Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

50 | Spring 2008 Special issue: Virginia Woolf

Christine Reynier (dir.)

Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/582 ISSN : 1969-6108

Éditeur Presses universitaires de Rennes

Édition imprimée Date de publication : 1 juin 2008 ISSN : 0294-04442

Référence électronique Christine Reynier (dir.), Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008, « Special issue: Virginia Woolf » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 01 juin 2011, consulté le 03 décembre 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/jsse/582

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 3 décembre 2020.

© All rights reserved 1

SOMMAIRE

The “Obstinate resistance” of Woolf’s short story Christine Reynier

PART ONE THE SHORT STORY COMMITMENTS

The role of the imagination in Virginia Woolf’s short fiction Elke D’hoker

Beauty and damaged life in Virginia Woolf’s short fiction Charles Sumner

Fashioning Anti-Semitism: Virginia’s Woolf’ “The Duchess and The Jeweller” and the readers of Harper’s Bazaar Kate Krueger Henderson

Speech-acts, represented thoughts and human intercourse in “The Introduction” and “Together and Apart” Anne Besnault-Levita

Adeline’s (bankrupt) education fund: Woolf, women, and education in the short fiction Ann K. McClellan

Who’s afraid of Rosamond Merridew?: Reading medieval history in “The journal of Mistress Joan Martyn” Leena Kore-Schröder

PART TWO BEYOND EXPERIMENTALISM: GENETICS, PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE AND THE SHORT STORY

“What’s ‘it’ – What do you mean by ‘it’?”: Lost Readings and getting lost in “Kew Gardens” Oliver Taylor

Enclosing the Whole: Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” as Autopoetic Narrative Frank Stevenson

“In the Circle of the Lens”: Woolf’s “Telescope” Story, Scene-making and Memory Laura Marcus

“To Slip Easily From One Thing To Another”: Experimentalism And Perception in Woolf’s Short Stories Teresa Prudente

PART THREE MUSIC, PAINTING, CINEMA AND THE SHORT STORY

Telling “by” Pictures: Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction Liliane Louvel

Beyond the boundaries of language: music in Virginia Woolf’s “The String Quartet” Émilie Crapoulet

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 2

Reflections on a Cinematic Story Abbie Garrington

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 3

The “Obstinate resistance” of Woolf’s short story

Christine Reynier

1 I have often wondered why, although I have regularly gone back to Virginia Woolf's short stories, I still feel I do not know them very well. This is of course no other than the secret charm of Woolf's short stories: they are so hermetic or puzzling that one cannot help re-reading them; they are so varied that one keeps forgetting them; they are so challenging that one feels bound to delve into them again and again. They offer “the obstinate resistance” (Woolf 1988: 158) of the text that Woolf loves in Sir Thomas Browne's writings and that she analyses in her essay “Reading”. The military metaphor of resistance might suggest that once the fortress of the text has been assaulted, it will surrender to the reader. However, the author makes it clear that such is not the case. The reader she depicts in her essay is not meant “to strip a whole page of its sentences and crush their meaning out in one grasp” (158); on the contrary, “the obstinate resistance” of Urn Burial “at first trips us and blinds us” (158); so that reading may not be synonymous with deciphering the text which does not yield its meaning easily: “[w]e must stop, go back, try out this way and that, and proceed at a foot's pace” (158). The type of reading Woolf advocates is a difficult, slow, and demanding process comparable to “mounting only a solemn and obstinate donkey instead of going up to town by an electric train” (158). It is the very type of reading Woolf's own short stories require.

2 The route the reader must follow when reading Browne and Hackluyt is a long and circuitous one in which his or her “attention wanders. [...] It floats far out at sea. It is soothed almost to sleep” (148).

3 What Woolf describes here is what Roland Barthes calls “reading looking up”,1 letting the reader's imagination go on with the writer's work, letting the reader enter the text through its loopholes. Such creative reading can only be induced by a text “rich, [...], with more than one can grasp at any single reading” (149); and instead of being linear, it consists of “repeated shocks” (152) that come at irregular intervals, like “[t]he little irregular beam of light” that shows the children their way during the moth-hunting scene evoked in the same essay. Reading has thus to do with seeing rather than meaning, with overcoming blindness and seeing at intervals an “unknown world”

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 4

(150), a world of magic such as the one the children discover at night with great “excitement” (151) in the story embedded in the essay and which functions as an allegory of reading while enacting, through its apparent unrelatedness to the reflections on the subject, the “obstinate resistance” of the text to reading. Reading therefore also means to have access to the “glory of the moment” (152) in which one experiences the writer's gift and generosity: 2 “[o]ne is conscious all the time that Sir Thomas was never paid a penny for his prose. He is free since it is the offering of his own bounty to give us as little or as much as he chooses” (159).

4 Woolf's short stories certainly require the type of reading the author evokes in her essay. Confronting the “obstinate resistance” of the text, reading through a series of irregular shocks that call for a “shock-receiving capacity” (Woolf 1981, 83) akin to the writer's, is undoubtedly a demanding process, all the more so since the texts are short and offer little narrative help, and this may account for the relative critical neglect of Woolf's short stories. Yet for those who are ready to play the game and submit themselves to the experience of reading these short stories, they may well find it rewarding. Indeed, if writing is, as Woof tells us about Thomas Browne, a generous process, an “offering” made by the writer to the reader, it induces a similar “desire to impart” in the reader: But why beauty should have the effect upon us that it does, the strange serene confidence that it inspires in us, none can say. Most people have tried and perhaps one of the invariable properties of beauty is that it leaves in the mind a desire to impart. Some offering we must make; some act we must dedicate, if only to move across the room and turn the rose in the jar. (159)

5 This is at least what all the contributors to this special issue have experienced and the gifts they make are the essays presented here. Some break new ground, some exemplify enduring trends in Woolfian criticism; some are the work of distinguished scholars, others of younger readers. They all shed a different light on Woolf's short stories, which they analyse either in groups or separately, illuminating them and thus bringing to the fore texts that tend to be relegated to the margins of Woolf's work.

6 In “Reading”, Woolf further shows in a metaphorical way how an English reader, solitary as he or she may be in his or her own private library, necessarily reads a book with the English literary tradition in mind: “If I looked down at my book I could see Keats and Pope behind him, and then Dryden and Sir Thomas Browne—hosts of them merging in the mass of Shakespeare, behind whom, if one peered long enough, some shapes of men in pilgrims' dress emerged, Chaucer perhaps” (142); and the English history as well, thoughts of “the red coats of the invincible.

7 British soldiers”(141) and Empire never being far from his or her mind. In other words, Woolf's reader is unavoidably grounded in a specific literary tradition as well as steeped in a specific socio-historical context. Such a conception of reading implicitly suggests that the reading of a text is never fixed and is bound to be renewed with every reader, his or her nationality, his or her sociological or historical background. It indirectly begs for the “cosmopolitan” readings of Woolf's short stories that are offered here and which come from readers scattered all over the world and living in different geographical, cultural, and historical contexts, those of England but also of France, Italy, and Belgium, of the United States and Taiwan—all of them entering at times into a dialogue with each other.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 5

8 In several articles, Woolf's short story is analysed not as experimental ground for her novels as has too often been done, but as a form of many commitments, whether ethical or political, feminist or historical. Elke D'hoker, in an exploration of imagination in some of Woolf's short stories, shows that, although it has rarely been used so far, ethical criticism is particularly relevant to Woolf's writings. She thus asks new questions and follows a new trend that I also illustrated in a recent article, “Virginia Woolf's Ethics of the Short Story”. Reading “Holborn Viaduct”—a hardly ever mentioned sketch—“The Man Who Loved His Kind”, and “Solid Objects”, and basing his analysis on Adorno, Charles Sumner provides a most challenging analysis of Woolf's use of literary beauty as a powerful socio-critical form of commitment. Kate Henderson offers an extremely perceptive and innovative analysis of Woolf's writing and reading praxis in “The Duchess and the Jeweller” and shows that this short story, so often analysed as an anti-Semitic one, deals in fact with the consumers' practices that are the readers' of Harper's Bazaar in which it was initially published.

9 Anne Besnault-Levita offers a rigorous and most stimulating reading of “The Introduction” and “Together and Apart”, two of the Mrs Dalloway's Party short story cycle, in terms of conversation and in the light of pragmatics and feminist narratology. Drawing on Woolf's own experience and on the historical exclusion of women from university, Ann McClellan examines five short stories trying to appraise Woolf's solutions to the problem of women's education. Her cultural studies and feminist methodologies offer a good example of a type of reading that has been prominent in Woolfian criticism and which is here applied to Woolf's short stories. In a challenging reading of “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”, Leena Kore-Schroder takes us away from a feminist reading of the short story to questions of land and ownership in the Middlle Ages, unearthing unexpected connections between Rosamond Merridew and a major historian of the time, and delineating in the end in perfectly new terms the type of history in which Woolf grounds her characters.

10 The second set of articles, which offers genetic readings and readings based on philosophy or scientific theories, also takes us beyond experimentalism. Comparing first 1919 edition of Kew Gardens with the typescript and reading the short story in the light of the early diaries and Deleuze, Oliver Taylor comes up with a stimulating and challenging analysis of Woolf's imagination as nomadic while Frank Stevenson, who focuses on Woolf's aesthetics of disproportion and discontinuity, offers a reading of “Kew Gardens” in the light of both informative and chaos-complexity theory and especially, of Michel Serres's writings, which renews our understanding of the short story. In an innovative genetic analysis of the different draft versions of “The Searchlight”, Laura Marcus shows that the telescope scene lies at the center of a network of connections both with Woolf's art and life and argues that it is central to Woolf's understanding of memory, to her self-representations and above all, to her “scene-making”. As for Teresa Prudente, she renews the reading of Woolf's short stories by looking at them through the lens of Ricoeur's concept of duration.

11 Finally, interart analogies are examined in the last three papers which focus on music, painting, cinema, and Woolf's short story. Illustrating Woolf's saying that “All great writers are great colorists, just as they are musicians into the bargain” (“Walter Sickert”), Liliane Louvel goes on with her exploration of the sister arts and in a fine analysis of painting and writing in Woolf's short stories, redefines the visual as a critical tool with which to open “the eye of the text” while Emilie Crapoulet, in an

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 6

attempt to understand the relation between language and music, gives an innovative reading of “The String Quartet” as an assessment of the power of music and an exploration of the way in which it makes meaning. While one of the first critics to have written on Woolf, Winifred Holtby, remarked on the cinematic qualities of Woolf's short stories, few critics have followed suit.3 This is what Abbie Garrington begins to explore in her analysis of “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” which draws a parallel between this text and “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari”, a film Woolf analyses in her essay “The Cinema”.

12 Because Woolf's short stories offer an “obstinate resistance” to reading, they keep haunting the reader and lend themselves to endless renewable readings, as the essays presented here testify. It is true that quite a number of articles have been devoted to individual short stories but they are scattered in various journals, except for those collected by Benzel and Hoberman in Trespassing Boundaries. Virginia Woolf's Short Fiction, “the first collection of essays to be published that is devoted solely to Woolf's shorter fiction” (Benzel and Hoberman XV) and a most valuable addition to the only two full- length studies of Woolf's short stories published so far, Baldwin's Virginia Woolf. A Study of the Short Fiction and Skrbic's Wild Outbursts of Freedom. Reading Virginia Woolf's Short Fiction. In such a context, this special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English, the second collection only of essays to be published that is devoted solely to Woolf's short stories, is particularly welcome.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Baldwin, Dean R. Virginia Woolf. A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

Barthes, Roland. “Ecrire la lecture”, Le Bruissement de la langue. Essais critiques IV. Paris: Seuil, 1984. 33-36.

Benzel, Kathryn N. and Ruth Hoberman, eds. Trespassing Boundaries. Virginia Woolf's Short Fiction. New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Holtby, Winifred. Virginia Woolf. A Critical Memoir, with a new introduction by Marion Shaw. London: Continuum, 2007.

Reynier, Christine. “Virginia Woolf's Ethics of the Short Story”, Etudes Anglaises 60/1 (Janvier- mars 2007): 55-65.

---. “Virginia Woolf's Dischronic Art of Fiction in her Essays”, Etudes britanniques contemporaines 33 (novembre 2007).

Skrbic, Nena. Wild Outbursts of Freedom. Reading Virginia Woolf's Short Fiction. Westport, Connecticut; London: Praeger, 2004.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past”, Moments of Being. Unpublished Autobiographical Writings (1976). Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Triad/Granada, 1981. 71-160.

---.“Walter Sickert”, Collected Essays, vol.2. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1966. 233-244.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 7

---. “Reading” (1919), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 1919-1924, vol. 3. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London & New York: H.B.J., 1988.141-161.

NOTES

1. Barthes writes about “lire en levant la tête” (Barthes 33). 2. On this subject, see (Reynier 2007b). 3. See especially chapter VI: “Cinematograph” (Holtby 116-136).

AUTEURS

CHRISTINE REYNIER Professor of British Literature at the University of Montpellier III. She founded the Société d' Etudes Woolfiennes in 1996 and chaired it until 2004. She has published extensively on Woolf as well as on other major modernist writers, edited books and journals on Woolf (Virginia Woolf. Le pur et l'impur, eds. C. Bernard & C. Reynier, Rennes: P. U. R., 2002; Insights into the Legacy of Bloomsbury. With Unpublished Essays and Memoirs by Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, ed. with an introduction by C. Reynier, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 62, octobre 2005), taken part in The British Companion to the Short Story project and published in the V. Woolf Miscellany; she has also written a monograph on Jeanette Winterson. She is currently completing a full-length study of Woolf's short stories.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 8

PART ONE THE SHORT STORY COMMITMENTS

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 9

The role of the imagination in Virginia Woolf’s short fiction

Elke D’hoker

1 The early decades of the twentieth century, the period in which Virginia Woolf started writing her short fiction, have often been called the heydays of the British short story. Only in the 1880’s had the British short story come into its own, and in the subsequent decades, writing short fiction became a fashionable and even fairly lucrative pursuit. As several critics have noted, the early twentieth century was also marked by a “wave of experimentalism in British short fiction” (Benzel and Hoberman 3) and Woolf’s short stories have often been read in terms of these narrative experiments. Because of the development of mass readership and the changed context of publishing, authorship too underwent significant changes around the turn of the century and, with the advent of modernism, so did the conception of literature and art. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the short story provided a suitable medium for reflection on the changing nature of art and the artist (Maunders x). While these themes are perhaps most famously explored in the short fiction of Henry James and James Joyce, several of Woolf’s short stories too stage meta-fictional concerns. Indirect evidence of the theoretical preoccupations in some of Woolf’s short stories can be found in the way critics have often interpreted these stories in the context of her essays (cf. Baldwin 21f., Head 81f.). Moreover, as Susan Dick notes in her introduction to Woolf’s collected shorter fiction, “the line separating Virginia Woolf’s fiction from her essays is a very fine one” (2) and stories such as “Memoirs of Novelist” or “Three Pictures” cross the boundaries between essay, sketch and story.

2 In this essay I propose to investigate in more detail the meta-fictional properties of a handful of Woolf’s short stories, focusing in particular on their exploration of the role and function of imagination. In the short stories as in the essays the imagination is a key term in Woolf’s aesthetics. In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, Woolf claims defiantly that a character should be a product not “of freehold villas and copyhold estates”, but rather “of imagination” (1968: 333). In “The Art of Biography” it is the artistic imagination which ultimately separates biography from art proper (1967: 225f.) and in “Modern Fiction” the “creative power” of the imagination is a crucial factor in

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 10

the attempt to forge a more truthful representation of “life itself” (1966: 107-8). On the other hand, short stories which foreground, question or dramatize the role of the imagination in both art and life can be found throughout Woolf’s career: from “Memoirs of a novelist” and “The Mark on the Wall” over “Sympathy” and “An Unwritten Novel” to “Moments of Being”, “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” and “Three Pictures”.

3 In the existing criticism of Woolf’s short fiction her staging of the problem of the imagination is often read in terms of the irresolvable tension between binary opposites. Thus Joanne Trautman Banks calls central to Woolf’s aesthetics such oppositions as “art and life, appearance and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, the self and the not-self, vision and fact” (18) and in an insightful discussion of “The Lady in the Looking-Glass”, Julia Briggs similarly detects a “series of binary opposites: life and art; room and garden; inside and outside; words and pictures; imagination and reality; change and stillness; light and shadow” (176). While the tension between the two poles in these oppositions is of course ultimately irresolvable, I will nevertheless try to pin down Woolf’s position with regard to the imagination in a somewhat more precise way. What part of the binaries does Woolf privilege in her stories: reality or the imagination, the self or the other, art or life? What does Woolf’s short fiction reveal about the power and the limits of the imaginative faculty? What does it tell us about the methods and tools the artistic imagination wields? And what is the ethical dimension of the sympathetic imagination as Woolf sees it? These are some of the questions which I will hope to answer in this essay.

Imagination as the artist’s tool

4 One of the first stories in which the issue of the imagination is centrally addressed is “Memoirs of a Novelist”. It is one of Woolf’s so-called early stories which combine several different genres: “nineteenth-century biography, the journal, the essay, and the review” (Snaith 127). In this short work, the unnamed narrator comically criticises Miss Linsett’s biography of the (fictional) Victorian lady novelist Miss Willatt. This biography, the narrator argues, sadly fails to bring its subject to life due to a mixture of “nervous prudery”, “dreary literary conventions” (Woolf 2003: 67) and, as Dean Baldwin has put it, “a failure of imagination” (11). Exasperated by the excess of useless circumstantial fact in the biography and by the lack of true insight in Miss Willatt’s personality, the narrator then sets about providing an alternative biography, one geared towards the inner consciousness of both the novelist and her biographer. On the basis of tiny but telling remarks in letters and novels, the narrator imagines an inner life for Miss Willatt which gives the lie to the blameless stone effigy Miss Linsett fashioned for her. Though her speculations are at first quite modestly introduced by small phrases such as “(if we may theorise)” (63), “we can imagine” (65), “we can only guess” (66) or “one believes” (67), they quickly give way to bold statements about the characters’ ‘true’ motivations, regrets, secret hopes and dreams. In this way, the narrator does succeed where Miss Linsett failed: Miss Willatt becomes a ‘real’ person whose inner life is convincingly illuminated. “Memoirs of a Novelist” thus offers – in part – a plea for the imagination as the artist’s tool needed to truly express “the spirit we live by, life itself”, as Woolf put it in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1968: 337).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 11

5 A similar celebration of the imagination can be found in “The Mark on the Wall”, though the imagination is here directed towards an object rather than a person. That the lengthy imaginative speculations which the narrator engages in upon seeing a mark on the wall, are ultimately proven wrong is largely irrelevant: a mere fact which interrupts the far more fascinating work of the imagination. Interestingly, both “Memoirs of a Novelist” and “The Mark on the Wall” refer in a small remark to one of the driving forces behind Woolf’s fiction: the curiosity about other human beings. In the first story, the narrator wistfully talks about “all these people” who “come to life again” and “tempt us intolerably to know more about them” (72). And even though the facts of their lives are “irrecoverably” lost, their personality can be revived in fiction. In “The Mark on the Wall”, on the other hand, the narrator first introduces a motif which will be explored again and again in Woolf’s short fiction, that of the people who “face each other in omnibuses and underground railways” who inspire the artist with an insatiable curiosity as to the lives lived behind the “mirror” (79).

6 This motif is explored in greater detail in the well-known essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” where Woolf calls this curiosity the central driving force of her writing. She explains how, for her, a novel seems to originate in “the figure of a man, or of a woman, who said ‘My name is Brown. Catch me if you can” (1968: 319). Woolf then further explores the idea of a nameless woman in a train carriage whose very expression invites the observer/narrator to imagine a life for her. Since the essay is centrally concerned with the opposition between the obsolete and ineffective “Edwardian” conventions for writing and the quest of the “Georgian” writers for new forms and fictions, the imagined life of Mrs. Brown takes the form not of a series of material details but of little scenes in which the narrator “sees the person … sees Mrs. Brown” (322). What is important to Woolf here, as in “Memoirs of a Novelist” and “The Mark on the Wall”, are not the facts of a life, but the artist’s “vision” of a life – and, by extension, of “life” in general (325). And the imagination has a central role to play in the creation of this vision.

7 The artistic attempt to imaginatively perceive the inner life of other human beings also inspires three other short stories in Woolf’s oeuvre: “An Unwritten Novel”, “Moments of Beings: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points’” and “The Lady in the Looking-Glass. A Reflection”. Dominic Head calls these three stories the “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown stories” (81), because they are driven by the same ‘catch-me-if-you-can-demon’ which Woolf explores in the essay of that title. Characteristic of all three stories, moreover, is that the imaginative quest for the “true” personality of the character is at the end of the story checked--and reverse--by the “facts” of reality. The stories all end with an alternative scene which may--or may not--be more accurate than the first one. In all three stories, in other words, the imagination comes up against its own limits. Yet a careful reading of the stories shows that the limits of the imagination are already evident within the richness of the narrator’s initial visions, suggesting a failure or lack at the heart of the imaginative faculty itself. In spite of the obvious similarities between all three stories, moreover, each story spells out the limitations of the imagination in a slightly different way. In what follows, therefore, I will discuss each of the Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown stories in terms of a different failing of the imagination, even though cross-references will also make the links between them apparent.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 12

The limits of the imagination

8 The setting of “An Unwritten Novel” most closely resembles the anecdote of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” as the narrator finds herself challenged into storytelling by the “expression of unhappiness” on a woman’s face in a railway carriage (106). She then sets out to “read” that expression, to “see” the life behind it. It is indeed the very “life, soul, spirit” (111) of “Minnie Marsh” which the narrator is interested in and both reading and perceiving are foregrounded as activities in her attempt to imaginatively capture that life. “I read her message, deciphered her secret, reading it beneath her gaze”, the narrator claims (108). And frequently she describes scenes as though literally “seeing” them. The narrator thus imagines for Minnie Marsh a contemptuous sister-in- law she is going to visit, an unspecified crime she committed in the past, an ailing mother she nursed faithfully for many years and a lurid travelling salesman she has to confront at her brother’s house. Even though the narrator claims that all this unhappiness is “life’s fault. Life imposes her laws; life blocks the way” (112), to the reader it is much more the conventions of sentimental fiction which seem to determine Minnie’s life. Indeed, as Dean Baldwin has noted, the narrator’s “deciphering takes the form of clichés from popular fiction” (22). Far from being original and true, in other words, the narrator’s imagination is heavily determined by existing literary stereotypes and conventions. This is finally confirmed by the sudden appearance of the woman’s son which disproves the narrator’s entire story, ironically at the exact point when she claims “I’ve read you right – I’m with you now” (115). In “Three Pictures”, one of Woolf’s later stories, this tendency of the imagination to be bound and determined by preconceived ideas and stereotypes is explicitly commented on: “[I]t is impossible that one should not see pictures […] We can not possibly break out of the frame of the picture by speaking natural words” (222). If these pictures take an explicitly social form in that story – “if my father was a blacksmith and yours was a peer of the realm, we must needs be pictures to each other” (222), in “An Unwritten Novel”, the far more general nature of these pictures and stereotypes is demonstrated. They inevitably shape our interpretation, our ‘reading’, of other people, thus effectively curbing the powers and possibilities of the imagination.

9 “Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points’” is another story about the imaginative ‘reading’ of another person. The exercise is brought about here not by an unhappy look, but by an unexpected remark. Miss Craye’s remark about Slater’s pins brings home to her pupil, Fanny Wilmot, the realisation that her piano teacher has an ordinary life too. This leads her to an imaginative (re-)construction of that life on the basis of a few stray facts and remarks. “Around these”, as Baldwin has put it, “Miss Wilmot spins imaginary incidents of courtship and proposals spurned, and of a life given meaning by Miss Craye’s battles against the headaches that have plagued her for years” (53). A closer look at the text reveals some of the workings of Fanny’s imagination as she effectively reads significance into some remarks of Miss Craye, ever so slightly altering them in the process. Thus a remark of Miss Craye about men – “It’s the use of men, surely, to protect us” – is recalled in three different ways. In the first recording, Miss Craye says it “smilingly” (211). Subsequently, Fanny meaningfully changes the remark into “It was the only use of men, she had said” (211, italics mine) and in the final instance, Miss Craye delivers the remark “with a queer, wry acerbity” (211). In a similar way, another of Miss Craye’s remarks about men – “they’re ogres” –

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 13

is first recounted as being said “half laughing” and later on as “laughing grimly” (213). One could indeed, as Fanny notes elsewhere, “make that yield what one liked” (212).

10 These and other half-deliberate misreadings betray Fanny’s strong personal investment in the scenes she imagines for Miss Craye. Several other details further confirm this impression. When Fanny imagines Miss Craye’s desire “to break the pane of glass which separated them from other people” (210), this reflects in fact her own desire to break through the reserved front of her piano teacher and to penetrate the person behind it. Similarly, Fanny’s reading of Julia Craye as a strong, independent woman who turns down a suitor so as not to “sacrifice” her freedom (212-13) recalls Fanny’s earlier remark that she doesn’t “want protection [from men]” (211). Finally, the mixture of desire and frustration, of wanting and not getting it which Fanny ascribes to Miss Craye might again simply be a projection of her own half-conscious longings. This is also the conclusion which Annette Oxindine reaches in her reading of the lesbian dimension of this story. “Suspecting Julia’s lesbianism,” she argues, “Fanny is able to project onto her teacher all the frustration and desire she has been unable to acknowledge as her own” (54).1 For Oxindine, the story is thus much more about “Fanny’s discovery of her own sexual feelings for another woman”, than about Julia Craye’s own lesbianism (54).

11 To return to the question of the imagination, it is clear that the inner life which Fanny fashions for Julia Craye is very much determined by her own thoughts and feelings. The imagination is thus again shown in its limitations, bound as it is by the personality of the one who imagines. In fact, the narrative set-up of “Moments of Being” lends itself particularly well to the exploration of the subjectivity of the imagination. Unlike “An Unwritten Novel” and “The Lady in the Looking Glass”, this story is narrated by an omniscient narrator who focalises through Fanny and is thus able to reveal more of the personality of the creator than is possible in the first-person narratives. Moreover, the omniscient narrator takes over at crucial moments, for instance to mark the final surprise reversal which – as in “An Unwritten Novel” – further confirms the inevitable imperfections of the imagination.

12 “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” is the last of Woolf’s stories centrally concerned with the possibility of truly knowing another human being. In this story, the ‘other’ is no (half) stranger, but an intimate friend of the narrator. The narrator is left alone in the drawing room while her friend, Isabella Tyson, has gone out in the garden to cut flowers. As the narrator is pondering the strange opposition between the reality around her and the life reflected in the large mirror hanging in the hall, she comes to realise how little she really knows about her friend: “it was strange that after knowing her all these years one could not say what the truth about Isabella was” (216). There are some facts, but no real knowledge of Isabella’s inner being: “[i]t was absurd, it was monstrous. If she concealed so much and knew so much one must prize her open with the first tool that came to hand – the imagination” (217). The narrator then starts a rich train of speculations about Isabella’s innermost thoughts about life and death, happiness and regret. She also fancifully compares Isabella to the elegant, fantastic flowers she is cutting and she likens Isabella’s thoughts to the dancing light in the drawing room. Yet the narrator realises at the same time that the metaphors will not do, “for they come like the convolvulus itself trembling between one’s eyes and the truth” (216). As in the other stories, the speculations are finally proven void when, in a final reversal, Isabella is revealed to be “perfectly empty” and to have “no thoughts” at all (219). If this is the truth – and I will come back to that question later on – it is a

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 14

rather negative kind of truth which does not reveal much about Isabella’s inner self either.

13 The story thus addresses the fundamental difficulty of ever fully knowing the intimate self or inner life of another human being. Isabella cannot wholly be known through fancy or metaphor – and perhaps not even through art. Once again, the imagination comes up against its limits here. This is also suggested in the story “Sympathy” where the narrator’s imagination is stirred upon reading the death-notice of her friend’s husband in the morning paper. She claims to “see” the death-bed, the widow’s grief and even the dead man himself. Yet she stops short of imagining her friend’s first, crucial confrontation with her dead husband: “There is a moment I can’t fancy: the moment in other people’s lives that one always leaves out; the moment from which all that we know them by proceeds; I follow her to his door; I see her turn the handle, then comes the blind moment and when my fancy opens its eyes again I find her equipped for the world – a widow” (102). These stories thus draw out a third failing of the imagination: its inability to penetrate the innermost self of another human being.

Art and the Imagination

14 The three stories discussed here seem to have a similar outline: a train of speculative thought about another person is cut short by a final reversal. Dean Baldwin, however, traces a crucial difference between them, when he discusses the closing scene of “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” as follows: We have here the only story in which the narrator is able to pierce the barrier of external reality and discover something essential about her subject. Why is this narrator able to succeed where Fanny Wilmot and the narrator of “An Unwritten Novel” were not? The answer is the mirror, for it does more than reflect; it also composes and holds. (56)

15 In order to assess this difference between the stories, it is necessary to further investigate the final paragraphs of all three stories, which describe the famous reversal scene in which the imaginative speculations of the narrator or focaliser are proven wrong. In “An Unwritten Novel”, the narrator watches aghast as “her” Minnie walks away with her loving son. At the same time, this scene “floods her anew”, and to an even greater degree as she jubilantly embraces her mysterious fellow creatures: “If I fall on my knees, if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it’s you, unknown figures, you I adore; if I open my arms, it’s you I embrace, you I draw to me – adorable world!” (115).

16 Another, more literal, embrace can be found in “Moments of Being” when an ecstatic Miss Craye disproves Fanny’s speculations about loneliness and suddenly embraces her pupil. Again, this leads Fanny to experience a sudden vision in which “[A]ll seemed transparent for a moment” and she really sees Julia. The word “saw” effectively becomes a mantra in the final paragraphs; it is repeated no less than ten times: “She saw Julia open her arms; saw her blaze; saw her kindle. Out of the night she burnt like a dead white star” (214). In “The Lady in the Looking-Glass”, finally, the narrator similarly sees Isabella at last, but this time as a reflection in the mirror: “At once the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and superficial and to leave only the truth. It was an enthralling spectacle” (219). When considering these final scenes, the inevitable

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 15

question is of course whether the “truth” has indeed been grasped: whether the inner self of M.M., Julia and Isabella has actually been penetrated and their life or soul finally been revealed.

17 First, it should be evident that the mere placing of these scenes at the end of the stories ensures that they cannot in turn be contradicted. The story closes on this revelatory moment and thus precludes dissent. It is important to note, moreover, that the “truth” is in all three cases arrived at in a brief, sudden and heightened moment of revelation. The endings are all “moments of being”, to use Woolf’s terminology, but also--and perhaps even more so--moments of seeing: Joycean epiphanies, yielding a special insight or a newly-discovered significance. As in the Joycean epiphany, moreover, ordinary reality is transcended in these moments and the moment achieves the perfection and timelessness of art. In “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” this artistic transformation is made explicit through the image of the mirror, but in the other stories too, the revelatory moment transforms reality into art. As a result, the referential aspect has ceased to matter.2 It has become irrelevant whether M.M. or Julia are really happy, or whether it is at all possible for a person to be so empty of thoughts. With art’s fixing, composing and transcending gestures, another truth has taken over – a truth which replaces the potentiality of the imagination with the timeless intensity of achieved art.

Ethics and the imagination

18 Yet art is, in fact, but a partial concern of these stories. It is only in the final paragraphs of each story that a momentary vision achieves the transcendent quality of art. The rest of the stories is very much set in ordinary reality and is concerned with the reading of and dealing with other people in everyday life. The evident importance of the imagination in these interpersonal activities leads one to wonder about the ethical dimension of the imagination in Woolf’s short fiction. Surprisingly, however, this topic has so far received but little attention on the part of Woolf critics. In a fairly complex difficult philosophical discussion of “it” in Woolf’s short fictions, Anne Besnault-Levita does explore what she calls “the ethics of Virginia Woolf’s poetics of the implicit” (135) and in her essay on Woolf’s short fiction, Joanne Trautman Banks argues cryptically that “Woolf investigates the imagination as a tool for knowing, unifying, and finally transcending its environment through love” (18). Yet, on the whole, the ethical or moral dimension of Woolf’s short stories has not really been a well-researched topic in the existing criticism, due perhaps to the virtual absence of explicit references to ethics or morality in the stories themselves. Nevertheless, I believe that the contemporary theoretical debate about ethical criticism or the ethics of reading can shed some further light on the role of the imagination in Woolf’s short stories.

19 If we consider the ethical value of the imaginative faculty in Woolf’s stories, a first thing that becomes evident is that the imagination is, on the whole, a positive force. It speaks of a genuine interest in other people which is opposed to the deadening interest in the “material” of Mr. Bennett and his fellow novelists (Woolf 1966: 104-5).3 In several stories, secondly, the imagination is revealed to be a sympathetic imagination, which allows for a fellow-feeling, an embracing of a shared humanity. Thirdly, a few stories also show how the sympathetic imagination works through identification. In the “The Lady in the Looking-Glass”, for instance, the narrator – resolved to truly know Isabella

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 16

– decides “[o]ne must put oneself in her shoes” (218). And in “An Unwritten Novel”, the narrator identifies with the suffering of the poor woman opposite to such an extent that she takes over the woman’s habits of twitching and rubbing the glass: Something impelled me to take my glove and rub my window. There, too, was a little speck on the glass. For all my rubbing it remained. And then the spasm went through me; I crooked my arm and plucked at the middle of my back. My skin, too, felt like the damp chicken’s skin in the poulterer’s shop-window […] Leaning back in my corner, shielding my eyes from her eyes, seeing only the slopes and hollows, greys and purples, of the winter’s landscape, I read her message, deciphered her secret, reading it beneath her gaze. (107-8)

20 The ethical or moral qualities which Woolf thus seems to attribute to the imagination correspond with Martha Nussbaum’s take on the sympathetic imagination.4 In books such as Love’s Knowledge (1990) and Poetic Justice (1990) Nussbaum offers an extended plea for the value of the narrative imagination in ethical behaviour. In the essay “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism”, she further defends these claims against a number of opponents. There she argues again for the powerful moral force the imagination presents, both because of its “cognitive role” “in bringing us into contact with the complexity of our own lives and the lives of others” (348) and because of its compassionate dimension, which allows us to emotionally share the plight of our fellow human beings (349). Literature is for Nussbaum a prime way for exercising this moral imagination, precisely because it allows for identification, as it “take[s] us into the lives of those who are different in circumstance from ourselves and enable[s] us to understand. While it will be clear from the foregoing that Woolf shares some of Nussbaum’s faith in the powers of the imagination, there are other signs in the stories which indicate a greater wariness of the imagination as well as a comical undercutting of the moral powers which Nussbaum takes so seriously.

21 It is hard, for instance, to ignore the irony in the ‘rubbing-and-twitching fragment’ from “An Unwritten Novel” quoted before. The narrator’s excessive identification with her fellow passenger is clearly mocked and so are, as I have argued, the highly clichéd scenes she imagines for her. In the story “Sympathy” too, the capacity of the sympathetic imagination to inspire compassion for other people is questioned. The narrator seems to spend all her sympathy in imagining elaborate scenes of mourning for her friend Celia, so that at the end of her daydreaming, she has no feelings left: “It seems to me that he has been dead for weeks, for years; when I think of him I see scarcely anything of him, and that saying about his of liking furniture means nothing at all. And yet he died; the utmost he could do gives me now scarcely any sensation at all. Terrible! Terrible! to be so callous!” (105). When the narrator subsequently finds out that it was Celia’s father-in-law who died, not her husband, she even exclaims “O don’t tell me he lives still! O why did you deceive me?” (105). The sympathetic imagination is here treated with a good dose of irony and its results are clearly not conducive to what Nussbaum would call “moral behaviour”.

22 The limitations of the imagination which Woolf highlights in the three Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown stories – its reliance on set patterns and clichés, its subjectivity and its inability to penetrate the inner core of the other – of course further detract from the positive, moral force which Nussbaum claims for it. If the imagination offers only a biased reading or a partial understanding of the other, it may not present a sound base for a caring and responsible relationship at all. In “The Lady in the Looking-Glass”, moreover, Woolf goes even further. Here, the very act of reading – a positive force in

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 17

the other stories – is rendered in much more ambiguous terms. We have seen how the narrator, dismayed at the realisation that her friend Isabella may have “concealed so much”, is determined to “prize her open”, to “fix [her] mind upon her”, “to fasten her down” (217). Similarly, she wants to “catch” Isabella’s inner self, to “penetrate a little farther into her being” (218). These words are all suggestive of the violence inherent in the act of reading or knowing the other, as he or she is likely to be defined, placed or “caught” in categories or clichés. After all, as Woolf put it in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, aren’t we all “uncomfortable […] at travelling with fellow passengers unless [we] have somehow or other accounted for them?” (1968: 322).

Imagination and alterity

23 The critique of the imagination implicit in this use of terms brings Woolf’s conception of the imagination closer to the poststructuralist take on ethics and reading. In his essay “Violence et Métaphysique”, Jacques Derrida follows Emmanuel Levinas in his criticism of Western (moral) philosophy as “egology”, because it invariably tries to reduce the other to the same. As Levinas points out, “[t]o possess, to know, to grasp are all synonyms of power” and when the other is thus “possessed, seized, and known”, it is no longer other (qtd. Derrida 91). This reduction of the “other” to the “same”--with its familiar categories, clichés and norms – is something the sympathetic imagination is also guilty of. We have seen how Woolf shows this in “Moments of Being” where Fanny projects her own desires on Julia Craye and in “An Unwritten Novel” where the narrator reduces the strange woman sitting across from her to a character she knows from popular fiction. While Nussbaum explicitly defends the compassionate imagination for making us realise how “different” people have after all but “similar hopes and fears” (349, my italics), Woolf is clearly much more ambivalent about this reductive quality of the imagination.

24 As an alternative to Western ‘egology’, Levinas proposes an asymmetrical ethical encounter in which the self is placed under a radical imperative by the Other. Levinas’ strictly philosophical ethics of alterity, to which I cannot do full justice here, have been elaborated in more pragmatic terms by several literary theorists, who have also applied it to literature. Derek Attridge, for instance, takes up a clear position against Nussbaum when he argues: It is in the acknowledgement of the other human being’s uniqueness and therefore of the impossibility of finding general rules or schemata to account fully for him or her that one can be said to encounter the other. At the same time as it is an affirmation of the other as other, therefore, the experience is an encounter with the limits of one’s powers to think and to judge, a challenge to one’s capacities as a rational agent. (24)

25 I would argue that Woolf’s short stories realise some of this “impossibility” or translate some of this “challenge” in the difficulties and obstacles the imagination encounters in its attempt to read other people. Each in its own way, the Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown stories show how the imagination is always trying and failing to fully understand the other. While the stories approve of the curiosity which makes one want to meet the challenge posed by the other’s otherness, they also show that that challenge can never fully be met. The hesitations, limitations and, finally, reversals of the narrative imagination in Woolf’s stories thus bear witness to what Attridge called, “the impossibility of finding general rules or schemata to account fully for [the other]”.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 18

While the attempts to ‘read’ the other are in themselves laudable, even ethical, they are also doomed to fail.

26 Yet for Woolf, they fail in reality--not necessarily in art. In the revelatory moment at the end of each story, in fact, Woolf seems to reaffirm her faith in the ability of art to temporarily fix or frame the other, or--to put it in more positive terms--to bring the other to life. Even if the truth reached in these epiphanies is no longer a referential truth, but the timeless truth of art, the endings of all three stories offer a powerful epiphany which seems to reassert the truth of the imagination against the limitations first revealed. In this, I would argue, Woolf essentially differs from thinkers like Attridge or Derrida. Woolf’s faith in the power of artistic imagination to reveal the truth of (a) life, even if only momentarily, is a characteristically modernist belief. Attridge’s postmodern theories, on the contrary, are far more sceptical as they highlight the fundamental limitations of art, knowledge and the imagination. This difference can also be illustrated by means of a passage from “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” in which Woolf begs her audience’s tolerance for “the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure” of modern art (1968: 337). For, she argues, this “exhausted and chaotic condition” (335) is only temporary: it is due to the modern writers’ attempts to break free from their predecessors. Be patient, be supportive, she urges her readers, because unity and truth will in the end break through, as “we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature” (337). If for the postmodernists “the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure” would be fitting emanations of the intrinsic limits of the artistic and sympathetic imaginations, for Woolf these failures and limits are a reality made bearable by the promise that they can be overcome. It is this duality, finally, which Woolf’s metafictional short stories admirably capture as the hesitant and searching meanderings of the narrative imagination are – finally, but temporarily – suspended by the promise of wholeness, fixity and stability of art.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Attridge, Derek. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other.” PMLA (special topic: Ethics and Literary Study) 114,1 (1999): 20-31.

Baldwin, Dean. Virginia Woolf. A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Benzel, Kathryn N. and Ruth Hoberman. “Introduction.” In Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth Hoberman. Trespassing Boundaries. Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 1-13.

Besnault-Levita, Anne. “What ‘It’ Is About: The Implicit in Virginia Woolf’s Short Fictions.” Journal of the Short Story in English 40 (2003): 135-147.

Briggs, Julia. “‘Cut deep and scored thick with meaning’: Frame and Focus in Woolf’s Later Short Stories.” In Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth Hoberman. Trespassing Boundaries. Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 175-191.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 19

Derrida, Jacques. “Violence et Métaphysique.” In Writing and Difference. Trans. and Intr. Alan Bass. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. 79-153.

Dick, Susan. “Editor’s Introduction”. In: Virginia Woolf. A Haunted House. TheComplete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Vintage, 2003. 1-6.

Harpham, Geoffrey. Getting it Right: Language, Literature and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Maunder, Andrew. The Facts on File Companion to the British Short Story. New York: Infobase, 2007.

Nussbaum, Martha. “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism.” Philosophy and Literature 22 (1998): 343-65.

Oxindine, Annette. “Sexing the Epiphany in ‘Moments of Being’, Woolf’s Nice Little Story About Sapphism.” Journal of the Short Story in English 31 (1998): 51-61.

Reynier, Christine. “The Short Story according to Woolf.” Journal of the Short Story in English 41 (2003): 55-67.

Snaith, Anna. “‘A view of one’s own’: Writing Women’s Lives and the Early Short Stories.” In Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth Hoberman. Trespassing Boundaries. Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 125-138.

Trautmann Banks, Joanne. “Through a Glass, Longingly.” In Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth Hoberman. Trespassing Boundaries. Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 17-24.

Woolf, Virginia.“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, Collected Essays. Volume I. 1965. Ed. Leonard Woolf London: Hogarth, 1968. 319-337.

---. “Modern Fiction”, Collected Essays. Volume II. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth, 1966. 103-110.

---. “The Art of Biography”, Collected Essays. Volume IV. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth, 1967. 221-228.

---. A Haunted House. The Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Vintage, 2003.

NOTES

1. Oxindine even goes so far as to read Miss Craye’s kiss at the end as a projection of Fanny, but I am not fully convinced by the textual evidence she gives in support of that interpretation (51). I will come back to that final scene later on in this essay. 2. In an interesting article on Woolf’s theory of the short story, Christine Reynier similarly argues how “honesty” in Woolf’s theory of fiction does no longer involve “true-to-life details and the creation of ‘the illusion of reality’”, but rather “inconclusiveness”, “freedom” and “emotional intensity” (60-61). 3. In “Modern Fiction” Woolf also praises the Russian writers specifically for their “sympathy for the sufferings of others” (1966: 109). 4. I am taking Martha Nussbaum here as an example of a larger strand in ethical criticism, often called “neo-humanist” or “hermeneutic” criticism (see Harpham 1f.). Richard Rorty and Alisdair MacIntyre are also representatives of this tradition.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 20

RÉSUMÉS

Cet article étudie la fonction, le pouvoir et la dimension éthique de l'imagination dans quelques nouvelles de Woolf écrites à différents moments de sa carrière. Il montre que si certaines nouvelles—et certains essais—de Woolf présentent l'imagination comme une force positive dans le renouvellement de l'art, d'autres soulignent les limites de l'imagination—son recours à des formes fixes et des clichés, sa subjectivité et son incapacité à pénétrer au cœur de l'autre. En se plaçant dans une perspective éthique, cet article tente ensuite de cerner la façon dont Woolf aborde l'imagination et de situer l'auteur dans le débat critique contemporain sur l'éthique et la littérature. Bien que Woolf, comme, d'une certaine manière, Martha Nussbaum, croie au pouvoir moral de l'imagination narrative, par sa conscience de la violence potentielle et des limites de l'imagination, elle se rapproche de la conception post-structuraliste de la critique éthique qu'ont des penseurs tels que Jacques Derrida et Derek Attridge. Enfin, cet article s'interroge sur l'opposition entre l'art et la réalité dans les nouvelles de Woolf consacrées à l'imagination et conclut que, parce que Woolf continue à croire au pouvoir imaginatif de l'art, son éthique et son esthétique modernistes ne coïncident pas avec le projet post-moderne de Derrida et Attridge.

AUTEURS

ELKE D’HOKER Fund for scientific research – FlandersCatholic University of Leuven, BelgiumPost-doctoral researcher of the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders and a lecturer at the Catholic University of Leuven. She has written a critical study on the fiction of John Banville (Rodopi 2004) and has published articles on twentieth-century fiction in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Critique, Contemporary Literature and Irish University Review. Her current research project deals with the short story by women authors.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 21

Beauty and damaged life in Virginia Woolf’s short fiction

Charles Sumner

I

1 Concern for beauty is a recurrent feature of Virginia Woolf’s writing, whether it is through attention to beautiful objects, or her characters’ sense of beautiful experience, or an impressionistic prose style laden with painterly metaphors of color, line, and spatial relation. When discussing beauty in her work, critics focus on how these metaphors formally re-construct the complexity of aesthetic experience, or the felt experience of cognition. However, a merely formal approach re-enforces the conservative sensibility that Woolf uses beauty to overcome. To be sure, Woolf appreciates the sense of delight, happiness, and freedom – the “flight of the mind” – that accompanies beautiful experience. But for her, beauty is also a means for social criticism. For example, she often uses intensely lyrical language to describe forms of damaged life, such as suicidal depression and social and economic degradation, and the tension arising from this fusion of suffering and beauty lends the latter a socio-critical edge. This use of beauty sets Woolf apart from other modernists who, generally, seek to reflect social upheaval through a discordant writing style. Moreover, it allows Woolf to challenge the liberal shame about beauty, or the guilty sense of privilege accompanying its appreciation, by using it to observe and indirectly comment on the disturbing social features of her fictional worlds. I will examine why she believes this challenge is necessary and how she represents it in her short stories and sketches, including “Holborn Viaduct”, “The Man Who Loved His Kind”, and “Solid Objects.”

2 For Woolf, beauty must never be fetishized or sought as an end in-itself, a point she makes explicit in her essay on “Street Haunting”: “after a prolonged diet of this simple, sugary fare, of beauty pure and uncomposed, we becomes conscious of satiety” (Woolf 1967b: 157). This rejection of “beauty pure and uncomposed” clearly defines “Holborn Viaduct”, a literary sketch consisting of three paragraphs, each of which begins with

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 22

intensely visual – indeed painterly – scenes of beauty and ends with juxtaposition to some sort of suffering. This is Holborn Viaduct . . . And there’s a pale lawn. Antelopes, sun-dappled, withdraw. Purple, starry flowers climb and hang. All’s nodding and waving. Then why, wretched little boy, do you run across the street with your armed crooked against the wind? Still, still, through the bars of the railings there are caves of redness. The bootboy, lifting the concertina, squeezes out melody. The kitchen table, with its yellow loaf, white aprons and pots of jam, is rooted to the heart of the world. Then why does blood-smeared paper drift down the pavement? Upstairs, three steps at a time into your drawing room – Surely, surely, with the firelight red upon the terrier’s hind legs, curved pictures in the cheeks of your tea pot and – actually – green dragons on the china – you can’t be going to kill yourself? (Woolf 1989: 315)

3 The questions that end each paragraph pose a single riddle: why is there suffering in a world filled with beauty? The pathos of this riddle is qualified by the italicized you, a graphic indication that the questions are not merely sympathetic; they seem almost to indict the sufferer for refusing to allow beauty the power to assuage. This temptation to indictment dramatizes desire for an aesthetic transfiguration of suffering, a dialectical turning of despair into sublimity and pain into beauty. And yet the desire remains unfulfilled, shored against the suicidal depression which remains solely what it is, separate from the “purple, starry flowers”, from the “yellow loaf, white aprons and pots of jam”, from the “pictures in the cheeks” of tea pot curves. The house near Holborn Viaduct seems warm and inviting; it is a refuge from the wind and cold and is filled with fires seen as “caves of redness”, patches of color that suggest emancipation from threatening nature. To be sure, this sense of warmness is strengthened by the enumeration of domestic objects, or aesthetic fragments which strive toward the unity of a singular emotional and visual whole. However, these objects and emotions are split asunder by the one fragment that refuses integration, namely the suicidal inhabitant. In turn, this refusal of integration prevents an aesthetic transfiguration of suffering and instead transforms this house’s beautiful objects and emotions into an expressive sense of grief.

