctors) which keeps readers to the straight highway of routine idea. . . . We must cast ourselves into the mystery of existence as alert women experience it; we must undertake the gaps, uncertainties, and so-called ‘madness’, inconclusive as they are, for there is no other route to full biographical truth. (94-5)

Biographers, she adds, should be challenged “to project a rising character, a still unrecognized creature who appeared to be crawling out from under the stone of history”

265 (97). Acknowledging the fundamentally constructed nature of biography, indeed of history

itself, helps lift the stone. For despite multiple biographies, despite sustained critical

attention, we still do not know who “Virginia Woolf’ was, and is. We never will. Yet as

we repeatedly attempt new biographical portraits, we learn to know all over again how little we know. That is the perverse promise of postmodernism, its glory and its curse.

' Anticipation also is in eflfect when the biographer presents events as if they were inevitable. This “See? I told you so” attitude will be explored later in the chapter in a discussion of biographers’ descriptions of Virginia W oolfs suicide. ~ This is tme even in the case of James Boswell’sLife o f Johnson, in which Boswell makes a point of appearing to be composing his biography just as the events are unfolding. For even though, as Boswell writes, “I had the honour and happiness of enjoying his [Johnson’s] friendship for upwards of twenty years; [and] had the scheme of writing his life constantly in view” (19), a biography is always written after the events it describes. For the reader, the illusion that she or he is experiencing, by virtue of the biographer, events in the biographical subject’s life as they happen is a tribute to the biographer’s skill. ^ A postmodernist-inspired willingness to admit that a construction has taken place is visible as well in political and popular culture, according to Elizabeth Kolbert; in the 1996 presidential race, she reports, “the mechanics of the campaign have become campaign issues.” She continues: “It used to be that candidates and their staffs went to great trouble to hide the mechanics of the campaign. But this year, the candidates have taken to reading their stage directions out loud, routinely discussing their ftmdraising efforts, the breakdown of their poll results and their advertising strategies.” Campaigns, she says, “have taken on a curiously inverted q uali^ (A11), rather like biographies that acknowledge that they are staged constructions, not objective reflections of “reality.” “ Hence Marjorie Garber’s perceptive remark in her introduction to a section inSeductions o f Biography entitled “Postmodernism and the Possibility of Biography”: “If poststructuralism bequeaths to biography the question of the split subject, postmodernism acts out that ambivalent bequest, testing and transgressing the borderline between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality,’ or ‘fiction’ and nonfiction’ in novels, films and popular culture” (176). ^ Definitions are notoriously slippery, and a definition of postmodernism and its attendant swarm of theories and assumptions is especially daunting. As Catherine R. Stimpson writes in her introduction to Elizabeth Abel’s Virginia Woolf and the Fictions o f Psychoanalysis, “Spuming a single identity, postmodernism spawns contradictory images of what it might be. Often, it seems a wild young thing, at home in the carnival. From time to time, however, it seems a dour scold, at home in a bare room, stripped of fiuniture and the bric-a-brac of illusions” (L\). Linda Hutcheon concurs: “O f all the terms bandied about in both current theory and contemporary writing on the arts, postmodernism must be the most over- and under-defined” (3). My understanding of postmodernism, which informs this chapter, is shaped by the writing of Hutcheon, Jonathan Culler and Brian McHale. Hutcheon calls the postmodern “a problematizing force in our culture today: it raises questions (or renders problematic) the commonseusical and the ‘natural.’ But it never offers answers that are anything but provisional and culturally determined (and limited)” (xi). I like to think of the postmodern as the very air in which we move: one can deny it or ignore it, but its influence, and utter necessity for the sustenance of contemporary intellectual life, remains. What is at issue, then, is not the existence of the postmodern, but the implications of that existence. As McHale writes, “Postmodernism, the thing, does not exist precisely in the way that ‘the Renaissance’ or ‘romanticism’ do not exist. There is no postmodernism ‘out there’ in the world any more than there ever was a Renaissance or a romanticism ‘out there.’ These are all literary-historical fictions,

