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Impressionism in the Early Novels of Virginia Woolf Author(S): Jack F Impressionism in the Early Novels of Virginia Woolf Author(s): Jack F. Stewart Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 9, No. 2 (May, 1982), pp. 237-266 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831259 . Accessed: 27/06/2012 17:50 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Modern Literature. http://www.jstor.org JACK F. STEWART UNIVERSITYOF BRITISHCOLUMBIA in the Impressionism Early Novels of Woolf Virginia In "A Sketch of the Past,"1 Virginia Woolf traces the origins of her sensibility in childhood. "If I were a painter," she observes, "I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers. I should make a picture that was globular; semi-transparent. I should make curved shapes, showing the light through, but not giving a clear outline. Everything would be large and dim; and what was seen would at the same time be heard . sounds indistinguishable from sights." This verbal painting has the glowing indistinctness of an Im? pressionist canvas: colors, shapes, sounds, and rhythms merge in a synthesis of sense and emotion. Whereas a pure Impressionist like Monet works "directly from nature, striving to render [his] impressions in the face of the most fugitive effects,"2 a writer like Proust (or Woolf) works from visual memory; both aim, however, at instantaneity, "that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything."3 The quality of light suffusing objects with color awakens Woolf's aesthetic consciousness. "Light," says Maria Kronegger, "is the soul of impressionist paintings, and the soul of impressionist literature. Reality, for the impressionist, has become a vision of space, conceived 1 VirginiaWoolf, Moments of Being,ed. JeanneSchulkind (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), p. 66. (Titlesub? sequentlyabbreviated as MB.)All referencesin my text are basedon editionspreviously given in footnotes. 2 Quoted in WilliamC. Seitz,Claude Monet (Abrams, n.d.), p. 44. 3 VirginiaWoolf, To the Lighthouse(1927; rpt. London:Hogarth Press, 1967), p. 297. (Titlesubsequently abbreviatedas TL.)Other Hogarth editions of Woolfcited in my textare: The Voyage Out (1915)(VO); Night and Day (1919) (ND);Jacob's Room (1922) ()R);Mrs. Dalloway (1925) (D);Orlando (1928) (O);The Waves (1931) (W);Between the Acts (1941) (BA);Collected Essays (1966) (CE);A HauntedHouse and OtherStories (1944) (HH);A Roomof One's Own (1929)(AROO); A Writer'sDiary, ed. LeonardWoolf (1953) (AWD);The Diary of VirginiaWoolf, ed. Anne OlivierBell (1977) (Diary). 237 238 JACK F. STEWART as sensations of light and color."4 In her Diary, Woolf shows an Im? pressionist sensitivity to movements of light over landscape: "the look of clouded emerald which the downs wear, the semi-transparent look, as the sun & shadows change, & the green becomes now vivid now opaque" (Diary, I, 185). Light is certainly the soul of her work?or, rather, a synthesis of light, time, and space sensuously apprehended in a moment of being. In "The Narrow Bridge of Art," Woolf sees fiction extending its range to convey "the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect on us of the shape of trees or the play of colour, the emotions bred in us by crowds . obscure terrors and hatreds ... the delight of movement, the intoxication of wine. Every moment is the centre and meeting-place of an extraordinary number of perceptions which have not yet been expressed" (CE, II, 229). This commitment to sensation and perception links Woolfs art with that of the Impressionists.5 In To the Lighthouse (1927), she gives the flux of sensations associated with childhood their fullest ordering. But before she could encompass that luminous vision, she had written two apprentice and two experimental novels. I shall consider Impressionist motifs in The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob's Room (1923),6 leaving aside Mrs. Dalloway (1925), where impressions are psychologized in interior monologues. Woolf, who conceived her fiction in visual scenes, stresses the close analogy between her art and that ofthe painter.7 As a writer, she aims to render the feel of life in a given consciousness at a given moment, through a language of sense perception that parallels that of paint. Ralph Freedman says she saw the design of her novels of the twenties "chiefly 4 MariaElisabeth Kronegger, Literary Impressionism (Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 42, 48. 