II

4 That the appreciation of beauty is a privilege primarily of the moneyed leisure class Woolf never denies, and it is a sign of her integrity not only as an artist but also as a social critic that she does not. But it is not simply that the lower class has limited access to material comfort and the freedom of aesthetic imagination; for the inverse is also true, namely that because of her social position Woolf can never fully understand the psychological angst and concomitant aesthetic endured by the lower classes. Moreover, no amount of money or education could buy this understanding. The imagination is largely the child of the flesh. One could not be Mrs. Giles because one’s body had never stood at the wash-tub; one’s hands had never wrung and scrubbed and chopped up whatever the meat may be that makes a miner’s dinner. The picture was always letting in irrelevancies. One sat in an armchair or read a book. One saw landscapes or seascapes, in Greece or perhaps in Italy, where Mrs. Giles or Mrs. Edwards must have seen slag heaps and row upon row of slate roofs in a mining village. (Woolf 1967b: 137)

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 23

5 This passage suggests Woolf’s belief that she has no right to trespass into the realm of the lower class by employing some sort of naturalist aesthetic, and that any such employment would be a base form of “slumming”, profiting literarily at the expense of an Other’s suffering. Further still, any attempt to represent an overcoming of hardship caused by poverty would rob the lower class of critical insight into their servitude and suffering. In her fiction, Woolf could have addressed those questions which matter so intensely to a miner’s wife, “questions of sanitation and education and wages, this demand for an extra shilling, or another year at school, for eight hours instead of nine behind a counter or in a mill” (Woolf 1967b: 136). Put differently, Woolf could have produced a proletarian or working-class literature, one that expresses the worker’s actual interests and emotions. But this sort of literature does not advance any radical claim of social liberation. Instead, it represents adjustment to the established society. By contrast, Woolf’s beautiful aesthetic offers the promise of a new sensibility and a new atmosphere liberated from the need to adjust to the prevailing ugly and aggressive social structure, one that relegates miners to unsanitary housing, for instance, or to inadequate education and nine hours in a mill.1 Simply put, without an established ideal and example of aesthetic beauty, cultural and even political revolutionaries would know what they revolt against but would have no idea what they revolt for.

6 There can be no doubt that Woolf understood this idea and measured her own art in relation to it. Recalling her attendance at the congress of a working women’s guild, she writes, It is much better to be a lady; ladies desire Mozart and Cézanne and Shakespeare; and not merely money and hot water laid on. Therefore to deride ladies and imitate, as some of the speakers did, their mincing speech and little knowledge of what it pleases them to call ‘reality’ is not merely bad manners, but it gives away the whole purpose of the Congress, for, if it is better to be a working woman, by all means let them remain so and not claim their right to undergo the contamination of wealth and comfort. (Woolf 1967b: 140)

7 Woolf invokes Mozart, Cézanne, and Shakespeare to posit beauty not only as an artistic but also as a social ideal. The beauty of their art sustains the life of a “lady” as much as adequate income and hot water, thereby suggesting that imaginative desire has been sublimated into physical desire and that the beauty produced by these artists provides sensual as well as intellectual gratification. In a letter to Roger Fry, for example, Woolf describes the physical sense of pleasure she gets when reading Proust: “One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical – like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined” (Woolf 1976: 566). Speakers at the convention caricature and condemn this sublimation of imaginative into physical pleasure, and they find “reality” in the mines or in the mills, behind the counter or in the kitchen. But Woolf suggests that this sort of labor is no more “real” than aesthetic beauty, and that the working women’s resentment toward upper class comfort and privilege has caused them to value servitude more than the ideal of such privilege. Consequently, the women have become complacent with their degraded condition and given “away the whole purpose of the Congress”. In forfeiting this purpose, revolutionary consciousness becomes distorted. For if the attitude of these women is any indication, the revolutionary proletariat values the ideal of labor more than the gratification of sensual and spiritual ends for which labor is only a means.2

8 To be sure, this distortion of consciousness affects not only the proletariat but also its upper class champions. In a diary entry of July 19, 1919 Woolf writes,

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 24

It seems to me more and more clear that the only honest people are the artists, and that these social reformers and philanthropists get so out of hand and harbor so many discreditable desires under the guise of loving their kind, that in the end there’s more to find fault with in them than in us. (Woolf 1977: 293)

9 Paradoxically, it is the philanthropist’s sympathy with the proletariat that prevents him from understanding it. For if he is not to condescend to the lower classes, then his understanding of them must be based on their own distorted consciousness, the valorization of poverty and servitude which Woolf witnessed at the working women’s congress. In this way, the philanthropist’s noble intentions are often turned to bad ends, and the terms given for the relief of suffering can actually end up intensifying it. By contrast, Woolf believes that artistic practice helps to develop the sensibility needed to properly assess human needs and desires: The practice of art, far from making the artist out of touch with his kind, rather increases his sensibility. It breeds in him a feeling for the passions and needs of mankind in the mass which the citizen whose duty it is to work for a particular country or for a particular party has no time and perhaps no need to cultivate. (Woolf 1967a: 231-232)

10 Woolf’s experience with the working women’s guild taught her that human beings tend to repress consciousness of their own passions and needs. In turn, this repression itself becomes an essential need, a form of masochistic gratification demanded by a social system which values labor and competition more than enjoyment and cooperation. By contrast, she asserts that artistic practice generates a sensibility which refuses this sort of masochistic value. For her, cultivation of this sensibility is worth more to the masses than a philanthropist who propitiates their resentment and hatred for it.

11 Here we find the determining factor in Woolf’s conception of the critical and political significance of literature, and specifically of literary beauty. Writers who ply their novels with a specific political agenda, as she accuses H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy of doing, betray the aim of igniting revolutionary consciousness because they teach readers to think only in terms of prevailing social values.3 By contrast, Woolf seems to believe that literature has the greatest chance at political relevance when it strikes an overtly a-political stance. Her lyrical prose helps her to achieve this stance and to develop structures of thought and feeling which transcend the limits of established necessity. That is, her production of literary beauty gratifies sensual and spiritual needs which are disregarded by prevailing social values. Demonstrating not only that these needs exist, but that they can in fact be gratified does more for political consciousness than manifestly political literature ever could. This fact explains Woolf’s contempt not only for the modern cult of ugliness and for liberal shame about the appreciation of beauty, but also for the “mocking spirit which sneers at beauty for being beautiful; which turns the looking-glass and shows us that the other side of her cheek is pitted and deformed” (Woolf 1967a: 223).

12 Woolf dramatizes her contempt for this mocking spirit in “The Man Who Loved His Kind.” In this story, Richard Dalloway runs into a schoolmate named Prickett Ellis and invites him to his wife’s party later that evening. Ellis is a lawyer who counsels poor people without access to legal representation, and during the party we gain insight into his character. Initially it seems he does not care for public admiration. For example, he has recently represented a couple named the Brunners who came to his chambers and made him the gift of a clock despite their poverty. Looking back on this scene he recalls a desire for “nobody to see his face. That was what he worked for – that was his

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 25

reward” (Woolf 1989: 196). Ellis wishes nobody to see his face because he doesn’t want to vitiate the pure goodness of his actions. That is, he takes pleasure in pure philanthropy, unmixed by and even antithetical to a desire for social capital. Let the capitalists and socialites have that; Ellis is moved by higher moral impulses. Immediately after recalling this scene with the Brunners, however, he looked at the people who were actually before his eyes as if they danced over that scene in his chambers and were exposed by it, and as it faded–the Brunners faded – there remained as if left of that scene, himself, confronting this hostile population, a perfectly plain unsophisticated man, a man of the people (he straightened himself), very badly dressed, glaring, with not an air or a grace about him, a man who was an ill hand at concealing his feelings, a plain man, an ordinary human being, pitted against the evil, the corruption, the heartlessness of society. (Woolf 1989: 196)

13 Juxtaposing the opulence of the Dalloways’ party with the Brunners’ poverty, Ellis believes that the latter exposes the corruption of the former. Moreover, he imagines the juxtaposition demonstrating that behind the social airs, the proper manners and graciousness of the partygoers, there is a latent hostility, a desire to combat him and everything he stands for. So rather than adopt their manners or style of dress, he comes “badly dressed, glaring, with not an air or a grace about him”. And in contrast to the desire to conceal his face when receiving the Brunners’ gift, he now shows himself “a man who was an ill hand at concealing his feelings”.

14 For Ellis, this ill-handedness is a virtue, a sign of his authenticity or genuineness. And it is precisely this signifying quality which gives the lie to the purity of his philanthropic desires, his goodness for being “a man of the people”. He comes to the party badly dressed and glaring so that the partygoers will know he doesn’t belong to their set, and so that they will recognize his moral superiority and rectitude. It turns out, then, that Ellis desires social capital after all. Moreover, the fact that he must display his superiority to this elite crowd suggests that Ellis is not really a man of the people. That is, he does not consider “the people”, symbolized by the Brunners, to be his equal. If he did, then he would have to engage them in a similar signifying competition; for it is only those he fears may be equal or superior to him that could inspire such competition.

15 After more insolent glaring, more competitive signifying, Ellis “put on his spectacles and examined the pictures.” Not content to let his eyes rest here, he read the titles on a line of books; for the most part poetry. He would have liked well enough to read some of his old favourites again – Shakespeare, Dickens – he wished he ever had time to turn into the National Gallery, but he couldn’t – no, one could not. Really one could not – with the world in the state it was in. [. . .] And he looked at the arm chairs and the paper knives and the well bound books, and shook his head, knowing that he would never have the time, never he was glad to think have the heart, to afford himself such luxuries. (Woolf 1989: 196-197)

16 To Ellis, luxury seems heartless, especially “with the world in the state it was in.” Rather than indulge in luxury, in the comfort and the beauty decked out and displayed in the Dalloways’ home, he will try to change the state of the world. The problem is not with the vagueness of this notion of change; for here we see a moment of genuine negative critique prompted by just motives. That is, the plight of the Brunners and others like them move Ellis to criticize the unequal distribution of social wealth; it is wrong for the Dalloways to have so much and the Brunners so little. I will return to this point later, but for now I want to note the faulty logic with which this critical negation is undertaken. Ostensibly, Ellis will try to “change the world” by bringing luxury and

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 26

comfort to those who are presently without it, and yet he stands amidst luxury and comfort thinking how heartless it is to possess it. Thus by his own logic, Ellis will paradoxically make the world more heartless by bringing luxury to more people. If the Brunners, for instance, were to win a case due to his legal work and become the recipients of wealth and luxury, then they too would be guilty of heartless possession; but isn’t this outcome exactly what Ellis is fighting for?

17 Still, Ellis is not the only partygoer disgruntled by the beauty and comfort of the Dalloways’ home. Also present is a woman named Miss O’Keefe who “wanted an ice or something to drink”.

18 And the reason why she asked Prickett Ellis to give it her in what he felt a haughty, unjustifiable manner, was that she had seen a woman and two children, very poor, very tired, pressing against the railings of a square, peering in, that hot afternoon. Can’t they be let in? she had thought, her pity rising like a wave; her indignation boiling. No; she rebuked herself the next moment, roughly, as if she boxed her own ears. [ . . .] The whole force of the world can’t do it, she said in a fury, and that was why she said so commandingly, to the unknown man: “Give me an ice”. (Woolf 1989: 197-198)

19 Miss O’Keefe’s attitude and behavior mirror Ellis’s. That is, she treats him with the same haughty superiority that he has been transmitting through his insolent, silent stares. And in this meeting a literary or art critic would certainly have a leg up on these two lovers of their kind; the critic would be trained to see, to look closely and to recognize something which they apparently cannot, namely that when one of these two characters looks at and speaks to the other, they are equally looking at and speaking to themselves. This fact is so apparent that their failure to see it suggests they lack the capacity for empathy. This lack reduces them to the level of the rest of the party guests, a similarity that is unsurprising given Miss O’Keefe’s internalization of a reality principle based on class division and domination, a psychic acquisition signaled by the rough self-rebuke following her wish to let the poor woman into the private square: “No; she rebuked herself the next moment, roughly, as if she boxed her own ears”. No better than the other party guests, and perhaps worse, she and Ellis are the only two who behave with the meanness for which they condemn the others.

20 The most immediate exercise of this meanness occurs in a conversation about beauty. Walking out into the Dalloways’ garden, Miss O’Keefe remarks “How beautiful!” Oh, it was beautiful, this little patch of grass, with the towers of Westminster massed round it black high in the air, after the drawing-room; it was silent, after that noise. After all, they had that – the tired woman, the children. (Woolf 1989: 198)

21 Given the value Woolf implicitly assigns to beauty as a social ideal, Miss O’Keefe’s remarks seem sensible. The woman and her children that day were very poor and very tired, but they had the beauty of Westminster, the majesty of its government buildings – including Buckingham Palace – and its statues of famous military men such as Gordon, Havelock, and Nelson, to reflect on and appreciate. Indeed, if they could only reflect and appreciate Westminster’s ubiquitous beauty they might be relieved of their misery. As Miss O’Keefe remarks, “nobody need pay a penny for this” (Woolf 1989: 199). Still, there is a snag, a rub in her thinking. For instance, the aforementioned statues celebrate men who guaranteed domination of the British upper class both at home and abroad. Asking the poor woman and her children to find beauty in symbols of their oppression seems at best insensitive, at worst stupid. Moreover, the government

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 27

buildings – “the towers of Westminster” – pose the same affront. These beautiful symbols of empire, of upper class domination, are designed to pacify, to encourage the underclass to take pride in its oppression, not to challenge it. Miss O’Keefe is correct in one respect, “nobody need pay a penny for this [. . .] You can have it for nothing. Beauty” (Woolf 1989: 199). But the point is moot; the poor woman and her children not only need not but cannot pay a penny for these beautiful examples of architecture and statuary because the forces which they symbolize have already robbed the woman of anything to pay with. Therefore, Miss O’Keefe is not a mouthpiece for Woolf’s views on beauty; rather, she distorts them.

22 To be fair, it is not only the cityscape that Miss O’Keefe commends for its beauty. She also appreciates the landscape – what little there is of it – cultivated in the Dalloways’ garden. For example, she experiences a sort of aesthetic rapture vis-à-vis “a cat or two slinking across the grass, and the wavering of leaves, and the yellow and red fruit like Chinese lanterns wobbling this way and that” (Woolf 1989: 198). In turn, this rapture arouses her pity for the party guests; when juxtaposed to what she considers the genuine beauty of nature, the party “seemed like a frantic skeleton dance music set to something very real, and full of suffering” (Woolf 1989: 198). Miss O’Keefe’s pity suggests awareness that appreciation of natural beauty is always mediated by social convention, or that the “image of nature survives because its complete negation by artifacts would necessarily involve closing one’s eyes to the possibility of a sphere beyond bourgeois work and commodity relations” (Adorno 102). Given the dialectical penetration of social convention into the image of natural beauty, the latter mourns the primacy of the former. By drawing attention to this fact, Miss O’Keefe implicitly critiques Ellis’s sense of moral superiority. For him, appreciation of natural beauty has nothing to do with mourning for those beholden to social convention or damaged by class domination. Instead, he imagines this appreciation as a means to affront or shock the dominant class: He did like once a year to get right away from everybody and lie on his back in a field. He thought how shocked they would be – these fine folk – if they realized the amount of pleasure he got from what he was old fashioned enough to call a love of nature; trees and fields he had known ever since he was a boy. (Woolf 1989: 197)

23 Prickett Ellis values nature precisely because this sense of value implies an old fashioned and therefore genuine sensibility. He believes this sensibility contrasts sharply to that of the upper class party guests who are beholden to inauthentic fashions good for little else than conspicuous display. However, Miss O’Keefe’s critique discloses the fact that Ellis’s sensibility, old fashioned though it may be, is fashion nevertheless. He too is guilty of reifying and thereby rendering inauthentic his appreciation of natural beauty, an appreciation which, if valued for its own sake rather than the purpose of self-aggrandizement, holds a socially critical potential.

24 Piqued on the one hand by Miss O’Keefe’s misguided recommendation that the poor should take solace in the Westminster cityscape, and on the other hand by her implicitly critical understanding of his own aesthetic sensibility, Prickett Ellis let her have it – this pale, abrupt, arrogant woman. [. . .] “Beauty!” he said. He was afraid he did not understand beauty apart from human beings. [. . .] Beauty apart from human beings? What did he mean by that? she demanded suddenly. Well this: getting more and more wrought up, he told her the story of the Brunners

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 28

and the clock, not concealing his pride in it. That was beautiful, he said. (Woolf 1989: 199)

25 Whereas Ellis sees fault in Miss O’Keefe’s reasoning about beauty, he fails to see the defects in his own ideas. He possesses the “mocking spirit which sneers at beauty for being beautiful”, and this spirit leads him to valorize the Brunners’ suffering by making the beauty of their gift contingent upon it. That is, he transfigures their poverty into a source or pre-condition of beauty and thereby finds personal consolation for their suffering. In doing so, he risks inducing the couple also to find false joy in their poverty, potentially diminishing their desire for leisure and freedom from material penury. Moreover, he leaves room for any outside observer to suggest that if the couple is capable of such beautiful generosity, then their suffering cannot be as bad as all that. Last and perhaps worst of all, Ellis finds their poverty beautiful only when the couple sacrifices something to him, thereby subjugating aesthetic pleasure to the principle of exchange. Whereas this subjugation is a natural result of Ellis’s reformist commitment, it actually contributes to the economic and social degradation he means to combat.

26 It has been easy to criticize Prickett Ellis and Miss O’Keefe. After all, this story is designed to dramatize Woolf’s suspicion of those philanthropists “who harbor so many discreditable desires under the guise of loving their kind” (Woolf 1977: 293). Still, the critic should be wary of venturing too close to the contempt for Prickett Ellis and Miss O’Keefe which they have themselves displayed for the Dalloways’ party guests. These two characters have a point, namely that the world is full of injustice and inequity. As Dean Baldwin writes, “most of the people enjoying themselves at this get-together are the beneficiaries of that injustice. Their wealth and leisure are made possible by others’ suffering” (44). Consequently, the story blocks its two most obvious avenues of readerly sympathy and dramatic resolution. On the one hand, readers cannot sympathize with Prickett Ellis and Miss O’Keefe because in setting out to be “lovers of their kind,” they actually end up hating it: “Hating each other, hating the whole houseful of people who had given them this painful, this disillusioning evening, these two lovers of their kind got up, and without a word, parted forever.” (Woolf 1989: 200) On the other hand, the Dalloways and their guests do not act hatefully toward one another, but they are, as Baldwin writes, the beneficiaries of others’ suffering. The only way out of this impasse is to be ceaselessly critical of one’s own critical motives. For example, if Prickett Ellis and Miss O’Keefe had engaged in a little critical self-reflection, then the reader would likely be able to identify with their critique of the Dalloways’ party guests. Still, even this approach is strewn with difficulties, a point I will try to demonstrate by turning to the short story “Solid Objects”.

III

27 “Solid Objects” portrays a developing friendship between two characters, John and Charles. In the opening scene, these two are walking on a “vast semicircle” of beach and engaged in a conversation which ends with John’s expostulation, “Politics be damned!” (Woolf 1989: 102). Eventually they stop to rest, and Charles skips stones on the water while John burrows deep into the sand, whereupon his fingers “curled round something hard – a full drop of solid matter – and gradually dislodged a large irregular lump, and brought it to the surface”. Enraptured by this new found object, he investigates it further.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 29

28 When the sand coating was wiped off, a green tint appeared. It was a lump of glass, so thick as to be almost opaque; the smoothing of the sea had completely worn off any edge or shape, so that it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler or window-pane; it was nothing but glass; it was almost a precious stone. (Woolf 1989: 103)

29 The sea’s smooth rhythms have eroded any trace of use value which might help to identify the particular history attached to the lump of glass, and yet, the glass has no manifest exhibition value either; it “was almost a precious stone”, but not quite. The formlessness which renders the lump of glass neither a tool nor a jewel in fact transforms its form into an end in-itself, and the glass becomes an object of contemplation to be appreciated as “nothing but glass”. Consequently, John holds it to the light and examines its particular aesthetic qualities: it is hard, concentrated, and definite in comparison to “the vague sea and the hazy shore.” (Woolf 1989: 103) Pleased with this find, he slips it into his pocket, an act unnoticed by Charles who returns to their previous political conversation. These separate actions are emblematic of their developing friendship: Charles continually urges John to seek a political career, but John disavows politics in order to give more time and attention to collecting objects like the lump of glass, objects which he can appreciate on a purely aesthetic level.

30 Eventually, John adds to his collection a broken piece of china “shaped, or broken accidentally, into five irregular but unmistakable points. The colouring was mainly blue, but green stripes or spots of some kind overlaid the blue, and lines of crimson gave it a richness and lustre of the most attractive kind” (Woolf 1989: 104). Further still, he finds a piece of iron “almost identical with the glass in shape, massy and globular, but so cold and heavy, so black and metallic, that it was evidently alien to the earth and had its origin in one of the dead stars or was itself the cinder of a moon” (Woolf 1989: 106). These two items, along with the original lump of glass, he displays on his mantelpiece, determined to possess more and more objects valued for their relations of form and color and for the way that these plastic qualities are intensified by the luster of glaze. Indeed, the search becomes so consuming that he retreats not only from politics, but from society altogether, opting instead for an imaginative world in which aesthetic appreciation is paramount.

31 Predictably, Charles fails to understand John’s obsession and, disappointed that his friend has thrown away what promised to be a brilliant political career, he completely cuts ties with John. Somewhat unpredictable, however, is the virtually non-existent critical response to Charles’s decision. Rather than treat it directly, critics have tacitly sanctioned it, suggesting that John’s obsession with discarded and broken objects and his retreat from society are forms of pathological behavior. For example, Robert Watson writes that if “John’s story involves an allegorical debate won by the contemplative over the active principle, by the esthetic over the political vision, it also hints at the disturbing consequences of such creative eccentricity” (4). More pointedly, Douglas Mao asserts that the story’s “earnest mood gives it the feeling of an argument somehow premised on the metamorphosis of vague desire into singular pathology” (26).

32 It is not at all clear why the story, or John’s actions within it, should seem to be premised on a “singular pathology”. If John dislikes political life, as his outburst “Politics be damned!” suggests, then his desire for another kind of life is neither pathological nor even the least bit irrational. To suggest otherwise is to privilege a capitalist ratio which fails to see that “the end of all rationality viewed as the sum total

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 30

of all practical means would have to be something other than a means, hence a non- rational quality” (Adorno: 79). This ratio’s stubborn refusal to cede its own ends generates innumerable social pathologies, among which is a critical compulsion to label John pathological. After all, his imaginative retreat into the private world of aesthetic appreciation is nothing more than action guided by the capitalist ratio which condemns the retreat to begin with: John is seeking payment, seeking to gain something, for the very difficulty of living, working, and standing for political office. Given that administrators of capitalist social structures refuse to make good on the promise of payment, that they refuse to make life worth living, John imagines the payment into existence; he literally creates it for himself through his collection of beautiful – even if broken and previously discarded – objects. He is therefore no more pathological than the ratio of capital which fuels his supposed pathology.

33 To be sure, critics have also emphasized the productive potential that comes with John’s retreat into a private world of aesthetic contemplation. For example, Bill Brown approvingly remarks that “John makes no effort to express himself in his exhibition; rather, the lives of these things – the glass contemplative, the china vivid, fitful, surreal – overwhelm his life” (408). For Brown, John’s provision of a space in which these objects can freely live and breathe teaches an important lesson in ethics: “The ethics of the story thus reside in Woolf’s depiction of an experience – of experience – that activates for the fragment a life of its own” (411). The problem with this account is that it shifts the site of agency from John to the objects themselves. This shift risks losing sight of the fact that these objects represent new possibilities for John. That is, they offer an opportunity for John to cultivate and exercise the sort of sensibility opposed to that demanded by contemporary political practice. Losing sight of this fact shoves to the background the larger problems that force John out of the socio-political mainstream to begin with, along with the need to analyze and critique them.

34 Objects cannot have sovereignty; John can only create the illusion that they do. This illusion is similar to the commodity fetish, or the appearance of sovereignty enjoyed by commodities, and results from the fact that both John’s collection and his attitude towards it are thoroughly mediated by the domination of that fetish. Therefore, one cannot assign a positive ethical value to John’s willingness to allow his material objects, or “things”, to overwhelm his life; for this overwhelming nature of things, or commodities, originally contributes to John’s political despair. Consider the following passage: He [Charles] did not see, or if he had seen would hardly have noticed, that John after looking at the lump for a moment, as if in hesitation, slipped it inside his pocket. That impulse, too, may have been the impulse which leads a child to pick up one pebble on a path strewn with them, promising it a life of warmth and security upon the nursery mantelpiece, delighting in the sense of power and benignity which such an action confers. (Woolf 1989: 103-104)

35 John feels a sense of power and benignity by providing a home for the little lump of glass. The fact that the opportunity to feel these emotions compels him to pocket and preserve the glass suggests that his political career does not provide these emotions. In the political world, he is powerless, overwhelmed by “things” and the endless social mediations through which they pass. By contrast, when he recognizes an overlooked treasure on the street or on the beach or under a bush, he attempts to reassure himself of immediacy and power through the adventure of speculation. There is therefore no positive ethical value in the story; there is only potential for an ethical criticism of the

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 31

story. Nevertheless, we must end on a flat note; for the very need to remark this distinction undermines the ethical value of criticism by risking self-congratulation of the sort Woolf attributes to John when he “saves” his little objects.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. C. Lenhardt. Ed. Gretel Adorno & Rolf Tiedemann. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.

Baldwin, Dean. Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

Brown, Bill. “The Secret Life of Things: Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism”, Aesthetic Subjects. Eds. Pamela Matthews & David McWhirter. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1973.

Mao, Douglas. Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Watson, Robert. “Solid Objects as Allegory”, Virginia Woolf Miscellany (Spring 1981): n.16.

Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays vol. II. New York: Harcourt, 1967a.

--- . Collected Essays vol. IV. New York: Harcourt, 1967b.

---. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. New York: Harvest,1989.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. I. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1977.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. II. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1978.

--- The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. II. Ed. Nigel Nicholson. New York: Harcourt, 1976.

NOTES

1. Regarding this ugly reality, she writes “I daresay it is true, however, that I haven’t this ‘reality’ gift. I insubstantise, willfully to some extent, distrusting reality – its cheapness” (Woolf 1977: 248). 2. Consider, for instance, Adorno’s claim that “Marx wanted to turn the whole world into a giant workhouse” (Jay 57). 3. For Woolf’s critique of Wells and Galsworthy see “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” in Collected Essays I, 319-337.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 32

RÉSUMÉS

La beauté apparaît de manière récurrente dans l'œuvre de Virginia Woolf, que ce soit à travers l'attention portée aux beaux objets, l'expérience de la beauté que font ses personnages ou son style impressionniste empreint de métaphores picturales comme la couleur, la ligne ou la relation spatiale. Lorsqu'ils abordent la beauté dans son œuvre, les critiques s'intéressent à la manière dont ces métaphores reconstruisent formellement la complexité de l'expérience esthétique ou l'expérience sensible de la cognition. Cependant, une analyse purement formelle renforce la vision conservatrice selon laquelle Woolf utilise la beauté pour enchanter. Il est vrai que Woolf apprécie le sentiment de plaisir, de bonheur et de liberté—“l'envol de l'esprit”—que donne l'expérience de la beauté. Mais pour elle, la beauté est également un moyen de critiquer la société. Ainsi utilise-t-elle un langage intensément lyrique pour décrire certaines formes de vie meurtrie, telles que la dépression suicidaire et la déchéance de nature économique et sociale; et la tension inattendue qui se dégage de la fusion de la souffrance et de la beauté confère à cette dernière une dimension sociale et critique. Une telle utilisation de la beauté distingue Woolf des autres modernistes qui, en général, cherchent à réfracter les bouleversements sociaux dans un style discordant. En outre, cela permet à Woolf de lancer un défi à la honte de la beauté qu'entretient la société libérale ou au sentiment d'être à la fois privilégié et coupable qui va de pair avec l'appréciation de la beauté, en utilisant celle-ci pour observer et commenter indirectement les aspects sociaux dérangeants de son monde fictif. L'analyse montrera pourquoi elle pense que ce défi est nécessaire et comment elle le représente dans certaines nouvelles et esquisses, en particulier dans “Holborn Viaduct,” “The Man Who Loved His Kind” et “Solid Objects.”

AUTEURS

CHARLES SUMNER Received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where he currently teaches in the English department. He has published articles on Theodor Adorno and on Wyndham Lewis, and has another forthcoming on the cultural politics of pre-war London.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 33

Fashioning Anti-Semitism: Virginia’s Woolf’ “The Duchess and The Jeweller” and the readers of Harper’s Bazaar

Kate Krueger Henderson

1 Virginia Woolf’s “The Duchess and the Jeweller,” published by Harper’s Bazaar in 1938, has since been criticized for being at best trite, or at worst blatantly racist. In this story, a repellent Jewish jeweller,1 ironically named Oliver Bacon, is fooled by a degenerate Duchess into purchasing fake pearls. Dean Baldwin argues that Woolf acquiesces to the conventions of “slick magazine fiction” by using “flat characters” aimed more at ridicule than understanding (62). However, “The Duchess and the Jeweller” should not be dismissed simply because it appeared in a magazine. Her success as a short story writer hinged upon negotiating the politics of periodical publishing. Instead, Woolf’s depiction of a transgressive cross-class and ethnic encounter in “The Duchess and the Jeweller” acknowledges the commercial context of Harper’s Bazaar and, simultaneously, indicts readers’ practices of consumption.

2 In her literary criticism, Woolf argues that a text’s meaning is incomplete until a reader interacts with it. Readers of Harper’s Bazaar, versed in both contemporary anti-Semitic stereotypes and the fashionable materialism modeled in the magazine, watch Bacon practice familiar habits of consumption before he foolishly accepts the aristocracy at face value. Through her choice of narrative perspective, Woolf encourages her readers to identify with the Jewish protagonist. By implication, Woolf threatens readers’ confidence in materialism as a path to social mobility and as a bulwark against association with others deemed socially inferior.

3 Using a representation of a repressed Jew, Woolf leads potentially anti-Semitic readers to recognize that commodities do not represent character or morality, and that consumers are ultimately corrupted by their misplaced belief in surface value. My reading of “The Duchess and the Jeweller” aligns with Kathryn Benzel and Ruth Hoberman’s approach to close reading. They argue that one can neither focus entirely

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 34

on form or content, but in terms of what that form and content produce, including interactions between readers and texts (13). Thus, one cannot stop at simply citing the anti-Semitism within “The Duchess and the Jeweller,” but must also consider how it operates in the text and to what end. By arguing that Woolf uses the anti-Semitic sentiment of her readers to invoke certain associations and responses, I am not attempting to argue that Woolf is somehow outside of or excused from responsibility for the stereotypes she utilizes. Ultimately, her depiction of Oliver Bacon is undeniably anti-Semitic, and Woolf’s production of an anti-Semitic portrayal of a Jew cannot be overlooked, excused, or ignored, whatever her intent.2

4 “The Duchess and the Jeweller’s” representation of a Jewish man was controversial from its inception. New York literary agent Jacques Chambrun initially accepted the synopsis of “The Duchess and the Jeweller” after receiving it in 1937, but later rejected it “on the grounds that it was ‘a psychological study of a Jew’ and thus, because of widespread racial prejudice in America, unacceptable to his (unnamed) client” (Woolf 1984: 107). Literary critics have consistently misread these initial objections to Woolf’s story. Julia Briggs argues that Chambrun’s comments are a reaction to the inappropriate portrayal of the Jewish character: “If Woolf herself failed to notice the prejudice reflected in ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller,’ it was evident enough to the New York agent Jacques Chambrun who commissioned it, or else to his client” (182). Laura María Lojo Rodriguez similarly argues that “it was difficult for critics and audience alike to account for such a racist portrait of a Jew, which was so inconveniently at odds with the oeuvre of a writer happily married to a Jew for more than thirty years” (116).

5 But, in actuality, Chambrun does not object to the anti-Semitic tone, but rather to the fact that the jeweller is Jewish, given the “widespread racial prejudice in America” that indicates that the audience is anti-Semitic. In addition, a magazine editor doubted Woolf’s ability to successfully change the background of the character, lending credence to the idea that it is the jeweller’s identity, not his portrayal that is of immediate issue: “. . . I am sure Mrs. Woolf cannot make this a story for us. It is a psychological study of a Jew and as they have distinctive characteristics I don’t think she could make it a . . . Scotsman or an Irishman” (Lee 679).3 Clearly, the objection here relates to readers’ inability to accept a Jewish character, not Woolf’s prejudice. The misguided focus on Woolf’s personal anti-Semitism has prevented critics from adequately assessing not just the source of publishers’ initial critiques, but also the message of the story itself.

6 The magazine industry’s targeting of particular readerships inevitably affected its choice of content. Mary Ellen Zuckerman observes that “undesirable consumers included [...] blacks, the illiterate, and the poor [...]. The delineation by publishers (pushed by advertisers) of welcome and unwelcome readers cemented the middle-class, white nature of the [...] women’s journals,” which “embraced particular images and subjects and rejected others” (132). In the 1930s, Jews were overwhelmingly considered undesirable by this segment of the population. As Jewish refugees fled German- controlled territories in increasing numbers, public opinion polls demonstrated American anti-Jewish sentiment relating to immigration and apprehensions over wealth and power. In 1938, a poll blatantly confirmed the popularity of anti-Semitic stereotypes when the public identified greed, dishonesty, and aggressiveness as the three qualities Americans most objected to in Jews (Breitman and Kraut 88). This prejudice was also evident in governmental policy: President Roosevelt’s anti-Jewish

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 35

refugee stance was based on a broad popular consensus. Most Americans believed that admitting Jewish refugees did not serve the national interest, especially during the Depression (Feingold 250). Anti-Semitic stereotypes abounded in the politics and the public mind of the time.

7 In this light, Woolf’s revisions, which removed all direct references to Jewishness, are a different kind of compromise. Rather than toning down her apparent anti-Semitism, Woolf was removing the word, or explicit label, of Jew from the text, in order to concede to publishers’ demands that the Jew be erased. Leena Kore Schröder argues that, “much as the narrative tries to write out the Jew, it can’t avoid foregrounding the terms of Jewishness” (306). However, Woolf’s project of revision was never to “write out the Jew,” but to mask him. Thus, the Jew in “The Duchess and the Jeweller” is hidden in plain view. What is perhaps most radical about this controversial story is that Woolf then compels her readers to identify with the very figure they most abhor. Schröder points out that “the Duchess is the story’s real criminal” and that our sympathies remain with the victim of her con, the jeweller (310). Despite his objectionable characteristics, the narrative is told from the jeweller’s point-of-view. Readers are privy to his internal thoughts even as they absorb the descriptions of his stereotypically unattractive Jewish body.

8 Because the narration is focalized through Oliver’s thoughts, readers experience the story through his perceptions. In turn, the readers marry their own expectations and beliefs to the point-of-view presented in the text. Virginia Woolf argues in “How Should One Read a Book?” that “if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other” (Woolf 1932: 282). In “The Duchess and the Jeweller,” readers are exposed to Oliver Bacon’s alternate perspective through their engagement with the text. Michel de Certeau explains how the reader’s entrance into the story demands a shift in one’s figurative location, which exposes one to different worlds: “[the reader] is transported into [the text] [...] . This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person’s property into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient” (xxi). If the reader enters “The Duchess and the Jeweller” through the window provided by the narrative perspective, they must figuratively move in with Oliver Bacon. Their personal identities then inevitably inflect their comprehension of this alternate point-of-view.

9 In order to understand how “The Duchess and the Jeweller” operates for readers, I first examine how the content regarding fashion in Harper’s Bazaar frames the story, before exploring how the societal tension surrounding refugees may have directed readers’ responses to Oliver Bacon. “The Duchess and the Jeweller” engages with both of these factors as readers are introduced to this Jewish parvenu. Woolf’s subsequent depiction of a morally dubious exchange with a Duchess undermines initial assumptions about social status and the role of commodities in remaking the self. Virginia Woolf ironically uses a parody to mount a critique of the unquestioning acceptance of surface value. In doing so, she encourages the consumers of Harper’s Bazaar to question their own practices of self-fashioning and consumption mirrored in a detested figure, and, implicitly, the impulse to rely on caricatures that falsely praise the aristocracy and vilify the Jewish “other.”

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 36

Consuming Jewishness

10 Even as they were savvy consumers of fashion, contemporary readers of Harper’s Bazaar were also familiar with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Despite Woolf’s revisions, “The Duchess and the Jeweller” retains Bacon’s Jewishness through anti-Semitic descriptive characteristics. Just as the readers will identify Bacon’s wealth based on his clothing and commodities, so too will they comprehend anti-Semitic stereotypes with which they are familiar due to the political controversy regarding Jewish refugees.

11 Harper’s Bazaar was initially published in November of 1867 as a weekly journal, claiming that its combination of fashions taken directly from Europe and “first-class” literary selections would be indispensable to readers who desired such cultivation (Trahey xii). In the 1930s, Harper’s Bazaar continued to offer “high” culture as well as “low,” including articles by writers and intellectuals as well as regular fashion and shopping advice (Luckhurst 80). The May 1938 issue of New York’s Harper’s Bazaar in which “The Duchess and the Jeweller” appeared begins with a section on New York and Paris fashions. It contains articles like “Paris Hats,” “Coin Dots and Lace,” and, most coincidentally, “Pearls of Little Price” (Harper’s Bazaar). Clearly, such articles create a consciousness of correct and incorrect shopping, of consumption as a skill as well as a practice.

12 The ability to recognize styles, brands, and fabric types is enhanced by such reading, which makes distinctions between products and encourages fashionable behavior. The title page of “The Duchess and the Jeweller” is embellished with an illustration of a loupe and individual pearls scattered across the text, rendering it almost indistinguishable from other jewelry ads that precede it. The later pages of the story are sandwiched between ads for perfume and makeup that occupy the outside columns of each page. As a text, “The Duchess and the Jeweller” is embedded within a larger framework of consumption.

13 Initially, “The Duchess and the Jeweller” offers to a readership of practiced consumers, gleaning their education from Harper’s Bazaar, a list of commodities that operate as explicit codes of value. In addition, anti-Semitic physical characteristics become another contentious system of signs. Bacon’s inescapable alien Jewishness is particularly important for the readers given his identity as an English Jew. As Hitler’s policies in German-controlled territories persecuted Jews, thousands attempted to flee to the United States, England, and other countries during the 1930s. In fact, in July 1938, only two months after the May publication of “The Duchess and the Jeweller,”4 thirty two countries convened at Evian, France, in an attempt to find a solution to the international “Jewish refugee problem” (Friedländer 248). No significant changes in immigration policies occurred, however. Though some newspapers, including the London Spectator, expressed outrage at the lack of aid offered, in general, fears of “foreign” Jewish refugees flooding into England and the United States in the 1930s were encouraged by the press.

14 Woolf herself in 1938 wrote of “innumerable refugees” (Sherman 217-218), even as she, the wife of a British Jew, acknowledged the looming threat of anti-Semitic policies implemented by a militant German regime (Walkowitz 127). In England, distinctions between domestic and “foreign” Jews were common practice due to fears of alien Jewish invasions. As a result, domestic Jews were concerned about being associated with refugees that were more visibly “unassimilable” and thus threatening to the status

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 37

of all Jews (Gilman The Jew’s Body 1991: 136). The attempt to blend in was a critical issue for established Jews in England and the Unites States facing a rise in anti-Semitic sentiment due to these waves of Jewish refugees (Berman 78). Oliver Bacon’s attempts to “fashion” himself through commodities as a wealthy Englishman hoping to associate with the Prime Minister enacts cultural fears of Jews as a threat to the very definition of the nation.

15 Within this social context, Woolf readily plays upon the readers’ backgrounds and viewpoints. She sets up a conflict between common assumptions about fashion and Jewishness. Virginia Woolf argues that the reading process is always inevitably framed by such personal assumptions, beliefs, and reactions: “. . . we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. But as time goes on perhaps we can train our taste; perhaps we can make it submit to some control” (Woolf 1932: 293). Woolf’s acceptance of the reader’s personal experience as a necessary part of reading anticipates reader response schema theory, which asserts that background— education, upbringing, and life experiences—determines the prior knowledge that the reader brings to bear upon the text. Moreover, viewpoint—what a reader expects to learn from the text, what she believes about the author’s intentions—determines her disposition toward the text itself (Flynn and Schweikert xv). On the one hand, Woolf exploits the reader’s exposure to an apprehensive national climate that encourages negative stereotypes of Jews. But, Woolf also makes Bacon’s project of identity-making coincide with the viewpoints of these fashion magazine consumers, using material products to try to create themselves anew.

The Elephant in the Room

16 The introductory moment of “The Duchess and the Jeweller” quickly assembles a barrage of outward markers of Bacon’s privilege. Woolf commences with a detailed description of Oliver Bacon’s5home and morning routine.His affluence is emphasized by his geographic location in his upper-floor apartment, looking “down upon the glossy roofs of fashionable cars packed in the narrow straits of Piccadilly. A more central position could not be imagined” (Woolf 1938: 248). On the surface, Bacon first appears to be a member of high society. The description of his flat is a litany of objects. Chairs covered in hide, sofas covered in tapestry, the curtains made of figured satin, the mahogany sideboard, and “the right brandies, whiskeys, and liqueurs” all illustrate the composition of his wealth and status (248). Luxurious materials indicate both economic and social success. They function, in this first moment, to introduce others to his elevated social position.

17 The list of products then extends to Bacon’s assessment of his personal appearance. His appraisal of his perfect trousers, boots, and spats, “cut from the best cloth by the best scissors in Savile Row” again indicate his power as a consumer who can buy the highest quality clothing from the most well-known tailoring district in London which fashion- conscious readers will inevitably recognize as well (248). This attention to dress illustrates how clothing operates as a system of signification for wealth and prestige. Psychologist Elizabeth Hurlock explained in a 1929 study of the motivation for fashion, One of the chief values of clothing is that it enables people to advertise themselves in a way that will win the attention and admiration of others. Many who lack any ability and could not hope to rise above the ‘average’ on their merits alone, find a satisfactory outlet for this desire for recognition through the medium of dress. (28)

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 38

18 It is not enough to own fine clothes; others must see one wearing them in order to benefit fully from their value. Accordingly, Bacon measures his success through the reaction to his conspicuous display: “But still Oliver felt it purring down his spine, the nudge, the murmur that meant, ‘Look at him—young Oliver, the young jeweller—there he goes.’ Young he was then. And he dressed better and better; and had, first a hansom cab; then a car; and first he went up to the dress circle, then down into the stalls” (Woolf 1938: 249). The murmurs that follow him through the streets of London are foremost in his mind, rather than prosperous business transactions. Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen argue that the city reinforces the use of clothing as a social signifier, since it is “a jungle of display, a circus of facade. Signs and lights shouted for attention. Window displays cried ‘Look and see!’ It wasn’t just a ‘habitat,’ it was, by its form, a self- promoter” (141). Oliver, in this atmosphere of spectacle, fixates on the products he conspicuously consumes as he attempts to ground his urban social identity solely in these signs.

19 This moment, however, is short-lived as Bacon self-consciously acknowledges his unlikely accession to this position. The chasm between his past and his present illustrates how much of himself Bacon has abandoned in order to assimilate. Woolf undermines the authority of Bacon’s wealth and central social position by invoking his repressed Jewish identity: “But he dismantled himself often and became again a little boy in a dark alley” (Woolf 1938: 248). Hannah Arendt points out that the Jewish parvenu must surrender all previous connections and characteristics in order to climb out of obscurity. She argues that “insofar as the Jew seeks to become ‘indistinguishable’ from his gentile neighbors he has to behave as if he were indeed utterly alone; he has to part company, once and for all, with all who are like him” (85). In his attempt to blend into upper-class English society, Bacon has both dressed for the part and abandoned his childhood associations. But, even as Bacon reinvents himself through his purchasing power, he cannot obliterate his emotional ties to his past.

20 When Bacon considers his movement through London, he cannot help but recall his origins as a boy in a London slum, and he speaks to a picture of his mother of his accomplishments. His subsequent reminiscence shifts readers’ perceptions of Bacon. Oliver’s memories of “selling stolen dogs to fashionable women in Whitechapel” not only link him to criminality, but also place his childhood home in a lower-class Jewish neighborhood (Woolf 1938: 248).6 Rather than being a clearly demarcated member of high society, Bacon is a shifting figure that has climbed geographically and socially. Even as Woolf allows Bacon to dismantle himself, she forces this dissection of his selfhood upon the reader, who cannot avoid the signs that dissolve his public persona.

21 Bacon’s Jewishness is then solidified by his physical description. Though he has proven himself by becoming “the richest jeweller in England,” his yearning for more from life is expressed in the quivering of his “nose, which was long and flexible, like an elephant’s trunk” (249). His outward appearance had previously been described with a focused attention on his dandified clothing, but now his physical description extends beyond the clothing itself. Oliver cannot mask his crooked nose; no expensive cloth can cover it. Matthew Jacobsen points to “a long European tradition of anti-Jewish imagery” in which the Jewish nose is a part of “a unique Jewish physicality or Jewish ‘blood’” (Jacobsen 239, 241). Bacon’s attempts to dress himself in expensive clothing can then be read as an elaborate attempt at masking his physical difference. Phyllis Lassner argues that Woolf focuses on physical characteristics—such as Bacon’s nose—in

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 39

a way that calls attention to the stereotype while denying its presence. She points out that “the sheer number of words Woolf must use to recast the Jewish nose implicates her synecdoche in a suspicious gesture that both elides his Jewish identity and disparages it” (132-133). However, because Bacon’s identity is foregrounded by a constant barrage of stereotypical characteristics, it is never elided, but is actually made more obvious than if he had simply been named a Jew.

22 Woolf’s portrayal of Bacon illustrates the tradition of marking Jewish identity that, according to Jacobsen, denoted “their essential unassimilability” (Jacobsen 242). In addition to his elephant-like nose, Bacon’s way of walking is compared to that of a camel. Stereotypes also focused on the “bandy legs” and “flat feet” which supposedly caused the different gait of the Jew. This particular idea emerged from associating Jews with cities, places synonymous with disease and decay that produced medical problems with feet (Gilman 48-52). Bacon exhibits this affected walk, swaying slightly “as the camel at the zoo sways from side to side [...]. So the great jeweller [...] swung down Picadilly, perfectly dressed, with his gloves, with his cane” (Woolf 1938: 249). Though he walks along the street where he lives in his dapper attire, Bacon’s movements betray a sense of foreignness.So, as Bacon continues to attempt to ascend into the upper classes, he must cope with these stereotypically recognizable markers of Semitic identity as obstacles to assimilation. Sander Gilman explains that, for those who attempted to fit in, masking bodily “Jewish” characteristics became of paramount importance: “It was precisely those Jews who were most assimilated, who were passing, who feared that their visibility as Jews could come to the fore” (Gilman “Are Jews White” 1991: 234). Bacon is clearly not passing, and his attempts to repress his Jewish past and appearance are unsuccessful, even in his own mind.7

23 Bacon combats this inescapable Jewish past with thoughts of his current appearance of wealth. Even as the seconds tick by while he makes the Duchess wait to see him, Bacon again comforts himself with a recitation of the objects which signal his success: “With each tick the clock handed him—so it seemed—pâté de foie gras; a glass of champagne; another of fine brandy; a cigar costing one guinea” (Woolf 1938: 251). In doing so, Bacon regains control, eliminating thoughts of his origins and re-focusing on the Duchess who is about to see him. Once the Duchess enters the room, the interaction between the two characters illustrates how Bacon orients his identity in relation to the Duchess—both his opposite and his ideal.

Exchanging Aristocracy

24 The entrance of the Duchess sets up a major contrast between the social positions of the two characters. The physical description of the Duchess as she enters Bacon’s office illustrates her overbearing public persona: “Then she loomed up, filling the door, filling the room with the aroma, the prestige, the arrogance, the pomp, the pride of all the Dukes and Duchesses swollen in one wave” (251). Her stature illustrates her aristocratic past. She drapes herself in bright colors as her overweight body is held in check by pink taffeta. The sense of volume that the Duchess creates is, according to Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, typical of the display of aristocratic clothing. Attire can be “a palpable and powerful expression of a social relationship. Among men and women of the nobility, cloth—in abundance—was an achievement of their prosperity” (85). The comparison of the Duchess to “a parasol with many flounce [...] a peacock with many

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 40

feathers” furthers the impression of the Duchess’ wealth (Woolf 1938: 251). Since peacock feathers were used to garnish the hats and provide other accents on rich women’s clothing, clearly the Duchess’ representation as a peacock only reaffirms her magnetic, monied persona. Her magnitude becomes a marker of aristocratic opulence.

