University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 12-2012 The art of natality : Virginia Woolf's and Kathe Kollwitz's aesthetics of becoming. Jennifer Brooke Goldberg 1973- University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Recommended Citation Goldberg, Jennifer Brooke 1973-, "The art of natality : Virginia Woolf's and Kathe Kollwitz's aesthetics of becoming." (2012). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 510. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/510 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE ART OF NATALITY: VIRGINIA WOOLF'S AND KATHE KOLLWITZ'S AESTHETICS OF BECOMING By Jennifer Brooke Goldberg B.A., University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1994 M.A., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1997 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Humanities University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky December 2012 Copyright 2012 by Jennifer Brooke Goldberg All rights reserved THE ART OF NATALITY: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S AND KÄTHE KOLLWITZ’S AESTHETICS OF BECOMING By Jennifer Brooke Goldberg B.A., University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1994 M.A., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1997 A Dissertation Approved on November 7, 2012 by the following Dissertation Committee: Annette C. Allen Dissertation Director Benjamin Hufbauer Mary Ann Stenger DEDICATION To Michael, Caleb, and Ethan, who awaken me continually to the wonders of becoming . .. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS lowe my dissertation director, Annette Allen, more than I can express. I first became acquainted with Virginia Woolf under Dr. Allen's tutelage, and through this exposure I have been granted an unexpected and miraculous sense of belonging in the world. Dr. Allen continually fosters my creativity and contributes to my flourishing. This project could not have come to fruition without the intervention of those whose commitments to natality have given me faith in beginnings. To my parents, Anne and Rusty Jackson, I extend gratitude. I am especially thankful to my mother for bestowing upon me a creative approach to living. My beloved grandparents, Georgia Louise Houser (1925-2011) and Calvin Kermit Houser, best represent the world of my childhood. Their home is my Bachelardian paradise. I attribute much of my adult zest for life to that of my mother-in-law and father-in-law, Betty and Joshua Goldberg. And the unconditional love, companionship, and curiosity showered on me by Buttercup, Shiloh, and Lyra affirm interconnectivity between species. My children, Caleb and Ethan, have been my constant guides in this project in embodying becoming and in nurturing me. They provide a sense of home. To my husband, Michael Emanuel Goldberg, I offer my deepest love. His intellectual acuity and readiness to discuss the nuances of natality have been invaluable. Most invaluable, however, has been his loving creation of the home we share with our children and dogs, which would have collapsed had he not nurtured it and all who inhabit it. iv ABSTRACT The Art of Natality: Virginia Woolfs and Kathe Kollwitz's Aesthetics of Becoming Jennifer Brooke Goldberg November 30,2012 Though Virginia Woolfs and Kathe Kollwitz's personal histories and specific cultural circumstances were quite different, their aesthetics share fundamental qualities. This dissertation demonstrates that both artists affirm memory, the maternal, and creativity as coalescent, and through doing so assert a principle of connectivity that counters the turmoil of their times. Through this constellation, Woolfs and Kollwitz's aesthetics exude faith in the continued viability of beauty and of possibility, faith that a commitment to becoming will undermine the sources of hopelessness that enshroud the modem world. Channeling their losses into their creative endeavors, Woolf and Kollwitz appropriated crises from their pasts for moments of personal and cultural edification. They establish maternity as exemplary of the human need for mutuality and maternal desire as a search for interrelation that must be exercised imaginatively. Charting the cataclysms of modernity evident in thought, technology, and warfare, Chapter I demonstrates modernity's collective sense of homeless ness. Chapter II situates theoretically the presences Woolf and Kollwitz assert as potentializing a rediscovery of home; Svetlana Boym's reflective nostalgia and Grace Jantzen's ethic of natality prove especially instrumental here. Chapters III, IV, and V interpret Woolfs "A Sketch of the Past" and To the Lighthouse as manifestations ofWoolfs creative memory work, of her v search for her mother and her lost home. Sketching her mother as an artist, Woolf identifies Julia Stephen as the source of her daughter's creativity and suggests art as a regenerative expression of love. Chapters VI and VII transition to a consideration of Kathe Kollwitz's autobiography and diaries, and of her War series and The Mourning Parents memorial. These chapters illuminate her alignment of the sensuality of mothering with the sensuality of creation, and establish that she experienced her son's death in World War I as a death of becoming. Chapter VII in particular probes the depths of Kollwitz's grief and describes the creative process as a means through which she soothed herself. Creating art enabled her to work toward a world that does not desecrate interconnectivity, imagination, and childhood, a world worthy of her deceased son and of her own mothering. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................ .iv ABSTRACT ...........................................................................................v LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................vi INTRODUCTION "THESE FRAGMENTS I HAVE SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS" ...................... 1 CHAPTER I THE HOMESICK MODERN SOUL ............................................................ .21 CHAPTER II RETURNING TO INTERSUBJECTIVE ROOTS: FINDING A HOME WITHIN HOMELESSNESS ......................................................................4 7 CHAPTER III INHABITING: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE ART OF HOME ......................... 75 CHAPTER IV ASSEMBLING: MRS. RAMSAY AND THE ART OF CONNECTION .................. 97 CHAPTER V REMEMBERING: LILY AND THE ART OF RETURN .................................... .140 CHAPTER VI MOTHERING THE LIVING ..................................................................... 182 CHAPTER VII MOTHERING THE DEAD .........................................................................210 CONCLUSION TO NURTURE AND TO BE NURTURED ...................................................260 REFERENCES .................................................................................... 266 vii APPENDIX ART AND IMAGES ...............................................................................275 CURRICULUM VITAE ............................................................................289 viii LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1. Pieta (Kollwitz, 1903) ........................................................................ 275 2. Woman With Dead Child (Frau mit Totem Kind) (Kollwitz, 1903) ...................... 276 3. Woman and Death (Tod und Frau) (Kollwitz, 1910) ..................................... 277 4. Vampire (Edward Munch, 1894) ............................................................ 278 5. The Sacrifice (Das Opfer) (Kollwitz, 1922 -1923) ....................................... .279 6. The Volunteers (Die Freiwilligen) (Kollwitz, 1922 - 1923) ............................ .280 7. The Parents (Die Eltern) (Kollwitz, 1922 -1923) ......................................... 281 8. The Widow, I (Die Witwe, I) (Kollwitz, 1922 -1923) .................................... 282 9. The Widow, II (Die Witwe, II) (Kollwitz, 1922 - 1923) .................................. 283 10. The Widow, II (Die Witwe, II) (Kollwitz, 1922 -1923) ................................. 284 11. The People (Das Volk) (Kollwitz, 1922 -1923) .........................................285 12. Lamentation Over the Body o/Christ (Bellini, ca. 1500 ) .............................. 286 13. Tower ofMothers (Kollwitz, 1937) ........................................................ 287 14. The Mourning Parents (Trauernden Eltern) (Kollwitz, 1914 - 1932) ................288 ix INTRODUCTION "THESE FRAGMENTS I HAVE SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS"! For successful excavations a plan is needed. Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam, and it is to cheat oneself of the richest prize to preserve as a record merely the inventory of one's discoveries, and not this dark joy of the place of the finding itself. Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as succeeding, and consequently remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, essay its spade in ever-new