5 See Octave Mirbeau,in Figaro,1889, quoted in JacquesLassaigne, Impressionism, trans. Paul Eve (Funk & Wagnalls,1966), pp. 110-11. 6 HerbertHowarth, "Symposium of LiteraryImpressionism," Yearbook of Comparativeand GeneralLiterature, XVII(1968), 41, saysthat "Woolf develops from latent to overtImpressionism." I see this developmentcomplet- ing itselfwithin the firstthree novels. 7 See MB, 66, 70-73; also "WalterSickert," CE, II, 233-44. Commentingon ArnoldBennetfs essay, "Neo- Impressionismand Literature,"Woolf in ContemporaryWriters (ed. Jean Guiguet[London: Hogarth, 1965], p. 62) echoes the question:"is it not possiblethat some writerwill come along and do in wordswhat these men havedone in paint?"(Bennett's essay actually deals with Post-lmpressionist painting.) Several critics have related Woolfs artto paintingand/or Impressionism. See RalphFreedman, The Lyrical Novel (PrincetonUniversity Press, 1970); HermioneLee, The Novels of VirginiaWoolf (London: Methuen, 1977); Allen McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The EchoesEnslaved (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); JamesNaremore, The WorldWithout a Self (YaleUniversity Press, 1973); JaneNovak, The RazorEdge of Balance(University of MiamiPress, 1975); WandaMae Brewer,"Virginia Woolf and the Painter'sVision," DAI, XXX (1969), 716A-17A; HersheyJulien, "VirginiaWoolf: Post-lmpressionistNovelist," DAI, XXIX(1968), 4490A: JacquelineGaillet Thayer, "Virginia Woolf:From Impressionism to AbstractArt," DAI, XXXVIII (1977), 1419A.[Richard Morphet] Catalogue Intro? ductionto VanessaBell: Paintingsand Drawings(London: Anthony d'Offay, 1973), pp. 10-11, comparesthe visualstyles and motifsof Virginia'swriting with those of Vanessa'spainting. WOOLF AND IMPRESSIONISM 239 in terms of an analogy with painting, precisely with impressionist and post-impressionist art. Her 'paintings' were visual illuminations . artistic equivalents ofthe recognition ofthe moment. [in which] the image becomes that form of awareness which corresponds to the figure on the painter's canvas" (203). In this paper, I am concerned with interrelations between Woolf's early style and Impressionist painting,8 rather than with "literary impressionism," as the term is applied to Conrad's and Ford's narrative devices. To this end, I adopt Todorov's tactic of "superimposing the various works . by reading them as if in transparency, one on top of the other."9 The Voyage Out gives glimpses of the style that was to permeate Woolf's fiction. Here she wishes to convey the sense of "life itself going on" (AWD, 143), just as "the Impressionists all painted the passing scene . the fleeting moment in nature . action unfolding in space . the breath of life . .." (Courthion, 28). The outward bustle that catches the painter's eye parallels that inward movement where "the mind receives a myriad impressions," and where "life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope. ."10 The early plein-air Im? pressionists, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley, were variously at? tracted by movements of sunlight over leaves or flesh, river scenes, lights on dark water, cities by night, seascapes, clouds, mist, smoke, snow, floods, and crowds strolling, sitting, eating, drinking, dancing. The visual scenes in Woolf's early novels exploit similar motifs and 8 The followingworks on Impressionistpainting are cited in my text or notes: Mariaand GodfreyBlunden, Impressionistsand Impressionism(Rizzoli, 1976); KermitSwiler Champa, Studies in EarlyImpressionism (Yale UniversityPress, 1973); PierreCourthion, Impressionism, trans. John Shepley (Abrams, n.d.); William Gaunt, The Impressionists(London: Thames & Hudson,1970); ArnoldHauser, "Impressionism," The Social Historyof Art (London:Routledge & KeganPaul, 1951), II, 896-926; JacquesLassaigne (see above); LindaNochlin, Im? pressionismand Post-lmpressionism,1874-1904: Sourcesand Documents(Prentice-Hall, 1966); John Rewald, The Historyof Impressionism,rev. ed. (New York:Museum of ModernArt, 1961); LionelloVenturi, Im? pressionistsand Symbolists,trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York:Cooper Square, 1973). See also RogerFry, "Impressionism,"Characteristics of FrenchArt (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), pp. 125-49, as well as studies by GermainBazin, Alan Bowness,ed., BernardDunstan, Diane Kelder,and Phoebe Pool. Reproductionsof paintingsmentioned in mytext will be foundmost readily in DonaldHolden, Whistler Landscapes and Seascapes (New York:Watson-Guptill, 1976); WalterPach, Pierre Auguste Renoir (Abrams, n.d.); William C.
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