25 So, unlike Bacon, the Duchess does not use commodities in order to create her social worth. Rather, her intrinsic value as an aristocrat attaches to the items with which she chooses to adorn herself. Because Bacon and the Duchess hail from different social classes, their use of fashion as a display of social status and prestige serve very different ends. The Duchess, as an aristocrat, is a trend-setter. Bacon, however, who has climbed socially out of a Jewish slum, uses fashion as a tool of emulation. This difference in the use of clothing is an example of Reginald Abbott’s concept of the “style” packaging of commodity culture: “Trade was actually cueing its customers to acceptable styles—styles based on aristocratic forms. The spectacle or ‘parade’ of commodity culture was increasingly being consistently manipulated and constructed from the top down” (Abbott 201-202). Thus, the Duchess, rather than trying to create her persona through commodities, embodies the identity others, including Bacon and the readers of Harper’s Bazaar, may try to create through fashion. However, any initial assumption that the Duchess is a model to be imitated is rendered questionable by her actions, which quickly begin to undermine the assumption of worth based solely on her aristocratic position.

26 The Duchess’ character-value is brought into question by the very tactics of display with which she asserts her status. Her appearance marks her as aristocratic but also draws attention to her physical body in an atmosphere of interaction and exchange. Once they shake hands, the connection between Oliver Bacon and the Duchess is established. In this moment, Bacon and the Duchess move beyond the external markers that have characterized them as representatives of separate social spheres into a moment of deep internal and personal identification, which creates a clearly sexual undercurrent through commercial exchange. They are here to engage in a transaction that has become ritual: “And as their hands touched the link was forged between them once more. They were friends, yet enemies; he was master, she was mistress; each cheated the other, each needed the other, each feared the other, each felt this and knew this every time they touched hands in the little back room” (Woolf 1938: 251). The chiasmic structure of “hands touched” which forges the link between them and “touched hands” which ends it moves the reader subtly from a passive structure to an active one. Though at first it may seem like a courtesy, an almost accidental brushing of disembodied hands, Woolf’s repetition immediately revises this interaction to emphasize not only Bacon and the Duchess’ active participation in this forged link, but also that it occurs “every time” they are in “the little back room.” In this moment, subtle implications of impropriety begin to surface. This connection seems to be morally questionable as the indications of miscegenation between Oliver Bacon, the Jew attempting to enter into high society, and the Duchess who represents it, arise through their deep knowledge of one another.

27 The Duchess’ social vulnerability is expressed through the highly sexualized language that accompanies the presentation of the pearls that are for sale. Parts of the Duchess’ private self also seem to be put on display for the jeweller: “The Duchess opened; her heart, her private heart gaped wide” (251). As Oliver sees figuratively into her, the pearls are birthed from a slit in her ferret-like purse and slide “down the slopes of the

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 41

vast mountain sides that fell between her knees into one narrow valley” (252). As the pearls lay exposed in the Duchess’ lap, Bacon then plucks a pearl from this valley between her legs with his finger and thumb, examining it for authenticity. His seizure of the pearl from the Duchess’ body enacts a transgression as his business allows him access into private parts of this woman’s world.

28 Although she is not technically a prostitute, the Duchess’ physical vulnerability underscores her socially precarious position. Bacon’s discretion safeguards the Duchess’ honor and the respectable veneer of her aristocratic family, even as this transaction allows him personal access to her body and her secrets. The Duchess begs indirectly for secrecy and aid as she attempts to hide her gambling debts from her husband (252). According to Sander Gilman, British culture regularly associated gambling with sexuality, and neither was appropriate for proper women (Gilman 1991: 106). The Duchess clearly is a habitual gambler and has gotten herself into a compromising financial position because of it, which, by common association, also endangers her sexually and morally. Ironically, she must bare her flaws to one who covets her place in society in order to maintain that position.

29 The Duchess claims that these are the last of the pearls from the Appleby cincture (Woolf 1938: 252). Like a belt or girdle, a cincture is used to keep women’s garments in place. This item’s double use as functional apparel and luxurious adornment illustrates the intimate value of the piece, which only heightens the sense of personal connection to this particular commodity. Presumably an heirloom, the pearls from this cincture symbolize the personal, bodily value of the Duchess and also the symbolic value of the closed circle of the aristocratic world that has been violated.8 But, as Bacon wonders whether these pearls are, in fact, real, or whether the Duchess has already sold all of them from the cincture, he questions the value of this crumbling aristocracy which is being sold off piece by piece (252).

30 Bacon’s doubt is not overcome by examining the pearls, as is his professional practice. Rather, he is persuaded to purchase the pearls without examination by the Duchess’s extension of an invitation to join her family tomorrow, along with the Prime Minister (252). When Bacon hesitates, she mentions her daughter Diana and begs for the restoration of her honor. His infatuation with Diana and the aristocratic world offered by the Duchess goads him to accept the pearls based not on their actual value, but on their symbolic value. The mention of Diana immediately shifts the threat of sexual miscegenation from mother to daughter. The Duchess avoids any further sexual transgressions of her own body while still using the sexual availability of an upper-class woman to entice Bacon. Leena Kore Schröder explains that “the fear of mixing [...] is thus at the heart of this Jewish/non-Jewish plot: a fear of the union of that which is culturally unassimilable, forever degenerating into ambiguity” (308). Bacon’s subsequent fantasies of being alone in the woods with Diana clearly enact decadent fantasies that reinforce fears of compromised sexual innocence and purity (Woolf 1938: 253). Woolf invokes stereotypes of miscegenation to reinforce the depravity of the Duchess’ offer. By offering Bacon the social opportunities he desires and allowing him access to the upper echelons of society, she puts her daughter’s sexual purity at risk.

31 Ironically, the aura of an authentic tradition which surrounds Diana and, by extension, the pearls which signify access to her, is destroyed after the Duchess leaves and Bacon discovers the pearls to be false. Bacon quickly confirms his suspicions that he has been duped: “This, then, was the truffle he had routed out of the earth! Rotten at the centre

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 42

—rotten at the core!” (253) The animalistic imagery of Bacon’s piggish discovery and subsequent disenchantment reiterates his own debasement, even as he reveals the inherent flaws of the Duchess and her pearls. The pearls, along with the promises of a society to which he has longed to be a part, are false. The Duchess, who occupies the social center which he so desperately seeks to enter, is able to manipulate Bacon into sacrificing his wealth in exchange for social position—but, of course, that exchange is never actually completed.

32 Bacon faces the consequences of a man who has made a bad bargain because of his fantasies of social ascension through consumption. In the end, he returns to memories of his childhood, the past he has desperately tried to eradicate through the purchase of commodities: ‘Forgive me, oh my mother!’ he sighed, raising his hands as if he asked pardon of the old woman in the picture. And again he was a little boy in the alley where they sold dogs on Sunday. ‘For,’ he murmured, laying the palms of his hands together, ‘it is to be a long week-end.’ (253)

33 Bacon asks his absent mother, the icon of his Jewish past, for forgiveness after being fooled by such an attractive veneer. The promises of consumption are broken as he realizes that he cannot escape who he is. The ambiguity of his final comment, “it is to be a long week-end,” leaves the audience only with Bacon’s disappointment. However, according to Woolf’s theories of reading practices, the final epiphany must occur for the reader: The first process, to receive impressions with the utmost understanding, is only half the process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the whole pleasure from a book, by another. We must pass judgment on these multitudinous impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard and lasting. (Woolf 1932: 290-291)

34 Woolf’s formal choices require the reader to create closure. According to theorist Austin Wright, short stories often do not offer the conventional closure that novels require, a refusal that he terms “final recalcitrance” (121). The jeweller’s ambiguous reaction to his own revelation is this kind of ending. Instead, the reader is left, through reflection, to create her own sense of meaning from events that have reversed simplistic value judgments regarding both materials and people.

35 Though Woolf acknowledges this independence, she also uses common cultural codes regarding both fashion and anti-Semitism in order to encourage readers to make certain conclusions. Although Woolf does not overtly challenge anti-Semitic prejudices, she uses focalized narration in order to prompt readers to see that the Jew is the victim, not the villain, of this exchange. Because she employs the point-of-view of a culturally peripheral figure, Woolf opens the door to both identification, and possibly sympathy, with a Jewish figure.

36 Ultimately, “The Duchess and the Jeweller” overtly critiques blind worship of the aristocracy and imitative practices of consumption. Readers are given the chance to make their own conclusions about “The Duchess and the Jeweller.” Because their own background inflects their understanding, they may not alter their preconceived prejudices. But, by forcing readers to reassess the Duchess, the story, by implication, allows readers the opportunity to also reevaluate their judgments of the Jewish “other.” By witnessing their own acts of consumption in a caricatured Jew, readers of Harper’s Bazaar may question the practices that lead to his downfall, while simultaneously shifting their assumptions about the value of aristocratic society and the alien nature

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 43

of the Jew. Woolf requires her characters—and her readers—to read more critically, to be more aware of the core masked by social cachet. In the end, “The Duchess and the Jeweller” paradoxically demonstrates that we are what we are, despite what we own.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Abbott, Reginald. “What Miss Kilman’s Petticoat Means: Virginia Woolf, Shopping, and Spectacle”. Modern Fiction Studies 38.1 (Spring 1992): 193-216.

Arendt, Hannah. “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition”. (1944) Reflections on Literature andCulture. Ed. Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. 69-90.

Baldwin, Dean. Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

Benzel, Kathryn and Ruth Hoberman. “Introduction”. Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’sShort Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 1-13.

Berman, Jessica. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Breitman, Richard and Alan M. Kraut. American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

Briggs, Julia. “‘Cut deep and scored thick with meaning’: Frame and Focus in Woolf’s Later Short Stories”. Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. Eds. Kathryn Benzel and Ruth Hoberman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 175-192.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Dick, Susan, ed. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989.

Ewen, Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen. Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness. (1982) New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992.

Feingold, Henry L. A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920-1945. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

Flynn, Elizabeth A. and Patrocinio P. Schweikert. “Introduction”. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. ix-xxx.

Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews Volume I: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. New York: HarperPerennial, 1997.

Garb, Tamar. “Modernity, Identity, Textuality”. The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity. Eds. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.

Gilman, Sander. “Are Jews White? Or, The History of the Nose Job”. 1991. Theories of Race and Racism. Eds. Back and Solomon. London: Routledge, 2000. 229-237.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 44

---. The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.

---. Harper’s Bazaar. May 1938.

Hoberman, Ruth. “Collecting, Shopping, and Reading: Virginia Woolf’s Stories about Objects”. Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. Eds. Kathryn Benzel and Ruth Hoberman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 81-98.

Hurlock, Elizabeth B. The Psychology of Dress: An Analysis of Fashion and Its Motive. (1929) New York: Arno Press, 1979.

Jacobsen, Matthew F. “Looking Jewish, Seeing Jews”. (1995) Theories of Race and Racism. Eds. Back and Solomon. London: Routledge, 2000. 238-252.

Lassner, Phyllis. “‘The Milk of Our Mother’s Kindness Has Ceased to Flow’: Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, and the Representation of the Jew.” Between ‘Race’ and Culture. Ed. Bryan Cheyette. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. 129-144.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996.

Luckhurst, Nicola. “Vogue […] is going to take up Mrs. Woolf, to boom her…”. Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Diane Gillespie and Leslie K. Hankins. New York: Pace UP, 1997. 75-84.

McCue, Megan M. “Confronting Modernity: Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin.” Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Diane Gillespie and Leslie K. Hankins. New York: Pace UP, 1997. 310-319.

Rodriguez, Laura María Lojo. “Contradiction and Ambivalence: Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetic Experience in ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller.’” Journal of English Studies 3 (2001-2002): 115-129.

Schröder, Leena Kore. “Tales of Abjection and Miscegenation: Virginia Woolf’s and Leonard Woolf’s ‘Jewish’ Stories.” Twentieth-Century Literature 49.3 (Fall 2003): 298-327.

Sherman, A.J. Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich, 1933-1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Snaith, Anna. “Of Fanciers, Footnotes, and Fascism: Virginia Woolf’s Flush”. Modern Fiction Studies 48.3 (Fall 2002): 614-636.

Trahey, Jane, ed. One Hundred Years of the American Female from Harper’s Bazaar. New York: Random House, 1967.

Walkowitz, Rebecca. “Virginia Woolf’s Evasion: Critical Cosmopolitanism and British Modernism”. Bad Modernisms. Eds. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. 119-144.

Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Virginia Woolf and Anti-Semitism. London: Cecil Woolf, 1995.

Woolf, Virginia. “How Should One Read a Book?” (1932) The Common Reader First and Second Series. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume Five, 1936-1941. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. San Diego: Harvest Book, 1984.

---. “The Duchess and the Jeweller”. (1938) The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc, 1989. 248-253.

Wright, Austin. “Recalcitrance in the Short Story”. Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Eds. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989. 115-129.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 45

Zuckerman, Mary Ellen. A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United States, 1792-1995. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998.

NOTES

1. I have retained Woolf’s spelling of jeweller in the text of this article. 2. This critical approach differs from Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s analysis of Woolf’s use of satire. She argues that Woolf deploys stereotypes as a formal technique, a kind of “shorthand” that is thus not deliberately anti-Semitic (10, 16). 3. Lee’s account of Chambrun’s cable to Woolf is almost identical to Woolf’s account in her diary; Chambrun’s cable clearly illustrates the anti-Semitism of the American market, as he requested she change the race of the jeweller because of “terrific racial prejudice in America” (679). 4. “The Duchess and the Jeweller” was published in both the New York and the London editions of Harper’s Bazaar. 5. This name was a site of contestation in the original text. Woolf changed it in drafts from the Jewish-sounding Theorodoric and then Isidore Oliver to the final, more Gentile name of Oliver Bacon (Dick 309). Of course, the mention of bacon invokes associations with the traditional Jewish practice of abstaining from pork; thus, Oliver Bacon’s name simultaneously renders him acceptably Gentile and connects him to ideas of unclean Jewishness. This kind of maneuver deliberately plays on common links so that Woolf never has to actually say that Bacon is a Jew. From the moment he is named, an undercurrent of equations begins to identify him as such. 6. Anna Snaith’s analysis of Woolf’s use of Whitechapel in her novel Flush illustrates the relationship between geographic location and issues of race and class in Woolf’s work (620). According to Snaith, upper-class dog owners were often stalked, their dogs stolen and then ransomed. This kind of illegal activity was associated with Whitechapel, which was generally a Jewish borough. Woolf re-deploys this depiction of Whitechapel in “The Duchess and the Jeweller.” 7. Tamar Garb notes that anti-Semites believed that Jewish cultural and psychic otherness persisted even when Jews had rid the body of signifiers of difference (23). So, Bacon’s inability to resist memories of his past enacts another anti-Semitic stereotype. 8. Megan McCue argues that, in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, there is a tendency to see objects as representing the people who own them (315). If, in “The Duchess and the Jeweller,” the pearls represent the Duchess, by bartering them away to the jeweller, the Duchess is also bartering herself.

RÉSUMÉS

Depuis sa parution dans le Harper’s Bazaar en 1938, “The Duchess and the Jeweller” a été dénoncée comme étant ouvertement raciste. Pourtant, si l'agent littéraire, Jacques Chambrun, a au départ rejeté “The Duchess and the Jeweller”, c'est à cause de l'anti-sémitisme du lectorat américain. Woolf révisa la nouvelle et enleva toutes les allusions directes à la judéité d' Oliver Bacon qui, malgré tout, ressort encore dans la caricature. En fait, ce que la description d'une rencontre subversive de deux classes et deux groupes sociaux condamne, c'est la pratique de la

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 46

consommation des lecteurs. Les lecteurs habitués, d'une part, aux stéréotypes anti-sémites et d'autre part, au consumérisme à la mode, voient Bacon mettre en œuvre les habitudes modelées par le Harper’s Bazaar avant d'accepter sottement l'aristocratie telle qu'elle se présente. Par l'intermédiaire de la voix narrative, Woolf amène le lecteur à s'identifier à Oliver Bacon. Ainsi peut-il s'interroger sur les pratiques qui mènent à sa perte, tout en remettant en cause ses propres présupposés sur la valeur de la société aristocratique et sur le Juif comme nécessairement étranger. Woolf exige de ses personnages—et de ses lecteurs—qu'ils lisent d'un oeil plus critique, qu'ils prennent conscience de ce que le masque social cache. Paradoxalement, “The Duchess and the Jeweller” montre que nous sommes ce que nous sommes, quoi que nous possédions.

AUTEURS

KATE KRUEGER HENDERSON University of IowaAdvanced PhD candidate and distinguished Seashore Fellow at the University of Iowa. Her dissertation, “Making Room: British Women Writers, Social Change, and the Short Story, 1850-1940,” examines the interrelation between the growth in periodical publishing, the emergence of the short story as a genre, and the prevalence of women writing about social controversies in the Victorian and Modernist period.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 47

Speech-acts, represented thoughts and human intercourse in “The Introduction” and “Together and Apart”

Anne Besnault-Levita

1 Virginia Woolf’s short stories have long been the marginal part of Woolf's canon. In the 1980s-1990s, Ralf Freedman’s Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, Dean Baldwin's publication of Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short fiction and Dominic Head’s chapter on Woolf in The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice were essential landmarks in the revaluation of what is now considered to be an essential collection of genius pieces and formative experiences in genre, form and gender. This assessment has been more recently endorsed by Nena Skrbic’s Wild Outburst of Freedom: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction, by Kathryn Benzel and Ruth Hoberman’s collection of essays Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction and, in France, by the regular SEW conferences published in Études Britanniques Contemporaines.

2 In those works, many interesting pages introduce or discuss the stories comprised in Mrs Dalloway’s Party, a sequence written by Woolf around 1925 and first edited by Stella McNichol in 1973 (Woolf 1973). The critics generally agree about the specificity of this “cycle” in which “the setting is created by the interior world (or psychic geography) and by the heterogeneity of individuated experience” (Skrbic 148). Baldwin’s analysis, for example, focuses on the “party consciousness” evoked by Woolf in her diary: “But my present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness etc.” (Woolf 1980: 12).1 It draws our attention to generation and gender issues by highlighting the central interaction of the “endangered self” with its social surroundings (Baldwin 40). Focusing on the way “The New Dress”, “Happiness”, “Ancestors”, “The Introduction”, “Together and Apart”, “The Man Who Loved His Kind”, “A Simple Melody” and “A Summing Up” function as a sequence “tied together by theme, language and characters” and as a “place of transformation” between Mrs Dalloway and To the

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 48

Lighthouse, Beth Rigel Daugherty’s approach, in “A Corridor leading from Mrs Dalloway to a New Book: Transforming Stories, Bending Genres”, is structural as much as thematic (Daugherty 101-110). The critic underlines the contrast between “external social appearances and internal private realities”, between the characters’ “desire to communicate” and their “inability to do so” together with the “transitoriness of happiness against a backdrop of human suffering” (107). Above all, she emphasizes the “interconnectedness” of those stories: they all begin in medias res, all “illuminate an internal conflict”, all have “a Woolfian moment of being or recognition” and “feel concluded”, and all use connected words or phrases and images such as struggling flies and unmated widow birds. In “A Tolerable Shape: Mrs Dalloway's Party and the Short Story Cycle”, Nena Skrbic also highlights this structural coherence: Each of the stories involves confessional-like situations in which the characters bring to the fore the parts of their life (identity or social status, for example) that they have to come to terms with and reveal their personal feelings, hopes and aspirations to the reader. All the characters are at once ordinary and exceptional, profoundly sympathetic and deeply flawed. (Skrbic 144)

3 She also dwells on the thematic unity of the sequence, completing Daugherty’s study by exploring the characters’ “preoccupation with memory” (145) and “struggle between sameness and dissimilarity” (147), by insisting on “the repetitive experience of failure and fracture that social interaction entails” as an effect of the cycle, and by tackling the issue of “women's self-perception” and the way it raises “questions of manipulation, objectification, and loss of self-worth” (149). But Skrbic’s analysis is also aware of the way “language gives a framework to relationships” in those short fictions: “in the cycle, Woolf operates as social analyst, bringing into focus the question of how we communicate and how we place the individual socially” (148-149).

4 The stories in Mrs Dalloway's Party are indeed built around the idea of conversation as a form of social exchange in which different discursive communities defined by personal background, age and gender are involved. They examine utterances in their social context, raise questions about gender and its narratorial representation, and analyse discourses as the sites of ambiguities and conflicts. Their use of the clashing modes of internalisation (achieved mainly through free indirect speech) and dialogue reflects on communication as a praxis that problematises the self, intersubjective recognition and interpretative strategies at the same time. This is why I would argue that pragmatics2 and feminist narratology3 as critical approaches might add to my predecessors’ commentaries.

5 As representative evidences of this point, I have chosen two stories in which “the party” can be read as a metaphorised social stage implying specific linguistic games and role playing, and where the “introduction” motif — two characters of the opposite sex being introduced to each other by a third overbearing one — obviously implies forms of negotiation with cultural impositions, the other and language. In “The Introduction”, Lily Everit, who is attending her first party, tries “to remain inconspicuous”, and “hangs to the memory of [her essay on Swift] and the compliment” made to her by her professor as if it could protect her from “the intimidating world of male accomplishments (Westminster, Parliament, the telegraph)” embodied by Bob Brinsley to whom Mrs Dalloway introduces her (Baldwin 40). In “Together and Apart”, the meeting once again brought about by Mrs Dalloway, but this time between two “middle-aged characters who could be friends but are unable to find a bond” (Baldwin

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 49

42), ends up in “that paralysing blankness of feeling” which Baldwin attributes to Mr Serle’s “masculine arrogance” (Woolf 2004: 187-188).4

6 In both stories, the conventional narrative framework — an introduction and the ensuing conversation as a potential form of self-discovery and social apprenticeship — leads the reader to expect direct discourse to be the main mode of character- presentation. But Woolf’s “party consciousness” is explored through a more modernist discursive framework, and actual dialogue is reduced to a few lines while the inner voice of indirectly reported thought is pervading. My contention here is that although the actual utterance of impersonated speech in those stories is almost stifled by the use of free indirect and free direct discourse, it should nonetheless be studied as speech- acts reflecting on the characters' discursive negotiation with their conflicting agendas in the context of the prescriptive ideology of the party. This negotiation should then be shown to be at work in the stream of consciousness technique which turns out to be another mode of conversation involving similar forms of inner conflicts. In the end, more than a modernist domination of thought over speech, of the modernist solipsistic self over social interaction, what “The Introduction” and “Together and Apart” seem to me representative of is Woolf’s fictional critique of conversation and self- representation, and her pragmatic critique of interpretation.5

The prescriptive ideology of the party

7 In “The Introduction” and “Together and Apart”, as in the other “Party” stories, the represented social scene has obviously changed a lot since Jane Austen's descriptions of the manners of rural gentility. The subject is no longer courtship or marriageship, but human intercourse: Of all things, nothing is so strange as human intercourse, she thought, because of its changes, its extraordinary irrationality, her dislike being now nothing short of the most intense and rapturous love, but directly the word ‘love’ occurred to her, she rejected it, thinking again how obscure the mind was, with its very few words for all these astonishing perceptions, these alternations of pain and pleasure. (“Together and Apart”, 187)

8 The male characters do not exactly represent an ideal of manhood, like Knightley in Emma, the female characters are not exactly debutantes, and Mrs Dalloway is not supposed to be a matchmaker or an arbiter of relationships. However, in Woolf’s stories as in Austen’s novels, the party is more than a social occasion. It turns out to be a life experience, an encounter with “civilisation” (182), with “the world” — “this was the famous place: the world” (180) — and also with the “traditions” of a “regulated way of life” (180).

9 At “the very first sight of people moving up stairs” in Mrs Dalloway’s house (“The Introduction” 178), the character-focalizers begin to experience an increased awareness of the social and gender roles that are now imposed upon them — “As she walked with Mrs Dalloway across the room, [Lily Everit] accepted the part which was now laid on her” (180) — roles which they are shown to resist and to “accept” at the same time, as if the painful division between their private and public selves (a well- known modernist subject) was inescapable: “[Serle] smiled; he accepted it; he crossed his knees the other way about. She did her part; he is” (“Together and Apart” “187). “Remembering her youth,” and her own life — “(to introduce a couple made her think

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 50

of meeting Richard for the first time!)” (181) — thinking that there is something profoundly human in “a man feeling this for woman, and woman that for man, and there flowing from that contact all those homes, trials, sorrows, profound joy and ultimate staunchness in the face of catastrophe” (181), Mrs Dalloway “bear[s] down on [Lily] from the other side of the room”, “approache[s] her with a smile which Lily knew (though this was her first party) meant: ‘But you’ve got to come out of your corner and talk,’ and “never quite drop[s] her arm” until she finds “a group where there were young people talking, and Bob Brinsley” (178-79). As Lily progresses through space with her “commanding” guide (178), feeling “the strange mixture of excitement and fear, of desire to be left alone and of longing to be taken out and thrown down, down into the boiling depths” of the party (178), Woolf’s writing weaves together lexical, grammatical and metaphorical allusions to forms of cultural impositions. The prepositions suggest an impending threat: “bearing down on her”, “to menace her and mount over her”, [Mrs Dalloway] came straight down on her”, the part which was now laid on her”, “this regulated way of life which felt like a yoke about her neck”, “the yoke that had fallen from the skies onto her neck crushed her” (178-182). The use of passive forms such as “to be taken out and thrown down” (178) or to be “flung into a whirlpool where either she would perish or be saved” (179) hints at a form of violent subordination which is corroborated by the overwhelming presence of the symbols of masculine might: “Westminster Abbey; the sense of the enormously high solemn buildings surrounding them” (179), “the towers of Westminster; the high and formal buildings; talk; […] high towers, solemn bells, flats built every brick of them by men’s toil, churches built by men’s toil, parliaments too; […] What had she to oppose to this massive masculine achievement?” (179). Unable to escape from what the reader is led to see as a form of military enrolment (the image of the soldier and the uniform recurs three times in the short story), Lily’s “being (no longer sharp as a diamond cleaving the heart of life asunder)” turns “to a mist of alarm, apprehension and defence” (178) and “yield[s] to the pressure of unquestionable might, that is the conviction that it was not hers to dominate, or to assert; rather to air and embellish this orderly life where all was done already” (180).

10 In “Together and Apart”, the prescriptive ideology of the party is also at work: the predictive value of Mrs Dalloway’s “you will like him” in the first sentence implies a whole world of tacit social obligations and presuppositions. Yet it is treated in a more peripheral way. Probably because in Hegelian terms, Miss Anning and Mr Serle, aged around forty, do no longer stand for the naïve subject misrecognizing itself to be the centre of the world. As the first paragraph of the short story suggests, they seem to know that they cannot but be governed by “unwritten laws and social customs, a framework […] from which [they don’t] think to disassociate [themselves]” (Hegel 541): Mrs Dalloway introduced them, saying you will like him. The conversation began some minutes before anything was said, for both Mr Serle and Miss Anning looked at the sky and in both of their minds the sky went on pouring its meaning[,] though very differently[,] until the presence of Mr Serle by her side became so distinct that she could not see the sky, simply, itself, anymore, but the sky shored up by the tall body, dark eyes, grey hair, clasped hand, the stern melancholy (but she had been told ‘falsely melancholy’) face of Roderick Serle, and, knowing how foolish it was, she yet felt impelled to say: ‘What a beautiful night!’ (183)

11 Nonetheless, the characters’ increased social and gender awareness of the other’s differences does not prevent them from performing their part in a conventional way:

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 51

“‘Well!’ said Miss Anning, patting the sofa cushion emphatically. And down he sat beside her.” (183). It does not prevent them from experiencing a sense of foolishness or inadequacy (this is particularly true of Miss Anning whose maturity has not made her much more secure than Lily Everit), nor does it spare them the pain of expecting what they finally will not get: “Miss Anning felt that she had struck accidentally the true man, upon whom the false man was built” (183); “Let him think so; not liking him, she wanted him to run away with an absurd idea of her” (186).

12 In the two stories, the reader’s own romantic expectancies about the forging of a new relationship are deflated through situational irony. The encounter is soon experienced on both sides in terms of “confrontation” and “collision” and the feeling of isolation is intensified: “Their eyes met; collided rather, for each felt that behind the eyes the secluded being, who sits in darkness while his shadow agile companion does all the tumbling and beckoning, and keeps the show going, suddenly stood erect; flung off his cloak; confronted the other” (186). In “The Introduction”, this “collision” leads to an anticlimax of horrified disillusion and to the revelation of a gendered relationship of victim and victimiser: But as she said this, she saw him — how else could she describe it — kill a fly. He tore the wings off a fly, standing with his foot on the fender his head thrown back, talking insolently about himself, arrogantly, but she didn’t mind how insolent and arrogant he was to her, if only he had not been brutal to flies. (181)

13 In “Together and Apart”, it is followed by a “paralysing blankness of feeling” so that “neither Mr Serle nor Miss Anning could move or speak” (187-188). Each time, what had been a rather quick exchange of words is ended in a definitive and almost pathetic way: the mutual recognition demanded by the cultural and literary codes set up in the short stories has failed: ‘I saw you at the Meistersinger, and you cut me. Villain,’ said Miss Cartwright, ‘you don’t deserve that I should ever speak to you again.’ And they could separate” (“Together and Apart” 188).

“Failed” communication

14 As many critics have shown, conversation is an essential theme and critical practice in Virginia Woolf’s work. In its represented ideal form, it can be about inventing oneself or re-positioning oneself as a speaking subject; it implies an agonistic yet creative exchange with the other, and might even lead to a felicitous6 and almost wordless sense of community, as in the following passage from the Voyage Out: When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness. The joint lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this stage of community, and it was often necessary for one or the other to recall with an effort whether a thing had been said or only thought, shared or dreamt in private. (Woolf 1970: 194)

15 Because it can invert power-relations and ideological locations, or, in more feminist terms, because it is the place from where to seek an alternative to the authoritative dominance of patriarchal discourse, conversation is also a writing and a reading praxis to which Woolf ascribes a political as well as an ethical value7.

16 But we also know that in their fictional form, whether this form be a dialogue in the traditional sense of the term or the paratactic juxtaposition of disembodied voices,

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 52

Woolf’s conversations always problematize the process of communication, often contrasting discourse with silence, talk with small talk, speech as “an old torn net” (“The Evening Party” 93) with voice as the meaningful rustling of inarticulate sense. In “The Introduction” and “Together and Apart”, the sense of failure associated with the dialogue first appears to be linked with the way the over-determined social structure previously described leads to an apparently over-determined linguistic structure: “‘Mr Brinsley — Miss Everit. Both of you love Shelley.’ […]

17 ‘And I suppose you write?’ he said, ‘poems presumably?’

18 ‘Essays,’ she said” (181). In this extract, the cultural presupposition voiced by the male character (“as a young woman, you probably think that you should write, and if you do, it cannot but be in the feminine and confessional mode of poetry”), reinforced by Mrs Dalloway’s presumed psychological knowledge, prevents the exchange of words from being a sharing of views. The three lines are acts of authoritative assertion that unveil or hide irreconcilable pragmatic implicatures.8 The conversation stops here, but as the narrator of “Together and Apart” suggests, “it had began some minutes before anything was said” (183), as soon as Lily entered Mrs Dalloway’s rooms, “hug[ging] to herself the thought of her essay of Dean Swift which Professor Miller had marked with three red stars” (178), proud of a success which could very well be interpreted by the reader in more ambiguous terms of gender conflict: to write an essay is indeed a form of literary emancipation (Woolf’s own essays prove it), but this emancipation is here slightly and ironically subdued by the patriarchal figures of the Dean and the Professor to whose authority (a rather misogynous one in Swift’s case) the young Lily Everit is still subordinated.

19 In “Together and Apart”, the conversation lasts a little longer in terms of narrative time and number of words. Yet, it is interspersed with a pattern of never-actualised signifieds (reported in free direct or indirect discourse) that designate some of the actual utterances as “dull commonplaces” (184): ‘What a beautiful night!” […] Foolish! Idiotically foolish! (183) That is what she felt now, the withdrawal of affection, Serle’s disappearance, and the instant need they were both under to cover up what was so desolating and so degrading to human nature that everyone tried to bury it decently from sight — this withdrawal, this violation of trust, and, seeking some decent acknowledged and accepted burial form, she said: ‘Of course, whatever they may do, they can’t spoil Canterbury’. (187)

20 In the last quoted paragraph, the images of separation and loss culminate with the term “burial” and contrast with the repeated idea of “decency” which announces the return to a coded meaningless utterance.

21 And yet, in traditional pragmatic terms, a conversation has taken place. If we suppress the characters’ inner thoughts interrupting it, this is how it unfolds: ‘What a beautiful night!’ ‘Well!’ said Miss Anning, patting the sofa cushion emphatically. […] There was a Miss Serle who lived at Canterbury when I was a girl there.’ […] ‘Yes.’ ‘We are originally a Norman family, who came over with the Conqueror. There is a Richard Serle buried in the Cathedral. He was a Knight of the Garter.’[…] ‘On, Stanley, on,’ she said to herself and asked him: ‘Do you know Canterbury yourself?’ […] ‘Yes, I know Canterbury,’ he said reminiscently, sentimentally, […]

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 53

‘She’s like a fruit tree—like a flowering cherry tree,’ he said, looking at a youngish woman with fine white hair. […] ‘It’s odd that you should know Canterbury,’ said Mr Serle. It’s always a shock,’ he went on (the white haired lady having passed), when one meets someone’ (they had never met before), ‘by chance, as it were, who touches the fringe of what has meant a great deal to oneself, touches accidentally, for I suppose Canterbury was a nothing but a nice old town to you. So you stayed there one summer with an aunt? (That was all Ruth Anning was going to tell him about her visit to Canterbury.) ‘And you saw the sights and went away and never thought of it again.’ […] ‘I loved Canterbury,’ she said. He kindled instantly. It was his gift, his fault, his destiny. ‘Loved it,’ he repeated. ‘I can see you did.’ […] ‘Canterbury twenty years ago,’ said Miss Anning, […].

22 According to Jakobson’s well-known model, what we have here is indeed a typical “situation of communication”: an addresser sends a message to an addressee, who replies. The message sent is “operative” since the CONTEXT referred to — here Canterbury — is “graspable by the addressee”; the CODE , “fully, or at least partially, common” to both permits Mr Serle and Miss Anning to establish a CONTACT (“a physical channel and psychological connection between [them]”), in order “to enter and stay in communication” (Jakobson 1260): “‘What a beautiful night!’, “‘Canterbury twenty years ago’”. The denotative, phatic, emotive and conative functions of language are here at work. The characters share an interest for the same referential place; Mr Serle’s emotion when remembering the place is perceptible — “he said reminiscently, sentimentally” — as is the effect on him produced by Miss Anning’s reply: “I loved Canterbury, she said”. In the terms of traditional pragmatics then (some of the theorists of which criticized Jakobson's communication for being insensitive to dialogism and for assigning the addressee a passive role), the dialogue reproduced here is an interaction of persons living in the «world», their utterances are context- dependent9, and performed with a certain illocutionary force (statements and requests are made, feelings are expressed) having “certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons” (Austin 1962: 101): “He kindled instantly”. Moreover, the dialogue can be said to follow most of the maxims of Grice’s cooperative principle, thus enabling the conversational implicatures always involved in speech-acts to be disambiguated: the uttered sentences avoid prolixity, irrelevance, falsehood, obscurity, ambiguity and disorder.10

23 Under those conditions, why is it that the reader has the impression that communication fails, that the linguistic surface of rational and polite cooperation hides the difficulty if not impossibility of cooperation, even if, at one moment during the exchange, an encounter briefly takes place? This impression is obviously linked with the characters’ inner thoughts when they interrupt the dialogue, either contradicting what is actually said, or taking the speaker far away from the actual subject of conversation, into an inner world of memories and impressions: ‘Do you know Canterbury yourself?’ Did he know Canterbury! Mr Serle smiled, thinking how absurd a question it was — how little she knew, this nice quiet woman who played some instrument and seemed intelligent and had good eyes, and was wearing a nice old necklace — knew what it meant. (184) ‘Canterbury twenty years ago,’ said Miss Anning, as one lays a shade over an intense light, or covers some burning peach with a green leaf, for it is too strong, too ripe,

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 54

too full. Sometimes she wished she had married. (187)

24 The sense of failure then comes from the reader’s recognition that the characters’ inner thoughts, the thoughts that define who they really are, are not shared but kept secret. But it might also come from a process of identification with the characters’ frustration and with his hopes of recognition by and communion with the other.

25 Another reading of the way communication works or does not work in “The Introduction” and “Together and Apart” might indeed lead us to consider that Woolf’s fictional critique of dialogue as conversation was not only social, but also “pragmatic” long before the discipline was born. Many essential principles of the traditional pragmatics of conversation are challenged here. Searle’s principle of expressibility— “Whatever can be meant can be said” and no meanings are inherently unexpressible in a mutual cognitive environment (Searle 19-21)—is one of them as the following extracts from “The Introduction”, shows: But, thought Lily Everit. But — but — but what? Oh nothing, she thought hastingly smothering down softly her sharp instinct. Yes, she said, she did like reading. (181)

26 Grice’s “intention-recognition” principle, according to which the speaker’s communicative intention shapes his speech-act and can always be recognised by the addressee is another. In the words of Jonathan Culler who takes up the issue in his book entitled On Deconstruction: «Intention cannot serve as the decisive determinant or the ultimate foundation of a theory of speech acts. […] What [someone] had in mind at the moment of utterance does not determinate what speech act his utterance performed” (122-123): Was he ‘falsely melancholy,’ as they said? Prompted by the sky, which seemed to make it all a little futile — what they said, what they did — she said something perfectly commonplace again: ‘There was a Miss Serle who lived at Canterbury when I was a girl there’. (Together and Apart” 183)

27 To be at the same time together and apart: this is what the dialogues in the stories of Mrs Dalloway’s Party are mostly about, and to “make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged (Grice 1989: 26) is not enough to ensure felicitous cooperation. As George W. Turner rightly explains: “often pragmatist researchers and sociolinguists assume an ideal combination of a speaker and a hearer without lapses of attention, preconceptions and preoccupations that distort meaning, misinterpretation of directives or bees in bonnets. We assume that people not only do share but want to share”.11 I would argue that this description of a non-ideal situation of communication perfectly illustrates our two dialogues. It is first uncertain whether the two “couples” in presence in the short stories want to share anything, have anything to share or know what they should share. In fact, being introduced to each other means that they have little choice in this respect: “she felt impelled to say” (183), “and it’s odd, she thought, how one’s feelings are influenced” (185). Then Woolf’s technique of alternating scraps of talk with inner thoughts obviously suggests those interruptions and lapses of attention Turner evokes: Lily and Mr Brinsley, Miss Anning and Mr Serle, are preoccupied with themselves (the repetition of “herself” in “The Introduction is remarkable”), with their own trends of thoughts, with their diverging memories, genealogies, immediate pasts… The characters’ physical contexts (where the

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 55

conversation is taking place, what objects are present, what actions are occurring) and their epistemic context (their background knowledge of the world) obviously interfere with the verbal exchange. Last but not least, the two dialogues involve the use of cultural preconceptions that either lead to misinterpretations (“Together and Apart”) or to stopped communication (“The Introduction”).

Subjectivity, authority, interpellation

28 Therefore, what direct discourse as dialogue suggests here is that conversation is about disagreement and confrontation as much as cooperation. It is neither a mere matter of linguistic reflexes nor a unifying therapeutic force. It is the place where subjects discursively negotiate their relationships to hierarchies of power but are unavoidably threatened by interpellation, being then “assujetti, captured at a place” through language (Lecercle 80)12. Thus, it appears that in the two stories the female subjects are “interpellated” at a place where “timidity” and “fear”, together with the internalized idea of being “circumscribed and limited creature[s]” (179), makes them find it difficult “talking to men”, because their talks might “peter out into dull commonplaces” (184). Similarly, the male protagonists are clearly interpellated at a position which prevents them from listening with preconceived ideas to women’s talk.

29 This might explain why much more space is devoted to the representation of inner thoughts in the stories, as if this was the signal that a temporary yet repeated withdrawal from the coded language of the public sphere could enable the subject to free itself from conventions, from the embedded habits of mind and language. Instead of sharing their thoughts (in direct discourse), the characters shape their thoughts (in free direct and free indirect discourse), addressing some of the replies they could have made to the other to themselves instead: But what was the whirlpool? Oh it was made of a million things and each was distinct to her; surrounding them; being a woman. Perhaps that was the thing that came out, that remained, it was partly the dress, but all the little chivalries and respects of the drawing-room — all made her feel that she had come out of her chrysalis and was being proclaimed what in the comfortable darkness of childhood she had never been — this frail and beautiful creature, before whom men bowed, this limited and circumscribed creature who could not do what she liked, this butterfly with a thousand facets to its eyes and delicate fine plumage, and difficulties and sensibilities and sadness innumerable; a woman. (“The Introduction” 179) He had involved himself too deep in life — and her he would cross his knees (all his movements were a little unconventional and distinguish, and not blame himself but put the blame off upon the richness of his nature, which he compared favourably with Wordsworth’s, for example, and since he had given so much to people, he felt, resting his head on his hands, they in their turn should help him, and this was the prelude, tremulous, fascinating, exciting, to talk; and images bubbled up in his mind. (“Together and Apart”, 185)

30 The reader could then be tempted to understand the alternation between dialogue and stream of consciousness as an expression of a dichotomy between the characters’ inauthentic selves and their true selves, between a process of subjectivation and the possibility of self-expression operated through a “movement from self to the object of perception, to self again, to past and immediate past and present, […] from perception to reflection and back again” (Kaplan 82). On the one hand therefore, the “wobbling”

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 56

and “melting” of a dissolving self; on the other, Lily’s essay as a “hard-lump” symbolising the solidity of her “I”: “One divided life (she felt sure of it) into fact this essay, and into fiction, this going out, into rock and into wave, she thought, driving along and seeing things with such intensity that forever she would see the truth and herself, a white reflection in the driver’s back inextricably mixed: the moment of vision” (“The Introduction 178).

31 But of course, as Lily herself perceives, things are not that simple. Lily’s essay is itself a discourse, as “fictional” (in Woolfian terms) as the party is real and not real at the same time. Her “I” (and ours) might sometimes feel to be “hard as a nut”, but “in the shadow of the letter ‘I’ is all shapeless as mist” (Woolf 1957: 104). Thinking is not a context- independent, merely self-reflexive activity: “and it’s odd, she thought, how one’s feelings are influenced. She did not like him, though she rather liked that comparison of his of a woman to a cherry tree” (“Together and Apart” 185). Internal focalisation does not always give us unmediated access to a character’s thoughts (it is clearly not the case here), and free indirect discourse is the site of “doubleness and indeterminacy”, as Kathy Mezei rightly recalls: “we shouldn’t forget that it is the mode through which the character-focalisation appears to be freed from the narrators mediation but is not” (Mezei 69). Just as Mrs Dalloway’s unconsciously imposes her reading of the signs to her protégées, influencing the conversation then withdrawing from it, the narrator offers us his characters’ thoughts interwoven with his own language, and although he never subordinates their words to his, his presence is a form of control implying the reader’s participation either through empathy or ironic distance. In the extract quoted above, for example, I would suggest that Lily’s thoughts follow the syntactic rhythms of an authentic quest for self-discovery while borrowing some gendered linguistic clichés— “being a woman”, “this frail and beautiful creature” — which might be ascribed to her as an interpellated female subject, or to the narrator’s light irony. In both cases, it seems that Woolf has chosen to locate ambiguity and complexity within subjectivity, narration and authority, and therefore in the interpretation process as well.

32 “The Introduction” and “Together and Apart”, as most of the short fictions comprised in Mrs Dalloway Party, are stories about the difficult recognition of the other and expression of the self. One way of interpreting them could consist in thinking that the protagonists’ failed communication leads them to withdraw from the social scene of dialogue into a solipsistic inner world. But if mutual recognition appears difficult, it seems that there is no possible recognition of the self without any confrontation with the other, and that there is no subjectivation through language that is unmediated. For a female reader then, susceptible to feel empathy for the female character-focalisers and to be interpellated by the text at the place of a “feminist” reader, Woolf’s conversational critique of conversation cannot but appear complex. While the two dialogues speak Woolf’s “feminist” critique of the patriarchal potential of language, they do so without inverting known power-relations, but by showing them at work, in direct discourse, in indirect discourse, in narrative discourse. The territory made by speech in those short fictions is therefore more than a phenomenological space characterised by “the pre-semantic insubstantiality existing prior to our usual form of communication” (Mildenberg 70):13 it is a pragmatic space of conversation as interpretation.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 57

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

AUSTIN, John L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

BALDWIN, Dean R. Virginia Woolf:A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

BENZEL, Kathryn N. and Ruth HOBERMAN, eds. Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

CUDDY-KEANE, Melba. “The Rhetoric of Feminist Conversation: Virginia Woolf and the Trope of the Twist”. Eds. Kathy Mezei. Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers. Chapel Hill and London: The U of North Carolina P, 1996, 137-161.

CULLER, Jonathan. On Deconstruction. London: Routledge, 1983.

DAUGHERTY, Beth B. “’A corridor leading from Mrs Dalloway to a new book’: Transforming Stories, Bending Genres”, eds. Kathryn Benzel and Ruth Hoberman. Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 137-161.

FREEDMAN, Ralf. Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity. Berkeley: California UP, 1980.

GRICE, H. P. “Logic and Conversation”, Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. Eds. P. Cole and J. L. Morgand. New York: Academic Press, 1975, 41-58.

---. Studies in the Way of Words. (Posthumously published volume collecting most Grice's papers on language, meaning and communication and some other topics.) Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989.

HEAD, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1992.

HEGEL, Gorg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.

JAKOBSON, Roman. “From Linguistics and Poetics”, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton and Company, 2001, 1258-1265.

KAPLAN, Sydney Janet. Feminine Consciousness in the Modern British Novel. Urbana, Chicago, London: U. of Illinois P., 1975.

LECERCLE, Jean-Jacques. Interpretation as Pragmatics. London: Macmillan Press, 1999.

LYCAN, William. “Philosophy of Language”, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Ed. R. Audi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 586-589.

MEZEI, Kathy. “‘Who Is Speaking Here?’: FID, ‘Gender and Authority in Emma, Howards Ends and Mrs Dalloway’, ‘Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers’”. Ed. Kathy Mezei. Chapel Hill and London, The U of North Carolina P, 1996. 66-92.

MILDENBERG, Ariane, L. “‘Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct?’: Virginia Woolf’s ‘Gigantic Conversation’”, Conversation in Woolf's Works.Ed. C. Reynier. Études Britanniques Contempraines (automne 2004): 69-80.

REYNIER, Christine. “Conversation Redefined: Notes on 'A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus'”, Conversation in Virginia Woolf’s Works, Études Britanniques Contempraines (automne 2004): 167-180.

SEARLE, John. Speech-Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1969.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 58

SKRBIC, Nena. Wild Outburst of Freedom: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. Westport (Connecticut): Praeger, 2004.

TURNER, George W. “Sharing, shaping, showing: the deep uses of language”, The Pragmatics of Style. Ed. Hickey Leo. London and New York : Routledge, 1989, 15-27.

WOOLF, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harvest Press, 1957.

---. Mrs Dalloway: A Short Story Sequence. Ed. Stella McNichol. London: Hogarth Press, 1973.

---. The Voyage Out. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1925-1930. Ed. Anne Olivier and Quentin Bell. London: Hogarth Press, 1980.

---. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (1985). Ed. Susan Dick. 3rded. London: Grafton Books 1991.

---. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (1985). Ed. Susan Dick. London: Vintage, 2003.

NOTES

1. As Susan Dick explains, once Woolf had completed Mrs Dalloway she “began quickly to write a group of eight stories (beginning with ‘The New Dress’) which were all set at Mrs Dalloway’s party. In each of these she presents, from the perspective of one or two characters, the subtle tensions that distinguish the ‘party consciousness’” (Woolf 1991: 3). 2. “Pragmatics studies the use of language in context, and the context-dependence of various aspects of linguistic interpretation. [Its branches include the theory of how] one and the same sentence can express different meanings or propositions from context to context, owing to ambiguity or indexicality or both, speech act theory, and the theory of conversational implicature” (Lycan 1995). 3. In her introduction to Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, Kathy Mezei retraces the complex history of feminist narratology as a heterogenous critical field. She also offers a definition which has provided me with a theoretical starting point: “through close textual reading, […] feminist narratology locates and deconstructs sites of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and transgression in aspects of narrative and in the sexuality and gender of author, narrator, character and reader”; it locates the sites of ambiguous discourses within “the narrator, the focaliser, the reader, author-ity, subjectivity, historicity, linearity, or specific structures and features of narrative and discourse and their complex interrelations” (Mezei 2). 4. All references to Woolf’s short stories refer to Susan Dick’s 2004 fourth edition introduced by Helen Simpson. 5. I am of course indebted here to Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s Interpretation as Pragmatics, published in 1999. 6. The adjective “felicitous” is here borrowed from pragmatics and refers to the “felicity conditions” that must be satisfied for a speech-act to be performed. 7. Many references should be mentioned here, starting with Woolf’s essays discussing the notion and illustrating it as a literary and critical practice (“Mr Conrad: A conversation” (1923) for example), her short-story entitled “A Dialogue Upon Mount Pelenticus” and Christine Reynier’s paper commenting it (Reynier 167-180), or, among others, Melba Cuddy-Keane’s pages on “Dialogue vs lecture” (Cuddy-Keane 89-91) and “Reading dialogically” (131-135). 8. In this particular case I use “implicatures” in the Gricean sense of the difference between what is actually said and what is intentionally implicated by the speaking subject, knowing that the question of intentionality remains problematic.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 59

9. In pragmatics, “context” includes the linguistic context (the previous linguistic utterances) and the extra-linguistic context surrounding the speech-acts such as the time, place and represented world in which the characters live, the intentions of the speakers. 10. Grice's theory of conversation implies a sharp distinction between what someone says and what someone ‘implicates’ by uttering a sentence. What is said is identified with the literal content of the utterance; what is implicated, the implicature, with the non-literal, what is (intentionally) communicated, but not said, by the speaker. According to Grice, conversational implicatures have the following properties: (i) they are calculable, that is, inferable from, among other things, the cooperative principle and the conversational maxims; (ii) they are cancelable either explicitly (adding something like "but I did not meant that") or contextually, by changing the context; and (iii) except for those implicatures based on the maxims of manner, they are non- detachable, i.e., there is no way of saying the same thing that would not carry the implicature (Grice 1975: 41-58); Grice’s conversational maxims are maxims of quality, quantity, relation and manner. They can be summarized as follows: - Quality: speakers should be truthful. They should not say what they think is false, or make statements for which they have no evidence. - Quantity: a contribution should be as informative as is required for the conversation to proceed. - Relevance: speakers' contributions should relate clearly to the purpose of the exchange. - Manner: speakers' contributions should be perspicuous: clear, orderly and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity. 11. This assessment is also shared by Jean-Jacques Lecercle when he explains how the traditional pragmatic “view of dialogue and, by extension, of interpretation has so solidly established itself as to have the strength of doxa” (Lecercle 43-47). 12. In Interpretation as Pragmatics, Jean-Jacques Lecercle develops his own version of Althusser’s theory of interpellation, pp. 152-198. 13. Ariane Mildenberg is here evoking the “gigantic conversation” of voices in The Waves.