266 discursive artifacts constructed either by contemporary readers and writers or retrospectively by literary historians” (4). ® Few understood the gloriously fictive nature of great biography better than Virginia Woolfi herself a sophisticated critic of biography. As she wrote in a 1927 essay, “The New Biography”: “For in order that the light of personality may shine through, facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integri^ (229). ’ “Plausible fictions” is a term coined by Michael Reynolds in “Up Against the Crannied Wall: The Limits of Biography” (171); “authorized fictions” was offered by Nadel (209). * This is not Kakutani’s first foray into the anti-postmodernist fold, moreover. In 1994 she wroteMew a York Times essay, “Opinion vs. Reality in an Age of Pundits and Spin Doctors” that made essentially the same point: relativism and experimentation in writing about the past threaten to overwhelm the traditional somces of meaning and joy in art. “Post-modernists now place quotation marks around words like ‘reality,’ insisting that the old notion of objective knowledge has become obsolete.. . . Throughout our culture, the old notions of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ are in danger of being replaced by the new ones of ‘opinion’ [and] ‘perception’ ” (B l). She adds, “In recent years, the virtual enshrinement of subjectivity in both academia and popular cultme has serious implications” (BIO). ® Also, the fact that the historians Clive chooses to praise include nineteenth-century giants such as Thomas Babington Macaulay is proof that the historical imagination he had in mind may be newly appreciated by a postmodern sensibility, but of course need not have been produced under its aegis. As we shall see, Clive is not the only one to call a certain biographical technique a “trick.” In his article about biographers’ desires to create the illusions of seamless wholes, John Worthen writes: “Biographical writing is very often indeed a species of confidence trick — in spite of its continual claim to be rooted in documentary evidence” (240). Indeed, if the word “ignorance” seems a trifle harsh, it is worth recalling that Lytton Strachty used it in a similar vein in his playful preface to Eminent Victorians: “The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian — ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art” (9). '* John Mepham believes this polemical stance detracts firom DeSalvo’s argument: “No effort is made to test alternative hypotheses, to examine other plausible view either about the facts of the matter or about the general narrative of W oolf s development. The style of argument is more like partisan legal advocacy than balanced scholarly judgment” (Criticism in Focus, 20). What Mepham does not realize, however, is that the previous biographies — to which DeSalvo alludes when setting up her contrary argument — constitute the very “alternative hypotheses” for which Mepham asks. Moreover, what is “balanced” about scholarship? From the decision to study a particular author or work, on through to interpretation and analysis, scholarship can be, at its root, just as personal and subjective as any other creative undertaking. Roger Poole’s 1995 preface to a reissue of his study.The Unknown Virginia Woolf, fairly drips with outrage that his work has become merely an “alternate version” to the studies by Bell and Leonard Woolf. He also has other targets for his anger feminists who refused to allow criticism by a man to join antliologies of essays about Virginia Woolf; critics who misinterpreted his book. Poole takes Bell to task for “a certain breety nonchalance about his maimer which covered over some menacing and fiightening aspects of her early life” (xiv). *■* In a 1980 article, “Writing Lives: Theory and Practice of Literary Biography,” Katherine Frank suggests that biographies can be classified either as “narrative” or “analytical”; the narrative ones, she adds, often are written by novelists and include novelistic techniques such as scene-settings and climaxes, yet do not interpret the biographical subject’s life. I think these categories are simply too broad to be useful; DeSalvo, for instance, certainly argues a mean case, so her biography might be slotted in the analytical category, but, as I shall describe shortly, she also sets scenes and is vitally interested in character development. Moreover, a knowledge of the chronology of Virginia W oolfs life is imperative if one is to follow DeSalvo’s argument, hence narrative and analysis are intermingled. It seems to me that biographies are too nuanced to be put into categories, and must be critiqued individually. 267 This idea was suggested by the work of William C. Dowling, who, as quoted by Nadel, believes that “the true subject. . . of all biographies is the impossibility of the biographical enterprise” (231). It has also, of course, fieed the reader from the idea that reading is somehow neutral or objective; as Jonathan Culler notes in “Literary Competence”: “Reading is not an iimocent activity” (116). Reading, like writing, necessitates a perspective, and a perspective is implicitly biased.

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