Woolf and the Art of Exploration Helen Southworth
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Clemson University TigerPrints Woolf Selected Papers 2006 Woolf and the Art of Exploration Helen Southworth Elisa Kay Sparks Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cudp_woolfe Recommended Citation Woolf and the Art of Exploration: Selected Papers from the Fifteenth International Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited by Helen Southworth and Elisa Kay Sparks (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2006), xiv, 254 pp. ISBN 0-9771263-8-2 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in Woolf Selected Papers by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Woolf and the Art of Exploration Selected Papers from the Fifteenth International Conference on Virginia Woolf Woolf and the Art of Exploration Selected Papers from the Fifteenth International Conference on Virginia Woolf Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon 9–12 June 2005 Edited by Helen Southworth and Elisa Kay Sparks A full-text digital version of this book is available on the Internet, at the Center for Vir- ginia Woolf Studies, California State University, Bakersfi eld. Go to http://www.csub.edu/ woolf_center and click the Publications link. Works produced at Clemson University by the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, including Th e South Carolina Review and its themed series “Virginia Woolf International,” may be found at our Web site: http://www. clemson.edu/caah/cedp. Contact the director at 864-656-5399 for information. Copyright 2006 by Clemson University ISBN 0-9771263-8-2 Published by Clemson University Digital Press at the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina. Produced with Adobe Photoshop Elements CS, Adobe InDesign CS2, and Microsoft Word 2000. Th is book is set in Adobe Garamond Pro and was printed by University Printing Services, Offi ce of Publications and Promotional Services, Clemson University. Editorial Assistant: Allison Kerns. To order copies, contact the Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, Strode Tower, Box 340522, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina 29634-0522. An order form is available at the digital press Web site (see above) under “SCROLL” and linked to the themed issue page entitled “Virginia Woolf International.” Front cover illustration: Virginia Woolf Walking by Elisa Kay Sparks; background maps by permission of Washington State University Libraries (Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections); cover design by Elisa Kay Sparks. Frontispiece: Scan of London maps taken by Elisa Kay Sparks. iv Table of Contents Introduction Rishona Zimring • Trespassing .....................................................................................vii Helen Southworth and Elisa Kay Sparks • Common Ground .........................................ix List of Abbreviations ...................................................................................................xiv Exploring Keynotes Diane F. Gillespie • Godiva Still Rides: Virginia Woolf , Divestiture, and Th ree Guineas ...... 2 Maria DiBattista • Woolf’s Sense of Adventure ............................................................... 27 Jed Esty • Unseasonable Youth, or Woolf’s Alternative Modernity .................................... 29 Christine Froula • On French and British Freedoms: Early Bloomsbury and the Brothels of Modernism ............................................................................... 30 Douglas Mao • “Strange Necessities”.............................................................................. 31 Trevor James Bond • Loves, Languages, and Lives: An Exhibit from the Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf ............................................................................... 33 Exploring Woolf’s Life Gill Lowe • Hyde Park Gate News ................................................................................ 38 Alice D’Amore • Autobiographical Ruptures: Rhoda’s Traumatic Displacement ................ 44 Sally A. Jacobsen • Between the Acts: Ottoline Morrell and Mrs. Manresa, D. H. Lawrence and Giles Oliver ........................................................................... 50 Exploring Subjects and Objects/Nature Kathryn Simpson • Short Change: Economies Explored in Woolf’s Short Fiction .............. 58 Christina Alt • Virginia Woolf and the “Naturalist Novelist” .......................................... 65 Kelly Sultzbach • Th e Fertile Potential of Virginia Woolf’s Environmental Ethic .............. 71 Katie Macnamara • Refl ections on a Solitary Potato: Th e New Collective Essay and the Exploring Modern “I” ............................................................................................ 