RÉSUMÉS

Dans Mrs Dalloway’s Party, cycle de nouvelles que Woolf rédigea aux alentours de 1925 et que Stella McNichol publia pour la première fois sous cette forme en 1973, Woolf étudie ce qu'elle appelle “l'état de conscience-réception, l'état de conscience-robes”. Dans la plupart des nouvelles de ce cycle (“The New Dress”, “Happiness”, “Ancestors”, “The Introduction”, “Together and Apart”, “The Man Who Loved His Kind”, “A Simple Melody” et “A Summing Up”), “la réception” peut se lire comme une métaphore de la scène sociale où se jouent certains rôles et jeux linguistiques. Cette réception permet à Woolf d'examiner les énoncés dans leur contexte social, de poser des questions relatives aux hommes et aux femmes ainsi qu'à leur représentation et d'analyser le discours comme site d'ambiguïté et de conflits. Convoquant les outils de la pragmatique et de la narratologie féministe, cet article analyse ces sites discursifs d'ambiguïté et de conflits dans “The Introduction” et “Together and Apart” où le motif de la “présentation” suggère une négociation avec ce que la culture impose, avec l'autre et avec le langage, et où les modes conflictuels de la focalisation interne—essentiellement du discours indirect libre—et du dialogue présentent la communication comme une pratique où se fondent tout à la fois le sujet, la reconnaissance intersubjective et les stratégies d'interprétation.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 60

AUTEURS

ANNE BESNAULT-LEVITA University of Rouen, Maître de Conférences at the University of Rouen where she teaches English literature and translation. She is the author of a thesis on ellipsis in the short stories by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen (1996) and of La Voix du moment: Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Stories (1997). Her main field of study is modernist fiction and criticism, short story theories, and feminist criticism. She has recently published articles on Virginia Woolf’s short fictions and critical essays and has contributed to Andrew Maunder’s British Companion to the Short Story (New York: Facts on File, 2007).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 61

Adeline’s (bankrupt) education fund:1 Woolf, women, and education in the short fiction

Ann K. McClellan

1 In undertaking an analysis of the woman scholar figure in twentieth-century British women’s fiction, Adeline Virginia Woolf provides the most logical and illuminating point of origin. Woolf’s life and career directly parallel the political and cultural institutionalization of British women’s education at the beginning of this century. The disparity between her own privileged experiences and the harsh realities of women’s exclusion from higher education and, more importantly, British culture, led Woolf to the determination that women’s lack of education is the direct cause of all gender inequality: intellectual, professional, political, or otherwise.

2 While Woolf could easily have been caught between her idealism, on the one hand, and her frustration, on the other, she instead deals creatively with these questions through her writing.

3 That is, her unique position as both an “insider” (an intellectual, a college teacher, and a writer) and an “outsider” (one not formally educated in a university, and, more importantly, a woman) allowed her to present innovative solutions to the problem of women’s education and gender inequality at the same time she analyzed and critiqued the academic system. Employing cultural studies and feminist methodologies, this essay examines five short stories in the context of Woolf’s biography, her essays, and the history of women’s higher education in Great Britain to evaluate how Woolf both articulated the problem of women intellectuals as well as anticipated contemporary theorization of these issues.

Woolf’s Childhood and Education

4 Raised in a traditional, conservative Victorian household, young Adeline Virginia Stephen and her sisters were taught reading, writing, basic arithmetic, and Latin at

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 62

home by their parents and private tutoring in classical languages from Clara Pater and Janet Case.2 Woolf’s diaries depict her voracious adolescent appetite for reading, but this appetite put her in an awkward position. Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, had rather strict and traditional ideas about the kinds of education young women should receive (Stemerick 55). She “signed an anti-suffrage manifesto, holding that women had enough to do in their own homes without a vote” (Woolf 1990: 12), and promoted “womanly” aspects of education like philanthropy and nursing (Woolf 1990: 68).

5 Perhaps the strongest familial opponent to women’s higher education was Woolf’s father. When Cambridge was voting on women’s membership in the university in 1897, Leslie Stephen refused to go up and place his vote. Leslie Stephen was a dynamic father figure for Woolf and gaining his approval was one of the most important aims in her life, but the only way she could get his attention was by pursuing abnormally difficult reading projects and exceeding his expectations.3 Such a split between pleasing her mother and her father seems to have divided Woolf’s identity into a weak, invalid daughter seeking a mother’s love and the sexless, academic writer who desired, above all else, the father’s approval.

6 While the majority of Woolf’s family supported the traditional arguments against women’s education, this by no means implies that Woolf was unfamiliar with the university system or prominent thinkers of the period. As Melba Cuddy-Keane notes, Woolf interacted with many Cambridge and Oxford academics throughout her life. She was also closely acquainted with many influential women scholars of the period like Jane Harrison, a well known classical scholar and one of the first female graduates of Girton. Her cousin, Katherine Fisher, was one of the first Vice-Principals of Newnham College, and her friend, Pernel Strachey, was also appointed to Newnham in 1905 (Woolf 1990: 243). Later in her life, Woolf had several women friends who attended college like her friend Ka Cox, a “young Newnhamite” (Bell 173). Her brother Adrian’s two daughters, Ann and Judith Stephen, also attended Cambridge (Christ 9). But such an education was not for her.

7 Woolf did attend classes in Greek and History at King’s College in 1897 (Woolf 1990: 132; Daugherty 1998: 127) and had hopes of becoming eligible for “the first B.A. degree—if the ladies succeed” (Woolf 1990: 87); however, these classes were infrequent and often interrupted by illness and family needs, and some contemporary scholars doubt whether she could have passed the qualifying exams for Cambridge had she the chance (Daugherty 1998: 127). While Woolf later stated that there were some advantages to being educated at home rather than at a university, she was very sensitive of its short- comings as well. She missed the camaraderie and community of a university education, and she described her own self-education as “delv[ing] into books, painfully and alone” (Woolf 1975: 77). When writing A Room of One’s Own, she told Smyth, “I forced myself to keep my own figure fictitious, legendary. If I had said, ‘Look here, I am uneducated because my brothers used all the family funds’—which is the fact—‘Well,’ they’d have said, ‘she has an axe to grind’” (qtd. in Meyerowitz 242). Near the end of her life, however, Woolf seems much clearer about who was to blame. In a letter to Ben Nicholson, Woolf wrote: “I never went to school or college. My father spent perhaps 100 pounds on my education” (Woolf 1982: 419-20). While in the first example, Woolf blames money rather than her father’s will or patriarchy as a whole, in the latter Woolf combines economics with patriarchy in order to illustrate how the two work together to exclude women from society.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 63

Women and Higher Education

8 Woolf’s exclusion from university was not unique for her time period. As historian Deborah Thom explains, although this period was considered the “heyday” of equal opportunities for schooling, gender was virtually excluded from all conversations and educational policy making. The few times gender was discussed it was only as a “general social question” regarding the issue of whether boys and girls should receive the same kind of education, not whether one specific girl should receive a different education from another (Thom 125). Another historian, Felicity Hunt, continues that it is remarkable that during the period between the two great Education Acts of 1902 and 1944, when so much of Britain’s educational policy was formed, that the central authorities on education seemed so entirely unclear about their missions, goals, and policies. The central authority never seemed to know the number, gender, or identity of its pupils at any given time let alone whether these children had similar or divergent reasons in undergoing schooling (Hunt 12). The debate over class versus gender would continue until late in the twentieth century. It was only in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s that gender, as a specific category, was seriously considered by educationalists as a “legitimate” discriminatory classification.

9 There were several important education reforms during the first half of the twentieth century that directly related to women’s access to education. The 1902 Education Act, for example, provided publicly funded secondary schooling for girls and brought the chance of a university education within reach for many women, including those from disparate backgrounds (Heward 13; Ollerenshaw 31; Anderson 11). The Fisher Education Act of 1918 offered free compulsory education to the age of fourteen for both genders. While the act was never fully realized due to the depression and budgetary cutbacks, public spending on education still rose approximately 65 per cent between 1920 and 1939, and by 1938 over two-thirds of all children between the ages of eleven and fourteen were in secondary schools (Heyck 185). Even though educational provision widened a great deal by the turn of the century, it is important to remain realistic about the relatively low numbers of students, in general, who went to university at this time. As late as 1912, the percentage of women going on to higher education was only two per cent of the entire population (Anderson 12), and regardless of class consciousness and intent, the majority of these were from middle- to upper-middle class backgrounds.

10 Perhaps most significant was the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 which abolished legal barriers to women’s participation in the civil services and the professions (Heyck 155). While the act appeared to give women a legal precedent from which to battle sexual discrimination, it did little to put an end to unequal treatment and unlawful practices (Rendel 1975: 72). This act was viewed by many educationalists as the gateway for women’s higher education. Oxford University responded to the passing of the act by admitting women to degrees in 1920; however, Cambridge continued to deny women membership until mid-century (McWilliams-Tullberg 165).

11 Although Cambridge University—and Oxford, to some extent—still resented women’s inclusion, attitudes toward women students and academics in the 1920s were generally positive, perhaps due to the war propaganda promoting women in the workforce. By 1914 there were over 14 colleges and universities in the United Kingdom offering

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 64

degrees to women. Women finally received degree honors from Oxford and Cambridge in the 1920s, although Cambridge refused to extend full membership to the university to these graduates until 1948. Women were gaining considerable ground in the education sector, although it is difficult to determine how many women were actually going to university before the 1920s.

Woolf and Morley College

12 Virginia Woolf was one of these new women university teachers. From 1905-7, Woolf taught history, literature, and composition at Morley College, a working class college admitting both men and women (Cuddy-Keane 81-2).4 While Woolf was originally very excited about the prospect of teaching (Woolf 1990: 217)—she rapidly became disillusioned with the patriarchal practice of lecturing. When she first began, she was uncomfortable with impromptu speech, so she wrote her lectures and read them aloud to her students (Woolf 1990: 223). However, this took a long time and she began to resent this distraction from her writing (Woolf 1990: 237). She came to realize during this time that lecturing was not the best method by which to transmit or share material. Woolf quickly noticed that “directly [she began] to read, their attention wanders” (Woolf 1990: 249). As a result, she developed a more comfortable speaking style, using only “short notes, which [she]…put into words on the spur of the moment” (Woolf 1990: 249).

13 Lecturing was viewed as a method of intellectual posturing particularly abhorrent to Woolf.5 She criticized the “idiocy of lectures”, “the whole hierarchy of professor, system, & so on” (qtd. in Cuddy-Keane 72). Throughout her career, she was concerned with the “vain and vicious” effects of a lecturer upon his audience (Woolf 1938: 155). Lecturing, for Woolf, was a form of fascism. It incites the most debased of human passions—vanity, ostentation, self-assertion, and the desire to convert […] why not bring people together so that they can talk, without mounting platforms reading papers” (qtd. in Marcus145). Woolf anticipates Foucault’s power/knowledge dialectic in her determination that lecturing allows for a hierarchical power structure which objectifies the students. Rather than teaching students engagement, typical colleges create students who are “so anxious to keep their possession and their ‘grandeur and power’ […] in their own hands that they will not use force but much subtler methods than force when they are asked to share them” (Woolf 1938: 29-30). Woolf’s position as a woman scholar both inside and outside of the system allowed her to imagine a more responsible and imaginative ideology. For instance, if women become professors, Woolf argued, “we can pour mild scorn upon chapels, upon degrees, and upon the value of examinations […] If we are asked to lecture we can refuse to bolster the vain and vicious system of lecturing by refusing to lecture” (Woolf 1938: 43).

14 For Woolf, the British education system not only furthers male interest through nepotism and circular systems of power, but its awarding of degrees and honors similarly encourages the kind of vanity and egotism Woolf names as the source of patriarchy. During her lifetime, Woolf turned down several offers of public approbation including honorary degrees from Manchester University and the University of Liverpool (Bell 172); similarly, she refused to deliver the prestigious Clark Lectures at Cambridge University or to write a book for the Home University Series on Post- Victorian literature (Bell 172; Woolf 1954: 81). Woolf describes these literary awards as

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 65

a “bore” (Woolf 1954: 189). While Woolf could easily have been caught between her desire to accept the honors she deserved and her anger at the patriarchal culture which rejected and denied her contributions as a woman, she instead dealt creatively with her own frustration in order to think beyond the already existing structures of domination and women’s oppression.

15 Woolf believed that to accept honors from the system that excluded one half of humanity, namely, her half, would be to become complicit with the gender/power hierarchy. Although she theorizes a futuristic college in Three Guineas where men and women would learn together and share their labors, Woolf realizes that, until that utopia is attained, women are held at a disadvantage in society. Their only way to fight is to resist: But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its color, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of all human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison. (Woolf 1928: 110)

16 Later in Three Guineas, Woolf labels this restraint “mental chastity” (Woolf 1938: 82). Once women bow to the male egotistical structure of lectures, prizes, and competition, then there is no hope for change. Allowing their intellectual and scholarly efforts to be “sold” propels women back into the realm of capitalism. Thus, if women conform to the economic rules of patriarchy they are in danger of perpetuating the very system that excludes them, yet if they do not challenge its structure and become independent they risk being continually denied access.

The Short Stories

17 In (re)writing her own histories of the women’s education movement, Woolf explored several different genres: the short story, the essay, and the novel. In all of these forms, however, Woolf takes a political focus on women’s oppression. After her visit to Cambridge in 1904, for example, Woolf’s diary reveals her decision to write a history of her own, “say of Newnham or the women’s movement” (Woolf 1954: 134). Similarly, her journal depicts the following notes: “W’s oppression… Legal status of women in 18th cent…Tenigrove [?] suggestion of womens colleges—put into practice by Miss Clough along with others at Newnham, 1860. Began in Cambridge—Girton?—spread to Oxford, Lady Margaret’s, Somerville &c” (Woolf 1990: 279). Woolf’s notes illustrate her knowledge of the pioneering work of Anne Clough and Emily Davies in the establishing of the first women’s colleges at Oxbridge; she even wrote a review of The Life of Emily Davies, written by her cousin, Lady Barbara Stephen. Clearly, many of these notes and some of Woolf’s early work culminated in A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas, and short stories such as “A Women’s College from the Outside”, “The Introduction”, and “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”. More importantly, however, they illustrate the cultural understanding Woolf brought to her interest in women’s education and gender inequality. From an early age, Woolf used her writing to explore the link between politics, culture, and women’s education by working through different theories, fantasies, and frustrations over her own, as well as other women’s, exclusion from academia.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 66

18 Woolf’s short fiction explores her fantasies about what it would have been like to attend a college like Girton or Newnham. Before she was forced to face the harsh realities of the prejudice aimed at women’s intellectual labors, women’s colleges were originally an ideal source of wish-fulfillment for her. Describing a visit to Cambridge in 1923, Woolf remarked: “I had romanced so much about Cambridge that to find myself sitting there was an anti-climax” (Woolf 1978: 230). Woolf works through these fantasies by focusing on three groups of women in her early short fiction: independent intellectuals (as in “A Society” and “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”), women college students (as in “A Woman’s College from the Outside” and “The Introduction”), and women academics (as in “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”). In each group, Woolf provides both a utopian and dystopian vision.

19 In the first group, Woolf attempts to imagine what it would be like for women to live independently as scholars and intellectuals. We see this in “Slater’s Pins Have No Points” when Fanny Wilmot fantasizes about her music tutor, Julia Craye. For Fanny, Miss Craye “knew nothing of pins,” i.e., the minutiae of ‘real’/domestic life, because she “had not sacrificed her right to go and look at things when they are at their best […] She had not sacrificed her independence” (Woolf 1989: 219). Fanny imagines Miss Craye “steadily, blissfully […] happy” (220). Julia Craye lives in an ivory tower of her own making and does not have to deal with the conflicts, prejudice, or limitations of ‘average’ women. Fanny projects her own idealism onto Miss Craye—including her lesbian fantasies—in order to protect the idea that there must be alternative outlets for women’s talents in society. By maintaining this fantasy, Fanny creates a psychological and emotional space through which to live the reality of her life.

20 In “A Society”, Woolf uses the independent scholar motif once again, but with a much more pessimistic conclusion.6 In this story, Woolf constructs a women’s group much like the Cambridge Apostle’s whose mission it is to discover whether men’s works are of equal merit to women’s childbearing and rearing responsibilities. Castalia, who goes to Oxbridge and spies on a don, quickly recognizes the privileged life an Oxbridge don leads. When asked whether these men “helped produce good people and good books” (128), Castalia can only burst into tears, explaining, “You can’t imagine […] how exciting, how beautiful, how satisfying [it is] to—to—answer questions” (129). While Woolf is clearly mocking the privilege of the male dons, Castalia’s tearful response also recognizes how much Woolf’s women characters want that privilege for their own. In response, Castalia and her peers determine to set up their own “Society of the Future” whereby, albeit unhappily, they will try to create an alternative system of value. Unlike “Slater’s Pins,” which provides an optimistic envisioning of this future, “A Society” recognizes the difficulty women will face in trying to change cultural attitudes toward their abilities, intellect, and opportunities.

21 In the second group, Woolf imagines women’s students and colleges themselves as forms of wish-fulfillment.7 Prior to her visit to Girton in 1928, Woolf composed a short story entitled, “A Woman’s College from the Outside” which depicts a mystical evening at Newnham College, Cambridge.8 The college grounds are described as a protected “garden,” where the women students may “unveil” their faces and wander unmolested in the moonlight (Woolf 1989: 145). The young students are watched over by—and themselves guard—the elderly women dons who, upon waking, will “immediately grasp the ivory rod of office” (147). Angela Williams, the protagonist of the story, reflects on the economic sacrifices her family has made in order for her to attend college. After

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 67

spending a night watching all the other girls gossiping and communing with each other, Angela is convinced of the “rightness” of women’s education and the place of scholarly women within the world (139). Woolf ends her description of this women’s college as if it were a new, fantastical world, discovered for the first time, full of possibilities yet still precarious: Sucking her thumb like a child (her age nineteen last November), she [Angela Williams] lay in this good world, this new world, this world at the end of the tunnel, until a desire to see it or forestall it drove her, tossing her blankets, to guide herself to the window, and there, looking out upon the garden, where the mist lay, all the windows open, one fiery-bluish, something murmuring in the distance, the world of course, and the morning coming, ‘Oh,’ she cried, as if in pain. (Woolf 1989: 142)

22 Angela seems to read the oncoming morning as a sign of society’s intrusion into her pristine new world, both painful and dreaded. There is a sense of suspension, of a pre- lapsarian society where young women commune together in the night, giggling and whispering. However, the coming threat of daylight seems to illustrate for both Angela and Woolf the fact that such a world only exists in the short, brief moments between night and dawn. At this early stage in her writing, Woolf’s utopian vision can be interpreted as a form of denial. Admitting that inclusion in academia will not remedy women’s over-arching oppression is still too damaging psychologically for her. To protect herself from disillusionment and despair, she must believe that education will provide women with the liberty they so desperately desire.

23 As she grew older, however, Woolf soon began to realize how far her fantasies were from the realities of women’s education in the early twentieth century. Rather than seeing education as liberating as she did in “A Women’s College from the Outside”, once Woolf went inside a college she realized that women’s situation was much graver. Much of Woolf’s criticism arose out of her visit to Girton College, Cambridge, in 1928 to deliver the two lectures on “Women and Fiction” which later became A Room of One’s Own. The reality of the women’s colleges was quite different from Woolf’s expectations. In her diary, she describes the corridors of Girton as being “like vaults in some horrid high church cathedral—on and on they go, cold and shiny, with a light burning. High Gothic rooms; acres of bright brown wood; here and there a photograph” (Woolf 1954: 132). Woolf’s depressing description more closely links the college dormitories to a hospital or prison than the Eden-like atmosphere in “A Woman’s College from the Outside” where the students’ name cards call forth an army prepared to “extinguish a fire, suppress an insurrection or pass an examination” (Woolf 1989: 146). There, name cards resemble a “dairy or nunnery, a place of seclusion or discipline, where the bowl of milk stands cool and pure and there’s a great washing of linen” (146). By contrast, the young women at Girton are “starved but valiant […] Intelligent, eager, poor; and destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals” (Woolf 1954: 132). Muriel Bradbook, a student present at Woolf’s lecture, did not appreciate Woolf’s depiction of her contemporaries: “She saw us as painfully deprived creatures from the midlands preparing to teach those with the same background”, she remarked in 1989(qtd. in Stewart 69). Q. D. Leavis, another contemporary, refused to accept Woolf’s lecture since she had “no first-hand knowledge” of university having been educated at home (qtd. in Stewart 79). The fact that Woolf thinks women’s education leads to further subjection of women—they are destined to become “schoolmistresses in shoals”—illustrates her realization of the circular and adulterated nature of patriarchal culture (as well as her

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 68

own class snobbery). She sees women’s position as much more dire than she originally anticipated.

24 Just as “Slater’s Pins have no Points” and “A Society” provide contrasting views of independent women intellectuals, so, too, does Woolf provide us with contrasting visions of women students and colleges. While “A Woman’s College from the Outside” represents an idealized portrayal of college life for women, “The Introduction” explains what happens to women students when they leave the protected walls of academia and are faced with the blatant hostility of patriarchy. Much like Woolf who felt she had to divide herself between her mother’s feminine expectations and her father’s intellectualism, Lily Everit separates life into “fact” and “fiction” (Woolf 1989: 184). But for her, the academic life is the ‘reality’ rather than society. She first describes her essay on Swift as “a lump of growing metal,” a “rock,” and “this hard lump” (184).9 Intellectualism is solid and real for Lily; it is the foundation on which she builds her character. She cherishes this (self) knowledge as something “to hug to herself, […] to sup, like a glass of wine” (184). This certainty about meaning, interpretation, and the value of academic thought becomes complicated when gender is taken into account, however.

25 As Lily begins to put on another identity—that is, the identity of a young woman getting dressed for a party—she is confronted with her gendered self in the mirror and in the eyes of those around her. It is only after she sees herself in “the long glass being finished off (a pat here, a dab there) by her sister and Mildred, the housemaid” that Lily begins to sense the essay “growing weaker” (184). Similarly, once she enters Mrs. Dalloway’s house, “she accepted the part which was now laid on her” (185) and her essay “wobbled, began melting, she could not keep hold of it, and all her being (no longer sharp as a diamond cleaving the heart of life asunder) turned to a mist of alarm, apprehension, and defense, as she stood at bay in her corner” (184). Once exposed to the world, Lily realizes that she is not, in fact, a scholar but “a woman”: “all made her feel that she had come out of her chrysalis and was being proclaimed what in the comfortable darkness of childhood she had never been—this frail beautiful creature who could not do what she liked” (185). Of course, in coming out of her chrysalis of adolescence and academia, Lily risks the kind of disfiguring Bob Brinsley enacts on the helpless fly near the end of the story. Outside of college, Lily feels the weight of civilization—“the towers of Westminster, the high and formal buildings; talk; this civilization […] this regulated way of life”—like a “yoke about her neck” (186) and feels she has no choice but to sacrifice herself—and her essay—to the superiority and power of patriarchy.

26 What is perhaps most troubling about “The Introduction” is Lily’s seeming willingness to bow down to Bob Brinsley and patriarchy. When she asks herself, “What had she to oppose this masculine achievement? An essay on the character of Dean Swift!” (186), she seems to readily “lay her essay, oh and the whole of her being, on the floor as a cloak for [Brinsley] to trample on, as a rose for him to rifle” (186). She does not think she has anything to offer civilization in comparison; in fact, it is man’s duty to “be worshipped” while it was woman’s “to worship, to adorn, to embellish” (187). The only thing that seems to keep Lily from total self-abnegation is the thought of her essay on Swift. Even though Brinsley’s fly mutilation makes Lily’s red stars “bloodstained”, the essay itself keeps jutting into her mind, becoming “more and more obtrusive” until she begins to see civilization and all its glories “with horror” (187-8). She leaves the party

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 69

feeling “like a naked wretch who having sought shelter in a shady garden is turned out and told—no, that there are no sanctuaries, or butterflies, in this world” (187-8). Rather than the safe garden of “A Woman’s College from the Outside”, this is a cold, dark place that expels Lily and thrusts her into the horror of a patriarchal world. Even though the story seems to end with an apocalyptic vision, I read Mrs. Bromley’s final comment that Lily “looked as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders” (187-8) as a newfound sense of the responsibility educated women will face in the new millennium, much like “A Society’s” “Society for the Future”.10 Once again, Woolf dispels women’s fantasies surrounding the possible liberation offered by education by illuminating the battles and responsibilities these women will face in their futures.

27 While Woolf includes women teachers in many texts, Rosamond Merridew in “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn” is the only professional woman scholar—although this ‘professionalism’ is questioned by some critics.11 Perhaps one reason this story is so complicated is that, unlike the other stories addressed here, there is no companion piece to “The Journal” to help the reader determine whether Rosamond is supposed to be an idealized figure or a parody. 12 Perhaps another reason is that it is a fragment, unrevised, and never published in Woolf’s lifetime. As the earliest of Woolf’s ‘academic’ stories—composed in 1906 while she was a professor at Morley College—it is the most important because it represents the beginning of her theorization about gender, education, and academia.

28 “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn” is broken into two components. The first half of the essay relays Rosamond Merridew’s background and the discovery of the manuscript, and the second half is the manuscript itself, in the voice of Joan Martyn, the fifteenth-century daughter of a Norfolk land owner. The majority of Merridew’s portion is spent establishing her credentials as a historian. She realizes that while many readers may not know who she is, she is, in fact, a well-known and respected historian of medieval land tenure systems. She is forty-five years old, unmarried, and an independent scholar (whether by choice or circumstance, we do not know). She tells her readers: “I have won considerable fame among my profession […] Berlin has heard my name; Frankfurt would give a soiree in my honour; and I am not absolutely unknown in one or two secluded rooms in Oxford and Cambridge” (Woolf 1989: 33). While some critics accuse Merridew of arrogance and conceit (Engler 12, Skrbic 109-10), her comments can also be read as an attempt to establish her authority as a historian and scholar. Particularly interesting are the different ways she represents her scholarly reputation in Europe as compared to England. In Europe, Merridew explains, her peers would “give a soiree in her honor”, but she is only known in “one or two secluded rooms” in Oxbridge. European universities, like those in Berlin and Frankfurt, accepted women as students and academics much earlier than those in England, so perhaps rather than reading Merridew’s comments as “declamatory” (Skrbic 110), they establish a scholarly authority that is well recognized in other advanced, parts of the world.

29 As an independent scholar, Merridew is particularly prey to attacks by her peers. Often when she is out scouting for historic documents she is denied access because “some official […] has promised to come down and inspect their documents, and the favour of the ‘State’ which such a promise carries with it, robs [her] poor private voice of all its persuasion” (Woolf 1989: 33). Bernd Engler takes this to indicate that Merridew is “not willing to work with publicly accessible historical documents, but tries, instead, to

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 70

build her reputation on the evidence of privately owned, and thus publicly undebatable material”; therefore, she “has no genuine academic interests at all” (12-3). This accusation ignores two important points: first, as a woman academic, Merridew has few, if any, opportunities for full-time, academic employment within a British university. Without such sponsorship, Merridew lacks access to university libraries, manuscript materials, and other scholarly documents that other professional male historians would have in the period. Rather than being “unwilling” to work with such documents, her sex excluded her from those realms where she would have had this opportunity. Second, as Merridew’s comments clearly indicate, she is not alone in seeking out original, privately owned documents for her research. Rather, she is in competition with ‘State’ officials who have more power and prestige by association than she does as an independent woman scholar. Without access to the university system, Merridew has to fight not only for her right to research, but also for the kind of research she chooses to do: the ideological and economic relationships between medieval land tenure and women’s lives.

30 Merridew admits that her theories of combining historical fact with personal narrative have also “taken many shrewd blows” (34). Describing this scholarly debate in distinctly phallic terms, Merridew explains: “The critics have always threatened me with two rods: first, they say, such digressions are all very well in a history of the time, but they have nothing to do with the system [of] medieval land tenure; secondly, they complain that I have no materials at my side to stiffen these words into any semblance of truth” (35). She is told by her (male) peers that storytelling has no part in history. But this kind of word stiffening is antithetical to Merridew’s feminist methodology and research. She wants to move beyond traditional divisions between “truth and fiction” (35) in order to imagine a new genre of scholarship. Engler criticizes Merridew for imagining the entire historical discipline as a vast conspiracy (Engler11). However, this is exactly what contemporary feminist epistemologists argue happens in scientific and historical research, especially. No knowledge is objective; everything is influenced by our standpoints and perspectives on the world. So what Engler—and Merridew’s critics in the story—complain about in her methodology is exactly the direction in which feminist research studies has gone in the future, thus reinforcing Merridew as a positive representation of women scholars.

31 Another striking aspect to Merridew’s character is her self-awareness of what her academic career has cost her, personally. Not only has she had to defend her scholarly interests, methodology, and publications from her peers, but she has also had to give up more traditional aspects of a woman’s life like marriage and children (33). Merridew has replaced biological children with her work, but she is clearly conflicted about this. She has a “maternal passion” for her publications but sees them as “shriveled and colourless little gnomes” (33). While they have “the fire of genius in their eyes” (33), her work has been deformed by society’s problematic expectations for women in the home and the academy. Although Woolf’s contemporary, Q. D. Leavis, criticized her for assuming that educated women could not have both an intellectual life and a family (276-7), such sacrifices continue to challenge contemporary women academics who want to ‘have it all’, and this is a common theme in 20th century British women’s fiction.13

32 When studied in their socio-historical context, these neglected short stories reveal Woolf’s continuing exploration of the conflicting influences pervading women and

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 71

education in the first half of the 20th century. Woolf recognized that the liberating, wish-fulfilling fantasy of women’s higher education was at odds with the harsh reality of living as an independent woman intellectual. While she was unable to imagine a time when her theories of women’s intellectualism and independence would be culturally acceptable or even feasible, it is exciting to see her innovative ideas regarding women, education, and gender equality coming to fruition in contemporary feminist epistemology and interdisciplinary learning. Woolf’s affiliation with both intellectualism and women’s oppression may have thwarted a less determined woman, yet this double bind provided the impetus to imagine creative alternatives to culture’s traditional prescriptions for women.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Anderson, Dame Kitty. “Women and the Universities: A Changing Pattern”. Fawcett Lecture Series. London: Bedford College, University of London: 1963.

Baldwin. Dean R. Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Pub., 1989.

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Quality Paperbacks, 1972.

Christ, Carol T. “Woolf and Education”. Kukil 2-10.

Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Daugherty, Beth Rigel. “Learning Virginia Woolf: Of Leslie, Libraries, and Letters”. Virginia Woolf & Communities: Selected Papers from the Eighth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jeanette McVicker and Laura Davis. NY: Pace UP, 1999. 10-7.

---. “Morley College, Virginia Woolf, and Us: How Should One Read Class?” Virginia Woolf and her Influences: Selected Papers from the Seventh Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Laura Davis and Jeanette McVicker. NY: Pace UP, 1998. 125-38.

---. “Virginia Woolf Teaching/Virginia Woolf Learning: Morley College and the Common Reader”. New Essays on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Helen Wussow. Dallas: Contemporary Research P, 1995. 61-78.

Dyehouse, Carol. Students: A Gendered History. Women’s and Gender History Series. NY: Routledge P, 2006.

Engler, Bernd. “Imagining Her Story: Virginia Woolf’s “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn” as Historiographical Metafiction”. Journal of the Short Story in English 20 (Spring 1993):9-26.

Heward, Christine. “Women and Careers in Higher Education: What is the Problem?” Morley, Louise and Val Walsh, eds. Breaking Boundaries: Women in Higher Education. Louise Morley and Val Walsh, eds. London: Taylor and Francis, 1996. 11-23.

Heyck, Thomas William. The Peoples of the British Isles: A New History from 1870 to the Present. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1992.

Hunt, Felicity. Gender and Policy in English Education: Schooling for Girls 1902-44. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 72

Kightlinger, Jennifer Ann DiGregorio. “Sex Costumes: Signifying Sex and Gender in Woolf’s 'The Introduction' and The Years”. Kukil 117-22.

Kukil, Karen V. Woolf in the Real World: Selected Papers from the Thirteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Clemson, SC: Clemson Digital P, 2005.

Leavis, Q. D. “Caterpillars of the Commonwealth Unite!” Scrutiny (7 September 1938): 203-14.

Marcus, Jane. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

McWilliams-Tullberg, Rita. Women at Cambridge: A Men’s University—Though of a Mixed Type. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1975.

Meyerowitz, Selma. “What is to Console Us? The Politics of Deception in Woolf’s Short Stories”. New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jane Marcus. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1981. 238-52.

Midgley, Nicholas. “Virginia Woolf and the University”. Woolf Studies Annual 2 (1996): 147-59.

Ollerenshaw, Kathleen. Education for Girls. London: Faber and Faber, 1961.

Rendel, Margarita. “How Many Women Academics in 1912-76?” Schooling for Women’s Work. Ed. Rosemary Deem. London: Routledge, 1980. 142-61.

---. “Measures to Combat Discrimination Against Women in Higher Education”. Women in Higher Education: Papers from a Conference held in London on 29 June 1973. Ed. David Warren Piper. London: Direct Design Printers, 1975. 68-79.

Skrbic. Nena. Wild Outbursts of Freedom: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. Westport, CT: Praeger P, 2004.

Snaith, Anna. “A View of One’s Own”: Writing Women’s Lives and the Early Short Stories”. Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. Eds. Kathryn Benzel and Ruth Hoberman. NY: Palgrave, 2004. 125-38.

Stemerick, Martine. “Virginia Woolf and Julia Stephen: The Distaff Side of History”. in Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays. Eds. Elaine K. Ginsberg and Laura Moss Gottlieb. Troy, NY: The Whitson Publishing Co., 1983. 51-80.

Stewart, Victoria. “Q. D. Leavis: Women and Education under Scrutiny”. Literature and History 13.2 (Autumn 2004): 67-85.

Thom, Deborah. “Better a Teacher than a Hairdresser? ‘A Mad Passion for Equality’ or, Keeping Molly and Betty Down”. Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women, 1850-1950. Ed. Felicity Hunt. London: Basil Blackwell, 1987. 124-46

Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. 2nd ed. San Diego: Harvest Books, 1989.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 2, 1920-1924. Eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harvest Books, 1978.

---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Vol. 1. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. San Diego: Harvest Books, 1975.

---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Vol. 6. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman. San Diego: Harvest Books, 1982.

---. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. San Diego: HBJ, 1985.

---. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. San Diego: HBJ, 1990.

---. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. San Diego: HBJ, 1957.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 73

---. Three Guineas. 1938. San Diego: HBJ, 1966.

---. A Writer’s Diary. 1954. Ed. Leonard Woolf. San Diego: HBJ, 1981.

NOTES

1. The title of the article is in reference to Woolf’s use of the “Arthur’s Education Fund” motif throughout Three Guineas. For those unfamiliar with the text, Arthur’s Education Fund is a reference to William Thackeray’s nineteenth century novel, Pendennis. 2. For more information regarding Woolf’s education, see the extensive work of Beth Rigel Daugherty, Carol T. Christ, and Nicholas Midgley. 3. Beth Rigel Daugherty’s essay, “Learning Virginia Woolf: Of Leslie, Libraries, and Letters” provides an excellent analysis Woolf’s conflicted relationship with her father. 4. Along with Melba Cuddy-Keane, Beth Rigel Daugherty has published extensively on Woolf’s experiences at Morley College. 5. Jane Marcus deals extensively with Woolf’s abhorrence of lecturing in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. 6. Jean Guiguet goes so far as to describe “A Society” as “a failed venture into militant literature” (qtd. in Meyerowitz 238-9). 7. While Dean Baldwin reads “A Woman’s College” as an optimistic “hope for a new generation of young women” (29), Jane Marcus is much less forgiving. Labeling the story a “failure,” Marcus accuses Woolf of romanticizing women’s education and “valorizing” virginity (172). 8. Originally developed as a chapter in Jacob’s Room (1922), “A Woman’s College from the Outside” was first published in Atalanta’s Garden in 1926. 9. Continuing with this phallic imagery, Jennifer Kightlinger and Ann DiGregorio describe Lily’s essay as a “performance of masculinity” (119). 10. Jane Marcus has a similarly positive reading of the ending with Lily “emerg[ing] triumphantly to insist that ‘this civilization depends on me’” (1). 11. Engler’s accusations of “gender-bias” (14) in Merridew’s research are striking when faced with the harsh language of his own essay, which describes Merridew as “an embarrassingly incompetent woman” (9), “conceited” (12), and “an amateur and a bungler” (12). 12. Nena Skrbic provides a neat summary of the conflicting attitudes scholars have applied to Merridew (109-10). 13. For further examples of women academics in 20th century British fiction, see my work on Dorothy L. Sayers and Jeanette Winterson published in LIT and Women’s Studies, respectively.

RÉSUMÉS

Convoquant les outils de la critique féministe et des “cultural studies”, cet article analyse cinq nouvelles en les plaçant dans le cadre de la biographie de Woolf, de ses essais ainsi que de l'histoire de l'enseignement supérieur et des femmes en Grande Bretagne afin de voir comment Woolf a posé le problème des intellectuelles tout en anticipant sur sa théorisation actuelle. Dans les nouvelles, le monde fictionnel contrasté, utopique ou dystopique, des étudiantes, universités et universitaires montre que Woolf croyait fermement à la capacité de l'éducation universitaire à

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 74

libérer les femmes alors même qu'elle souffrait de n'avoir pu accéder à une telle éducation et à une véritable carrière. L'écart entre sa situation privilégiée et la situation difficile des femmes exclues du système universitaire et de la culture britannique amena Woolf à penser que le manque d'éducation des femmes était la cause directe de toutes les inégalités entre les sexes. Parce qu'elle était à la fois dans le système en tant qu'intellectuelle, enseignante et écrivaine, et hors du système—parce que n'ayant pas eu accès à l'enseignement universitaire et surtout parce que femme—elle put présenter des solutions innovantes au problème de l'éducation des femmes et de l'inégalité entre sexes tout en analysant et critiquant le système universitaire.

AUTEURS

ANN K. MCCLELLAN Assistant Professor of English at Plymouth State University in central New Hampshire. She received her Ph.D. in 20th century British literature at the University of Cincinnati in 2001. She has published several articles on British literature in nationally recognised journals, and she is currently working on a two volume monograph analysing representations of women academics in 20th century British women’s fiction.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 75

Who’s afraid of Rosamond Merridew?: Reading medieval history in “The journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”

Leena Kore-Schröder

1 Virginia Woolf’s interest in history is well known for passing by the authorised, official version in favour of the ordinary and obscure. But why, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was she so interested not just in history, but in history when it dealt with the everyday and the anonymous? And why did she locate this ordinary, everyday history so often in the Middle Ages, launching herself in 1906 into history and fiction with Joan Martyn’s story set in the late-fifteenth century; renewing her interest in the medieval with essays like ‘”Reading” (1919) and “The Pastons and Chaucer” (1925); and at the end of her life developing a sustained analysis in “Anon” that was still based in the medieval period?

2 Interpretations of “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn” invariably read its modern- day protagonist, Rosamond Merridew, as a prototype “new” historian, a misunderstood scholar whose radical research ushers in possibilities for a revisionary feminist history. 1 This is a valid analysis, but it begs the question of why Merridew isn’t therefore a more attractive character? Her narrative voice often grates, as when, without blushing, she explains her methods to us as “a confession of my own virtues” (34, my emphasis), or affectedly reveals her age like the coyest of spinsters (32). She condescends to the Martyns, assuming much about their house and possessions, and her presumption that “they would [not] hesitate to sell this old [house], if a good offer were to be made for it” is nothing short of outrageous (36). For all her declared sensitivity to “the lives of men and women and children” (34), she does not show herself a particularly astute judge of character: however unappreciative of his “grandmother Joan’s diary” Mr Martyn may seem to her, that indifference is not supported by his confession that “a man likes to keep his family round him”, and that without the journal and other documents he would feel “kind of lonely” (43). His sentiments reveal that Merridew could not have

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 76

been more wrong when, on the doorstep of Martyn Hall, she informed us with all the lofty confidence borne out of many years of research, that “This is the kind of place [. . .] where the owners are likely to possess exquisite manuscripts, and sell them as easily [to] the first rag man who comes along, as they would sell their pig wash” (36). Yet, comically, once welcomed into the Martyn household, she continues to mis-read the signals. Having gathered that Mr Martyn does value his family manuscripts after all, she is more cautious about what she can presume, and where she formerly did not doubt that he would readily dispose of them, she is now equally sure that he will not: wondering if she dare ask him to let her borrow the papers, “Instinct [tells her] that Mr. Martyn was not the man to trust the benevolent impulses of his heart” (44). Wrong again. She is immediately contradicted by the spontaneous direct speech of the next line: “'O Madam, there’s no need to bother about that,' he said, carelessly [. . .]. 'If these old papers please you, I’m sure you’re welcome to ‘em'” (44).

3 Reading with some care, therefore, we do not have to reinforce Merridew’s own self- image. Rather, as with all first-person narratives, we should be on our guard from her first line onwards, for it is not only the Martyns who are being patronised. Merridew’s opening salvo, “My readers may not know, perhaps, who I am” (33), patronises us as well. Of course we have never heard of her, and thus, needing illumination, we are already relegated to the company of those who do not fully appreciate her true worth. It is a clever opening move, for in not wishing to be associated with Merridew’s doltish critics, we willingly side with her (as almost all critics who analyse this story have done), and thus we endorse her intellectual authority over her inferior fellow historians. Reading against the grain of her first-person voice, however, opens up spaces in which to question how Merridew’s modern-day half of the story is implicated with Joan’s medieval one: what has happened to Joan’s “odd” spelling that Mr Martyn warned would make her difficult to read (41)? His description that Joan arranged her journal by month is also not matched by what we find. Most strange of all, how would Joan have been able to anticipate that she was coming to the end of both her narrative and her life, and head her final section “Last Pages” (60)? Are we to read the medieval half of the story with a willing suspension of disbelief, or is this covert evidence that Merridew has already edited and shaped Joan’s journal?

4 Such questions underpin the claim that Rosamond Merridew is a dark horse. It is too easy to read her as an unconventional, if not eccentric, figure whose work has been unfairly ignored by the academic establishment of patriarchal males interested only in confirming and promoting the official “our island story”. That, however, is precisely how Merridew would want us to see her: a lone female, who has won whatever academic success she has at the expense of marriage and motherhood; who dares to disagree with the standard practice of explaining history through figures of power rather than those subordinate to it; and, whose methodology is criticised for abandoning historical fact in favour of imagination and narrative. Her note of defiance suggests that she has many critics, but this criticism is hard to identify if we put her work, “The Manor Rolls”, alongside that of her real-life medievalist contemporaries. For example, if we look at the numbers of court rolls published in any decade from 1840 onwards, it is common to count in single figures: one or two in each of the six decades from 1840 to 1880 (before Woolf’s birth, and before Merridew would have been research active); and seven, two, six and one for each respective decade from 1930 to 1970 (at the end of Woolf’s life, and following Merridew). However, the statistics for manorial court rolls published during Woolf’s lifetime and in Merridew’s period, are

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 77

strikingly high in comparison: fourteen for each of the three decades from 1880 to 1910; eight in the period 1910-20 (presumably this dip is affected by the First World War); and up again to twelve in 1920-30 (Razi and Smith 2). In other words, the hey-day for research into medieval manorial court rolls is between 1880 and 1910: the very period into which Merridew is written, and towards the end of which Woolf herself becomes engaged with questions about historiography.

5 What is notable about Merridew’s research, therefore, is not that it is unorthodox, but quite the opposite: in terms of period and methodology her work is typical of historical studies at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Middle Ages were popular, and new historical methods using unpublished and uncanonical sources were being developed not only by the most eminent Oxbridge professors, but by scholars in other universities as well. Neither were the ordinary lives of obscure individuals overlooked: piecing together the everyday was a main reason for studying manor rolls at all. Such archives became important not least because, as a comparatively young discipline in the universities, medieval studies sought to establish itself as a scientific and document-based history that countered the romantic antiquarianism of the Victorian cult of the Middle Ages. There was also keen academic interest in local history, away from centres of power: newly discovered manuscripts led researchers to backwaters, and changes in the structure of municipal government in the late-nineteenth century encouraged such well-received studies of local borough records as those by Mary Bateson and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.2 The importance of developing history as a new discipline that embraced economic and social life was never disputed, with the London School of Economics established to fulfil this very purpose in 1895. Furthermore, so much of this socio-economic research was conducted by women, many of them, as might be expected, at the LSE, as well as in the recently-established women’s colleges. For example, in the first volumes of the Victoria History of the Counties of England that were published between 1905 and 1911, and which drew heavily upon medieval local records, 78% of the essays were written by women. Indeed, in the years between 1870 and the 1930s, female social and economic historians of all periods were well respected and represented in learned and professional bodies: even the conservative Royal Historical Society was one third composed of women, while the female membership of the Historical Association was “an astonishing 90%” (Melman 18).

6 Pre-eminently, these female scholars were medievalists, drawn to the period because it offered them a different view on the relations between community and individuality, or the public and the private, from that of the traditional post-Reformation emphasis on the citizen in the political nation-state. Neither were these female medievalists as ostracised as Merridew claims herself to be. The promising career of the already- mentioned Mary Bateson was curtailed by her early death in 1906, but other women went on to various degrees of success, all of them fostered in the climate of medieval studies at the beginning of the twentieth century: some of the better-known names are Elizabeth Dixon, Lina Eckenstein, Rose Graham, Alice Clark, Frances Davenport, Helen Cam, and especially Eileen Power.3 Born in 1889, dying suddenly in 1940, Power was an established professor at the London School of Economics, author of two seminal and best-selling studies of medieval society, and described by her biographer as “the best- known medieval historian of the interwar years” (Berg 2). Of all these female historians, Eileen Power was what Rosamond Merridew would have liked to be: a prominent medievalist with a brilliant career and formidable publishing record (no children, married only at 46—at 45, Merridew still has hope!), whose achievements

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 78

were widely respected and influential. Power’s Medieval People (1924), which went into ten editions and is still in print today, gives an idea of what Merridew’s publications could have been like: it is certainly this book that Woolf buys in December 1940, when she records that “I bought Eileen Power for 6d”, and regrets not adding a new cigarette holder to the purchase (Woolf 1984: 345).

7 Merridew precedes Power by two decades, but neither did Power herself spring from nowhere, for she was trained in those same methods of medieval historiography that Merridew espouses in 1906. It is, therefore, of some interest that Woolf was herself acquainted with Eileen Power. She comes into Woolf’s wide network of family connections through the figure of Karin Costelloe, with whom Power was very close friends. Costelloe and Power first met in 1910 and in 1912-14 shared rooms in London. Through Karin, Power quickly became intimate with the Russell and Berenson families: Alys Russell was Karin’s aunt; Mary Berenson , her mother; and Ray Costelloe was her sister, to whom Virginia was introduced in 1909 through Lytton Strachey’s sister Marjorie, and who married his brother, Oliver, in 1911. It is, however, Karin Costelloe’s own marriage to Virginia’s younger brother Adrian (in 1914, breaking up the living arrangements with Power) that brings Eileen Power into closest proximity with Woolf. Power was deeply sorry to lose her house-mate, admitting in a letter to Margery Garrett that she was “plumbed to the depths of atrocious misery, because I had taken a dislike to Adrian sixty times greater than my dislike to Hugh Dalton [who had married another close friend] & considered all those Bloomsberries as unsatisfactory folk with whom to have permanent relationships” (Berg 52). However, she came to terms with Adrian and his Bloomsbury connections, well enough to have been invited by Virginia to dinner at Tavistock Square in June 1925 (Woolf 1980: 30), and to have invited her back: in January 1940 Woolf remembers “shar[ing] a packet of choc. creams with [Humbert Wolfe], at Eileen Power’s”, over ten years before (Woolf 1984: 256). This occasion would most likely have been one of Power’s regular “kitchen dances” (as she called them): stylish and lively parties that she held in her basement kitchen—and her biographer confirms that Humbert Wolfe was a regular guest. From the early 1920s to her death in 1940 Power lived at No. 20 Mecklenburgh Square, and it is in this kitchen that Woolf would have eaten those chocolate creams. Therefore, in 1939 when the Woolfs themselves moved into the Square, to No. 37, Virginia of course would have remembered Eileen Power (she certainly remembers the kitchen dance, and buys her book), who was then at the height of her academic fame, a strikingly beautiful, famously elegant woman whose presence in the Square could not have gone unnoticed.

8 The kitchen was a wonderfully appropriate venue, as Power herself must have been aware, for a hostess-historian who introduces her book, Medieval People, as “being chiefly concerned with the kitchens of History” (2). Power’s ability to conduct her research of the 1920s and 30s through a “kitchen” point of view, and Woolf’s to devise a fictitious female historian who was doing just that earlier in 1906, testifies to the fact that both women had available to them a historiographical model which strongly inspired and supported their work. That model is F.W. Maitland (1850-1906). Arriving at Girton as an undergraduate in 1910, Eileen Power just missed Maitland’s high-profile presence as Downing Professor of the Laws of England at Cambridge, but she became familiar with his work as her own academic interests developed, and was willingly influenced by his methodology: as her friend and fellow-medievalist Helen Cam rightly

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 79

observes, “We are all pupils of Maitland” (vii), and it is in this sense that Merridew, and Woolf her creator, also sit at Maitland’s feet.

9 Maitland’s importance for medieval history as a discipline in the twentieth century cannot be underestimated.4 He was a practising lawyer whose legal interests in medieval land-tenure led him to extensive research into the manorial court rolls of the Middle Ages. Like Woolf’s Rosamond Merridew, best known for her work, “The Manor Rolls”, Maitland too is renowned for his historical studies and editions of manor, or court rolls. Onwards from 1889, when he published his edition of court rolls in the period 1246-1303, Maitland’s articles and books on the legal complexities of medieval rural English society were based upon careful examination of the documents of its manorial courts.5 Court rolls are the written records, begun in the thirteenth century, of regular assemblies held by the lord of the manor at his hall, which all tenants were required to attend. At these meetings or “courts” the lord or his representative decided upon what land, and how much, would be held by each of his tenants. These rolls, therefore, furnish the direct link between land and power in the medieval world, not simply by revealing the details of land ownership, but more pointedly, by foregrounding the problematic position of those who neither owned land, nor held land directly from the landlord. Land, and access to it, is therefore a defining feature of the medieval subject, and this Maitland realised by making land ownership the key issue of his research.

10 Maitland’s greatest contribution, however, was his double recognition that manor rolls are not only important as legal documents, but that they also shed valuable light on social and economic history. When, therefore, Woolf’s fictitious medieval historian announces with questionable modesty that her “researches into the system of land tenure in the 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries have been made doubly valuable [. . .] by the remarkable gift I have for presenting them in relation to the life of the time” (34), she is only declaring what had been conclusively established by F.W. Maitland before her, whose work marks the real turning-point in the study of medieval history. His imaginative interpretation of the medieval period recognises the fortuitous way in which English common law has grown out of the decisions and ambitions of a self- interested medieval power elite. There is nothing preordained or destined about law founded in such power: its origins are contingent and circumstantial and, therefore by implication, the law can be superseded and changed. To Maitland, each case recorded in plea rolls reveals not so much anything inherently true of the English legal process itself, as of the people who ran it. Commenting, for example, on a particular rule that “lived on into modern times, when it looked absurd enough and did much mischief” (he is responding to observations made by Woolf’s “Uncle Fitzy”, Sir James Stephen, in his book, History of Criminal Law) Maitland nevertheless asserts that “It was the outcome of strict medieval logic” (Pollock and Maitland 2: 509). In other words, laws are never deliberately made to be obscure: at one time in the distant past they had a purpose, and that purpose can be imaginatively rediscovered. This is precisely Merridew’s point when she declares that “I have often made so bold as to hint that the subtleties which delight us so keenly were more a proof of our ancestors' negligence than a proof of their astounding painstaking. For what sane man, I have had the audacity to remark, could have spent his time in complicating his laws for the benefit of half a dozen antiquaries who were to be born five centuries after he was in the grave?” (34).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 80

11 It is in the work of Maitland that all the key features Merridew credits herself with are found. Like her, he is interested in the history of obscure everyday lives. Plea rolls concern named individuals, each with a unique case: Maitland’s interest is always in specific detail, rather than general pattern. Then, too, he admits the crucial importance of uncanonical evidence, and works as readily with incidental archival papers, as he does with official public documents. He also recognises that these are constructed texts, and that they handle their material subjectively. But, rather than seeing this lack of historical objectivity as a problem, Maitland turns it to his advantage by realising that subjective points of view are nothing less than indices of real people in real places at particular times: they afford him with the ability to appreciate what is human. Maitland also traces common law back through a history that is emphatically social: he is not much concerned with spiritual or ecclesiastical questions, for all that the Church was a dominant power in the Middle Ages. Rather, his source material consists of dealings between people, in matters of family and community relationship. And lastly, in order to practice a historiography of this kind, Maitland possesses an unconventionally lively imagination. To understand history in this way, is also to allow for its narrativity.

12 The joke in “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn” is that it refers and defers to the work of Maitland without ever mentioning him by name. Merridew’s performance of herself, therefore, should be read as a partly disingenuous one, for if she is not a complete stranger to the “secluded rooms” of Oxford and Cambridge (33), then at least two academics there will have made her acquaintance: Sir Frederick Pollock, elder statesman of the English legal system and Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, and of course, F. W. Maitland himself at Cambridge. Neither man was an academic maverick or outsider. They collaborated on the monumental History of English Law in 1895: a project conceived by Cambridge University Press to capitalise on the names of two Oxbridge heavyweights, and which even over a century later has yet to become a period piece. Thus, the slyly grudging backwards-construction of her admission that she is “not absolutely unknown” (33) should alert us to the fact, that while Woolf projects her voice through Merridew, she nevertheless keeps it firmly, and typically, tongue-in-cheek. I would suggest, therefore, that “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn” is written with Maitland in mind as its reader. Half-tribute, half-joke, the story is inspired by affection for an admired friend (and he was a very close one) in the same way that the contemporaneous “Friendships Gallery” is written for Violet Dickinson, and much later, Orlando for Vita Sackville-West; Woolf does not reserve such offerings for women alone. Maitland, sadly, was dead four months after the story was written, and this could well be the single greatest reason why Woolf left this otherwise successfully-developed narrative unpublished in her lifetime, for with the death of Maitland she may have lost her prime motivation for writing it.

13 Woolf’s friendships with Violet Dickinson and Vita Sackville-West are well documented; that with Maitland is not. The reason why the young Virginia had the opportunity to involve herself with medieval history is not because Maitland was so eminent in his field, but that he was so familiar in hers. He belonged to the intellectual aristocracy of the Fisher and Stephen families, and was Leslie Stephen’s regular companion on his “Sunday tramps”. At home with the Stephens at Hyde Park Gate he met and fell in love with Virginia’s cousin Florence Fisher, whom he married in 1886. With his legal background Maitland also fitted seamlessly into the Stephen family; indeed, with Law

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 81

as the Stephen profession, going back for three generations and extending into the fourth with Thoby (who was destined for the Bar), it is fair to say that the Stephens were nothing less than a legal dynasty: Woolf had the Law in her blood. The family recognised, and kept to its own: just as Maitland’s brother-in law H. A. L. Fisher wrote the first Maitland biography in 1910, even so did Leslie Stephen request Maitland to write his, published in 1906. The young Virginia, too, was drawn into this family network, invited by Maitland to contribute her own “Note” on her father, and aiding him by editing her parents’ letters.

14 Had Maitland lived, he would undoubtedly have been a familiar figure in Bloomsbury, not merely because he was a Cambridge Apostle, but for yet stronger reasons of family and friendship. Virginia held Maitland as closely in her affections as Maitland held her in his, as is apparent from his last letter to his wife, in which he gives news of Thoby Stephen’s death. It is poignant to read how Maitland’s last thoughts in this letter are for Virginia, and she would surely have been gratified to know how much faith he had in her in spite of the breakdowns that were already a part of her recent past: “I can’t help thinking of poor Ginia. If her head stands all this anxiety and sorrow and joy, it is a good steady head” (Maitland 1965: 385-6). Maitland was not to know when writing this that he himself would be dead in a little over three weeks’ time. There are, therefore, very particular circumstances that brought Virginia close to Maitland in the 1905-06 period during which she was not only becoming more sure of herself as a writer, but was also attempting to become a teacher of history at Morley College. She respected him professionally, not just because he was writing her father’s life (which alone would have drawn her to him—“It is a blessing we have that book”, she tells Violet Dickinson [Woolf 1975: 271]), but also because of her own involvement in its production. Maitland, after all, helped Virginia to publish her first piece of writing in book form, and that is surely something never forgotten. The sad timing of events would also fix him in her memory, with her father’s biography published but a few weeks before Thoby’s death, only to be quickly followed by Maitland’s own. Her letter to Violet Dickinson after Maitland’s death is as heartfelt as anything she ever wrote on the passing of friends and family: ‘I do admire so few people—none I think as I admired him—and somehow the loss is very great’ ( Woolf 1975: 270-1).

15 Without doubt the young Virginia respected Maitland tremendously, and eagerly hoped for his approval of the short piece that he asked her to contribute. He did like it, just as she admired his finished biography. He needed Virginia to help him with extensive quotation from Leslie Stephen’s private correspondence, and this feature alone renders his biography strikingly different from the conventional model. Much of his book consists of long uninterrupted passages from Leslie’s own personal letters. Thus, not only did Woolf help to research and contribute to a biography that is partly the standard chronology of a life, and partly the voice of the subject himself, but she also witnessed Maitland’s historiographical method at first-hand, which wrote history out of personal and private experience, and treated unpublished source material equally with public and published texts. In Maitland, Woolf had her first example of an historian who, with her own father as subject, was able to interleave personal with public experience in order to explain how the two are inextricably related. There are crossovers of influence here, partly due to Woolf’s admiration of Maitland as man and historian, and partly due to her desire to write history in a way that would be respected by a scholar like Maitland. The result is “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”, half of which is narrated by a historian of medieval land tenure; and the other half told in the

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 82

first-person voice of an English girl living in late-medieval Norfolk. The two sections are contiguous, just as in the Stephen biography Maitland’s own authorised “public” voice as biographer stands beside Leslie Stephen’s personal and private one. Even more to the point, Maitland’s ability to untangle medieval law through his imaginative sympathy with the people who shaped it, is the very talent that Woolf bestows on her historian, Rosamond Merridew.

16 It is not just Merridew who engages with Maitland’s historiography, however: the whole of the story does so in its concerns with land ownership, which direct the course of Merridew’s scholarship as much as they determine Mrs Martyn’s “Theory of Ownership” over four centuries earlier. The present-day Mrs Martyn immediately draws attention to the fact that “Her husband was a farmer on rather a large scale; but land had sunk terribly in value” (37). The family history is partly charted in terms of land acquisition and loss: one Martyn ancestor “bought the Lower Meadow”; another “sold the Fen Farm” (39, 40). The modern Mr Martyn has every reason to claim that “I learnt a great deal about the land” from Joan’s journal (41), just as Joan’s father in his turn “is wont to sit, when he is at home, with the Manor Rolls and other legal papers before him”(49). Even Merridew negotiates in these same terms, establishing her credentials through reference to a more powerful local landowner than the Martyns: “Mr Lathom, (the great landowner of the place) will tell you all about me” (44). Land is a driving force behind Joan’s marriage contract—her mother points out appreciatively that “You [Joan] might for instance rule over the land of Kirtlings—your land would touch ours” (50)—and indeed, Joan is herself proud of the Martyn estate, to the extent that she is more attached to it than she ever could be to a husband. Even the pull of the feminine and the maternal, away from the masculine and the patriarchal, is still embodied for Joan in terms of land: “Norfolk and the parish of Long Winton in Norfolk is to me what my own grandmother is; a tender parent, dear and familiar, and silent to whom I shall return in time” (52).

17 It is not for nothing, therefore, that the story presents the “Theory of Ownership” through the ruling matriarchal figure of Joan’s mother instead of a male Martyn. “Thinking back through mothers” in this story entails more than just a spiritual heritage, but rather, goes to the very sources of power in property and possession in a way that has little to do with feminist resistance. Joan’s mother is an unapologetic nationalist whose ambitions for “the management of house and lands” (59) are preparation for the larger political organisation of England as a great nation-state. Are we to read her negatively? Yes, in so far as we measure our response according to Joan’s reluctance to embrace this nationalist, empire-building vision. Woolf places the Martyns of the late-fifteenth century into a very specific historical moment, one which Marx in Capital identifies as the turning-point between one type of socio-economic organisation and another: “the prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last third of the fifteenth century and the first decade of the sixteenth century [. . .] [in] the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land” (672). Where Maitland, and Merridew following him, studies land tenure in order to better understand the socio-economic history of medieval England, Marx takes the history of land ownership as a mirror in which to see the rise of capitalism. If we go by Marx’s analysis of the late-fifteenth century in England as the period of transition from an agrarian, “peasant” society to one that is capitalist, then Joan writes precisely as feudal England, organised upon the household as a corporate group, shifts into the modern nation-state, based upon individual ownership and capitalist

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 83

production. In this Marxist “progressive” view it is therefore significant that Joan remembers the way that her mother’s “Theory of Ownership” envisages a future of trade and national prosperity, with “wagons that pass each other going laden to the coast and returning as heavily laden with goods taken from ships” (60). Joan’s mother’s household organisation, with its subsistence economy, looks forward to that of a larger global market. Her daughter Joan fights shy of this system— it is the same one that Woolf in Three Guineas incriminates for privileging one gender over another on precisely these issues of property and ownership—and yet, Joan comes round to accepting it, once she realises that it will also bring stability to the land, with no need for fortified manor houses. Writing as she does at the end of the Wars of the Roses, whether or not it is the capitalist turning-point that Marx identifies, this vision of affluent peace is understandably attractive to her.

18 The point of Mrs Martyn’s “Theory of Ownership” is not whether we should read it positively or negatively. It forms part of story’s undercurrent of power and land ownership, reaffirming the connection between them in a way which (like Maitland) neither supports nor criticises that relation—even though its assumptions and consequences may be ripe for criticism—but rather, explores the tie between land and subject. Joan Martyn reveals the nature of this tie in her description of the ‘one road’ running through the land. Not the broad and prosperous trading road of her mother’s vision, this is a road of threat to the community and danger to the self: “There is but one road, and it passes through vast lands, where no men live, but only those who have murdered or robbed; for they may not dwell with others in towns, but must pass their lives with the wild beasts, who murder also, and eat the clothes from your back” (49). Joan refers to the criminal class of men known as “outlaws”—literally standing outside the law—which begs the question of how they can be dealt with by law, if they are not recognised as legal subjects. The outlaw is problematic because, in a society in which selfhood is defined primarily according to landed status, to lack a tie to the land is itself an implicit threat to the idea of order and identity. The outlaw is more “wild beast” than man (his symbol, as Pollock and Maitland observe, is a wolf’s head),6 and Joan reacts accordingly when she encounters one such figure on a cold afternoon’s walk with her brothers. Without any knowledge of crime, the Martyn siblings assume that he is a malefactor or “Sanctuary man” (52; a refugee from justice in a consecrated church). Looking like a wanderer, without tie to land, he is associated with criminality (robbery, murder or debt; 52) and animalism (‘prowling out of bounds in search of food’; 52), in stark contrast to the story’s other wanderer, Master Richard. While the minstrel, too, often lives exposed and eats “like a man who has fed upon hips and haws, and drunk water from the brook” (56), nevertheless his is a sylvan attractiveness rather than a bestial threat: only the artist-figure is permitted to wander in the medieval world. It is significant, therefore, that the beast imagery brims over into the immediately following scene. Here Joan describes how she and Anthony visit one of their own serfs or tenants. For all that they have rights to live and work on Martyn land, Beatrice and Peter Somers are sub-human to Joan, and they merge with the wild-beast “Sanctuary man”. Anthony speaks to the wife as “to some animal who had strong claws and a wicked eye” (53), while Joan doubts that she can even talk, “snarling and howling was her only language” (53). Joan’s horror bears no trace of fellow-feeling or sympathy. She detects no “human sense” in Peter, but only the responses of an idiot (53). She cannot imagine him living other than as an animal, and although it is her brother who insists that the Somers are people who “will tear us to pieces with their fangs”, she does not disagree:

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 84

Peter Somers’s “ugly face” continues to haunt her on her walk, and “it was like waking from a nightmare to enter our own clean hall” (53).

19 Joan’s is a complex response, and one that is not easily accommodated by a reading that would emphasise her feminist significance. It reveals the threat of landlessness in terms that Joan realises both socially and psychically. Reading past the subjectivity of her description, we might regard this scene very differently, and foreground either its pathos or injustice. For Joan, however, the Somers hovel, with its associations of dirt, animalism and sexuality, is but a continuation of the threat of the outlaw, whereby what is politically and socially dangerous has become internalised by her. In the way that she finds the threat of the outlaw equivalent with that of the serf, it reveals how that threat can never be expelled, for even as it is distanced from what is civilised and proper, it haunts and delineates the borderlands of social order from within. The sanctuary it finds is inside the system itself, just as the Somers hovel is not outwith the Martyn estate, but part of its internal management. Little wonder that Joan feels uncomfortable.

20 To thus understand history in interrelated social and psychic terms avoids explaining it teleologically. The idea that the real direction of history is always towards a confirmation of the superior present, Maitland realises, is essentially a lawyer’s explanation of history, whereby the past is used to account for a present situation. Maitland’s revisionism comes from his legal re-reading of the relations between past and present, and does not regard English legal history as a continuous progression from simple beginnings to mature complexity: “Simplicity is the outcome of technical subtlety; it is the goal not the starting point. As we go backwards the familiar outlines become blurred; the ideas become fluid, and instead of the simple we find the indefinite” (1897: 9). Maitland’s “blurred” and “fluid” history upsets the unilinear direction of accepted historiography, as is evident from the title alone of his landmark study of the economic and social organisation of early England: Domesday Book and Beyond (1897). “Beyond” in Maitland’s formulation is not used in the more usual sense of “afterwards”; for him, “beyond” means before, and presents a challenge to the compass points of origin and consequence. How we take our bearings matters not only to how we read history, but also “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”: are we to approach it chronologically from Joan’s moment in 1480 to the present day of Merridew? The arrangement of the two narratives, with Merridew’s preceding Joan’s, would seem to contradict such linearity. Is Merridew, then, meant to contextualise the medieval half of the story? Again, such “progressive” history is confounded, for Merridew’s authority as interpreter grows faint: the story fades away with Joan, and Merridew does not re-enter to complete her function as its framing point of view. Woolf thus places the middle and modern ages into narrative jeopardy, whereby neither can explain, nor account for the other. Rather, both stand in a relation that is in Maitland’s sense “blurred” and “fluid”.

21 This narrative strategy is the story’s single most radical move, for not only does it refuse the “Whig” sense of progressivist history, by which the past is forever perfecting itself into the (English) present,7 but it also refutes the Marxist historical model, by which pre-capitalist peasant, or communal society is necessarily differentiatedfrom modern social organisation based upon capitalism and individual ownership. Would the 24-year-old Virginia have been able to formulate such a paradigm-shift, so far-reaching in its socio-historical assumptions as to challenge Marx himself? In all probability, no;

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 85

but she would have been more than able to assume it through F. W. Maitland, who at the turn of the century stood virtually alone as a medievalist whose methodology did not follow the usual polarised route from peasantry to capitalism. Maitland’s ability to transcend the binary historiographical tactics of reading the sophisticatedly complex present against a naively simple past is nothing less than revolutionary. Not only does he counteract the evolutionary model of history, but at the same time he also exposes the ideological assumptions of superiority that accompany such a model. His logic enables Woolf to read history in terms of sameness rather than difference: to read across the temporalities of Rosamond Merridew and Joan Martyn, rather than to keep them separate. What Maitland makes possible for Woolf, therefore, is nothing short of the ability to appreciate what “ordinariness” can mean in itself, for if she seeks to understand an “ordinary mind on an ordinary day” (Woolf 1994: 160) she first needs a history that operates in terms of relation rather than exclusion. In his Domesday Book and Beyond Maitland exhorts us to attend to “the thoughts of our forefathers, [and] their common thoughts about common things” (520). Retaining even his periodic cadences in her own prescription to “examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day”, it is in the early “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn” that Woolf initiates that close engagement with Maitland’s historiography that would carry her through to the last, unfinished “Anon” at the end of her writing life.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Berg, Maxine. A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Cam, Helen. The Hundred and the Hundred Rolls. An Outline of Local Government in Medieval England. London: Methuen and Co., 1930.

Maitland, Frederic William. Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England. 1897. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921.

---. The Letters of Frederic William Maitland. Ed. C. H. S. Fifoot. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Selden Society, Cambridge University Press, 1965.

---. The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth and Co., 1906.

Marx, Karl. Capital. 1887. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Vol. 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart: 1954.

Melman, Billie. “Gender, History and Memory: The Invention of Women’s Past in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” History and Memory 5 (1993): 5-41.

Pollock, Frederick and Frederic William Maitland. The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I. 1895. 2 Vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911.

Power, Eileen. Medieval People. 1924. London: Methuen and Co., 1926.

Razi, Zvi and Richard Smith, eds. “The Historiography of Manorial Court Rolls.” Medieval Society and the Manor Court. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 1-35.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 86

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. Vols. 1, 3, 5. London: The Hogarth Press, 1977, 1980, 1984.

---. The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. Vol. 1. London: The Hogarth Press, 1975.

---. “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: The Hogarth Press, 1985. 33-62.

---. “Modern Fiction.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. Vol. 4. London: The Hogarth Press, 1994. 157-165.

NOTES

1. “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn” remains relatively little-studied by Woolf scholars. Those who do, don’t deviate significantly from the direction set by Brenda Silver in “Cultural Critique”, her Introduction to the (strangely abridged) text of the story in Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). See similar interpretations by: Anna Snaith, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (London: Palgrave, 2000) 58-62; and very briefly, Julia Briggs in her Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (London: Penguin, 2005) 112. An interesting study is Hilary Skelding’s “Redefining the Angel in the House: Evelyn Everett-Green and the Historical Novel for Girls,” Women’s Writing 8.1 (2001): 119-137; while Skelding acknowledges the importance of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century female historians (with Everett-Green as her primary focus), she still delivers the familiar argument for revisionary feminist history. The only analysis to offer an ‘atypical’ interpretation is Bernd Engler’s “Imagining Her-Story: Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ as Historiographical Metafiction,” The Journal of the Short Story in English 20 (1993): 9-26. Engler draws attention to Merridew’s unreliability, as I do, although for profoundly different reasons. For a reading of the story that places it against the contemporaneous and iconic significance of the English country house, see my article “‘The Lovely Wreckage of the Past’: Virginia Woolf and the English Country House,” English 55 (2006): 255-280. 2. Mary Bateson, ed., Borough Customs, Selden Society 18, 21 (London: Quaritch, 1904, 1906); Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The Manor and the Borough (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908). See also Peter Clark’s discussion in “The City,” Peter Clark, ed., History and Historians in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 3. See their work: Elizabeth Dixon, “Craftswomen in the Livre des Métiers,” Economic Journal 5 (1895): 209-28; Lina Eckenstein, Women Under Monasticism: Chapters on Saint-Lore and Convent life Between AD 500 and AD 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896); Rose Graham, S. Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertines (London: Elliot Stock, 1901); Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1919); Frances Davenport’s innovative work is discussed in Razi and Smith 8-9; Helen Cam, Studies in the Hundred Rolls (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1921); and lastly, Eileen Power’s two books, Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275-1535 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922) and Medieval People (London: Methuen and Co., 1924). Biographies of these women, and many others, can be read in Jane Chance, ed., Women Medievalists and the Academy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). It is a valuable reference work, although weighted towards the American academy. Nonetheless, from the information provided, Woolf’s Rosamond Merridew is an accurate typecast: of the 36 medieval scholars listed who were born before 1900, 26 were spinsters, 4 married late in middle-age, and 4 were married with no children. Only 2 women were both married, and had children—and both, if this tells us anything, were Continental Europeans.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 87

4. My discussion of the importance of Maitland’s work has benefitted greatly from Norman F. Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1991) particularly Chapter 2, as well as from the three biographies: C.H.S. Fifoot, Frederic William Maitland: A Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); G. R. Elton, F.W. Maitland (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985); and H. A. L. Fisher, Frederick [sic] William Maitland: A Biographical Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910). 5. Maitland’s major works in this field, all of which underpin my analysis, are: Select Pleas in Manorial and other Seignorial Courts, Selden Society 2 (London: Quaritch, 1889); The Court Baron: Precedents of Pleading in Manorial and other Local Courts, Selden Society 4 (London: Quaritch, 1891); “The History of a Cambridgeshire Manor,” English Historical Review 7 (1894): 417-39; Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England (1897; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921); and Essays on the Teaching of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901)— this last source is a fascinating text to put alongside Woolf’s own history teaching at Morley College; she must have known his book. Finally, there is the magisterial The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2 vols. (1895; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911) which Maitland wrote together with Frederick Pollock (it is widely accepted that Maitland did most of the work). 6. Pollock and Maitland 1: 476: it is interesting to consider that the Woolfs’ own insignia for The Hogarth Press is a wolf’s head. 7. This is meant in Herbert Butterfield’s sense as he argues in The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931), which itself is a critique of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s method in The History of England from the Accession of James III (1848-55).

RÉSUMÉS

Cet article replace le personnage de Rosamond Merridew, qui apparaît dans “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn”, dans le cadre des études et de l'historiographie médiévistes du début du vingtième siècle; il se démarque de l'image que ce personnage veut donner d'elle-même, celle d'une historienne férue d'expérimentation, féministe et marginalisée, et montre que son travail est typique de l'histoire médiévale en tant que discipline universitaire de l'époque. Tout en reconnaissant l'importance de médiévistes contemporains tels que Eileen Power (1889-1940), cet article s'attache essentiellement aux travaux de F.W. Maitland (1850-1906) qui portent sur l'organisation légale et socio-économique de l'Angleterre du Moyen-Âge et fournissent en fait le véritable modèle de la nouvelle Histoire, si souvent attribuée à Merridew. Ceci permet de lire la nouvelle en termes de pouvoir, de terre et d'identité, questions dont Woolf aurait eu connaissance par l'intermédiaire de Maitland.

AUTEURS

LEENA KORE-SCHRÖDER University of Nottingham, U.K.Teaches in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham, England. She has published widely on Woolf as well as John Betjeman and Herbert Read, and is finishing a book on Woolf and the uses of History.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 88

PART TWO BEYOND EXPERIMENTALISM: GENETICS, PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE AND THE SHORT STORY

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 89

“What’s ‘it’ – What do you mean by ‘it’?”: Lost Readings and getting lost in “Kew Gardens”

Oliver Taylor

1 In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf shows how bringing the mind into contact with “facts” relies on the trespassing of spatial and textual boundaries. On the way to the “Oxbridge” library where she intends to look at the amendments to a manuscript, she rapidly pursues her thoughts about women and fiction hither and thither across the turf, only to be intercepted by a Beadle who sends her back to the gravel path. No great harm is done, except to her pleasure – after all, “turf is better walking than gravel” (Woolf 1945: 8) – and to her thoughts, which she realises have been sent back into hiding once she is back on the straight and narrow. Predictably, when she arrives at the library via this path she is not permitted to enter there either. So she proceeds to take these encounters and weave them into an argument that demonstrates the creative potential of going off the beaten track. Indeed, she only breaks off her thoughts on the future of women’s writing “because they stimulate [her] to wander from [her] subject into trackless forests where [she] shall be lost” (78).

2 Nevertheless, with this in mind, she considers the novel, a book that, she says, should be adapted to the body to accommodate the interruptions of a modern (woman’s) life and one that leaves an impression on the mind’s eye that is “pagoda shaped” and “domed like the Cathedral of Saint Sofia at Constantinople” (71). The simile is apropos, since her own first-hand impressions of St. Sophia, show that, from as early as 1906, she was attempting to record how the body as a whole perceived both form and the “fragmentary”, “strange rays of light” that compose “it”: “Here was St. Sophia; & here was I, with one brain 2 eyes, legs & arms in proportion, set down to appreciate it. Now what ever impression it made was certainly fragmentary & inconsequent” (Woolf 1990: 349). Moreover, this same diary of Constantinople also demonstrates the importance of “los[ing] your way in the unrecorded slums” for the town to become “a real town of flesh & blood” (353).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 90

3 In these examples, then, Woolf is not only using place and structure as metaphors for different systems of thought, such as she does, say, in Night and Day to describe Ralph’s building a pile of thought “as ramshackle and fantastic as a Chinese pagoda” (Woolf 1992: 237). She is also stressing the importance of the body to the navigation of established structures and how, by trespassing their given forms, it is brought into closer contact with them.

4 Thinking back to Kew Gardens through these passages, one is struck by the similarity between them. For example, like Woolf in A Room, the young woman of her short story, Trissie, is lead down the garden’s “path” by a young man instead of going to the “Chinese pagoda” as she pleases. When taking the story’s revised typescript into consideration further parallels arise. Her diary’s description of St. Sophia as “the fruit of a great garden of flowers” (Woolf 1990: 348) suddenly takes on renewed resonance amongst details of a cathedral and mosaic in the typescript omitted from its publication in 1919.1 Even a cursory glance over the story’s well known opening sentence reveals differences in the typescript that align it with the description of her stroll through the Oxbridge quadrangles in a way lost in the 1919 edition: From the oval shaped flower-bed there [rise] perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart shaped or tongue shaped leaves half way up, and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour rough to the finger: and from the red or blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerge[s] a straight bar rough with gold [dudt] and [knobbed] at the end.2 (Woolf typescript: 1 [my italics]) Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. (Woolf 1928: 8 [my italics])

5 Not only do the emendations show that Woolf originally wrote the story in the present tense, crucially the language of her typescript – “raised”, “knobbed”, and “rough to the finger” instead of “upon the surface” (Woolf 1919: 1) to describe the “spots of colour” – appeals to a haptic sense that makes explicit that such an experience of the present at Kew comes through the immediate medium of touch. Whilst there is something attractive to Woolf about the liberty afforded to the mind by the hermetic “smoothness” of the Oxbridge atmosphere, it is belied by her anxiety about the kind of dualistic thought that has made “smooth lawns” (Woolf 1945: 11) of what was once marsh and grassland and excluded her, as a woman, from these structures. Moreover, the roughness of the present at Kew highlights the importance of embodiment to the cognition of a place that, paradoxically, offers the subject smooth passage between its lawns, paths and oval-shaped flowerbeds.

6 In her use of these metaphors of “rough” and “smooth” for space and her blurring, or trespassing, of the boundaries between them to demonstrate how each gives rise to the other, Woolf’s terms for spaces like Oxbridge and Kew might be fruitfully set beside Deleuze and Guattari’s “Smooth space and striated space – nomad space and sedentary space” (Deleuze 524). As we saw in the opening sentence of Kew Gardens, Woolf, too, invokes this “primordial duality between the smooth and the striated […] in order to subordinate the differences between ‘haptic’ and ‘optic,’ close vision and ‘distance vision’ to this distinction” (Deleuze 547). Deleuze and Guattari give “deserts, steppes, ice, and sea, local spaces of pure connection” as examples of this haptic space whose

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 91

“orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation”. It is one of the contentions of this paper that Kew Gardens operates in much the same way, “step by step” (Deleuze 544). By following Woolf off the beaten track and, as in A Room, into a manuscript (or, in this case, her own typescript), the present essay will show that, read alongside the published version, its variant readings help the reader better appreciate the place of the body in her attempt to write the human subject into touch with Kew’s “smooth” atmosphere.

7 Critical approaches to Kew Gardens often overlook or ignore altogether the revised typescript, and in so doing underplay the interaction between the mind and the body and the physicality of Kew. Edward Bishop’s and John Oakland’s articles are silent on the typescript and both, in placing the story in the context of Woolf’s view of life as “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” in “Modern Fiction”, focus on the atmosphere of the garden in consciousness. Bishop argues that “Woolf does not document the physical scene, she immerses her reader in the atmosphere of the garden” (269) and Oakland, who briefly wonders if Woolf’s essay involves “too passive [a] conception of perception”, also accepts it as the framework in which to set the story (265). Alice Elizabeth Staveley opens her thesis with the same quotation from “Modern Fiction” but, whilst it represents the most in depth study of the story and Woolf’s “Monday or Tuesday Years”, she too considers that “the only major distinction between the surviving typescript and the published text [is] an excised section of the typescript that expands on the women’s dialogue rendering it more of a competition than an exchange” (Staveley 73 n62). Kathryn N. Benzel’s article is an exception. But for her the “revisions demonstrate an experimental narrative strategy – generalizing and abstracting” which “recognize and replicate the indeterminacy of life” for consciousness, which she, too, links to Woolf’s essay (194).

8 For both Benzel and Bishop, then, Kew Gardens is represented “not as a physical entity but as a collection, sometimes consistent, sometimes discordant, of characters’ thoughts” (Benzel 192). Oakland’s argument that the story “is more than atmosphere, insubstantial impressionism or an experiment” challenges these views but, in not considering the typescript, omits a level of detail in its suggestion that the story reveals “a harmonious, organic optimism” (Oakland 264). The present essay is sympathetic to Oakland’s reading and by showing the way in which the optic and haptic function together in the story will also look at the ways in which humans, animals, plants, and machines merge through the senses. Its main focus, however, will be on bringing to the reader’s attention the emendations Woolf made to the typescript in the creation of the 1919 edition, with a view to emphasising the importance of embodiment to an understanding of the story, and thereby demonstrate how current critical accounts in terms of “thought” or “atmosphere” might gain from readings that show Woolf writing perception and cognition through movement and touch. Whereas, Benzel’s account of the typescript focused largely on Woolf’s holograph emendations to the typescript itself, my own approach will consider both these and the silent corrections made to the typescript in the 1919 edition. Moreover, by reappraising the story in light of early diaries concerned with the creative potential of getting lost and travel away from popular thoroughfares, like that above on St. Sophia, rather than her essay on “Modern Fiction”, I hope to leave the reader with a renewed sense of Woolf the nomad rather than Woolf the urban flâneuse.3

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 92

9 Woolf’s opinion of Hampton Court and Kew in 1903 was that, on the “maps” of most Londoners’, these locations might be “marked blank like certain districts of Africa” and that they were “essentially places which you visit between trains”. Her own experience, by contrast, was “crammed from no guide book or travelers tales. I have seen what I describe with my own eyes” (Woolf 1990: 172–3). The “intimacy with which she [wrote] about Kew in her diary” has lead Benzel to suggest that “she viewed the gardens as her own private space” (Benzel 194). However, even Woolf’s most intimate accounts of the places she explored and came to know privately in her earliest diaries show that, in her use of, say, cartographic imagery or detail from local guidebooks, her “refashioning” of “the geography of place” (Woolf 1992: 346–7) acknowledged, incorporated and was made in informed contradistinction to others’ opinions about and descriptions of it. Kew is one such location for her, “an intermediate space” (Staveley 33) between the private and the public, the local and the global; the gardens, as Katharine Hilberry feels, have “no points of the compass” (Woolf 1992: 350). In these early accounts of her nomadic travel, it is often those in which she demonstrates how mapped and unmapped, rough and smooth, space give rise to each other that result in her best traveler’s tales.

10 One of the earliest examples of this is an adventure she had whilst on holiday in Bognor in February 1897. Virginia and Vanessa, with “no map, no watch, and no knowledge of the country”, set out on bicycles and find “the roads muddier and worse than [they have] ever ridden on”. They take to the footpath, which is “smoother” than the road and thus penetrate so far into the country that “footpaths cease to exist”. Their progress is cyclical in a double sense since they return to the “respectable High St.” of the town, but not before Woolf has gained a knowledge of the countryside she lacked at the outset: the six inches of “sticky clay” through which they comically plough is set (in an aside) against Jack Hills’ declaration that “the country [is] a sandy one” (Woolf 1990: 33). Here, Woolf shows that an accurate knowledge of a location is, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, contingent upon getting lost in it.

11 The entry is also characteristic of those from the early months of 1897 in her use of deictics to write sensory experience through the hand and touch, and thereby couple the visual and the tactile, in writing the navigation of unknown space. In the February entry above, the deictic “– and behold – here was a school of little boys marching towards us!” itself stands out typographically on the page. She uses the same technique a month later to image some daffodils on another bike ride where she also “Lost the train at Welwyn” (Woolf 1990: 60). Again, in April, on another bike ride, having scaled a hill “on foot”, she writes: “behold a beautiful smooth descent of two miles and a ½ lay before us!” (Woolf 1990: 73). Just as in Kew Gardens and A Room above, here, too, “smooth” progress into uncharted space remains contingent on “the roughness of the present”. The importance of dismounting to explore on foot is again made clear two years later when Woolf was holidaying in Warboys. Despite the “roads” having their “beauties to the eye”, a bicyclist is “a mechanical animal”, so it is not until she dismounts that the scenery is “appreciated”. Here again, an appreciation of the “flat” scene from the “raised” road involves both the optic and haptic: to be “set down” within it, the present is there “to gaze at, nibble at & scratch at” (Woolf 1990: 143).

12 These nomadic movements continue in 1905. Although Woolf thought the maps accompanying her lectures in March “dull” (Woolf 1990: 255), tramping about Cornwall in August, “the map of the land [became] solid in [her] brain” (285) and, a year later,

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 93

she wrote how, “after leaping & circumnavigating, & brushing through reeds, & scrambling beneath barbed wire, it is pleasant to lie on the turf & try steering by windmills & towers to indicate on the map where you are precisely” (311). This is a far cry from the sheepish Woolf who thought it less “idiotic” to admit to losing “the road in broad daylight” than admitting to getting lost on the way to “nowhere” in 1903 (190) and continues to show the importance of cartography and infrastructure to her nomadic imagination.

13 Such is the case with her comments on “the scarcity of good roads in Cornwall” (290), which, by contrasting the “smoothly hammered” roads of the metropolitan “South” with the rough, “marks of rusticity” there, begin to use the same textural metaphors to criticize abstract systematization with an imaginative, felt space. Whereas the roads of the South “strike directly to their destination”, stepping aside from the Cornish “road” one must trust “innumerable little footpaths, as thin as though trodden by rabbits, which lead over hills & through fields in all directions”. Bodily sensitivity and spatial awareness go hand in hand. For example, “the Cornish substitute for the gate” (“granite blocks […] jut[ting] out at convenient intervals so as to form steps”) she likens to “the farmer wink[ing] one eye at the trespasser”. This system “keeps the land fluid, as it were so that the feet may trace new paths in it at their will” (290). But, as this and her earlier writings above show, such fluidity is not necessarily a sense best achieved by the human. By “becoming-animal”4and tracing multiple rabbit-like footpaths, Woolf deconstructs the “cut & dry” (290), “orthodox” (291), “natural” (366) system of delimiting space in a way that looks forward to A Room. Such imaginative immersions in animal and vegetable being alongside an emphasis on process and becoming, the haptic as well as the optic, can also be seen in her revisions to Kew Gardens.

14 Kew Gardens and these early diaries share much common ground in their acknowledgement of the power of the voice to create and condition space. In 1903 Woolf recounted “being brought to a stop” in her explorations “by hearing male rustic voices, alarming to pedestrians of the womanly sex” (Woolf 1990: 190), and Kew Gardens also displays the tension between the desire for an immersion in the natural outside of language and the interruption of this by the voices of others. The story opens with a description of a flower’s “throat” and concludes with a chorus of human, animal, and mechanical voices “murmuring” together, offering an alternative to the human dialogues that punctuate the story. Yet even critics, such as Bishop and Oakland, who emphasise the way in which these human episodes structure the story, neglect to point out that each of them concludes with one directing the other through Kew differently from how they have been or wish to explore it. Crucially, these moments of direction are also interruptions of mergings of the human with the natural world.

15 A comparison of the typescript with the 1919 edition shows that Woolf’s revisions of these moments of identification are much more evocative in the published version, and, by extension, their interruptions are more strongly felt. However, with the first couple, the human world is as other to the animal as the animal is to the human. Consequently, Woolf cut the part of the simile, given from the snail’s point of view, linking Simon and Eleanor’s movement with the butterflies’ through human deictics (“[flutter this way and that]” [Woolf typescript: 2]), to leave extant the more abstract “zig-zag flights”. Likewise, in the typescript, sexual difference is delineated more sharply: the final two sentences of what is the second paragraph in the 1919 edition form a short, separate paragraph in the typescript, emphasizing the otherness of the

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 94

sexes in both body and thought. Woolf also omits her holograph emendation to the typescript of Eleanor’s second piece of dialogue that pluralizes the final word “reality” to “reality” (Woolf typescript: 3) in 1919. But although the published version mitigates this solipsism by merging the typescript’s second and third paragraphs and omitting Eleanor’s self-assertive “I” (“For me, a kiss[.] <–> I imagine six little girls” (Woolf typescript: 3) becomes “For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls” (Woolf 1919: 3), thus allowing her to invite Simon imaginatively inside her “reality”) the potential understanding these changes suggest between the human sexes doesn’t extend to that between themselves and the surrounding plant life. Woolf omits another holograph emendation made to the typescript in 1919 that shows how the memory of Eleanor’s kiss narrows the distinction between herself and other human and plant life: “the kiss of an old grey haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses all my life [.] <– with the red water lilies – the past!>” (Woolf typescript: 3). The typescript demonstrates Eleanor’s closest identification with nature, but Woolf tempers this in 1919 to allow for the theme’s gradual development through the story.

16 Whereas in the typescript the two men are introduced in the same paragraph as the snail and the high-stepping insect, in the published version Woolf, again, delineates the human and animal more sharply by making “This time they were both men” the beginning of a new paragraph (Woolf 1919: 4). As with Simon and Eleanor, she shows the merging of the two through a simile; this time that describing the elderly man’s gestures in the manner of “an impatient carriage horse who is tired of waiting outside a house” (Woolf typescript: 5) becomes in 1919 just “an impatient carriage horse tired of waiting outside a house” (Woolf 1919: 5). Although the published version has brought the identification closer by focusing on the horse-like-man rather than targeting them separately, in both versions it is immediately undercut because in the man these gestures are “irresolute and pointless”. Through these two early couples, Woolf shows that identification with an other is a matter of being rather than one that can be achieved through language. To underscore this, she contrasts superficial identifications of the human and the natural world through metaphors, which immediately impose likeness, with descriptions that show identification happening as a bodily process.

17 It is through the younger man, William, that Woolf begins to affiliate the human and animal worlds in this way. However, this move is counterbalanced by an equivalent estrangement of human beings from each other. In the typescript, it is from the “sight of [Eleanors] dress in the distance” that William must divert the old man’s attention by touching a flower with “the tip of his walking stick” (Woolf typescript: 6). In 1919, this sense of estrangement through her holograph emendation of “Eleanor” to “woman” is compounded by the silent alteration of “ships lost at sea” to “women drowned at sea” (Woolf 1919: 5). On the other hand, the deictic function of “tip” to create intersubjectivity between the two men not only shows Woolf’s move towards the haptic and the optic but, in so doing, her equivalence between this way of perceiving through multiple senses and that of the snail’s perception of the texture and sound of the leaf with “the tip of his horns” (Woolf 1919: 7). That Woolf intended this resonance is made clear when looking at the typescript, in which she wrote “point of his horn” (Woolf typescript: 8) before silently emending it to “tip” in 1919.

18 Unlike the introduction of the other human couples, there is no “transition” (Oakland 269) paragraph between the two men and the two elderly women because, from the entrance of the latter, they recognize (indeed are “frankly fascinated by”) the absolute

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 95

otherness of the men in terms of sex, class, psychology, body, and space. Staveley’s footnote on the typescript (quoted above) suggests how, in the published version, Woolf softened the antagonism between the women themselves, but criticism of the scene has yet to look at the typescript in relation to how Woolf came to write the scene as a “moment of intoxication and identification, the immersion of the human in the natural” (Oakland 271). Benzel, who is the only one to consider the typescript, like Staveley, interprets the deletion of the competitive aspect from it as evidence that the women’s relationship becomes “vague, and the preceding lines of dialogue seem disconnected to any reality” (Benzel 197). Likewise, Bishop’s take on the published scene focuses on how the words of the women’s dialogue “cease to have more than vestigial denotative meaning” but instead become “palpable” and “non-cognitive” (Bishop 272). Looking at the typescript in the context that Oakland interprets the scene is interesting as its revision largely demonstrates how Woolf wanted to show this “identification” as an adaptive process happening as a function of the garden’s exploration, rather than imposing this blurring of material categories for the reader at the outset through self-conscious linguistic technique (like the metaphors discussed above). Woolf thereby particularizes each of these moments of identification as moments of being rather than generally relativizing the human and the natural worlds.

19 From the first paragraph of the typescript, Woolf describes the spaces of the vegetable world in explicitly (human) architectural terms: the light illuminates “the vast cathedra spaces beneath the dome of the heart shaped and tongue shaped leaves”; in the paragraph with the high-stepping insect, the “flat blade like trees” wave “from the root to the highest pinnacle”; and in the cancelled passage of narrative concerning the two women their words make “a mosaic round them” (Woolf typescript: 1; 4; 7). But in 1919, the equivalence between the human and the natural is achieved with a lighter touch. Woolf omits “cathedral” and “mosaic” and emends the other description to “from root to tip” (Woolf 1919: 4). Again, as with the flowers unfurling at the “tip” into multicoloured petals in the first sentence, the men’s joint attention on the flower through the “tip” of William’s walking stick, and the “tip” of the snail’s horns sensing the leaf, Woolf’s preference for the word in the published version over variants of it in the typescript shows her using it to signify the meeting of an other at the limit of one’s being in a language that appeals to the body but which doesn’t exclusively favour the human perspective.

20 Each of these moments also emphasizes the importance of movement to this process. By gradually introducing the way in which the natural world is identified with the human in this way, Woolf can show both how the human subjects adapt themselves to the terms of the garden but also how the animals come to terms with the presence of humanity in their environment. So, in the transitional paragraph after the ponderous woman has identified with the flowers, not only does Woolf emend the description of the snail’s horns from “point” to “tip”, the snail also begins to perceive the leaf’s “roof” in the (albeit crude) terms of human architecture. Moreover, the holograph emendations to his perceptions show that, when the snail is interrupted in his identification with the human, as the humans are in their identifications with nature, the process is ongoing but incomplete: he is only “” to the terms in which he begins to perceive the leaf, rather than accepting the terms in which they are “[revealed to him]” (Woolf typescript: 8).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 96

21 Her emendations to the ponderous woman’s identification with the flowers also make this clear: [She] looked through [thil] the pattern o[j] falling words at the flowers standing coool,firm and upright <,> with a curious expression, […] She came to a standstill opposite the oval shaped bed,and [v]eased even to pretend to listen to what other woman said. After a time [she] suggested that they should find a seat and have their tea. (Woolf typescript: 7–8) The ponderous woman looked through the pattern of falling words at the flowers standing cool, firm, and upright in the earth, with a curious expression. […] So the heavy woman came to a standstill opposite the oval shaped flower bed, and ceased even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was saying. She stood there, letting the words fall over her, swaying the top part of her body slowly backwards and forwards, looking at the flowers. Then she suggested that they should find a seat and have their tea. (Woolf 1919: 6–7)

22 In the typescript, Woolf draws an arrow to her holograph insertion (“”) from the word “bed” in the previous sentence. However, like the similes used to merge Simon and Eleanor with the butterflies and the elderly man with the carriage horse above, in 1919 she omits this insertion, again demonstrating her preference for process over single metaphorical statement to write the identification of the human with the natural. What the “other woman said” in typescript becomes what she is “saying”, and “letting”, “swaying”, and “looking”: all show ongoing bodily movement underlying thought and development. This is true generally of the difference between the typescript and the published version. For example, in the first paragraph Woolf alters “threads of fibre beneath the surface” (Woolf typescript: 1) to “branching threads of fibre” in 1919, the paragraph’s final sentence in typescript is also emended from “[come into]” to “” Kew Gardens (Woolf typescript: 2), and the description of William’s look of stoical patience is changed from “slowly [deepened] ” (Woolf typescript: 6) to “grew slowly deeper and deeper” (Woolf 1919: 6).