78 Exploring London’s Spaces Robert Reginio • Virginia Woolf and the Technologies of Exploration: Jacob’s Room as Counter-Monument............................................................................................... 86 Karin de Weille • Terra Incognita of the Soul: Woolf’s Challenge to the Imperialist’s Concept of Space ................................................................................. 95 v Benjamin Harvey • Th e Twentieth Part: Word and Image in Woolf’s Reading Room ...... 103 Elizabeth F. Evans • Woolf’s Exploration of “Th e Outer and the Inner”: A Spatial Analysis of Th e Years .............................................................................112 Exploring Foreign Lands Eleanor McNees • Th e English Tourist In/On America: Leslie Stephen vs. Virginia Woolf ........................................................................... 122 Cheryl Mares • Th e Making of Virginia Woolf’s America ............................................. 131 Joyce Kelley • “Nooks and Corners Which I Enjoy Exploring”: Investigating the Relationship Between Vita Sackville-West’s Travel Narratives and Woolf’s Writing ....................... 140 Joanna Grant • Th ey Came to Baghdad: Woolf and Sackville-West’s Levant ................... 150 Exploring Art and Empire Emily O. Wittman • Th e Decline and Fall of Rachel Vinrace: Reading Gibbon in Virginia Woolf’s Th e Voyage Out ........................................................................160 Ayako Muneuchi • Hotel Narrative and the Birth of Virginia Woolf’s Modernism ........ 169 Mollie Godfrey • Discovering the Readerly Mind: Woolf’s Modernist Reinvention of the National Poet ............................................................................................. 177 Renée Dickinson • Extinguishing the Lady with the Lamp: Florence Nightingale and the Work of Empire in the Interludes of Th e Waves .....................................................186 Exploring Cultural Origins and Contexts Meg Albrinck • Lily the Ethnographer: Discovering Self in To the Lighthouse ..............196 Alexandra Neel • Th e Photography of Antarctica: Virginia Woolf’s Letters of Discovery ..... 203 Randi Koppen • Sartorial Adventures: Woolf and the (Other-) Worldliness of Dress ........ 212 Akemi Yaguchi • “A Novel is an Impression not an Argument”: Virginia Woolf and James Sully ............................................................................ 220 Stephanie Callan • Exploring the Confl uence of Primitive Ritual and Modern Longing in Between the Acts ................................................................. 225 Notes on Contributors ................................................................................ 232 Conference Program ...................................................................................... 236 Index ...................................................................................................................... 249 vi Introduction TRESPASSING by Rishona Zimring hen it comes to Woolf, I tend to think back through my grandmother, whose collection of hardcover editions of Virginia Woolf gathered dust on the book- Wshelves of our house until I graduated from college and devoured them whole, starting with A Room of One’s Own (1929) and A Writer’s Diary (1953). For me, the art of exploring the works of Woolf began at home, in a few of the countless hours I spent there drifting through the stuff that had collected over the years. Th us it is with a certain feeling of resonance that I read the memoir of Woolf’s friend Gwen Raverat, née Darwin, exploring her grandfather’s house, as a child, and fi nding there all manner of passions and wonders. She writes of the mere pebbles: Th ey were not loose, but stuck down tight in moss and sand, and were black and shiny, as if they had been polished. I adored those pebbles. I mean literally adored; worshipped. Th is kind of feeling hits you in the stomach, and in the ends of your fi ngers, and it is probably the most important thing in life. Long after I have forgotten all my human loves, I shall still remember the smell of a gooseberry leaf, or the feel of the wet grass on my bare feet; or the pebbles in the path. (141–42) Th e smell of those tobacco-infused hardcover editions and the feel of their smooth, shiny, disintegrating dust jackets provides me with similar feelings. Exploring an old house has its curious surprises and even terrors: Raverat writes of dashing “at full speed” through her grandfather’s study, which was “faintly holy and sinister. Th ere were many mysteri- ous things on the tables and shelves, including a baby in a bottle; or at least something in alcohol, which I took to be a baby” (153). Here, there is a sense of shock, even hor- ror; exploration,