23 This reliance of the processes of language and thought on the body Woolf makes clearest in the relationship between the final couple, who, unlike the two men are introduced seamlessly in the same paragraph as the snail, suggesting how they will be put in touch with the garden in a way that the others are not. In answer to Trissie’s question “‘What’s ‘it’ – do you mean by it?’”, Bishop begins his article by insisting that “The reader knows what the young woman means” because it “occurs near the close of ‘Kew Gardens’”. “‘It’”, for Bishop, is “the essence of the natural and the human world of the garden”; not the “physical scene” but the “atmosphere of the garden” (Bishop 269). For Staveley, “‘it’ carries a weight of social signification that goes beyond questions of essence: ‘it’ encodes a critique of the economies of sexual exchange that underpin prevailing assumptions about conventional patterns of courtship, romance, and marriage” (Staveley 64). But, to continue placing the story in the context of Woolf’s diaries, perhaps the reader gets a better sense of what she means by “‘it’” from her diary entry on the 27th February 1926: I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on & say ‘This is it?’ My depression is a harassed feeling – I’m looking; but that’s not it – that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Sqre last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; & the moon which is risen over Persia I have a great & astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it’ – It is not exactly beauty that I

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 97

mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; trotting along Russell Sqre with the moon up there, & those mountain clouds. Who am I, what am I, & so on: these questions are always floating about in me; & then I bump against some exact fact – a letter, a person, & come to them again with a great sense of freshness. And so it goes on. But, on this showing which is true, I think, I do fairly frequently come upon this ‘it’; & then feel quite at rest. (Woolf 1980: 62–3)

24 Although Woolf, here, perhaps gets no closer than Trissie to defining what “‘it’” is, in both the diary and the short story the physical process (“(as I was walking through Russell Sqre last night)”) and physicality of process (“something one can lay hands on”; “bump against”) along the way to approaching the construction of “‘it’” are strongly felt.

25 Again, in this context, the revisions to the typescript are telling in that they emphasise how thought and bodily action go hand in hand, and, at the same time, how, in revising the characterization of both humans and animals to this end, Woolf blurs the distinction between the two. So, just as Woolf silently changes the typescript where the young couple press “the end of her parasol deep down into the soft earth” from “who knows (so they thought) what precipices aren’t concealed in them, or what slopes of glowing ice don’t shine in the sun of the further side[.]” (Woolf typescript: 9) to read “who knows (so they thought as they pressed the parasol into the earth) what precipices aren’t concealed in them, or what slopes of ice don’t shine in the sun on the other side? Who knows? Who has ever seen this before?” (Woolf 1919: 8), her holograph emendation to the typescript (retained in 1919) regarding the high-stepping insect waiting “with its antennae trembling ” (4), makes clear this reciprocity between thought and action in both humans and animals alike. Whereas in Night and Day, the narrator supplies a gloss to what Katherine means by “this” as she walks around Kew (Woolf 1999: 346), in Kew Gardens it is not the precise meaning of deictics such as “this” and “it” that is important. Rather, like Woolf’s experiments with them in the diaries above, her emendations to the typescript show that the body and its movement through space create these moments of intersubjectivity and this language for it, making “it” very much contingent on the “physical scene” and the particular situation of the subject within it.

26 In the 1927 edition of the story, Woolf added to this haptic sense of space by replacing “slopes of ice” with “ridges of ice” (16). Indeed, her emendations of the typescript demonstrate a turn towards the haptic experience of Kew in 1919: the description of the human old man on seeing the woman’s dress changes from “He took off his hat and began to hurry towards her saying” (Woolf typescript: 6) to “He took off his hat, placed his hand upon his heart and hurried towards her muttering and gesticulating feverishly” (Woolf 1919: 5); the metaphor for the youthfulness of the final couple metamorphoses from one about “the smooth pink case of the flower” (Woolf typescript: 8) to “the smooth pink folds of the flower” (7); even the simile for the mechanical gears of the motor omnibuses incorporates touch, turning “one within another” (10) in 1919, whereas they merely turn ceaselessly in typescript. Woolf’s hand in the production of the typescript may also have actively contributed to her writing in a heightened haptic sense: the darker ink on page ten – which includes “the young man fingering the coin in his pocket”, “pulling the parasol out of the earth”, and drawing Trissie on – shows

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 98

that she must have changed her typewriter’s ribbon before typing it, and the remainder of the story.

27 But whilst the (human) body is manifestly placed at the centre of perceptual experience in the garden, many of Woolf’s revisions of the typescript in 1919 show how human categories of thought are not privileged in the same way. Indeed, the “atmosphere” she achieves in the story is not, as critics like Bishop and Benzel suggest, at the expense of the physical but rather by emending human divisions of space and time to allow causality to be felt not thought. The emendations to the passage of light through the opening paragraph provide the best example of this: the red and blue and yellow lights pass one over the other staining some inch of the bed for a second with a spot of the most intricate colour. It [may] [strike] upon the smooth grey back of a pebble, or the shell of a snail with its brown circular veins, or, falling into the centre of a rain drop, held in a crevice of the earth, […]5Instead of that [however] the drop [is] left in a second silver grey once more: and the light now settle[s] upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the threads of fibre beneath the surface; and in another second [it] passe[s] on (Woolf typescript: 1) the red blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth grey back of a pebble, or the shell of a snail with its brown circular veins, or, falling into a raindrop, […] Instead the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on (Woolf 1919: 1)

28 In 1919, the passage of time is not measured by the “second”. Rather, the perception of the movement of light is the very way in which the passage of time is felt. Instead, “again” and “then” (for example in the emendation from “After a time” to “then” in the final sentence of the scene with the two women above) are words that characterize the causal relation of events for both humans and animals alike, rather than time’s conception in minutes and seconds. Indeed, the “time” that one should have tea according to convention rather than desire is the premise upon which the young man regulates Trissie’s exploration of the garden.

29 It is fitting that, having given a reading of Kew Gardens in light of Woolf’s early writing about nomadic travel and the significance of the body feeling its way into unmapped space, my closing observations should concern a small but important change to the typescript that demonstrates Woolf’s preference for going off the beaten track at Kew. In her article, Benzel notes that, rather than closing with the snail going on “quietly towards his goal” (Woolf typescript: 12), in the published story light simply flashes into the air. However, as this article has shown, Woolf’s emendations to the animal world double those made to the human – the high-stepping insect trembles in deliberation just as the ponderous woman sways in time with the flowers; the tips of walking sticks press themselves upon the world like the tips of the snail’s horns – and this change should be read alongside another of Woolf’s amendments on the same page. Whereas in the typescript, the men, women and children who see “the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass path” leave it for the shade of the trees, in 1919 they only see “the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass” (9). Here, like Woolf in A Room, they are not following a path anyway when they lose themselves in the trackless forest. For the men, women and children, then, as much as for the snail, the smooth space of the

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 99

garden, unlike the infrastructure of the city that makes itself heard outside, is one that must be felt into and that unfolds itself through this process of exploration.

30 For Deleuze and Guattari, “Taking a walk is a haecceity”. “Haecceity, fog, glare. A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle” (290). As we have seen, so, too, is a walk in Kew Gardens. Each being we meet in the garden is already on the way to somewhere else; their identifications with one another are always kinetic. This essay has shown that the differences between the typescript and the published story demonstrate how Woolf revised the story to these ends. Whilst it is fair to say that certain revisions to the typescript represent a move towards “generalization and abstraction” (Benzel 194) Woolf’s “mist” derives “from extreme precision, not vagueness” (Bishop 274), and I would argue that her emendations generally appeal to a haptic sense of space, rooting perception, thought and action in the bodies of humans and animals alike. Through the body and its movement, the deictic language for what the character’s perceive (for example, Trissie’s “turning her head this way and that way […] wishing to go down there and then down there”) makes sense; “‘it’” describes and interrogates the ongoing process of sensing, of making sense, out of one’s body as much as it seeks to fix upon a definition. In the midst of things at Kew, perception “no longer resides in the relation between a subject and an object, but rather in the movement serving as the limit of that relation” (Deleuze 311). The nomadic “streaming, spiralling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation” (Deleuze 550) taken by the couples and animals through Kew Gardens blurs them together whilst they move in this way. Such “zig-zag flights” are taken by Simon and Eleanor and the butterflies. In another diary entry on her exploration of Cornwall in the summer of 1905, Woolf wrote: “We make expeditions, it seems to me, more for the sake of the going & coming […] than because there is any special sight of beauty to be found in the spot where we pitch our resting place” (Woolf 1990: 294). By unearthing some of the variant lines lost in the transition between the typescript and the published version of the story, one can see how Woolf tried to leave her reader with a similar sense of Kew, and the ebb and flow of a walk through it in July.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Benzel, Kathryn N. “Woolf’s Early Experimentation with Consciousness: ‘Kew Gardens,’ Typescript to Publication, 1917–1919” in Virginia Woolf: Turning the Centuries. Selected Papers from the Ninth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Ann Ardis and Bonnie Kime Scott. New York: Pace UP, 2000. 192–9.

Bishop, Edward. “Pursuing ‘It’ Through ‘Kew Gardens’” in Studies in Short Fiction 19 (1982): 269–75.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004.

Oakland, John. “Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens” in English Studies 3 (1987): 264–73.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 100

Staveley, Alice Elizabeth. “Reconfiguring ‘Kew Gardens’: Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday Years”. DPhil thesis. U of Oxford, 2000.

Woolf, Virginia. “Kew Gardens”. Typescript. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. 1–12.

---. Kew Gardens. London: Hogarth, 1919.

---. Night and Day (1919). Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1999.

---. Kew Gardens. London: Hogarth, 1927.

---. A Room of One’s Own (1928). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945.

---. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897–1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. London: Hogarth, 1990.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume III 1925–1930. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNellie. London: Hogarth, 1980.

NOTES

1. All references to the printed edition of Kew Gardens are to the first 1919 edition, unless stated otherwise. However, since no pagination was given to either this or the 1927 edition, the page numbering I have given for these editions takes page 1 to be that on which the text of the story begins. 2. For the ease of the reader, I have silently corrected Woolf’s often extensive typographical errors in quotation from the typescript. Words in [square brackets] indicate holograph deletions to the typescript. Words in indicate holograph insertions to the typescript. 3. See Rachel Bowlby, “Walking, Women, and Writing: Virginia Woolf as flâneuse” in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Routledge, 1992). 4. See “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…” in A Thousand Plateaus, which makes special reference to Woolf. 5. My ellipsis to indicate my abbreviation of this passage of the typescript.

RÉSUMÉS

La flâneuse urbaine: c'est en ces termes qu'on a souvent parlé de l'écriture de Woolf de “Street Haunting” à “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street”. Cet article propose de revenir sur ces termes en lisant “Kew Gardens” à la lumière des journaux d'adolescence où Woolf décrit ses explorations nomades de la campagne, hors des sentiers battus. Les critiques de cette nouvelle ont négligé ou minimisé l'importance des révisions que Woolf fit du tapuscrit et d'un commun accord, lisent le jardin en termes d'atmosphère. En présentant une comparaison détaillée du tapuscrit et de la première édition de “Kew Gardens” (1919), cette étude découvre certaines lectures perdues et les met en relation avec les observations que Woolf consigne dans son journal sur le potentiel créatif que constitue le fait de se perdre. En outre, en examinant la façon dont Woolf révise le tapuscrit en 1919 et insiste sur l'exploration physique de l'espace par le toucher, cet article montre

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 101

l'importance du corps dans toute analyse du langage, de la conscience—à la fois humaine et animale—et de l'atmosphère dans la nouvelle.

AUTEURS

OLIVER TAYLOR U.K.Doctoral Fellow at Durham University where he is in the final stages of completing a Ph.D. on “Body Language in D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf”. He has published articles on “Love Among the Haystacks” and “The Prussian Officer” in The Companion to the British Short Story (Facts-on-File: 2006) and a chapter on “D. H. Lawrence’s and Virginia Woolf’s Hands” in The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning After Theory (Peter Lang: 2008).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 102

Enclosing the Whole: Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” as Autopoetic Narrative

Frank Stevenson

“[I wish to] re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, and shape infinite strange shapes ” (Woolf 1975: 356)1

1 The short pieces published in Monday or Tuesday (1921) and written between 1917 and 1921—not quite Virginia Woolf’s earliest period2—are social, historical, autobiographical, psychological, epistemological and/or metaphysical experiments. “A Society” begins with the creation or origin of a particular society (a group of women who are friends) rather than with, say, the origin of human society: “This is how it all came about. Six or seven of us were sitting one day after tea. [...] After a time, [...] we drew around the fire and began as usual to praise men” (Woolf 1989: 124). “A Mark on the Wall” is more explicitly epistemological and (meta)physical: it focuses on a fixed physical point, a mysterious “mark” (in fact a snail) which the narrator tries to identify in a discontinuous, freely-associating stream-of-consciousness.

2 “Kew Gardens” can be read, from a very objective, detached, abstract point of view, as a physics experiment: a hidden microphone (the snail) is placed randomly within a large public garden, and it records fragments of the conversations of a series of couples as they approach and pass, their voices emerging out of noise to make sense, then fading again into noise. But this is to speak of a focal point or observer that is (like the snail in “Mark”) “within the system”, to use the terms of cybernetics and systems theory. There is also an omniscient observer, no less apparently trans- human, standing outside the system and encompassing or enclosing it, although this second observer or point of view becomes clearest at the story’s end. Here I am particularly interested in exploring the relation between these two perspectives, and I will suggest a way in which we might look at this highly experimental narrative as being itself a sort of self-enclosed, self-creating, autopoietic “system”.3

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 103

Visual-Aesthetic, Temporal, Linguistic Space

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, [...]. Life is not a series of symmetrical gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. (Woolf 1972: 106)

3 In this famous passage from “Modern Fiction” the “envelope” suggests a subjective, aestheticized view of consciousness while the “atoms” suggest a radically empirical view of human perception, as does Woolf’s interest in predecessors like Swift and Sterne.4 Noting the author’s interest in the painter Roger Fry, McLaurin explores Woolf’s visual-aesthetic, perspectival techniques and relates them to her experiments with representing temporality through repetition. “Kew Gardens” foregrounds painterly aesthetics in a special way; Julia Briggs speaks of the influence on Woolf of French impressionism and Katherine Mansfield’s own miniaturized and static (as in “painting a scene”) narrative techniques. As for empiricism, critics have seen it in the author’s stream-of-consciousness technique, mainly in the stylistically most experimental novels—Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves. However, readers of all persuasions have tended to take the author’s shorter fiction less seriously, in part due to its greater experimentalism (thus difficulty, “obscurity”).5

4 “Experimentalism” is the key point. Yet the term itself, a cognate of “experience” and “empirical,” tends to suggest science before it suggests art. Indeed, not only is literary (and more generally artistic) experimentalism closely related to the idea of scientific experimentalism, but the former may even be modeled on the latter. A literary experiment is roughly analogous to a scientific one in that it proceeds from some hypothesis about what fiction can and cannot do. It then tests that hypothesis by trial and error and compares the results to what the hypothesis predicted. If the experiment succeeds, some new insight is gained into the possibilities of language to order and describe the universe [...]. [However,] in science Nature is the ultimate arbiter, whereas in literature aesthetic considerations are paramount. (Baldwin 5)

5 Of course, in literature any aesthetic considerations are circumscribed by the limits of verbal language. Thus while it is true that Woolf was seeking “some new insight [...]into the possibilities of language to order and describe the universe”, she was always aware of the negative side of these possibilities, the limitations of English. Woolf was in fact very concerned with the relation between, on the one hand, visual-aesthetic (artistic, painterly) and physical space and, on the other, “linguistic space”; that is, she was preoccupied with the problem of representing physical and aesthetic spaces—where the relation between a “real” physical space and a “virtual” aesthetic one is already problematic—in verbal language.

6 Here Woolf was influenced by the painter Roger Fry and his theories on the use of shape, color and form to create a sense (an illusion) of perspective in painting. She took to heart Fry’s belief that spatial and plastic forms in themselves, independent of psychological ones, can create “spiritual” meaning or value (McLaurin 91).6 Thus in her writing she tends to foreground the pre-existing spatiality, the spatial framework that is always presupposed by verbal spatial descriptions, that is, to foreground their spatial-perspectival nature. “In many ways Virginia Woolf tries to right the balance

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 104

between the literary and the visual by allowing a great deal of the spatial element in her art—as much, indeed, as words can accomplish in this direction. She never forgets the visual, spatial metaphor involved in speaking of ‘point of view’ or ‘perspective’; they are never merely psychological” (McLaurin 91).

7 In this interface between visual-aesthetic and verbal-linguistic space(s) there is, for Woolf, a kind of tension between two modes or “orientations”. On the one hand we have the sense of the harmony of the perceived scene at this moment, a sense of the visual-aesthetic surface upon which everything is “smoothed out.” McLaurin cites a passage from Woolf’s diary (92): Proportions changed That in the evening, or on colourless days, the proportions of the landscape change suddenly. I saw people playing stoolball in the meadow; they appeared sunk down on a flat board; and the downs raised high up and mountainous around them. Detail was smoothed out. This was an extremely beautiful effect: the colours of women’s dresses also showing very bright and pure in the almost untinted surroundings. I knew, also, that the proportions were abnormal—as if I were looking between my legs”. (Woolf 1953: 96)7

8 On the other hand, of course, the “detail” can only be “smoothed out” because the incongruities were there to begin with, and we still have the slightly shocking sense of perceptual distortion: “the proportions were abnormal—as if I were looking between my legs”. The dynamic of flattening-out is really the interplay between two extreme positions, between what is “raised up from” and what is “sunk down on a flat board”, between positive and negative values. Thinking of this “negativity” more abstractly, perhaps as being in effect itself projected onto the two-dimensional surface, it appears as “holes” (or “discontinuities”) in an otherwise continuous, visual-esthetic-spatial or linguistic-spatial surface.8

9 The negativity can also be seen like this: what is momentarily foregrounded (“the colours of the women’s dresses” for instance) can also be “backgrounded” by what we first thought was its background, now emerging as foreground as if in a sort of Gestalt- switch.9 Yet such a “rhythm” is possible only if we adopt Woolf’s temporal mode ofpausingor “lingering in the moment”—as opposed to rushing forward into the future: “[I]n her own work she seeks freedom in Proust’s way, by the past crystallized in the present, and for that to occur a certain static quality is necessary. But there must be some rhythm in that moment of stillness; her own movement is not from present to future as in Lawrence, but from the near to the far and the large to the small. Her special moments are instantaneous and spatial” (McLaurin 93).

10 The “moment of stillness,” then, in which we gaze at a particular scene—which we might associate with the mode of “smoothing-out the surface”—has its own spatio- temporal rhythm: it is an essentially spatial leap, a discontinuous jump or displacement into the distant past or future that is now seen as a sudden move from “near to far and large to small.” The spectator’s indefinitely long lingering (or pause) before the scene brings her suddenly so close to its surface that we get the sense of a radical temporal displacement. Yet what is being gazed at is also the linguistic surface itself, the language-surface, which now (having come so close to us) appears to be filled with holes, aporias, spaces between the words.10 The temporal discontinuity becomes the discontinuity (irregularity, disorder) of the spatio-linguistic surface. Einstein’s relative equivalence of space-time at speeds approaching that of light indeed makes use of the idea or trope of folds in space, now also interpreted as holes; the trope of past (and/or

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 105

future) as “crystallized in the present” also suggests, with its image of embedment, a rough surface, a surface marked by holes.

11 Thus Woolf describes the conversation of her last two couples in “Kew Gardens”: The ponderous woman looked through the pattern of falling words at the flowers [...] . She stood there letting the words fall over her [...]. Long pauses came between each of these remarks: they were uttered in toneless and monotonous voices. [...] as if these short insignificant words also expressed something, words with short wings for their heavy body of meaning, inadequate to carry them far [...] but who knows [...] what precipices aren’t concealed in them, or what slopes of ice don’t shine in the sun on the other side? [...] he felt that something loomed up behind her words, and stood vast and solid behind them . (93-94)11

12 Here the author-observer is making her language-surface spatial. She sees the holes or spaces between the words because she is looking at the body, face or “surface” of langue from very close up, and or (the relativistic Gestalt-switch) from very far away—or, correlatively, from the perspective of the distant past and/or the distant future;12 perhaps she has some close that she passes through a hole in the surface and begins to approach “the sun on the other side”, to get further away again. And yet it is really the individual words—and not the surface of all the words—of which it is asked, “what precipices aren’t concealed in them, or what slopes of ice don’t shine in the sun on the other side?” Perhaps, after all, we could not finally distinguish between “flying into” an individual word and into the spaces between the words; these might be two different perspectives, taken from two different scales of magnitude, on the same “reality”.

13 Of course, the close-up perspective (at the moment of “passing through”?) is implied by the fact that the words themselves have become so solid and bulky that they are heavy, inclined to fall down to the ground—and thus perhaps to “smooth out” once again the projected surface. But this is because they now have become meaningless (“short insignificant words”), “their “wings” are too “short” to carry their “heavy body of meaning”. It is this (relative degree of) meaninglessness or insignificance that “draws” us toward them, even pulls us through them. If langue has become fragmented into particles, we are now looking at the individual particles from very close-up, having come in effect within their gravitational field.

A spatio-temporal-linguistic system with inside and outside observers

14 This close-up view of a surface that is spatio-temporal as well as visual-aesthetic (painterly) and linguistic presupposes, then, an observer who is pausing, lingering here and now and gazing at this surface as might a landscape painter or scientist. In the above passage it seems the observer has come so close to the perceived surface that she simultaneously seems extremely far away from it; or perhaps she has passed through one of these worm-holes to the “sun” on the “other side”; Woolf’s aesthetics of disproportion and discontinuity can allow for just such unthinkable jumps or flights. And yet this observer-within-the-story is balanced by a second, omniscient, “outside” observer; for we are looking, not only at a particular (minute) scene within the narrative but also at the “whole narrative” (at the larger scene depicted by the narrative) within a frozen moment that somehow warps temporal and linguistic space. In this “larger” experiment we find ourselves looking at a particular circumscribed space or place (London’s “Kew Gardens”) over an indefinitely extended period of time.13

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 106

Yet while we have various hints earlier on that the story’s complex, multi-dimensional space is potentially infinite, its “virtual eternity” is only really made clear in the long final passage: Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower-bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of green-blue vapour, in which [...]. both substance and colour dissolved in the green-blue atmosphere. [...] Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women and children, were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then [...] they wavered [...] dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue. It seemed as if all gross and heavy bodies had sunk down in the heat motionless and lay huddled upon the ground, but their voices went wavering from them as if they were flames [...]. Voices, yes, voices, wordless voices. (95)14

15 The humans’/ghosts’ “irregular and aimless movement” could be seen as an experiment in stationery time-lapse photography: 24-hour video films, shot from above, of traffic movements at one city intersection, or of human movements within one inner-city courtyard, when later viewed at high speed (in a one-minute movie) show a more jerky and irregular effect than we are aware of in “normal time”. Yet at the end of “Kew Gardens” the jerky movement goes to its natural limit and becomes the merging or fading-together of countless hordes of people (romantic couples) seen (imagined) walking here, over a very long period of time.

16 This merging encompassesor envelops the various individual fadings-in and fadings- out of discrete couples earlier in the story, as they walk about in the public garden and pass, within a very limited period of time (perhaps five minutes), a central focal-point. The passing to-and-fro of four discrete couples occupies the middle part of the story and also the “middle perspective,” for if “Kew Gardens” ends with a very wide perspective, it begins with a very narrow one. The opening passage, where the author uses the same impressionistic, painterly style she returns to at the end—(virtually) infinitesimal and infinite perspectives are equivalent in the eye of the landscape painter— gives us a close-up view of a relatively near-by (and non-human, natural) world, the suddenly unfamiliar world of flowers in a flower-bed: From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat it emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The light fell either upon the smooth grey back of a pebble, or the shell of a snail with its brown circular veins, or, falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water. (91)

17 In the story Woolf seems to be moving (“expanding”) from the “very small” to the “very big,” and/or from “very near” to “very far”—though this assumes a fixed point of view, a fixed location of the observer (author, narrator, reader) with respect to the narrative itself, lacking which it may seem that she is at each moment simultaneously moving back in the other direction. Perhaps the story is moving from an “observer within the system”— concretely embodied by the snail itself—to one “outside” of it. As for this snail, it was perhaps itsown Lilliputian, micro- and/or macroscopic (depending how we look at it) perspective that we had from the very beginning of the above passage.15Whereas the “figures of these men and women straggled past [...] with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the [...] butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights” (91), the snail’s behavior seems rational, goal-oriented.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 107

Embedded within the labyrinthine flower-bed (of the circular, continually circling-back “text”), it is trying to move forward in a straight line: In the oval flower-bed the snail [...] now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth [...]. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it [...] . Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat blade-like trees that waved [...] , round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture— all these object lay across the snail’s progress [...]. Before it had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings. (91-92)

18 The relativistic effect is clear enough: what would be a small leaf to us is an “arched tent” to it, our crack in the ground is its “brown cliff”—now thrust directly in our faces, forcing us to experience the snail’s world from its point of view. This effect reinforces the story’s fundamental sense of distortion, of relativistic disproportion or discontinuity: very small can be very big and vice versa; the extreme outer boundary of the trans-human omniscient observer may be just as permeable as the extreme inner limit of the innermost trans-human observer, the snail. But as inside observer the snail plays an important role in the story’s physics experiment: it is in effect the hidden microphone—for a human being could never so easily “hide”—which overhears these fragments of human voices, of human conversations as the couples approach and then pass by. True, a snail could not “understand” these voices, it would here them as (human) noises, but again we have the relativistic switch: a person who only heard snatches of conversations, unless she/he were really trying to pay attention, might hear them basically as senseless background noise.

19 Here we come back to the central role of sound, that is, of voices in the story. If spatio- temporal and visual-aesthetic surfaces are always relative-to-an-observer then so are the linguistic surfaces of human language and human literary narratives. In fact the non-human snail lives in its own self-enclosed world, and so do the four human couples, and so does each member of each of the couples: the radically limited nature of all human “communication” is clearly one of Woolf’s main points here. In other words, while we will tend to see each of these self-enclosed worlds in spatio-temporal terms we can also see it in linguistic terms, or (going back to my earlier formulation) spatio- linguistic (linguistic- spatial) terms. For the sense of isolation of human beings (if not also of flowers, snails and trans-human ghosts) has much to do with meaning, which in turn has much to do with (human) language, the possibility of human speech and communication. At the story’s opening the human couples, talking somewhat randomly as they saunter, also somewhat randomly, through the park are introduced via the inevitably distorted and distorting perspective (as far as any “human meaning” is concerned) of a snail; at the end the “voices” of all the couples walking here, in this particular space, for centuries past and centuries to come, are merged and thus become senseless noise on another level, another order of being.

A noisy, self-enclosed system with indeterminate boundaries

20 The point that human voices sound like noise not only to a snail (if it can hear them at all) but even, much of the time, to other humans is a crucial one. If we want to see linguistic space in relation to physical and temporal space, then we must note in the first place that human language in its spoken form is based on sounds (signifiers) that

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 108

have meaning, sounds which, from the point of view of physics (acoustics), are mere refinements of a wider spectrum of noise, just as colors are refinements of a wider spectrum of light- frequencies. In the “system” of Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” we have two kinds of “noise”: the noise of disorder that permeates the system in various ways, often in the form of relativistic juxtapositions, discontinuous spatio-temporal-linguistic leaps, and that “noise” which human speech becomes, that “babel” of meaningless sounds, when it is viewed (or rather heard) from a distorted perspective, from very far away or from very close to its source.

21 Among the various narrative spaces of the story, then, which become mere “blurs” when viewed from too-close or too-far, or (as in time-lapse photography) for too long (or too short) a time, we also have the linguistic space of the couples’ conversations. Just as anything may become a mere blur, a blankness when we gaze at it long enough or glimpse it too quickly, human speech is mere noise, a mere “crackling” except when heard within a very narrow and specialized range of listening (The snail only perceives “vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture”). Beyond this range its frequencies blur into those of the “wavering light,” the “green-blue vapour” and “flames” of “wordless voices” that Woolf’s omniscient perspective gives us at the story’s end. From the narrative’s “innermost” perspective, however, the linguistic surface of human conversations is filled with holes, with the “spaces between words”. In the third conversation this phenomenon is marked in two ways, first by the actual “conversation” between the two women and then by one woman’s second-level reflection on the phenomenon itself, as if she were herself temporarily standing in for the eye and ear of the omniscient “experimenter” of the story’s ending. The conversation itself goes like this: “Nell, Bert,Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I says—“ “My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar, Sugar, flour, kippers, greens Sugar, sugar, sugar” (93)

22 Here we should first note that ordinary, everyday conversations are already filled with various repetitions, partly those induced by “mindless” socio-linguistic rituals or functions such as “How are you?” and “Nice to see you!” or “How nice the weather is today” but also other sorts of careless repetition. They are also filled with the “lacunae” of vague, inane, quasi-meaningless or completely nonsensical (intentional or otherwise) remarks. It is as if the author, knowing this truth about human conversation, reduced all such conversations to their “general case” by speeding them up, playing the tape-recorder at high speed and then erasing most of the parts, the words in-between. Interestingly, the “holes” in spoken language more clearly manifest themselves not when speech is stretched out but when it is compressed; or rather, we have now come so close to the linguistic surface that we can see its lacunae as if we were (also) standing very far away, for it is from this perspective that everything (as at the story’s end) gets sped-up.

23 The “ponderous woman” then remains silent, gazing or rather listening to these words spoken by her friend which have now become noise. She looks “through the pattern of falling words at the flowers standing cool, firm and upright in the earth [...]. She stood there letting the words fall over her” (93). Similarly, the young man in the fourth couple stands back for a moment to reflect on the too-broad reference (thus rendering them nonsensical) of such common English words as “it”: he asks his girlfriend what the “it” means in her question, “Isn’t it worth sixpence?” and she replies, “O anything—

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 109

I mean—you know what I mean.” (If he already knows then her question was rhetorical, suggesting one form of redundancy and, once again, the “blankness” of meaning.) Woolf, looking at the linguistic surface from this defamiliarizing perspective, now takes all words as “it”-words, as flitting butterflies and bees, tiny falling objects, particles like those of rocks and air: “these short insignificant words also expressed something, words with short wings for their heavy body of meaning, inadequate to carry them far” (94).

24 In fact, the spaces within, between and/or behind words can themselves be seen as noise. In classical information theory noise is always in the background of communicated signals (as on the telephone, the radio or TV): as such it plays the paradoxical role of both “drowning out” the signal if it becomes too loud, and making “meaningful” messages possible by creating spaces between the discrete signals in a message like “areyouhowareyouhowareyouhow”. (For without the noisy spaces- between we might not know where to “begin” or “end” the message in order to decipher it16. Such a hyper-ordered or redundant message, lacking the noise- between to make it meaningful, becomes what Michel Serres (in Genesis) would call blank chaos, the “other side” of the dark chaos of pure randomness.

25 This capacity of noise or chaos to reorder or renew, by creating spaces-between, a system that has entered the entropy-driven, hyper-ordered state of terminal equilibrium, a virtue of disorder or noise emphasized in both information and chaos- complexity theory, casts a (potentially) very positive light on that systems-theory reading of “Kew Gardens” which foregrounds the chaos of the system’s individual parts and of the whole. Perhaps, on such a reading, the “middle” of the story—with its series of separate conversations—corresponds to the level of ordered meaning (where the noise between its parts gives meaning to the whole message or signal) that lies between the initial and final stages of entropic, self-ordering systems, between dark and blank chaos. For this is the ostensibly human “level” of the story, set between the initial trans-human (snail’s) perspective and final trans-human (omniscient) perspective.

26 Thus the crescendo of “encompassing noise” at the story’s end, enclosing everything within its bounds in a series of concentric orders or worlds, might be read not in transcendent, mystical terms but (also) in Serreisan terms as the hyper- redundancy of sound (meaning), as blank chaos which reverts to initial dark chaos. in the drone of the aeroplane the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce soul. [...] Voices, yes, voices, wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly [...]. But there was no silence; all the time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air. (95)

27 The Chinese-box structure or pattern would reinforce our sense that the whole story, as well as each of its parts, is “self- enclosed” except for the problem that the boundaries are always permeable, always being transgressed. Even the mechanical city that encloses the physical space of the park and the “human space” within it is encompassed by the sky, its own space ruptured by a droning airplane, while the voices of the now-extended human life-space “cried aloud [...] on the top of” everything else. Thus we get a final “discordant” symphony here, a cacophony, a mixing and merging of sounds or noises which tends to render boundaries indeterminate. The ceaseless sound (“But there was no silence”) also suggests the “terminal- equilibrium” reading—“no

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 110

boundaries” means nothing if not “chaos” of one sort or another—but insofar as this ultimate blank disorder may revert to the initial pure randomness (pure noise) there is still “hope”.

The possibility of an autopoietic narrative

28 Ultimately the widest context of this narrative is indeterminately human (voices), organic non-human (flowers, snails), mechanical (buses, airplanes) and natural- inorganic (the sky); that is, the “order of rank” is never specified. But the focus on an observer who is simultaneously and indeterminately internal-external suggests we might see the story itself as an “autopoietic system”. This means looking at it as a self- generating and self-creating system and emphasizing the reflexivity of both itself and all its parts, its various sub-systems. For the notion of self-creation through self-reference or self-reflection— a strategy implicit in Woolf’s focus on separate “worlds” which are ultimately conjoined yet also individually isolated and self-enclosed—is the key idea in autopoietic theory. “Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates” (Hayles 8, my emphasis).

29 Implicit here is perhaps one further “step” in the self-reflective process, a step most scientists are not concerned with but one that Hayles herself and several meta- fictional, especially sci-fi and cyberpunk fiction writers are very aware of (see note 4): in creative writing it is the writer (author) who “generates the system” of the narrative and thus self-reflexively becomes (or at least her voice, technique, design becomes, as in the human DNA code) “part of the system it [she] generates”. Hayles continues here: Reflexivity entered cybernetics primarily through discussions about the observer. By and large, first-wave cybernetics [considered] observers to be outside the system they observe. Yet cybernetics also had implications that subverted this premise. The objectivist view sees information flowing from the system to the observers, but feedback can also loop through the observers, drawing them in to become part of the system being observed. [...] The second wave of cybernetics grew out of attempts to incorporate reflexivity into the cybernetic paradigm at a fundamental level. [...] [The biologists Maturana and Varela] expanded the reflexive turn into a fully articulated epistemology that sees the world as a set of informationally closed systems. Organisms respond to their environment in ways determined by their internal self- organization. Their one and only goal is to continually produce and reproduce the organization that defines them as systems. Hence, they not only are self-organizing but also are autopoietic, or self-making. (Hayles 10, my emphasis)

30 Of course, the idea that a fictional narrative written in a language such as English might be an “autopoietic system” in the above sense is no doubt controversial, and here I am only speculating on its possibility. It seems we would first need to distinguish the system of the story itself (including all its sub-systems) from that other system, arguably wider and more encompassing, which includes the writer/author and also the reader of the story. (And although the complexity of the author-reader relationship lies beyond my scope here, an autopoietic reading of fictional narratives could arguably equate author and reader, thus solving the problem of their relationship). Then we would need to consider how the first system or level (the story itself) might fit the specifications of an autopoietic system as established by Hayles, Maturana, Varela et al, before moving to the second level. However, as is already implied by the self-reflective problem of the observer, no matter how remote, how far “outside” the system the

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 111

author/reader may feel they are, they are clearly carried right back into the “inner” system of the narrative through that feedback loop which also inevitably flows or loops through them.

31 For again, in writing creatively the writer also creates or generates out of herself/ himself a narrative or poetic system, like a spider spinning a web; if we can say that this system in effect “reproduces the organization that defines the writer (author) as a system” then we might have a more solid ground for speaking of “autopoietic narratives” in Hayles’ sense. Still, it may not yet be clear how those inner sub-systems within the larger system of the narrative themselves act like autopoietic systems (organisms, micro-organisms, “snails”) independently of the author who has breathed self-generating life into them. (In the real world of biology, snails and micro-organisms do not need humans to “motivate” their behavior, except very indirectly and often at a very far remove through the earth’s pervasive ecological system.) Perhaps then a fictional narrative could be an autopoietic system with a difference, a “homologous” autopoietic system, one in which the God-like author/reader somehow “breathe(s) life” into all the tiny constituent organisms, objects, parts, particles; that is, a system in which the author/reader as most aloof, objective, transcendent “observer” and “experimenter” is simultaneously the most intimate, inner, immanent one.

32 Perhaps what could make this possible is the fact that here we are dealing primarily with linguistic space; physical and temporal spaces are somehow incorporated (self- reflexively, autopoietically) within a verbal-linguistic space. For the latter is filled with holes, with the noise that lies between the words and, expanding, even threatens to drown them out, and it is in the force of this inter- , intra- or trans- verbal noise that space, time and language may become virtually indistinguishable. If the author/reader is not so much the creator as the “experimental observer” of this verbal-linguistic system, then it is because only she can see those other-than-human shapes that lie within it, shapes dwelling quite beyond her own creative power or reach, within/ between/behind her words, shining “in the sun on the other side.”

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Baldwin, Dean R. Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. New York: Harcourt, 2005.

Fry, Roger. Transformations. London: Chatto and Windus, 1926.

Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1999.

McLaurin, Allen. The Echoes Enslaved. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973.

Rosenthal, Michael. “The Problem of the Fiction.” Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Morris Beja. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. 187-199.

Serres, Michel. Genesis. Trans. G. James and J. Nielson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1995.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 112

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Second Edition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1948, 1961, 1965.

Woolf, Virginia. Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf. Decorated by Vanessa Bell. London: The Hogarth Press, 1919, 1929, 1999.

---. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. New York: Harcourt, 1989.

---. Collected Essays Volumes II. London: Hogarth P., 1972.

---. A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth P., 1953.

---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. I. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joan Trautmann New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. II. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joan Trautmann New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

NOTES

1. In a letter of 1917 Woolf claimed that the novel was “frightfully clumsy and overpowering [...] . I daresay one ought to invent a completely new form. Anyhow it is very amusing to try with these short things. (Woolf 1976: 167). 2. Dick places Woolf’s first five stories in the “Early Stories” group; this precedes the 1917-1921 group that includes “Kew Gardens”. 3. Katherine Hayles (1999) speaks of the paradigm shift away from such dualities as content/ form and signifier/signified to randomness (noise)/pattern (form) in the period since Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948); randomness and pattern are configurations of “information.” Hayles explains how, with the second wave of cybernetics beginning roughly from the 1960s, the location of the observer moved from outside to within the system. Chaos- or systems-theory- based readings have been used primarily with sci-fi and cyberpunk fiction and with mainstream writers like Pynchon (“Entropy,” The Crying of Lot 49) and DeLillo (White Noise)—where information theory is already to varying degrees the narrative “theme” or “content”—rather than with more “traditional” fictional narratives. 4. Woolf’s Collected Essays Vol. 3 contains one essay on Swift and three on Sterne. Swift’s interest in relativistic, micro- and macro-physical perspectives is clear in Gulliver’s Travels; he foregrounds the physio-chemical nature of the brain in “Tale of a Tub.” Sterne in Tristram Shandy deals on several levels with Locke’s empirical psychology of the mind, his random “association of ideas.” 5. See Baldwin, pp. xii, 3. As Rosenthal puts it: “Demanding everything and making few concessions to readers, [Woolf’s fiction] seems to many hermetically sealed in its austerity and fragility [...]. For as a writer Woolf was obsessed with [...] formal rather than thematic concerns, with finding ways of embodying [...] ‘the exact shapes my brain holds’ (Woolf 1953: 176). [...] Woolf was absorbed primarily in creating shapes” (190). 6. McLaurin cites Fry in Transformations (41): [It is a] “false assumption that spiritual values could only be attained through psychological structures, that spatial and plastic ones had no such function” (92). 7. McLaurin (92) adds here: “Earlier in her diary she had spoken of a new theory of fiction: ‘The one I have in view is about perspective. But I do not know. My brain may not last me out’” (Woolf 1953:83). 8. The title of McLaurin’s chapter is “Space: Hollowing Out a Canvas”.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 113

9. Thus Woolf opens “The Moment: Summer’s Night”: “The night was falling so that the table in the garden among the trees grew whiter and whiter, and the people round it more indistinct. An owl [...] crossed the fading sky with a black spot between its claws. The trees murmured. An aeroplane hummed like a piece of plucked wire” (Woolf 1972: 293). Here the faded background comes to dominate the scene, and the “black spot” between the owl’s claws might almost be the photographic negative of the white table. 10. It is as if, approaching very close to it, we were “stretching out” the surface, body, face of language. 11. Of course, this also has a crucial social dimension: it seems to express the virtual impossibility of real communication. But seen in the wider, more “abstract” context of information theory, such an impossibility can be read as a predominance of “noise” over “pattern” or “wholeness.” Vanessa Bell’s 1919 edition of “Kew Gardens” is “decorated” with woodcuts which frame Woolf’s words (in large print and on big pages) with wavy lines, circular flowers and other curving forms ( clouds, suns)—as if perhaps finally, on the outer boundary, this is what the words (human voices) will fade into. But on page 13, which begins with the words, “The ponderous woman looked” a large upright flower occupies the center of the page, with the words “falling over” it on both sides. 12. Looking at the stars from very far away we also see the spaces between them, whereas being (on earth) so close (relatively) to our own sun, in a sense we don’t see the space between it and us. 13. We also get this spatio-temporal “flattening” mode in Woolf’s novels, e.g. in the “Time Passes” section of To The Lighthouse and in The Waves, which plays with more repetitive spatio- temporal forms. But “A Haunted House” (also in the 1917-1921 group) comes closest to the “Kew Gardens” experiment. A ghostly couple return to their old house and try to communicate with the couple now living there. Woolf plays, partly through indefinite pronoun reference, with the confusion of identities: above all, it seems the couple now sleeping in their bed upstairs may also be the ghostly couple. The simplest explanation is the (meta)physical one: from the viewpoint of an omniscient God-narrator- observer who is “looking at” this house over a long period of time (100 or 1,000,000 years), any humans (or anything else) living in it would basically be “the same,” would be merged into “one.” 14. The supernatural effect of this human-to-trans-human transformation may also be seen merely as extending the purely “natural” interflow at the story’s beginning, where “the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July” (91). 15. This non-human “it” as observer-narrator of the story fits cybernetic systems theory as well as Woolf’s fictional world; it recalls the impersonal-pronoun play in “Haunted House” (a ghost is an “it”) but also the fourth couple’s “linguistic-space” discussion (near the end of “Kew Gardens) about the possible meaning of “it’ in the sentence, “Isn’t it worth sixpence?” 16. In information theory, more “information” means more possible meanings within a wider system(rather than the contents of a discrete signal). “Identifying information as both pattern and randomness proved to be a powerful paradox, leading to the realization that in some instances, an infusion of noise into a system can cause it to reorganize at a higher level of complexity. Within such a system, pattern and randomness are bound together in a complex dialectic that makes them not so much opposites as complements” (Hayles 25). The sped-up sentence (signal, message) “Nell, Bert, Lot [...] he says, I says, she says” looks more like pure noise —the Gestalt-switched inversion of a message like “areyouhowareyouhow”; that is, it looks like the words that the latter kind of message would need to have “placed between.”

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 114

RÉSUMÉS

En proposant une lecture autopoiétique de “Kew Gardens”, nouvelle publiée en 1919, cet article se fonde sur une interprétation de l'empirisme et de l'expérimentation dans les premières nouvelles de Woolf plus littérale que celle généralement adoptée par les critiques. L'autopoiesis est ici définie simplement comme le processus selon lequel un système reproduit l'organisation qui le définit comme système dans le cadre de son environnement élargi. De telles lectures ont été appliquées à la science-fiction et à la fiction cyberpunk ainsi qu'à la fiction d'auteurs tels que Pynchon et DeLillo, dont le thème suggère déjà ce type d'interprétation. Cependant, à ma connaissance, aucune lecture autopoiétique n'a été faite d'un écrivain “traditionnel” comme Woolf—dont le thème dans “Kew Gardens” n'est pas explicitement autopoiétique—ni de la forme narrative en général qui prenne en compte sa création d'un espace physique, temporel et linguistique fermé. La réflexivité du système—ici, narratif—nécessite la présence de l'observateur extérieur—ici l'auteur/lecteur—à l'intérieur du système. Cependant, alors que l'auteur/lecteur insuffle vie au système depuis l'intérieur de ce système, “Kew Gardens” met en avant l'impersonnalité mécanique du monde qu'il décrit, les ruptures dans l'espace verbal ou linguistique, les interstices ou le “bruit” entre les mots.

AUTEURS

FRANK STEVENSON National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei.Frank W. Stevenson Frank W. Stevenson has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston College and teaches western literature and literary theory at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. He is interested in theories of poiesis, mythos and the comic, in Deleuze's theory of noise and voice, and in Michel Serres' interpretation of information theory and non-linear dynamics. He has published books on Poe/Serres and the novels of Madison Morrison, and essays on (among other things) Nietzsche, Bataille, Lyotard, Poe/Deleuze, and Kafka/Serres/Deleuze. Professor Stevenson is also interested in comparative (Chinese/Western) philosophy and has published essays in Philosophy East and West (on Zhuangzi and chaos theory) and the Journal of Chinese Philosophy and in the book "Buddhisms and Deconstructions."

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 115

“In the Circle of the Lens”: Woolf’s “Telescope” Story, Scene-making and Memory

Laura Marcus

1 Virginia Woolf noted in her diary for 31st January 1939: “I wrote the old Henry Taylor telescope story that has been humming in my head these 10 years” (Woolf 1984: 204). The short story to which she was referring was published as “The Searchlight”, in the posthumous A Haunted House and Other Stories.The “humming” had, however, already been transferred to the page ten years previously, when Woolf wrote a story which she entitled “What the Telescope Discovered”, followed a year later by the incomplete “Incongruous/Inaccurate Memories”. In all, Woolf produced some fourteen different drafts of “the telescope story”, with fragments of other drafts. A number of the later draft versions set the scene at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, where Woolf’s great- aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, a pioneer photographer, and her close neighbour and friend the Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson were living in the mid-nineteenth century.

2 While some of the drafts of Woolf’s “telescope story” are dated, others are not, leading to uncertainties about the chronology of the story’s composition. J.W. Graham, in an article published in 1976 which was the first to look in detail at the variant drafts, took the published version, “The Searchlight”, as the culminating narrative for Woolf (Graham 1976). He noted the date of the first of the “Searchlight drafts” as January 31st 1939 (the date Woolf gives in her diary), but records three subsequent, though undated, typescripts. The last of these was, he argued, clearly the work of a professional typist and hence a “final” version. His argument was that [Woolf] began to draft the story in what was to prove its final form, then abandoned it for the very different Freshwater version, and then decided to return to the version drafted some two years earlier. Whatever her reasons for inventing the Freshwater version, the fact that she abandoned it is more pertinent to the present discussion, because it suggests that finally, after at least six drafts, she found this form of the story fundamentally inadequate. (Graham 1976: 385)

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 116

3 In a more recent article, Jane de Gay has queried Graham’s chronology, noting that the version of “The Searchlight” published by Susan Dick in Virginia Woolf: The Complete Short Fiction came to light after Graham had published his article, and its professional typing can be dated as no later than September 1940. The Freshwater story was begun in 1941, after Woolf had, bar very minor revisions, completed the draft subsequently published as “The Searchlight”. De Gay suggests that “the Freshwater story of 1941 had its own momentum, and that with its different framing narrative and title, it was developing away from the Ivimey version and the searchlight motif” (de Gay 2000: 209). For de Gay, the composition of the Freshwater story was driven by Woolf’s interests in Julia Margaret Cameron, Victorian photography and the writing of a non-patriarchal history. In this reading, the photograph replaces the searchlight and the telescope to become the story’s central motif.

4 Whereas J.W. Graham sought to establish a definitive version of the text, which he locates in the “final” typescript of “The Searchlight”, Jane de Gay perceives the Freshwater drafts as texts subsequent to, and independent of, the published version of the story and not as “inadequate” earlier variants of it. The differences between these two positions have a broader critical significance, which bears some relation to the shift in recent decades from “textual criticism”, the purpose of which is to produce an authoritative text, to “genetic criticism”, which, in the words of one critic, “uses preparatory material, variant textual states or any other evidence of the compositional process for purposes of interpretation and evaluation” (Falconer 1993: 71). Yet while Jane de Gay queries Graham’s location of the authoritative text, she still seeks to establish an autonomous Freshwater version of “the telescope story”.

5 My interest, like that of de Gay, lies substantially in the “Freshwater” versions of the narrative, but these seem to me not altogether distinct from the version published as “The Searchlight”. The interplay of all the textual variants, from 1929 through to 1941, opens up significant issues of creation and composition, and of the “scene-making” at the heart of Woolf’s writing. Questions of autobiography and life-writing are raised in and by construction of “the telescope story” which relate to genesis and literary genetics in a number of senses and in a number of ways, including structure and theme. They turn on what has brought not only writing but the very self into being. They also bring to the fore the question of “framing” in Woolf’s short fiction, and the question of the “frame” becomes inseparable from issues and problems of narrative motivation – that is, the issue of how to construct a narrative rationale as well as a casing for a “scene”.

6 At the heart of all Woolf’s versions of her telescope story is a passage from the nineteenth-century writer and Colonial Office official Sir Henry Taylor’s autobiography, published in two volumes in 1877 (privately printed) and then in 1885. In the autobiography, Taylor described his early years, recalling how he had lived for a time in “an old square ivy-covered border tower” in the North of England, always isolated from other people but particularly so one summer when his father and stepmother were away. He wrote: All the day long I saw no one but the servants, except that I sometimes looked through a telescope ... at the goings on of a farmstead on a road which skirted our grounds at the farther end. Through this telescope I once saw a young daughter of the farmer rush into the arms of her brother, on his return after an absence, radiant with joy. I think this was the only phenomenon of human emotion which I had witnessed for three years .... (Taylor 1885: Vol. 1, 45.)

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 117

7 He then returns, in Graham’s words, to “the leisurely chronicle of his Victorian life” (Graham 1976: 383).

8 In Woolf’s retellings of this episode, the embrace seen through the telescope is not that between siblings but between lovers, and the young man (not always identified in the various drafts as Henry Taylor) is impelled, when he sees the embrace, the kiss, in his lens, to run out of his tower and towards, or into, his life. She also revises the scene so that the telescope is focused on the sky before it is turned to the earth. The young man thus becomes an amateur astronomer, opening up a link between her story and Thomas Hardy’s novel of 1882, Two on a Tower, in which the youthful hero, all of whose passions are for the stars and the sky, enters into a relationship, and subsequently a clandestine marriage, with the woman on whose estate the tower with its telescope sits. In his 1895 Preface to the novel Hardy wrote: “This slightly built romance was the outcome of a wish to set the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe, and to impart to readers the sentiment that of these contrasting magnitudes the smaller might be the greater to them as men” (Hardy v.). A recent critic has argued of Two on a Tower: “Although new configurations of time and space had the potential to dwarf psychologically the human imagination, Hardy’s cosmological narratives effectively divulge ... ways in which readers may productively scrutinise their own life stories as well as the cultural evolution of the species” (Radford 2007). The echoes of Hardy’s novel in Woolf’s ‘telescope story’ are connected to her own fascination with relations of distance and proximity and between human experience and the dimensions of time and space. The centrality of Victorian science and scientific knowledge to Hardy’s novel, one of whose strands is the crucial link between astronomy and photography, is also one of the numerous sub-texts and inter- texts of Woolf’s story.

9 The published version of the story, “The Searchlight”, is not connected to Freshwater, and Sir Henry Taylor is absent from the scene. A Mrs Ivimey, a society-lady, stands on the balcony of a London club before going with her party to the theatre. The search- lights of the war-years illuminate the scene, the story thus opening up the concepts, also at the heart of Between the Acts, of the theatre of war and of the “interval” between acts and events. The beam of light the searchlights cast motivates Mrs Ivimey to tell the story of her great-grand-father, who when a boy, lived in an isolated tower, and one day turned his telescope from the skies to the earth. She enacts, with her fingers, the focusing of the telescope – “She made another quick little movement as if she were twirling something”: “He focussed it”, she said, “He focussed it upon the earth. He focussed it upon a dark mass of wood upon the horizon. He focussed it so that he could see ... each tree... each tree separate ... and the birds ... rising and falling ...” (Woolf 1991: 271). As Holly Henry notes, in her recent study Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy, the elliptical interruptions mean that the reader “must physically pause as the sentence is focused through the mechanisms of the ellipses and repetition of the words 'focussed', 'each' and 'lower'”, while Mrs Ivimey, “who narrates her tale while miming the act of peering through an imaginary telescope, looks back in time to glimpse a crucial moment which marks the beginning of her life”, her great-grandfather having married the young woman spied through the telescope (Henry 54-5). The telescope is thus understood as a device that allows for a simultaneous co-existence of the past and present. The young woman is Mrs Ivimey’s

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 118

great-grandmother, and it is thus her own origin or genesis – “metaphorically, a primal scene”, as Julia Briggs notes - that Mrs Ivimey “sees” (Briggs 52).

10 Holly Henry has made the published version of the story a central plank in her study, connecting it to Woolf’s fascination with telescopic vision, astronomy and the popularization of science in the early twentieth-century, and to the links between “telescopes, searchlights and war” (Henry 52). For Henry, the interest of “The Searchlight” is the question of telescopic vision, which, she argues, shaped Woolf’s “narrative scoping strategies” (Henry 51). I want to extend this focus in order to explore both what Woolf may have wanted from “the scene” and the issue of memory. The story, in its various manifestations, was bound into the two periods in Woolf’s life – the mid-late 1920s and the mid-late 1930s – when, in her writing, she was considering the question of memory, her childhood and her mother’s life most intensely.1

11 The earliest draft of the “telescope story”, titled “What the Telescope Discovered”, was written in 1929.2 It has no framing narrative and does not name the young man in his tower as Henry Taylor. It describes a boy in his tower on a lovely evening in which there is complete stillness in the air, but a “mysterious throbbing outside”. He turns his telescope from moon to earth and gradually brings a nearby farm “more and more clearly into view ... He gazed and gazed as if he were exploring a new world”. He sees a servant girl coming out of a door, and a farm boy seizing her “in his arms”. “He could see every movement – he could see the boys face flush and the girl half struggle from him and then give himself up to his embrace. He kept his telescope turned on them through the telescope. He kept it motionless fixed motionless upon them”. Then he rushes out of the tower “not knowing where he went or where he looked to find. Through the telescope he had discovered a new world”.

12 A 1930 version – “Incongruous/Inaccurate Memories” – identifies the story as that of Sir Henry Taylor.3 The opening frame here (as in the draft called “Ghosts”) suggests that “scenes” in narrative can transcend their immediate contexts: “these expansions and transformations are not travesties, but that the changes and rearrangements are only the [...] unfurling of a scene which when dropped into sympathetic waters. It is the natural effect of words when they are for some reason highly charged with meaning so as to go on living”. Even in the works of lesser writers this effect can occur, ‘especially in autobiography’: On they plod with their narrative and nothing happens, on they go, on we stumble, one thing follows another; then for no reason they present us with a scene, all of a sudden, and the scene begins to swell and to move and to float and to expand and is never afterwards to be forgotten, though by knocking about it has mixed itself up with so much else that one would be sorry ever again to compare it with the original.

13 The narrator then continues to tell – from “memory” – the telescope story. The telescope, turned upon the earth, picks up hills, clouds, sheep, the leaves of trees, a church steeple, an old farm house, windows, and “suddenly the disc of light fell upon two faces – a man and a woman, within that ring of perfect clearness, they we held fast ... they kissed ... There was life, there was love, there was passion. Sweeping the telescope aside, Henry crammed his hat on his head, rushed down stairs out onto the road, out into the world – and so became in time – was it Sir Henry Taylor of the Colonial Office?”.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 119

14 In her framing of the telescope scene, Woolf was, it would seem, puzzling over the impact that the brief passage in Henry’s Taylor autobiography had had on her, and makes it stand for other “scenes” which imprint themselves upon the reader’s mind. She implies that the dull Victorian autobiography, like History, gives us “one damn thing after another”. But then we are brought to a halt by “a scene” that is so resonant that it becomes a permanent dimension of the reader’s experience. The autobiographer transcribes it, however, “for no reason”, Woolf suggests, as if the scene’s very lack of narrative and subjective motivation, the unthinking quality of its presentation, were part of the condition for its transmission to another’s subjectivity.

15 Woolf’s phrase the “unfurling of the scene” recalls Lily Briscoe’s thoughts about Mr and Mrs Ramsay – “She was not inventing; she was only trying to smooth out something she had been given years ago folded up; something she had seen” (Woolf 1992: 215). The liquid imagery – “the scene begins to swell and to move and to float and to expand” – also echoes the most memorable scene of memory and scene-making in modern literature; Proust’s recalling of his past in the cup of tea, and his analogising of the act of memory in the unfurling and expansion of the little Japanese pieces of paper which become “flowers or houses or people” (Proust 55). Proust’s analogy is also an allegory, as John Coyle suggests, “of the transmutation of imaginative insight into fictional creation, and of the movement from solipsism to a populated world” (Coyle, 2006). Both the transmutation and the movement are echoed in Woolf’s relationship to, and reconstruction of, “the telescope story”, as she turns the borrowed scene into fictional forms and represents the ways in which solipsism – that of the boy alone in his tower – is transformed into relationship through the focus on the world outside and his perceiving of life, love and passion. The sexual dimensions of Woolf’s scene-making – the “humming” and the “mysterious throbbing” – are inextricably linked to the question of creativity and literary genesis: they are also to be found in her account (written in a letter to Roger Fry) of reading Proust in 1922, in which she described the extraordinary ways in which A la Recherche du Temps Perdu “titillates my own desire for expression [...] such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures – theres something sexual in it – that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession” (Woolf 1976: 525).

16 Woolf used the Proustian image in Jacob’s Room, when she described the fashion for putting “little paper flowers” in finger-bowls; in the telescope story draft it seems to raise, however, more complex and unresolved questions of memory and of what it might mean to take on as one’s own another person’s memory. The scene becomes, in the liquid imagery of the story’s opening, a “floating incident” of the kind Woolf was to describe in her own autobiography Sketch of the Past, in which she also wrote of the ways in which the “moments of being” she recalls always included “a circle of the scene which they cut out: and all surrounded by a vast space – that is a rough visual description of childhood. This is how I shape it” (Woolf 2002: 91).4 Memory and scene- making are thus shaped in the form of the telescopic or photographic optic – “in the circle of the lens” – as well as through the image of the self as “a porous vessel afloat on sensation”.

17 The drafts of the telescope story appear to be connected to Woolf’s self-representations and to the question of scene-making, her natural way, she writes, in “Sketch of the Past”, of “marking the past”:

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 120

A scene always comes to the top; arranged, representative. This confirms me in my instinctive notion – it is irrational, it will not stand argument, that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene – for they would not survive entire so many ruinous years unless they were made of something permanent; that is a proof of their “reality”. (Woolf 2002: 145)

18 The telescope scene survives entire, but, as Woolf suggests in her drafts, it “mixes itself up with so much else”. What are the components of this mixing? Increasingly, Woolf began to write the scene into Freshwater, where her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron lived and took photographs of “famous men and fair women”. Henry Taylor was her guest and one of her photographic subjects, and certainly one of the bearded sages to whom Roger Fry alluded in the edition of the photographs he prefaced and edited with Woolf: “In that protected garden of culture women grew to strange beauty, and the men – how lush and rank are their growths. How they abound in the sense of their own personalities” (Fry 1973: 24-5). The actress Ellen Terry – married at the age of 16 to the painter G.F. Watts and photographed at this time by Cameron, most famously in an image entitled “Sadness” – entered Woolf’s narrative frame. In the draft titled “A Scene from the Past” (with its marked echoes of “Sketch of the Past”) the motivation for the narration of the telescope scene (for which Woolf was always searching) became Terry’s confession to Sir Henry Taylor, with whom she is walking on Freshwater Down, of an illicit kiss in the garden the previous evening – “He kissed me” - while the rooks call over Farringford Woods “Maud, Maud, Maud”. This leads Henry Taylor to tell Terry the telescope story, of himself as a young man in his tower seeing “A man kissing a woman”. The narrative now revolves around two scenes of kissing.5

19 Henry Taylor recovers the past within a narrative whose own distance from the past of its narration is insisted upon throughout: “The scene was Freshwater; the date 1860; the month June ... Everything there was different from what it is today.6 From the “platform” (the term Woolf used in “Sketch of the Past”) of 1860, we are returned to Henry Taylor’s boyhood. As he “brought before her the stamp of a horse in the stables; the clink of a bucket on the stones; moss on ruined sheds, and himself, a boy”, Ellen Terry “saw what he saw”. Memories can be transferred, in and through the mind’s eye, and their transmission, within the frame of the story, from Henry Taylor to Ellen Terry, models that of their transmission from writer to reader, exemplified in the transference of the original scene from Taylor’s autobiography to Woolf.

20 In “A Scene from the Past”, Henry Taylor reproduces mimetically the gestures of that lost time as he narrates the scene from the past: One June day, he said, he mounted to his tower alone. And seizing the telescope – it was her arm he seized – he turned it – so –down onto the earth. Here he cast his eyes down on to the earth. Her’s [sic] followed his. And she saw what he saw. Not turf, not daisies, but moors flowing and great trees. Rooks were rising and falling, and in the clearing of a wood she saw an old gabled house. And then – what then? He was silent. The climb to the top of the down was steep. Pressing her dove grey glove upon his arm she urged him: ‘Tell me, tell me – what did you seen then?’ He drew himself erect. His eyes flashed. And in a voice of thunder that drowned the cawing of the rooks he shouted: “A man kissing a woman”. 7

21 As in a film, one landscape, or backdrop, is replaced by another, a trope used by Woolf in The Years.8 Woolf’s narrative is also cinematographic in its representation of the close-up kiss, a central image and narrative device in film from the 1890s onwards, and

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 121

the topic of numerous critiques, as the final kiss or “clinch” became a standard way in which to close a scene or an entire film. The 1929 version of Woolf’s story, “What the Telescope Discovered”, has, moreover, marked echoes of the titles of early films which, employing subjective point-of-view shots, often pointed up the “voyeuristic” dimensions of their perspectives: G.A. Smith’s “As Seen Through a Telescope”, in which a middle-aged man focuses his telescope on the ankle of a young woman bicyclist, which the spectator also views in the circle of his lens, was an influential model in the new medium. Its title would seem to be echoed by Woolf, who also hints at the voyeurism and the sexual dimensions of the scene she recreates, in her account of the “mysterious throbbing” which leads the young Henry Taylor to turn his telescope from sky to earth, and the flush on the face of the boy whom he sees through his lens. In the 1930 version, “Inaccurate Memories”, the framing of the embracing couple is markedly filmic. As the boy focuses and lowers the telescope: He could count the tiles, see the blue green pigeons waddling along the gutters, then the windows with their blinds blowing from the edge, and still lowering, it, suddenly the disc of light fell upon two faces, a mans and a womans; within that ring of perfect clearness they were held fast. An extraordinary expression was on their faces; they closed together; they kissed. It was miles away; but the shock was like a blow on his own shoulder. There was life, there was life, there was passion.

22 Woolf seems, in certain drafts of the story, to be drawing attention to the cliché of the “clinch”. The ironic distance she adopts is also at one with the suggestion that there is a very “Victorian” bathos to “the scene”: “I never knew a mother’s love”, she has Sir Henry Taylor pronounce in one version of the narrative.9 Woolf’s choices of an appropriate mode in which to tell the tale, and of the degree of irony to adopt, often seem uncertain and unstable: this undoubtedly contributed to her multiple writings and rewritings.

23 There would appear to be, however, more than an ironic intention at work in the proto- cinematographic focus on “the kiss” as seen through the telescope and its exploration of its impact on the viewing subject. Suggestive connections emerge between Woolf’s narrative and Walter Benjamin’s project, described in a letter to his friend Werner Kraft in 1935, of “pointing my telescope through the bloody mist at a mirage of the nineteenth century that I am attempting to reproduce based on the characteristics it will manifest in a future state of the world, liberated from magic” (Benjamin: 1994). As Jan Holmberg suggests, Benjamin’s use of the trope of the telescope to overcome the distance between his own time and the nineteenth century expresses the “ambiguous tension between distance and proximity”, as a specifically modern experience, articulated most fully in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Holmberg 2000: 85). Holmberg suggests that this tension is “aptly captured by the seemingly paradoxical concept of de-distancing” (Holmberg 2000: 84) (Martin Heidegger’s Ent-fernung), understood as “the distanciation of distance”, or, in Jacques Derrida’s phrase, as a “remote proximity” (Derrida 1979: 50-51), and represented in cinema in the “figure of closing in”, in instances in which “gaining knowledge is correlated with closing in” and in the use of extreme close-ups. In early cinema, the frequent use of telescopes “seems to underscore dimension of near and far” while, more generally, camera motion was described by early commentators as an interplay between emotional, spatial and temporal distance and proximity. As the film critic Eric Elliott wrote in 1928:

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 122

Size may alter even as we watch the scene, that is, by camera locomotion. We, as spectators, draw near to a subject, may become intimate with a distant object or emotion; conversely, we may depart from the object or emotion, become more and more separated from it, until (if necessary) it becomes absolutely final and past. (Elliott 1928: 67)

24 The “near and far” with which Woolf is concerned, and the interplay between distance and proximity, are profoundly linked to her relationship with the Victorian past and, as I have suggested, to the question of her own “genesis”. In this sense, the “telescope story” takes its place alongside To the Lighthouse, a text in which optical technologies – telescope, photograph, film – become the media of memory and of the “passage” between present and past, past and present. Woolf’s mother and father can also be glimpsed in the circle of the lens of the “telescope story”. In biographical terms they both had family or professional connections to Henry Taylor, and Leslie Stephen wrote Taylor’s Dictionary of National Biography entry, making no mention of the scene in the tower, and detailing his literary career and his career in the Colonial Office. The DNB indeed figures in a number of the story’s drafts, as a text which “remains intact” during the war’s destruction, while “the book in which this story [the telescope story] is told, and the album in which you could see him [Henry Taylor] draped in a shawl posed as King Arthur were destroyed only the other day by enemy action”.10

25 In some versions of the story Woolf suggests that she is narrating what Leslie Stephen (in the ‘person’ of the DNB) excluded, though she represents the depredations of war taking their revenge, leaving only the official account. There is a strongly gendered dimension to these questions of historical writing: what it selects and omits, what is preserved and what lost or destroyed. Woolf’s concern with gendered inscriptions and reinscriptions can also be seen in the ways in which she renders the telescope scene itself as a reworking of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot”. In Woolf’s versions, there is a man, not a woman, in a tower; the mirror has become a telescope; and looking, with desire, at the world outside and at human forms, is an invitation to life, and not to death. But, Woolf suggests, Henry Taylor ran towards the Colonial Office, and away from the scene, or the moment, or the perception, that might have marked him out for a different life-course. This is perhaps why Woolf wanted the scene for herself and why she keeps on retelling and remaking it. She did not so much steal the scene, it could be said, as rescue it.

26 Woolf’s play Freshwater, written in 1923 and then fully revised in 1935, when it was performed by members of the Bloomsbury group, was also intertwined with the history of the “telescope story’s” composition. The play was to be “a skit upon our great aunts”, as she wrote to Desmond MacCarthy: “The idea is to have masses of Cameron photographs, shawls, cameos, peg-top trousers, laurel trees, laureates and all the rest” (Woolf 1977: 72-3). Julia Margaret Cameron was played by Vanessa Bell, a question of how we “become” our ancestors that absorbed Woolf, and which lies at the heart of Orlando. The figure of Ellen Terry became, however, as or more prominent than that of Cameron in both versions of the play, many of whose components overlap with the various drafts of the telescope story, though Henry Taylor is not a presence in Freshwater. There are many reasons why the figure of Ellen Terry should have fascinated Woolf, but one of them was clearly that her life, for a short time, was so intertwined with that of Woolf’s “great aunts”. They offered patronage to Watts, and strongly encouraged his marriage to Ellen Terry, who was thirty years younger than Watts: a marriage which she claimed in her memoir ‘delighted’ her parents as much as

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 123

it did her young self: “I was happy, because my face was the type which the great artist who married me loved to paint” (Terry 1908: 53). A year later, there was a complete separation, ‘which was arranged for me in much the same way as my marriage as had been” (Terry 1908: 59). Woolf’s great-aunts and uncles were clearly instrumental in arranging both the marriage and the separation, playing a shaping, and, it could be argued, shameful part in her story.

27 Freshwater, for all its farce and facetiousness, makes a serious point in representing Terry as a victim of Victorian idealisations of female beauty and passivity, and in this Julia Margaret Cameron is seen to be as complicit as the male poets and painters, Tennyson and Watts, as she dresses Terry in a turkey’s wings to pose for the figure of the Muse. “I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied”, Cameron wrote of her photographic art (Woolf 1992: 18). Recent critics and photographic historians have pointed to the radical nature of many of her images and techniques, including and especially her diminishing of precise and definite focus. Woolf, however, in Freshwater in particular, represented Cameron’s art, and her obsession with “beauty”, as a very Victorian “arrest”, in the sense of making static, of the energy and movement that characterised the young Ellen Terry and, as Woolf would later present it, of her own mutable, changeable, “sketch”-like art of theatre: “Every night when the curtain goes down the beautiful coloured canvas is rubbed out” (Woolf 1967: 67).

28 In the play, Terry escapes from Freshwater, and its group of Victorian aesthetes and eccentrics, eloping with a young man who has no artistic pretensions, and heading for a Bloomsbury address which had indeed been the Stephens’ own home. Through a contraction of time which also characterizes the shift from the Victorian to the post- war in To the Lighthouse, Woolf, in her comic play, thus had Terry enact a version of the Stephens’s children own “escape” from Victorian Kensington to the more Bohemian Bloomsbury when their father died in 1904.

29 Woolf’s fascination with the figure of Terry culminated in a late essay on the actress in which she drew upon Terry’s memoirs, The Story of My life (first published in 1908 and revised in 1932), the correspondence between Terry and George Bernard Shaw, published posthumously in 1931, as well as the theatre director Edward Gordon Craig’s account of his mother, Ellen Terry and her Secret Self. Woolf’s essay was written in the Autumn of 1940 and published in February 1941: its composition overlapped with that of Between the Acts, in which Terry’s daughter Edith Craig and the Barn Theatre undoubtedly provided models for Miss La Trobe and her staging of the village pageant. A draft page of Between the Acts (part of the eighteenth-century act of the village pageant) is backed by a quotation from Terry’s memoir and part of a passage from a letter to Shaw, both quotations describing the circumstances of Terry’s brief marriage to G.F. Watts. In her memoir, Terry wrote of the period in which she became indifferent to her acting: “I was just dreaming of and aspiring after another world, a world full of pictures and music and gentle, artistic people with quiet voices and elegant manners. The reality of such a world was Little Holland House, the home of Mr Watts” (Terry 1908: 48). To Shaw, Terry had written, in a letter dated 7 November 1896 (only part of which is reproduced in the collection edited by Christopher St John), of the significance of “kissing” and of “my first kiss”: “I made myself such a donkey over it, and always laugh now when I remember” (St. John 1949: 111). Woolf begins the transcription of the passage from the sentence that followed, omitting the bracketed portion:

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 124

Mr Watts kissed me in the studio one day, but sweetly and gently [all tenderness and kindness, and then I was what was call ‘engaged’ to him and all the rest of it, and my people hated it,] and I was in Heaven, for I knew I was to live with those pictures. “Always,” I thought, and to sit to that gentle Mr W. and clean his brushes, and play my idiotic piano to him, and sit with him there in wonderland (the Studio). 11

30 As in the Henry Taylor “telescope” scene, “the kiss”, which condenses and emblematises Victorian sexuality, changes the course of a life.

31 Woolf drew directly on Terry’s words in her published essay on the actress, in which she played on the concept of the “sketch” as something both written and drawn: in her letters and memoirs, she suggested, Terry dashed off a sketch for a portrait – here a nose, here an arm, here a foot, and there a mere scribble in the margin. The sketches done in different moods, in different angles, sometimes contradict each other. The nose cannot belong to the eyes; the arm is out of all proportion to the foot. It is difficult to assemble them. And there are blank pages too. (Woolf 1967: 68)

32 Picking up on Edward Gordon Craig’s account of his mother’s “secret self”, Woolf’s essay pointed to Terry’s multiple selves which are schematised by “the two Ellen Terry’s – Ellen the mother, and Ellen the actress”. She also used Terry’s account of looking at a “very beautiful” old kitchen chair in her letter to Shaw, “rush-bottomed, sturdy-legged and wavy-backed”, to emblematise the ways in which the world of the stage could be readily displaced by Terry’s intense, painterly perception of reality (Woolf 1967: 71). Perhaps, Woolf implies, Terry could have been a painter rather than a painter’s Muse.

33 Ellen Terry’s life for a time touched closely upon that of Woolf's mother, despite the radical differences in their class and background. Born within a year of each other, Ellen Terry and Julia Jackson were both beautiful young women who, in the early 1860s, were “presented” at Little Holland House (where artists and writers met at the home of Woolf’s great-aunt and uncle Prinsep) and photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron. Woolf wrote in “Sketch of the Past”: How easy it is to fill in the picture with set pieces that I have gathered from memoirs – to bring in Tennyson in his wideawake; Watts in his smock frock; Ellen Terry dressed as a boy; Garibaldi in his red shirt – and Henry Taylor turned from him to my mother – “the face of one fair girl was more to me” – so he says in a poem. But if I turn to my mother, how difficult it is to single her out as she really was’. (Woolf 2002: 98)

34 Woolf’s fascination with Terry’s mercurial qualities, and her “secret self”, begins to bear on what she saw as her mother’s two lives, evidenced in her two very different marriages; the first to Herbert Duckworth and the second, after his shockingly sudden death in the first years of the marriage, to the widowed Leslie Stephen. The attenuation of the relationship between the half-siblings, the Stephen and the Duckworth children, after Leslie Stephen’s death would seem to confirm the absoluteness of the difference between the two men and the two marriages and, by extension, Julia Stephen’s “two selves”.

35 The central connection between “the telescope story” in all its variants and those writings of Woolf with which it intersected in the space and time of composition – To the Lighthouse, Freshwater, “Ellen Terry”, “A Sketch of the Past”, Between the Acts, is the question of origins. We might imagine a version of the story in which a child looks

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 125

through the telescope at the figures of the parents – “a man’s head, a woman’s head”– as in Rachel’s view from the ground, in The Voyage Out, as she sees the figures of Terence and Helen kissing above her. We might also be reminded of the photograph taken at St Ives, in which we see Virginia as a child, in the corner of the room, looking at her parents reading on the sofa, as well as the haunting image of the mother in To the Lighthouse: faint and flickering, like a yellow beam or the circle at the end of the telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her flowers, went wandering over the bedroom wall, up the dressing-table, across the wash-stand, as Mrs McNab hobbled and ambled, dusting, straightening. (Woolf 1992: 149)

36 Such images are, as I have suggested, framed in and by the relation between distance and proximity (including and especially the relationship between modernity and the Victorian past) which lies at the heart of so much of Woolf’s writing, and is so often viewed through the lenses of the technologies of vision.

37 The published version of the story – “The Searchlight” – occludes, through a fiction- making marked by the theatricality of its performance, the markers of the story’s own genesis. Sir Henry Taylor and Woolf’s own “Victorian” family are absorbed into Mrs Ivimey and her drama of her origins. Vanessa Bell commented on the curious name Woolf had chosen for the protagonist of the story, at the same time noting that she felt very drawn to illustrate it, but perplexed as to the choice of visual image she might make for so multifarious a narrative. It could be suggested, however, that Woolf was able to complete “The Searchlight” precisely because, in contrast to the other variants of “the telescope story”, it possessed the self-containment of the overtly fictional artefact and had not (in the words Woolf used to describe the processes by which a “scene” is transmitted and incorporated) “mixe[d] itself up with so much else”. The variants of the “telescope story”, provisional and sketchy as many of them are, provide windows onto the components of this “mixing” and onto the ways in which the “telescope scene” came to function as a “primal scene” or “ur-scene”. It allowed Woolf to explore the genesis of “scene-making” – the basis of her art and writing – as intertwined, in complex and overdetermined ways, with the issue of her own cultural and biological origins and “making”.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Benjamin, Walter. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940. Ed. Gershom Sholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Benzel, Kathryn N. and Ruth Hoberman, eds. Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. New York and Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave, 2004.

Briggs, Julia. Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 126

Coyle, John. “Pulp Fiction or, Proust and Joyce’s Rhetorical Flourishes”, 2006 (Accessedhttp:// www.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESL1/STELLA/COMET/glasgrev/issue3/coyle.htm). de Gay, Jane. “An Unfinished Story: The Freshwater Drafts of 'The Searchlight'”, Virginia Woolf: Turning the Centuries: Selected Papers from the Ninth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Ann Ardis and Bonnie Kime Scott. New York, Pace University Press, 2000, 207-215.

Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979, 50-51.

Elliott, Eric. Anatomy of Motion Picture Art. Terriet, Switzerland: POOL, 1928.

Falconer, Graham. “Genetic Criticism”, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms. Ed. Irene Rima Mabaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto P., 1993.

Fry, Roger. “Mrs Cameron’s Photographs”, Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women (1926). London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.

Graham, J.W. “The Drafts of Virginia Woolf’s 'The Searchlight'”, Twentieth-Century Literature, 22/ 4 (December 1976): 379-93.

Hardy, Thomas. Two on a Tower (1882/1895). London: Macmillan and Co., 1920.

Henry, Holly. Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Holmberg, Jan. “Closing In: Telescopes, Early Cinema, and the Technological Conditions of De- distancing”, in Moving Images: From Edison to the Webcam, ed. John Fullerton and Astrid Söderbergh Widding. Sydney: John Libbey, 2000, 83-90.

Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1, Swann’s Way. Trans. C.K.Scott Montcrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised D.J. Enright. London: Chatto and Windus, 1992.

Radford, Andrew. Review of Pamela Gossin, Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Review section, The British Society for Literature and Science (accessed http/:www.arts.gla.ac.uk/BSLS).

Skrbic, Nena. “Crossing Cultural Boundaries”, Trespassing Boundaries: Virginia Woolf’s Short Fiction. Ed. Kathryn N. Benzel and Ruth Hoberman. New York and Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave, 2004.

St. John, Christopher. Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: a Correspondence (1931). London: Reinhardt and Evans, 1949.

Taylor, Henry. Autobiography of Henry Taylor, 1880-1875. 2 Vols. London: Longmans Green, 1885.

Terry, Ellen. The Story of My Life. London: Hutchinson, 1908.

---. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs. London: Gollancz, 1933.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse (1927). London: Penguin, 1992.

---. The Years (1937). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. V. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1984.

---. The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 1912-1922. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. London: Chatto and Windus, 1976.

---. A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. 1923-1928. Ed. Nigel Nicolson. London: Chatto and Windus, 1977.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 127

---. “The Searchlight”, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Grafton, 1991, 269-72.

--- “Julia Margaret Cameron”, Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women (1926). London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.

--- “Ellen Terry” (1941), Collected Essays Vol. 4. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1967, 67-72.

--- The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1988.

NOTES

1. The significant works in these contexts include, from the mid-late 1920s, “The Cinema” (1926), To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf’s introduction to the Hogarth Press edition of Julia Margaret Cameron photographs, Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women (1926), the first version of Freshwater (1923), the first version of “The Searchlight” (1929) and A Room of One’s Own (1929). Works from the mid-late 1930s include the second version of Freshwater (1935), Between the Acts (1941), “Ellen Terry” (1940), later draft versions of “the telescope story” and “A Sketch of the Past” (1939). 2. “What the Telescope Discovered”. Ts. MH/B9j 1-5. Monk’s House Papers, University of Sussex, England. 3. “Inaccurate/Incongruous Memories”. Ts. MH/B9k: 1-5. Monk’s House Papers, University of Sussex, England. 4. Woolf used the image of the circle in her essay “A Glance at Turgenev” (1921) as, in Nina Skrbic’s words, “a supreme symbol of wholeness and unity, a wholeness and unity constantly threatened by the chaos outside it” (Nena Skrbic, “Crossing Cultural Boundaries”, in (Benzel and Hoberman 33). In the essay Woolf wrote of Turgenev’s “Russian” melancholy: “Beyond the circle of his scene seems to lie a great space, which flows in at the window, presses upon people, isolates them, makes them incapable of action, indifferent to effect, sincere, and open-minded. Some background of that sort is common to much of Russian literature” (Woolf 1988: 316 ). 5. Woolf wrote the draft entitled “A Scene from the Past”, or “Scene from the Past”, in at least five versions. The longest version, from which these quotes are taken is “A Scene from the Past”. Ts. MH/B10e: 1-25. Monk’s House Papers, University of Sussex, England. 6. Woolf, “A Scene from the Past”. Ts. MH/B10e: 1. Monk’s House Papers. University of Sussex, England. 7. Woolf, “A Scene from the Past”. Ts. MH/B10e: 1. Monk’s House Papers. University of Sussex, England 8. In the final part of The Years, “Present Day”, Woolf has North, at the family party, “looking at a couple at the farther end of the room. Both were young; both were silent; they seemed held still in that position by some powerful emotion. As he looked at them, some emotion about himself, about his own life, came over him, and he arranged another background for them or form himself – not the mantelpiece and the bookcase, but cataracts roaring, clouds racing, and they stood on a cliff above a torrent” (Woolf 1968: 203). 9. “A Scene from the Past”. Ts. MH/B10e: 3. Monk’s House Papers, University of Sussex, England. 10. “A Scene from the Past”. Ts. MH/B10e: 3. Monk’s House Papers, University of Sussex, England, 24-5. 11. MH/B5a. Monk’s House Papers, University of Sussex, England.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 128

RÉSUMÉS

Cet article examine la genèse et les différentes ré-écritures de l'histoire “télescope” de Woolf, dont la version publiée, “The Searchlight”, parut dans le volume posthume A Haunted House and Other Stories. Dans un article publié en 1976, J.W. Graham analyse la version publiée comme étant la version ultime. Plus récemment Jane de Gay a contré ces conclusions et analysé les brouillons de “Freshwater” comme étant des textes à la fois indépendants de “The Searchlight” et postérieurs à cette nouvelle plutôt que des variantes antérieures “peu satisfaisantes”. Cet article montre que tout l'intérêt vient au contraire de l'interaction entre toutes les variantes textuelles de 1929 à 1941. Ces variantes ouvrent sur des problèmes cruciaux de création et de composition ainsi que sur la “création de scènes” qui est au cœur de l'écriture de Woolf. La construction de l'histoire“télescope” pose des problèmes liés à l'autobiographie et à l'écriture de la vie, eux-mêmes liés à la genèse et à la génétique littéraire ainsi qu'à la manière dont se forge non seulement l'écriture mais également le moi. Cet article s'intéresse à la dimension “cinématographique” de la nouvelle et à la manière dont elle s'articule, dans toutes ces variantes, avec le lien qu'établit Woolf entre distance et proximité ou passé et présent, et qui sous-tend une grande partie de ses écrits.

AUTEURS

LAURA MARCUS Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work (1997: 2nd edition 2004) and The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007). She is editor of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays (1999), co-editor of the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (2005), and author of numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, including essays on Woolf and feminism and on Woolf and the Hogarth Press.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 129

“To Slip Easily From One Thing To Another”: Experimentalism And Perception in Woolf’s Short Stories

Teresa Prudente

1 Woolf’s engagement with the short story is to be read as more than an occasional exploration and alternative to her constant experimentation as a novelist: indeed, her short stories appear to unveil the foundation of her experiments in narrative and to provide us with an important insight into her innovative approach to writing.

2 From this point of view, the short stories which Woolf composed between the years 1917-1921, collected in the volume Monday or Tuesday (1921), testify to the writer’s crucial shift from her conventional writing in her first novels, i.e., The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), to more radical forms of writing. I will therefore establish in this essay a close link between Woolf’s anticipation in Monday or Tuesday of the major themes which were later to be developed in her novels and the narrative features specifically connected to the short story: it is in this confrontation that we can both envisage the reasons which led Woolf to choose this form as a privileged field of experimentation, and, conversely, understand how the short story allowed some of Woolf’s most important and until then subterranean issues, to emerge.

3 The short story has been defined since the first theorisations as a condensed form of narration in which brevity opens the way to a more intense development of the narrative elements; as Poe has underlined, the process of selection (Poe 1842: 298) which guides the author to the accomplishment of a short narrative piece functions as an essential element in determining the aspects peculiar to this form. According to Poe, it is in the limited yet profound space of the short story that impressions rather than facts can be conveyed and the sense of organic totality of the artwork is preserved from dispersion and lack of intensity. These major features defining the short story already contain several hints which suggest how Woolf’s interest in this narrative form is rooted in its potential to serve as an experimental space in which the author can escape the mere representation of “the surface, with its hard separate facts” (Woolf 1985: 79).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 130

The work of subtraction which I will underline in Woolf’s short stories anticipates the writer’s later insistence on the process of selection as fundamental in writing: So drastic is the process of selection that in its final state we can often find no trace of the actual scene upon which the chapter was based. For in that solitary room, whose door the critics are for ever trying to unlock, processes of the strangest kind are gone through. Life is subjected to a thousand disciplines and exercises. It is curbed; it is killed. It is mixed with that, brought into contrast with something else; so that when we get our scene at the café a year later the surface signs by which we remembered it have disappeared. There emerges from the mist something stark, something formidable and enduring, the bone and substance upon which our rush of indiscriminating emotion was founded. (Woolf 1958: 41-42)

4 In another essay, “The Narrow Bridge of Art”, Woolf identifies this process of elimination of the excessive and unimportant details from prose as the most determining feature leading the novel to be transformed into a form which, in contrast with “materialistic” works, will prove more adequate in conveying human experience. In Woolf’s view, the modern novel will result from the concurrence of poetry and prose and, by making “little use of the marvellous fact-recording power, which is one of the attributes of fiction”, will convey “the outline rather than the detail […] not only or mainly people’s relations to each other and their activities together, as the novel has hitherto done, but it will give the relation of the mind to general ideas and its soliloquy in solitude” (Woolf 1958: 18-19).

5 In the crucial years following her first novels, Woolf is engaged with the first embryonic forms of these ideas, and the short stories act as flexible structures in which the writer feels free to develop her new method and make innovative issues emerge. The stories collected in Monday or Tuesday indeed show both Woolf’s working on narrative forms which tend to essentiality rather than to the “trivial and transitory” (Woolf 1993c: 7), and her shift in the focus of narration from external reality to consciousness. The process of selection which Poe identified as the main feature of the short story, and Woolf conceived as a fundamental stage in creation, acquires in these stories a particular nature, anticipating Woolf’s later confrontation with forms capable of conveying reality as a “whole made of shivering fragments” (Bell 138). As Deleuze and Guattari have underlined, Woolf’s writing is structured along a dual movement which implies both a process of exclusion of the “trop-à-percevoir” (Deleuze – Guattari 342) and a simultaneous process of saturation which determines the density of her works. This two-directional path of creation, resulting from Woolf’s atomistic view, suggests how the short story is conceived by her as a narrative space in which limited extension bears the potential to become expansion in depth. In this sense, the stories collected in Monday or Tuesday reveal Woolf’s first narrative attempts at conveying the expanded and a-temporal dimension of those instants of revelation which she will later define as moments of being (Woolf 1978b). As Poe had remarked, the condensed form of the short story proves ideal in expressing such moments of intensity, by allowing the reader to be immersed into the fictive world of narration “at one sitting” (Poe 1842: 298) without interruptions, and by reproducing the ephemeral yet “immense force derivable from totality” (Poe 1842: 298). Woolf’s aim at conveying instants of revelation thus finds in the short story a perfect ground of expression, which allows her to escape the duration inherent in the novel and to fully convey the essence of these moments by leaving behind “the fabric of things” (Woolf 1966: 332), those detailed descriptions of external reality that she criticized in Edwardian novels. The brief temporal parabola on which moments of being are structured finds in the short story an ideal form of

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 131

representation, which mimetically coincides with the ephemeral nature of intense perceptual experiences and is able to convey how “all high excitements are necessarily transient.” (Poe 1842: 298). This emphasis on the potential held by the short story to contract time into a limited yet over-significant narrative space, stands at the foundation of Woolf’s engagement with this genre, which offered her the possibility to experiment innovative treatments of time in narration. As Paul Ricoeur (1984) has underlined, Woolf’s works can be understood as enacting the tension and contrast between subjective (“mortal time”) and objectified (“monumental time”) human perception of time, and the stories of Monday or Tuesday can be read as the writer’s first attempts at conveying the discrepancy between these two simultaneous temporal experiences. As I will show, Woolf’s treatment of time in these stories does not only involve the thematic emphasis on the contrast and interaction between external and internal reality, but also implies stylistic and structural elements which re-create in the reader a similar experience of temporal transformation.

6 “The Mark on the Wall” well exemplifies this double level of significance on which Woolf’s writing started being structured at that point in her career. The free and only lightly related way in which thoughts are in this story connected by the narrator’s voice, who is stimulated to a series of meditations by the casual remark of a sign on the wall, introduces one of Woolf’s most important issues: the portrayal of the human mind not as rigid and fixed datum, but in its dynamic and contrasting nature. Woolf’s intention was in fact to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order they fall, let us trace the pattern however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness” (Woolf 1993c: 9), and in this sense the short story allows her to transgress the conventional rules structuring the novel. Not being submitted to the requirement of a progression of the plot in time, the short story is employed by Woolf as an intensive structure in which the time of consciousness dominates narration. The remark on exterior reality from which this story moves is soon covered by the emergence of the narrator’s meditations, reproducing the movement which guides the voice in the story to transcend reality and enter the abstract space of meditation: “I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously […] I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface” (Woolf 1985: 78-79). The surface of experience, which is the origin of the narrator’s process of thought, is not however completely abandoned and erased from narration, but rather recurs cyclically in her perception, structuring the story on a temporal frame which does not proceed linearly but instead in the form of a spiral progression: “But as for the mark […] And yet the mark on the wall […] Ah! The mark on the wall!” (Woolf 1985: 77-83). In this sense, “The Mark on the Wall” appears revealing for the anticipation of two Woolfian major aspects: on the one hand the close connection and interaction between external and internal reality, and on the other, the treatment of narrative time not only as depicting, but rather as re-producing the time of consciousness. Woolf’s emphasis on the only apparent contradiction between materiality and transcendence will become recurrent in her following novels, in which revelation is not portrayed in contrast with everyday experience, but rather as briefly emerging from the intense perception of the most minute and ordinary aspects of life. As the writer observed in “Modern Fiction”, it was not to be taken “for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small” (Woolf 1993c: 9), and on this amplification of the most ordinary aspects of life she was in fact to structure her experimental novels. The experience of revelation, the exit from “those habitual

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 132

currents” (Woolf 1958: 233) of perception, is conveyed by Woolf in her novels as closely connected to a sensitive perception of reality in its most insignificant details, thus leading the subject to feel, like Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, “on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.” (Woolf 1958: 296). In this sense, “The Mark on the Wall” prefigures the essential inter-dependence in Woolf of solid reality and abstract re-elaboration, also anticipating how this will later take the form in her writing of a dynamic narrative counterpoint between the linear progression of time and the a- temporal dimension of consciousness. This is conveyed in the 1917 story by a circular structure which, by moving from and finally returning to objective reality, portrays the mind as a “spiral stairway” (Woolf 1993b: 5) in which thoughts are assembled and re- combined in a non-sequential modality. This experiment in breaking the rule of linear progression and cause-effect links, shows Woolf’s engagement with forms of writing that can convey life not as “a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged” (Woolf 1993c: 8), but rather in its “streaked, involved, inextricably confused” (Woolf 1966: 243) nature. “The Mark on the Wall” proceeds in fact through an a-linear narrative development which escapes the conventional impositions “to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest” (Woolf 1993c: 8) and allows instead Woolf to focus on the stratified time of consciousness, which finds expression in the internal expansion peculiar to the short story. This is able, as Poe remarked, to function as an organic and coherent form in virtue of its brevity which conceals a highly organized structure within which no element is wasted nor excessive (Poe 1842: 298).

7 The sense of totality conveyed according to Poe by the short story opens further implications in Woolf, whose conception of the organic bears very particular features. The construction of a coherent design which Poe envisages as the basis of literary creation is doubtlessly also fundamental for Woolf, who interprets moments of being as instants in which the secret pattern “behind the cotton wool of everyday life” (Woolf 1978b: 67) is revealed to the subject. According to Woolf, it is the act of writing which succeeds in crystallizing such moments of revelation, by translating into words the instantaneous flashing of a different reality and by reproducing through syntactical and formal structures the subject’s temporary ability in these moments to “put the severed parts together.” (Woolf 1978b: 67). Nevertheless, Woolf’s emphasis on the transient nature of instants of revelation reveals how the sense of a whole is felt by her as an ephemeral experience and must thus be conveyed in writing through equally dynamic structures which reproduce not only the re-composition of reality into a coherent design, but also, as she stated in her diary while conceiving To the Lighthouse, the inevitable “flight of time & the consequent break of unity in my design.” (Woolf 1980: 36).

8 This profoundly temporal conception of totality leads Woolf to the elaboration of forms which function as flexible structures within which the “infinite discords” (Bell 138) composing reality can be organically contained and simultaneously preserved in their internal dynamism. This applies also to the short story, which is employed by Woolf as a form similar to an “invisible elastic net” (Woolf 1993a: 41) which re-composes fragmentation without superimposing linearity and sequentiality to the elements of narration. As “The Mark on the Wall” demonstrates, the short story proves to function for Woolf as an ideal ground of experimentation in perception, in which reality is not only portrayed in its complex and inexplicable aspects, but even radically questioned. The ruminations carried out by the narrator’s voice in this story culminate in an

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 133

overlapping of reality and unreality which suggests how the borders between the two can be understood as thin and not precisely definable: “the mystery of life; the inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity!”, “these real things […] were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms” (Woolf 1985: 80). This state of loss of certainties originates from a casual and minute doubt which soon expands to shadow the subject’s entire perception, as will later happen to the character of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse: What does one send to the lighthouse indeed! At any other time Lily could have suggested reasonably tea, tobacco, newspapers. But this morning everything seemed so extraordinarily queer that a question like that […] opened doors in one’s mind that went banging and swinging to and fro and made one keep asking, in a stupefied gape, What does one send? What does one do? Why is one sitting here, after all? (Woolf 1993a: 214)

9 In “The Mark on the Wall” the process of questioning reality is ignited by an apparently small detail of perception, the subject’s sudden spotting of a sign on the wall, which in fact condenses two major Woolfian issues. In the first instance, the assonance between the two terms nail/snail (Woolf 1985: 77, 83) introduces Woolf’s constant work on “this power of suggestion which is one of the most mysterious properties of words” (Woolf 1993c: 140), anticipating how the writer will later develop the meta-semantic potential of language in her writing. Furthermore, it is the act of observation which in this story gives rise to the chain of thoughts which soon stimulate the subject to transcend objective reality and be immersed into the abstract dimension of meditation. This act of looking will become central in Woolf’s novels, in the form of a process of focusing on reality which paradoxically culminates in the appearance of the different reality of consciousness, as happens to the main character in Orlando: “he opened his eyes, which had been wide open all the time but had seen only thoughts” (Woolf 1993b: 64). This intent observation of reality does not lead in Woolf to a more solid perception of the external world, but rather to a wider spreading of doubt which urges the subject to exit his state of transcendence and cyclically go back to objective perception: “Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of” (Woolf 1985: 82).

10 In this sense the 1917 story opens the way to Woolf’s confrontation with the dualities real/unreal and visible/invisible which were to become central in her writing. The alteration in perception which she will extensively explore through the character of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway is in this story anticipated by the portrayal of the subject while crossing the borders of objective reality. As Elizabeth Bowen commented, this ability to explore the threshold between solid reality and hallucination, is one of Woolf’s most prominent features: “There is a touch of hallucination about “reality”; creative Orlando was right, so was his-her creator. Virginia Woolf’s vision conferred strangeness, momentarily, on all it fell on. […] The bus, the lamp-post, the teacup – how formidable she found them, everyday things!” (Bowen 1960: 46). Woolf’s attitudes to transfiguring everyday objects and unveiling the hidden significance behind phenomenal reality find a fertile ground in the short story, in which the writer feels free from the realistic canon dominating the novel at her time. The possibility of avoiding strict reference to reality and conveying instead the subject’s oscillations

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 134

between objective perception and subjective re-elaboration allow Woolf to work on an intensive use of language, in which every single words is endowed with multiple levels of significance. Many years after Woolf, Raymond Carver will theorize this potential inherent in short fiction with words similar to those employed by Bowen in praising Woolf’s work: “It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things – a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring – with immense, even startling power” (Carver 33). The power of substraction peculiar to the short story allows this form to be centered on essentiality and words can thus release their hidden meta-semantic potentialities, by escaping “anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change” (Woolf 1993c: 143). In this sense, the short story functions as a condensed form in which the visible and the invisible overlap and the “sunken meanings” of words can “remain sunken, suggested, not stated” (Woolf 1993c: 140). In virtue of their brevity stories can be understood as highly allusive forms, in which, as Carver remarks, the untold becomes as significant as what is narrated: “What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it’s also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things” (Carver 34).

11 Woolf’s engagement with the short story tends to deploy this potential to convey not only the surface of experience but also the unfathomable nucleus behind phenomenal reality. This applies not only to Woolf’s portrayal of the subject’s perceptual experiences, but also to her conception of the self as a dynamic and uncircumscribable phenomenon. The story “An Unwritten novel” testifies not only to Woolf’s conception of the self as unlimited and never completely definable, but also raises the fundamental issue of the creation of characters in fiction, which Woolf will later expand in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, by partly drawing on this story. The encounter with an anonymous woman on a train which Woolf cites in her 1924 essay to exemplify how human beings escape rigid definition and cannot be conveyed through the limited and stereotyped characterisations of realistic novels, directly refers to this short story. In “An Unwritten Novel” the narrator starts a series of speculations moving from the observation of a woman sitting in front of her on a train; from a few details of the woman’s appearance and behaviour the narrator builds up a complex imaginary plot, which includes a female character probably named after Alan Bennett’s eponymous character in Hilda Lessways. In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” it is indeed this novel which Woolf takes as a key example of how Edwardian novelists build their characters not moving from a true observation of human nature, but rather starting from their egocentric points of view: But we cannot hear her mother’s voice, or Hilda’s voice; we can only hear Mr. Bennett’s voice telling us facts about rents and freeholds and copyholds and fines. What can Mr. Bennett be about? I have formed my own opinion of what Mr. Bennett is about – he is trying to make us imagine for him; he is trying to hypnotize us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living there. With all his powers of observation, which are marvellous, with all his sympathy and humanity, which are great, Mr. Bennett has never once looked at Mrs. Brown in her corner” (Woolf 1985: 330).

12 In Woolf’s view, detailed descriptions of external reality are employed by realistic novelists to provide their characters with an “air of probability” (Woolf 1993c: 8), and

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 135

this concern about a faithful representation of phenomenal reality is what prevents their works from conveying a true exploration of human nature in all its contradictory and subtle aspects. The other reality which Woolf intends to bring to the foreground in narration, the ever-moving and inexplicable reality of consciousness, requires that these conventional rules of the novel are abandoned in favour of more flexible and dynamic forms of narration. These involve not only, as previously observed, a different treatment of narrative time and a stratified use of language, but also a less falsifying conception of characters. “An Unwritten Novel” well exemplifies how in Woolf’s view the true novelist is aware that his narrative representation of human nature can only be partial and fictive: “Most novelists have the same experience. Some Brown, Smith, or Jones comes before them and says in the most seductive way in the world, “Come and catch me if you can.” […] Few catch the phantom; most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair” (Woolf 1993c: 319). The woman in the carriage from which the short story moves, functions as “almost a symbol of human destiny” (Woolf 1985: 106) and is in the end revealed to contradict completely the narrator’s fantasies about her. The dramatic and complex plot which the narrator builds around the amplification of few details is in fact destined to fall to pieces when the woman’s true situation is revealed, and this final reversal leads the narrator to meditate on the overtly fictive nature of her creations: “Well, my world’s done for! What do I stand on? What do I know?” (Woolf 1985: 115). This revelation does not however undermine the principles of narration, but rather incorporates within writing the awareness of how limited representation is when confronted with the truly inexhaustible nature of human life. In this sense, “An Unwritten Novel” anticipates Woolf’s confrontation in her novels with the “thousand disagreeables” (Woolf 1993b: 4) composing human consciousness and her attempt to convey these without restraining them into a mystifying linearity and intelligibility.

13 The confrontation with the other always involves in Woolf the awareness of how what we perceive and understand is only a part of what is truly concealed in human nature. For this reason, alterity proves fundamental in stimulating the subject to that active fragmentation in thought which leads not only to uncertainty but also to a more productive and original process of thinking, as happens to Lily in To the Lighthouse when she is unable to formulate a final judgment of Mr. Bankes: How did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, after all? Standing now, apparently transfixed by the pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thoughts was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil. (Woolf 1993a: 40)

14 The narrator in “An Unwritten Novel” underlines how knowledge and understanding of the other is never completely accomplished but rather takes the form of an endless process in which, similar to Carver’s remarks on the short story, what is concealed acts as a subterranean level of infinite re-definitions. In this sense, like “The Mark on the Wall”, Woolf’s 1920 short story proceeds by following a spiral-like epistemological and temporal progression in which the profound knowledge achieved by the narrator at the end of the story is circularly connected to her initial observations on the mysterious nature of human beings: “Five faces opposite – five mature faces – and the knowledge in each face. Strange, though, how people want to conceal it! Marks of reticence are on all those faces: lips shut, eyes shaded, each one of the five doing something to hide or

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 136

stultify his knowledge” (Woolf 1985: 106). Woolf had already underlined in “The Mark on the Wall” how human beings tend to hide their inner nature when confronted with the others, and in particular with strangers, and her remarks in this story opens onto several levels of interpretation: Suppose the looking-glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people – what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. (Woolf 1985: 79)

15 What is perceived from the outside is only the “shell” of the subject and this necessarily falsifies the complex and multi-levelled nature of interior life. In this sense, Woolf again insists on the importance for writers to focus on consciousness and leave “the description of reality more and more out of their stories” (Woolf 1985: 80). The surface of appearances does not coincide with the dynamic and contradictory essence of human beings; in spite of this, Woolf does not seem to prefigure in this story forms of writing which erase the duality external/internal by focussing exclusively on consciousness, but rather to anticipate innovative narrations structured on the very interaction between these two simultaneous realities. “The Mark on the Wall” suggests in fact how the subject’s process of self-knowledge is centred not only on self- exploration but also on that dynamic confrontation with the others, which makes the subject experience a prismatic fragmentation of the self; according to Woolf “the novelists in future will realise more and more the importance of these reflections, for course there is not one reflection but almost infinite numbers; those are the depths they will explore, those phantoms they will pursue” (Woolf 1985: 79).

16 In this sense, the stories collected in Monday or Tuesday anticipate Woolf’s later emphasis on the process of self-knowledge conceived not as an autonomous act of self- exploration but rather, as Paul Ricoeur (1996) has theorized, in terms of an infinite process necessarily involving the confrontation with alterity. This also raises the important question of how Woolf perceived the technique of first-person narration, which she widely employed in short stories in contrast with the third-person narration of her novels. The short form appears in this sense to allow Woolf to explore the I- centered narration which she preferred to avoid in novels; however, the first-person voice is not to be understood as coinciding with the author’s voice nor are the short stories to be read as autobiographical pieces of writing. Though sometimes moving from remarks which could be easily read as autobiographical, the stories in Monday or Tuesday perfectly adhere to the canon of narrative fictive re-configuration. The first- person narrative voice present in some of the stories can thus be understood not as Woolf’s alter ego, but rather as a bodiless and abstract voice which anticipates the writer’s confrontation with “abstract mystical eyeless” (Woolf 1980: 203) forms of writing. This process of abstraction, particularly evident in the two stories “A Haunted House” and “Monday or Tuesday”, demonstrates Woolf’s implementing with that universal character potential in the short story, according to Poe (Poe 1846: 164), and reveals one of Woolf’s major innovations in writing: “I daresay it’s true, however, that I haven’t that ‛reality’ gift. I unsubstantise, willfully to some extent, distrusting reality – its cheapness” (Woolf, 1978a: 248). First-person narration does not function for Woolf in these stories as a means of expression of that “damned egotistical self” (Woolf 1978a: 14) that she had in fact deplored in other writers, but rather as a technique which

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 137

allows her to convey that process of fusion of the subject with an extra-corporeal reality which was to become central in her novels.

17 In this sense, most of the features that I have underlined in Monday or Tuesday appear to be closely connected to Woolf’s later development of the same themes and forms of writing in her novels. It is significant to observe how Woolf, though widely experimenting in her short pieces of writing, always felt the need to transfer these innovations to her novels rather than explore the short form further. An illuminating insight into Woolf’s position on this issue comes from an entry in her diary in which she directly connects one of her short stories to the conception of her first radically innovative novel, Jacob’s Room: “& happier today than I was yesterday having this afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form of a new novel. Suppose one thing should open out of another – as in An Unwritten Novel – only not for 10 pages but 200 or so – doesn’t that give the looseness & lightness I want; doesn’t that get closer & yet keep form & speed, & enclose everything, everything?” (Woolf 1978a: 13). The practice of short writing had doubtlessly taught Woolf how to free her forms from the rules of strictly sequential writing and how to “slip easily from one thing to another” (Woolf 1985: 79), thus conveying the disordered and unpredictable dynamism of the human mind. The short story does not however appear to provide Woolf with the temporal extension and the sense of development that she needs in order to fully deploy her narrative issues. The intensive character of short fiction allows Woolf to experiment with modalities of representation of the simultaneous and a-linear time of the mind, but also appears to avoid that fundamental confrontation with the passage of time which was to become central to her novels. Woolf’s aim to convey “everything” in her writing unveils her engagement with forms that can implement the potential of prose to express both the “ordinariness” (Woolf 1958: 18) of everyday life as well as the momentary “flight of the mind” (Bell 138). This emphasis on the temporary quality of moments of being points out how fundamental it is for Woolf to reproduce these instants of revelation not as absolute experiences separated from the linear flowing of time, but rather as “embedded in many more moments of non being” (Woolf 1978b: 70). In her view, “the real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being” (Woolf 1978b: 70) and it is this attention to the interaction of an extensive and an intensive perception of time which explains Woolf’s constant experimentation with the form of the novel. According to Woolf, it is this genre which holds the potential to reproduce human experience fully, by adding to the density of poetry and short prose, the awareness of how life is essentially rooted in time: The novel is the only form of art which seeks to make us believe that it is giving a full and truthful record of life, not the climax and the crisis but the growth and development of feelings, which is the novelist’s aim, he copies the order of the day, observes the sequence of ordinary things even if such fidelity entails chapters of description and hours of research. Thus we glide into the novel with far less effort and less break with our surrounding than in any other form of imaginative literature. We seem to be continuing to live, only in another house or country perhaps. (Woolf 1958: 141)

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 138

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Bell, Quentin, Virginia Woolf. A Biography, vol. I. London: The Hogarth Press, 1972.

Bowen, Elizabeth, “Orlando” (1960), Afterthought. London: Longman, 1962.

Carver, Raymond, “Principles of a Story” (1981), Prospect Magazine. London: Prospect Publishing, September 2005. 32-34.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie, mille plateaux. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980.

Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Philosophy of Composition", Graham's Magazine, Philadelphia, April 1846. 163-167.

---. “Twice-Told Tales”, Graham's Magazine, Philadelphia (May 1842): 298-300.

Ricoeur, Paul, Temps et récit, vol. I, II, III. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983, 1984, 1985.

---. Soi même comme un autre, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996.

Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse (1927). London: Penguin, 1993a.

---. Orlando: A Biography (1928). London: Penguin, 1993b.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2 (1920-24) Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, London: The Hogarth Press, 1978a.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3 (1925-30). Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, London: The Hogarth Press, 1980.

---. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: The Hogarth Press, 1985.

---. Granite &Rainbow. London: The Hogarth Press, 1958.

---. Collected Essays I, London: The Hogarth Press, 1966.

---. The Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected Essays. Vol. II, London: Penguin, 1993c.

---. Moments of Being. Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. Hogarth Press, London, 1978b.

RÉSUMÉS

Les nouvelles que Woolf composa entre 1917 et 1921 marquent un tournant dans son écriture, le passage de la forme conventionnelle de ses premiers romans à de nouvelles structures narratives qui préfigurent la méthode expérimentale de l'auteur. Woolf utilise la forme brève comme un champ privilégié d'expérimentation dans lequel le temps “alinéaire” (Ricœur) entre dans la narration et sape la ligne chronologique du temps. A travers la tension entre éléments contradictoires qu'elle met en œuvre, cette forme condensée répond à un double mouvement d'“inclusion” et de “saturation” (Deleuze et Guattari) qui lui permet de devenir un espace d'expansion, un territoire infini de dilatation interne et stratifiée. En cela, la nouvelle fonctionne comme une expérience de la perception qui interroge la nature de la réalité. Cela va de pair, chez Woolf, avec la recherche de formes d'écriture flexibles qui recréent la nature insondable de la réalité et évitent toute définition stable des personnages. C'est l'expérimentation que l'on trouve

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 139

dans Monday or Tuesday qui sert de base à l'innovation dans les romans, dans lesquels Woolf intègre les concepts de durée et de narration, tels qu'ils ont été redéfinis dans les nouvelles.

AUTEURS

TERESA PRUDENTE University of TurinHas completed a PhD in Comparative Literature in 2006 at the University of Turin (Italy). She has taken part in several international symposia and published for The Virginia Woolf Miscellany and The Modernist Journals Project. She is a contributor for the Italian magazine L’indice dei libri del mese and for the online literary reference work The Literary Encyclopedia. She is currently working on the English translation of her PhD thesis, which focusses on the concept of a-linear time in Woolf’s and Gide’s novels, and which will appear in 2008 for the American publisher Lexington Books.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 140

PART THREE MUSIC, PAINTING, CINEMA AND THE SHORT STORY

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 141

Telling “by” Pictures: Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction

Liliane Louvel

“It is indeed so exciting and so absorbing. This painter’s world of form and colour that once you are at its mercy you are in grave danger of forgetting all other aspects of the material world”. (Vanessa Bell 157) I will start from a personal reading, an “impression” and offer “une idée de recherche” as Roland Barthes once phrased it, that will lead me to make a series of propositions. It might appear fanciful because of its nature, but the word “impression” is telling for it evokes the print left on one’s mind by a series of readings: it is a memorial/mnemonic process, akin to Frances Yates’s “Art of memory” and Simonides’s gruesome testimony. And Simonides, who fathered the famous aphorism on the comparison of poetry with painting, in more ways than one testifies to the importance of images in relation to memory and to language. Frances Yates acknowledges that “this has a common denominator with the invention of the art of memory”1. So my “impression” is not that fanciful after all. I will venture that Woolf’s writing, in particular her short stories, is strongly marked by the presence of the visual. This I have already had occasion to develop (Louvel 2002). Woolf had, what painters call “an eye”, and a gaze I would add, a fact which imparts her texts with a very visual quality; this is what I purport to trace and find coherence with. This will also help me define what the “visual” is, what forms it can take on in a literary text and what use it can be put to as a critical tool to open “the eye of the text”. Looking back on Woolf’s text thanks to the visual we will see to what extent it is part of the writer’s creative imagination and process. It works both ways as it stands at the origin of her creative activity but it is also inscribed in her writing and thus is part and parcel of its literary quality. Thus it may be considered as one of the criteria to define the singularity of her writing.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 142

The strong presence of the visual: a taste for the hybrid.

Interestingly enough, Susan Dick, the editor of The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf chose this generic term and not the more classic “short stories”. Because she was experimenting with narrative forms, Woolf’s shorter fiction is extremely varied. Some of her shorter works, such as “Solid Objects” and “The Legacy”, are short stories in the traditional sense, narratives with firm story lines and sharply drawn characters. Others such as “The Mark on the Wall” and “An Unwritten Novel”, are fictional reveries which in their shifts of perspective and lyrical prose recall the autobiographical essays of nineteenth century writers. De Quincey in particular. Still others, which could be called “scenes” or “sketches”, probably owe to Chekhov, who helped us to see, Woolf remarked in 1919, that 'inconclusive stories are legitimate' (Woolf 1989, introduction: 1-2) And Susan Dick concludes that “the line separating Virginia Woolf’s fiction from her essays is a very fine one”. The key notion of experimenting with forms, the diversity of the shorter fiction and the playing on boundaries between genres and media, are at the core of Woolf’s use of the visual and the gaze as I will try to show. Furthermore, Woolf used to call her shorter fiction, her “short things” or “little pieces”, when she described her creative process, while lying ill, or “deranged” as she put it (Lee 375). As Christine Reynier warned “The number and variety of texts seem to preclude any overall reading that would lead to the definition of the Woolfian short story as a specific literary genre” (Reynier 55). The absence of “firm story lines” points to the fact that some of the “stories” devoid of the narrative quality usual to the genre, are closer to what Dick calls “fictional reveries”. In some cases, they are more akin to pictures, as the word reverie itself suggests for it seems to carry a more visually arrested (or static) quality. Moreover their condensed short form is a further link with painting. This is the case, for instance, with “Blue and Green”, or “Portrait 3” in “Portraits”. Both “pieces” develop in a shape close to that of a poem. Typographically setting them as verses would prove my point. Furthermore, “Ode Written partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush Above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville” though meant as a humorous retort, shows beyond its mirror-like referential shape (to the poem by G. G. Byron “Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos”) that it is also part of Woolf’s quest for an experimental form such as she sought in The Waves and in the form of the “playpoem”. Hybridity stands at the center of it all, with its haziness, fluidity and openness. The quest for the “shape” of her shorter pieces is acknowledged when apropos “An Unwritten Novel” she writes in a letter to Ethel Smyth: “That—again in one second— showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it— not that I have reached that end but anyhow I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach, Jacobs Room, Mrs Dalloway, etc-”.2 It is of import to note to what extent Woolf’s expression is suffused with images and in particular structural ones: “deposit”, “shape”, “fitted it”, “branching out of the tunnel”. Although talking of “the shape” of a story is a dead visual metaphor, in the case of Woolf, it recaptures all its strength when she details her struggle to find her way out of the tunnel of words in shaping the experimental gems that will put her on the way to her future novels. Notwithstanding, the “shorter things” also “were written in way of diversion; they were treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 143

the conventional style”3. The “shape” better fitted to embody Woolf’s experience must evolve out of the rules and composition of the genre so as to escape its constraints and implement its own. And the visual is an integral part of this process. The wish to innovate and find one’s own tool goes in hand in hand with Woolf’s very particular biography in terms of her lifelong engagement with the sister arts.

The sisters’ arts: Virginia and Vanessa.

Vanessa Bell, Virginia’s elder sister was a painter and Woolf constantly met painters in her circle such as Clive Bell, Roger Fry, David Garnett, Mark Getler among others. The founding of the Hogarth Press and the work turned out by the Omega workshops also prove that literary enterprise and the graphic arts ran along parallel lines. The rivalry between the two “sisters’ arts” is well known4 and how Woolf tended to measure her art against her sister’s own is attested to. But at this time she was still finding out how (and whether) she could write as a painter would paint. […] She kept testing her judgments against the painters. She went to the Omega shows and tried to make up her mind about the paintings under the barrage of Roger Fry’s opinions. She listened to him talking about Cézanne to Clive, and compared her own responses to the famous apples. She set her aesthetics against Fry’s, when he wrote to praise her for “The Mark on the Wall” : “I’m not sure that a perverted plastic sense doesn’t somehow work itself in words for me.”5 It has to be remarked that “the plastic sense” working “its way in words” is said to be “perverted”. We shall also see that the topic of Cézanne’s apples discussed in this extract will unexpectedly reappear in one of her sketches. The collaboration between the two sisters consisted, among others, in the decoration and presentation of Virginia Woolf’s writing, particularly so concerning her short pieces. For Monday or Tuesday, Vanessa completed woodcut illustrations for four of the stories. The 1927 issue of Kew Gardens contains illustrations on every page, some of them reminiscent of William Blake’s own ones in their intimate intertwining of words and images. Vanessa also contributed cover-designs: “What she provided was a kind of ‘visual underscoring’ which gave the books a sympathetic atmosphere” (Lee 368-69) according to H. Lee who also states that: “Through 1918 and 1919, she wrote other sketches for Vanessa to illustrate. In all of them, silence, darkness, death pull against social conventions” (Lee 375). Among these sketches figure “The Evening Party” and “Solid Objects”. According to Dick, “Portraits” and “Uncle Vanya” “are probably part of a collaborative work called ‘Faces and Voices’ that V. W and Vanessa Bell were discussing in February 1937” (Woolf 1989 :307). Some of this “very close relationship” as Jane Dunn termed it, surfaces in “The Symbol” whose narrator is writing a letter to her “elder sister”. The latter has children of her own and owes much to Virginia and Vanessa’s early childhood life. This short story about which Woolf wrote: “I wd [sic] like to write a dream story about the top of a mountain”6 and two years later “I think of taking my mountain top—that persistent vision—as a starting point”7 shows the importance of the visual in relation to her inspiration and to the choice of the narrative device: the tourist is busy writing her letter on a balcony overlooking the mountain scenery “like a box at the theatre” (290). She is the eye witness of a tragedy occurring under her very eyes as she is describing it to her sister. Three dots suspend the end of the letter: “As I write these words, I can see the young men quite plainly on the slopes of the mountain. They are roped together.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 144

One I think I told you was at the same school with Margaret. They are now crossing a crevasse” (290). The tourist’s pen falls off her hand and drops of ink “straggle[d] in a zigzag line down the page”. The narrator registers the drops of ink left to dry on the letter before the letter writer resumes her task unable to find “a fitting conclusion”, except the clichéd form she was struggling to avoid. This short story also calls to mind Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” in the combination of death and writing, of writing as giving a death blow. It is also very visual in the sense that not only is the scene described in (mock) real time, but the letter offers itself as the material evidence of what its writer is supposed to have under her eyes while depicting it, including the unfinished sentence and the (almost) visible ink stains. “The Symbol” also points to the etymology of the word as the Greek symbolon means putting together two separate parts of the same unit (originally, a clay disk) to compare them. This is even more obvious in the holograph in which a sentence later omitted figures: “The virgin peak had never been climbed [cancelled] It was a menace: something cleft in the mind like two parts of a broken disk: two numbers that cannot be added: a problem that is insoluble” (Dick in Woolf 1989: 312). The short story depicts the letter writer’s quest for meaning while scanning the landscape “'the mountain’ the lady wrote on the balcony of the hotel, ‘is a symbol …’” (288). Facts will answer the question, and the broken disk reassembled. The visual is remarkably staged by the insistence of Woolf’s narrators on seeing or watching. A case in point is “The Fascination of the Pool”: “But if one sat down among the rushes and watched the pool--pools have some curious fascination” (226-27), and its coda: “That perhaps is why one loves to sit and look into pools”. It is also the case in “The Symbol”, or in “The Lady in the Looking-Glass”, to quote only a few of the other “short pieces”, where a character is engrossed in a vision. The incipit of “Three Pictures” also runs as: “It is impossible that one should not see pictures; because if my father was a blacksmith and yours a peer of the realm, we must needs be pictures to each other (228). This strong declaration shows to what extent seeing/thinking in pictures, visual thinking or imagination, are of primary importance in the microcosm of “the short pieces”. In “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”, the moment of revelation rests heavily on a process of seeing, as the last paragraph proves when “saw” is repeated ten times. Many details are minutely strung together as if the narrator were using a magnifying glass. They are clearly delineated in “The Fascination of the Pool” where locations, visual indications such as shades and colours, are almost obsessively noted in only one paragraph Round the edge was so thick a fringe of rushes that their reflections made a darkness like the darkness of very deep water. However in the middle was something white[…] the centre of the water reflected the white placard, and when the wind blew the centre of the pool seemed to flow and ripple like a piece of washing. One could trace the big red letters in which Romford Mill was printed in the water. A tinge of red was in the green that rippled from bank to bank. (226, my emphasis) These details and the recurring visual apparatus offered by the story also concur with what I call “pictorial markers”, that is, textual markers clearly encoding the presence of the visual, of the pictorial (meaning picture in a more restricted sense). The literary text will not only mimic but work along the same lines as painting, image or “the visual” broadly speaking. Let us remember Woolf often wondered “how she could write as a painter would paint” (Lee 370), and saw the formula as reversible when she

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 145

addressed her sister: “what a poet you are in colours” (Woolf 1980: 381). A brief survey of titles, lexis, colours, genres, framing effect and typography will help me prove my point.

Pictorial Markers

Some of the titles of the “short pieces” are closely linked to the visual in a metareflexive way: “Three Pictures”, “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection”, “Portraits”, “Scenes of the Life of a Naval Officer”, “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain”. “Three Pictures” even includes three subtitles in keeping with its nature as it adopts the form of a polyptych and more precisely that of a triptych. Within “the first picture” of the triptych another subtitle is mentioned reinforcing the visual trend: “So now at the turn of the road I saw one of these pictures. It might have been called ‘The Sailor’s Homecoming’ or some such title” (229). Then follows a verbless series of sentences separated by semi-colons standing as many gilded wooden columns on the predella of a triptych separating its different episodes. The profane scene overhangs an explanatory label or cartellino situated at the bottom of it, in which verbs are reintroduced: A fine young sailor carrying a bundle; a girl with her hand on his arm; neighbours gathering round: a cottage garden ablaze with flowers; as one passed one read at the bottom of that picture that the sailor was back from China; and there was a fine spread waiting for him in the parlor; and he had a present for his young wife in his bundle; and she was going to bear him their first child. Everything was right and good and as it should be, one felt about that picture. (228, my emphasis) “The First Picture” depicts the happy arrival of the young sailor back home, “The Second Picture”, the cry overheard by the narrator. It is almost exclusively devoted to sounds and voices: “No picture of any sort came to interpret it, to make it intelligible to the mind. But as the dark arose at last all one saw was an obscure human form, almost without shape, raising a gigantic arm in vain against some overwhelming iniquity” (229). In “The Third Picture” the narrator on his way home is “going over the picture in every detail”, “making up picture after picture of [the sailor and his wife] so that one picture after another of happiness and satisfaction might be laid over that unrest, that hideous cry” (230). Then comes the final picture, the churchyard scene: “Indeed look at that picture! A man was digging a grave, and children were picnicking at the side of it”. When the narrator discovers the identity of the dead person, horror finds a vivid bitter expression in the final line: “What a picture it made!” The polyptych form is also that adopted for “Portraits”, although this group of nine “sketches” was partially arranged by and the titles given mostly according to the editor’s choice and guesses8. As for “Blue and Green” the two paragraphs stand as a diptych in which the two colours would stand facing one another each on their own panel. Once more the title Blue & Green, in italics overhangs the two subtitles GREEN BLUE (in block capitals) as in a diptych. This short story is a case in point as it develops the adventures of colour per se under the shape of a series of tiny vignettes, —somewhat like in “Three Pictures” but on a smaller scale—, juxtaposing “views” cleanly separated by semi-colons and told in the present tense: All day long the ten fingers of the lustre drop green upon the marble.[…] But the hard glass drips on to the marble; the pools hover above the desert sand; the camels lurch through them; the pools settle on the marble; rushes edge them; weeds clog them; here and there a white blossom; the frog flops over; at night the stars are set there unbroken. (142)

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 146

With the passage of time, blue takes precedence, then “It’s night ; the needles drip blots of blue. The green’s out” (142). A beginning, a middle and an ending, a story has been told but its “tour de force” rests on the fact that its main characters are colours, the colours of a tale. And colour is another of the «”pictorial markers” I offer as critical tools to open “the eye of the text”. “Blue and Green” are the two colours typical of Woolf’s imagination and apparently favourite of hers. In the poem-like “piece”, green is repeated six times in the text and twice in the title and subtitle; blue, nine times and twice more as well. Blue and green figure in innumerable instances. In “The Fascination of the Pool”, in the extract quoted above, green largely figures. In “Slater’s Pins”, Miss Cray wears “blue in winter, green in summer”. In “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain”, “the blue stuff turned to blue air” before reverting back to its material quality “the air became blue stuff”(160-161). In “Solid Objects” the pieces of glass Charles finds are green. Green and blue, the colours of water, would have pushed to Bachelard to place Woolf among “les rêveurs d’eau”, water dreamers. As in painting, Woolf recurs to strong framing effects. On the narrative level, Woolf’s short pieces often are very tightly held together by verbal clasps as it were. Like a picture frame, they play the part of a parergon, in between the reader’s world and the œuvre itself. In “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain”, order, disorder, return to order, are clearly indicated by the paragraphs setting, and the function of the “blue stuff” which undergoes the different metamorphoses of the blue fabric. Of course, an echo of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “We are such stuff as dreams are made of” cannot be ignored. Structurally speaking, beginnings and endings often stand in an echo system, coupled together in the coda with general truths uttered by the narrator. In “The Lady in the Looking-Glass. A Reflection”, the same sentence: “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms…”, opens and closes the story. “It is impossible that one should not see pictures” is echoed by “What a picture it made!” in “Three Pictures”. In “Slater’s Pins Have No Points”, Miss Craye’s ambiguous opening question “Slater’s pins have no points—don’t you always find?” finds its answer in her final surrender when she affirms, laughing: “Slater’s pins have no points”. The second paragraph of “The Fascination of the Pool” which opens with “pools have some curious fascination, one knows not what” meets a possible answer in the explicit: “That perhaps is why one loves to sit and look into pools”. The short “stories” often adopt the same kind of structure: as in “The Symbol” a beautiful image is cruelly found to be deceptive. Illusion is opposed to reality in the very last lines of the story: this is the case with “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” or “The Fascination of the Pool” among other very “visual” or “pictorial” stories. In “Three Pictures”, the cruel opposition between the euphoric first picture and the dysphoric last one is brought about by the text which voices the fragility inherent in human life: “All was as quiet, as safe [as] could be. Yet, one kept thinking, a cry had rent it; […] This goodness, this safety were only on the surface” (230). Besides the narrative level, framing effects seem to be favoured by Woolf, within the diegesis itself. In “The Fascination of the Pool” the vision is framed and darkened by the neighbouring rushes: “Round the edge was so thick a fringe of rushes that their reflections made a darkness like the darkness of very deep water” (226). Frames are also referred to under the guise of windows, door frames or thresholds “framing” characters. Two fine examples can be analysed. In “Slater’s Pins Have No Points” after

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 147

Fanny Wilmot has eventually found the lost pin on the carpet, she has a glimpse of a new Miss Craye lost in ecstasy: “She sat there, half turned away from the piano, with her hands clasped in her lap holding the carnation upright, while behind her was the sharp square of the window, uncurtained, purple in the evening, intensely purple after the brilliant lights which burnt unshaded in the bare music room” (220). Miss Craye’s figure is delineated by the “sharp square of the window” behind her which is reminiscent of Alberti’s famous prescription: to make a picture one has to draw a quadrangolo which is like a window open onto composition (la storia). She clearly stands as the portrait of a lady while her true nature is revealed in the equation between the intense purple London night and her passionate self:9 the purple colour of the background, that is red mixed with blue, suggests the erotic undertone of the evening revelation. In “Three Pictures”, a door frame explicitly plays the same framing effect as the window: “We cannot possibly break out of the frame of the picture by speaking natural words. You see me leaning against the door of the smithy with a horseshoe in my hand and you think as you go by ‘How picturesque!’” (229). “How picturesque!”, this metapictorial comment finds its counterpart in “The First Picture” in which “picture” is repeated 14 times on one single page. The self-reflexive nature of the story is “mise en abyme” thanks to the hall of mirrors of the different frames: that of the main title: “Three Pictures”, that of the three subtitles: “The first (Second then Third) Picture” and that of the sub-subtitle: “The Sailor’s Homecoming” embedded in “The First Picture”. The visual is not restricted to painting but it also includes “semiotic mediators” as so many variations of/on the pictorial. Woolf makes great use of mirrors, tapestries and optical devices or instruments fulfilling a variety of textual or narrative functions.

Variations of/on the pictorial: semiotic mediators

The mirror of course is prominent in “The Lady in the Looking-Glass. A Reflection”. It is the instrument of the revelation experienced by the narrator posted in an adjacent room. Its treacherous nature has already been alluded to above with the initial declaration of the incipit: “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms.” The fact Woolf chose the subtitle “A Reflection” shows to what extent she knew mirrors could be instruments of thought and knowledge. I have already had occasion to work at great length on this short story (Louvel 1997) and to do so here would be beyond the scope of this paper, but two sentences deserve quoting to show the visual quality of Woolf’s writing linked to this particular form of picture-making Suddenly these reflections were ended violently and yet without a sound. A large black form loomed into the looking-glass ; blotted out everything, strewed the table with a packet of marble tablets veined with pink and grey, and was gone. But the picture was entirely altered. […] one could not relate these tablets to any human purpose. […] And then it was strange to see how they were drawn in and arranged and composed and made part of the picture and granted that stillness and immortality which the looking-glass conferred. (223, my emphasis on visual lexis) The acheropoietic image (i.e., an image not made by a human hand) verges on the supernatural till the mental and logical reconstruction of the shapes rearranges and composes the no longer unheimlich letters. The mirror itself finds a semiotic variation when the pool of the eponymous story becomes a liquid mirror which turns out to be another place of revelation and

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 148

reflection to be stared at and pondered over: “Perhaps that was the reason of its fascination-that it held in its waters all kinds of fancies, complaints, confidences, not printed or spoken aloud, but in a liquid state, floating one on top of another, almost disembodied” (226). Reservoir of thoughts and knowledge, mirrors, with their fleeting reflections, offer endless subjects of puzzled contemplation. Another substitute of traditional pictures is provided by a different kind of image. The Curtain in “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain” becomes an interesting pictorial space: “and on her knees covering the whole of her apron, was a large piece of figured blue stuff. […] For the pattern of the blue stuff was made of troops of wild beasts and below them was a lake and a bridge and a town with round roofs and little men and women looking out of windows and riding over the bridge on horseback” (160). The metamorphosis of the microcosm also seems to point to the mystery of the creative process be it literary or painterly. Nurse Lugton is dreaming the text and its visual representation, “spinning a yarn” whereas her needle is idle. What happens takes place in the “blue stuff” lying on her knees, the fabric of her dreams, “the stuff dreams are made of”. True to the form of a tale this piece takes on,10 animals magically become endowed with movement and a whole world is brought into motion. Then as in Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker order is restored when “Suddenly Nurse Lugton twitched the curtain all in crinkles. […] The animals flashed back in a second” (161). What is of import to my purpose, is to match this small animated animal world with that of “The Lady in the Looking-Glass”: The room that afternoon was full of such shy creatures, lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling-things that never happen, so it seems, if someone is looking. [such nocturnal creatures] came pirouetting across the floor, stepping delicately with high-lifted feet and spread tails and pecking allusive beaks as if they had been cranes or flocks of elegant flamingoes whose pink was faded, or peacocks whose trains were veined with silver. […] Nothing stayed the same for two seconds together. (221) In both stories, is depicted the same sort of marvellous animated world getting alive close to a human being, happily unawares. Optical instruments such as the telescope also draw the reader’s attention to the importance of the gaze. The explicit climax of “Scenes from the Life of a British Naval Officer” shows the figure of Captain Brace mounting higher and higher beyond these impediments until he had mounted onto an iron platform upon which stood a telescope. When he had put his eye to the telescope the telescope became immediately an extension of his eyes as if it were a horn casing that had formed itself to enclose the penetration of his sight. When he moved the telescope up and down it seemed as if his own long horn covered eye were moving. (233-34) The captain has become reified, turned into a kind of monstrous insect, provided with a hornlike optical instrument appendix, all eyes greedily scanning the horizon. Seeing is equated with possessing and penetrating a territory. The telescope also plays a major part in “The Searchlight”, sometimes called “What the Telescope Discovered”. “Turning his telescope to the earth, [a young man] sees a couple kissing, and runs down the tower to find the girl”. Such is Lee's summary of what she aptly calls “a voyeuristic scene” (Lee 748-49). Let it be noted too that “The Symbol” and “The Searchlight”, both focusing on watching, the former a death scene the latter a love scene, were both written in the same year, 1929 (Lee 748-49).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 149

In “Solid Objects”, visual writing is informed by the strong presence of geometry and the accurate references to forms in the initial description: “The only thing that moved upon the vast semi circle of the beach, was one small black spot. As it came nearer to the ribs and spine of the stranded pilchard boat, it became apparent from a certain tenuity in its blackness that this spot possessed four legs” (102, my emphasis). Voices and the human element only come second. When a “closer view” is taken, the walking stick “cut long straight stripes on the sand” (102) before the two men’s presence is acknowledged. Finally, painting itself and art history, be they overt or covert, infuse the Woolfian text with a pictorial quality.

The overt or covert presence of art history

The pictorial vocabulary is one of the manifestations of the overt references to the “arts and crafts” of painting that may appear in Woolf’s text. The word “Sketches” is a recurring one in the diary or in the short pieces, as well as those of “characters” or “portraits” envisaged from the literary or painterly point of view.11 When lying in bed, Woolf writes: “and thus I sketched, I think, all that now, by the light of reason, try to put into prose”12, which echoes the title she chose for her essays: “Sketches of the Past”. The analogy between character-“drawing” and sketches is literally inscribed in the text while Miss Kingston is writing out receipts in “Slater’s Pins have no Points”: “Miss Kingston who gave little sketches like this on the first day of term while she received cheques and wrote out receipts for them, smiled here” (216) Painting may also be used as a simile as in “The Lady in the Looking Glass”: “But the picture was entirely altered”, “And then it was strange to see how [the letters] were drawn and composed and made part of the picture” (223), or in [Portrait 5] “to confirm or deny the portrait she had drawn” (224). In “Portraits” [Portrait 6] once more we find the evocation of “views” as so many vignettes cleanly framed by semi-colons: “But she paints […] whereas I like cool things; pictures of Venice; girls on a bridge; a man fishing, Sunday calm; perhaps a punt” (245). Painters are explicitly quoted: “Fra Angelico you remember painted on his knees” (245) or Leighton in “Ode Written Partly in Prose”: “And he sees the violets and the asphodel and the/naked swimmers on the bank in robes like/those worn by the Leighton pictures at Leighton/house” (239). In “Blue and Green” a topos of Italian Renaissance painting is put to use as one of the components of a complex synesthesia: “But the cathedral’s different, cold, incense laden, faint blue with the veils of madonna” (142). Covert references may contribute to what I called elsewhere “Pictorial description” or “effet-tableau”/“painterly effect”(Louvel 2001). A small vivid vignette is composed when the narrator in [Portrait 6] alludes to a past paradise the delights of which he enumerates: “And Oscar being witty; and the lady with the red lips standing on a tiger skin on a slippery floor—the tiger’s mouth wide open” (my emphasis). The pictorial kinship of the evocation is confirmed by what follows: “'But she paints!' (so my mother said) which meant of course the women in Piccadilly. That was my world. Now everyone paints” (245). As I tried to show above, a true “Pictorial effect” is achieved in “Slater’s Pins Have No Points” with the description of Miss Craye standing out against the purple background of the square window. To go one step further, one could argue that this “Lady with a Carnation” evokes other famous paintings representing the same

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 150

subject in a profane or a sacred way, I think of Leonardo’s famous Madonna for instance. Furthermore the carnation being a symbol of p/Passion can be found in quite a few Medieval or Renaissance paintings. We can think of Jacob of Utrecht’s or Johann Konig’s copy of Leonardo’s Madonna. Raphaël also took up the theme with his two Madonna with Carnation. But there are also more recent profane instances such as René Gruau’s Garçonne and Aman-Jean Edmond’s Femme à l’œillet. The carnation was a symbol of Christ’s Passion which explains its presence in sacred painting but it also was a sign of recognition for conspirators or sects. This tallies with the secret sapphist undertone of the text nevertheless claimed as such by Woolf in her private correspondence. In “[Portraits]”, particularly in “Portrait 3”, a striking passage calls to mind Meyer Schapiro’s hypothesis concerning Cézanne’s apples, and we have seen above that Woolf discussed them with Fry among others. The scene is located in a “French Inn”: “She was sitting in the sun. The light fixed her. There was no shadow. Her face was yellow and red; round too; a fruit on a body; another apple, only not on a plate. Breasts had formed apple-hard under the blouse on her body” (243). But what is eye-opening is Schapiro’s following interpretation: La place centrale accordée aux pommes dans un thème d’amour invite à s’interroger sur l’origine affective de sa prédilection pour les pommes dans sa peinture. L’association que l’on observe ici des fruits et de la nudité ne nous permet-elle pas d’interpréter l’intérêt habituel de Cézanne pour la nature morte et, de toute évidence, pour les pommes, comme le « déplacement » (au sens psychanalytique) d’une préoccupation érotique. (Schapiro 178) Apparently, Woolf shared the same “preoccupation” and associated a woman’s body with apples in a very explicit “cubist” way, together with a singular attention dedicated to shapes, shadows, colours and lighting effects. Our investigation on the possible pictorial undertones in Woolf’s shorter pieces, reveals that the pictorial references not only may consist in allusions to a painting, but also to a pictorial genre, topos or technique: “Slater’s Pins Have No Points” being a seduction scene taking part during a music lesson, is reminiscent of a Dutch topos. In seventeenth- century Dutch painting, many scenes depict “Music Lessons” or concerts and the represented musical “common chord” suggests harmony of another nature. A technique such as etching which uses acid on copper plates, illustrates Woolf’s meaning in a vivid visual way as in “The Lady in the Looking-Glass”: “At once the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and superficial and to leave only the truth” (225). And in “Portrait 3”, we have seen that the light has the same property: “the light fixed her”. The technique of caricature is put to use in the characterisation of theatre-goers in “Uncle Vanya”, and in “Scenes from the Life of a British Naval Officer” where the eponymous character is described in very bold strokes suggesting his rigid makeup: “His face had a carved look as if it had been cut by a negro from a well-seasoned log, had been polished for fifty years, had been dried in a tropical sun; had stood out in the freezing cold; had been sluiced by tropical rains; had then been erected before grovelling multitudes as their idol” (232). The choice of the crude idol as the model of Captain Brace’s face evokes Gauguin’s own wooden sculptures and paintings as well as the cubists’ use of African sculpture. The Captain faces a wall on which amidst dials “measuring, dividing [,] weighing and counting” an invisible substance, hung the very pictorial photograph of a “lady’s head surmounted by three ostrich feathers”. This parodic “Lady with Three Ostrich Feathers” is reminiscent of Hélène Fourment’s portrait by Rubens among other

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 151

suchlike paintings. We have seen that this “story” ends with a kind of voyeuristic scene turning the Captain into a sort of insect probing the universe: “When he moved the telescope up and down it seemed as if his own long horn covered eye were moving” (234). A last instance of the possible variations of the pictorial is put to use in “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain.” The “large piece of figured blue stuff” displaying animal and human life is reminiscent of a Medieval arras, together with its fantastic inspiration, its many details, its animals and “mille fleurs” making up a microcosm, a world unto itself: “the blue curtain […] became made of grass, and roses and daisies; strewn with white and black stones; with puddles on it, and car tracks and little frogs” (160). Yet here “exotic” animals bring in another kind of variation adding to the seduction of the tale destined to small children. I have tried to show how extensively the visual pervades Woolf’s work, in particular her shorter fiction, and how it bears on the singularity of her writing. So doing I tried to outline what “the visual”, in a sense broader than that of image, means and what forms it can take on when a literary text is suffused with it. In her essay, “Walter Sickert, A Conversation” Woolf expatiates on the sister arts, reaffirming the necessity of seeing, of writing as seeing and the difficulty of this feat: For though they must part in the end, painting and writing have much to tell each other : they have much in common. The novelist after all wants to make us see […] and he must often think that to describe a scene is the worst way to show it. It must be done with one word, or with one word in skillful contrast with another […] it is a very complex business, the mixing and marrying of words that goes on, probably unconsciously, in the poet’s mind to feed the reader’s eye. All great writers are great colorists, just as they are musicians into the bargain; they always contrive to make scenes glow and darken and change to the eye. (Woolf 1966: 241) “Scenes glow and darken and change to the eye”, indeed, and scenes are what the pieces of shorter fiction that came under scrutiny mostly depicted. As Reynier put it: “By defining the short story as brief and honest, Woolf defines the ideal she is aiming at: a spatial moment of cross-fertilization between form and emotion, prose, poetry and drama” (64); to this list, we could add the arts.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Bell, Vanessa. Sketches in Pen and Ink, ed. Lia Giachero. London: Pimlico, 1998.

Bernard, Catherine et Christine Reynier, eds. Virginia Woolf. Le Pur et l’impur, Colloque de Cerisy- la-Salle 2001. Rennes: P.U.R, 2002.

Dunn, Jane. A Very Close Conspiracy. Londres: Jonathan Cape, 1990.

Gillespie, Diane. The Sisters Arts. The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Syracuse: Syracuse U. P., 1988.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage, 1997.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 152

Louvel, Liliane. “'Oh to be Silent! Oh to be a Painter'. 'The Sisters’ Arts': Virginia and Vanessa”, Virginia Woolf. Le Pur et l’impur, Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, eds. Catherine Bernard et Christine Reynier. Rennes: P.U.R, 2002. 149-156.

---. “Les voix du voir, illusions d’optique et reflets sonores”, Journal of the Short Story in English 41 (Autumn 2003): 41-54.

---. “‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass’: portrait(s) de dame(s) avec miroir”, Métamorphose et récit dans l’œuvre de Virginia Woolf, Colloque de la Société d'Etudes Woolfiennes, ed. Christine Reynier, Etudes britanniques contemporaines (octobre 1997): 70-86.

---. “Nuances du pictural”, Poétique 126 (avril 2001).

Reynier, Christine. “The Short Story according to Woolf”, Journal of the Short Story in English 41 (Autumn 2003): 55-68.

Schapiro, Meyer. Style artiste et société. Paris, Gallimard, 1982.

Woolf, Virginia. “Walter Sickert: a Conversation”, Virginia Woolf. Collected Essays, vol. 2. ed. Leonard Woolf. London, Hogarth P., 1966.

---. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. ed. Susan Dick. San Diego, New York & London, Harcourt Books, 1989.

---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol.6. eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1980.

Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

NOTES

1. Simonides’s aphorism runs as follows according to Plutarch: “Simonides called painting silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks” (Yates 42). See also the story of the tragic banquet and its discussion in Chapter I “The Three Latin Sources for the Classical Art of Memory” (Yates 17-41). 2. Letter to Ethel Smyth, 16 Oct. 1930, L IV, 2254, 231, qtd in (Lee: 376). 3. See note 2. 4. See Jane Dunn, A Very Close Conspiracy, Diane Gillespie, The Sisters Arts; The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and Liliane Louvel 2002. 5. Letter to Ethel Smyth, 16 Oct. 1930, L IV, 2254, 231, qtd in (Lee: 376). 6. 22 June 1937 D V 95, qtd by Dick in (Woolf 1989: 312). 7. Qtd by Dick in (Woolf 1989: 312). 8. Qtd by Dick in (Woolf 1989: 312). 9. We know that this story was called by Woolf her “little sapphist story” in a letter to Vita Sackville-West, see Dick in (Woolf 1989: 306-307). The text is clear enough under this respect. 10. Woolf wrote it first for her niece Ann Stephen on a visit in the country, see Dick in (Woolf 1989: 303). 11. See Dick’s comment on “Three Characters” in (Woolf 1989: 307). 12. Woolf to E. Smyth, 16 Oct 1930, L IV, 2254 p. 231, qtd in (Lee 377).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 153

RÉSUMÉS

Mon hypothèse de départ sera que l'écriture de Virginia Woolf, en particulier ses nouvelles, est fortement marquée par la présence du visuel. Je poursuis en cela un travail commencé par ailleurs. Woolf possédait ce que les peintres appellent “un oeil”, j'ajouterai un regard, ce qui donne à ses textes une qualité toute visuelle. J'essaierai de le démontrer dans cette analyse qui s'efforcera également d'en dégager la cohérence. Ceci devrait également permettre de définir ce que le mot visuel veut dire, quelles formes il peut prendre dans un texte littéraire et à quels usages il peut être soumis en tant qu'outil critique lorsqu'il s'agit d'ouvrir “l’œil du texte”. Grâce à une étude attentive de certaines des pièces courtes de Woolf, j'essaierai de repérer les références explicites ou implicites à l'histoire de l'art et de voir en quoi elles “éclairent” le texte. Analyser les nouvelles de Woolf du point de vue du visuel, devrait permettre de repérer de quelle manière il fait partie intégrante de son imagination créatrice et de son processus d'écriture. Car le visuel fonctionne de deux manières: s'il est à l'origine de l'activité créatrice il est également inscrit dans l'écriture et donc participe de sa qualité littéraire. Ainsi, il pourrait être considéré comme l'un des critères permettant d'approcher la singularité de l'écriture woolfienne.

AUTEURS

LILIANE LOUVEL Professor of British literature at the University of Poitiers and specializes in contemporary British literature and word/image relationship. She has written numerous articles on this particular subject and published three books on the interrelationship between word and image: L'œil du texte (Toulouse PUM 1998), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Le double miroir de l'art (Ellipses, 2000), Texte/image, images à lire et textes à voir (Rennes PUR 2002). She has also edited three collections of essays on the subject published in EJES, La licorne and P.U. Rennes II. She has organized several conferences on the subject. Her work is currently being translated by Laurence Petit and will be edited by Karen Jacobs. Liliane Louvel is also the chairperson of the French Association of English Teaching Academics (SAES) and a member of the board of ESSE (European Society for the Study of English).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 154

Beyond the boundaries of language: music in Virginia Woolf’s “The String Quartet”

Émilie Crapoulet

“its [sic] music I want; to stimulate & suggest” (Woolf 1978a: 320)

1 From an author who felt that “the only thing in this world is music - music and books and one or two pictures” (1975: 41), and who, in her earliest years, humorously toyed with the idea of founding a colony “where there shall be no marrying - unless you happen to fall in love with a symphony of Beethoven” (1975: 41-42), it is hardly surprising that music was an art which directly inspired Virginia Woolf’s own literary compositions, playing a central role in her work as a writer. Woolf’s early technical proficiency,1 and wide-ranging experience of music-making 2 will lead her to question the nature of musical expression in relation to her own writing in her diaries, letters and essays, to such an extent that she planned to write a book “investigat[ing] the influence of music on literature” (1980b: 450), a project which unfortunately was curtailed by her death in 1941.3 In her aesthetics of prose, literature and music were inseparable and she felt herself to be more of a musician than a writer: to the poet Stephen Spender, she wrote that she wished that she could write “four lines at a time, [...] as a musician does; because it always seems to me that things are going on at so many different levels simultaneously” (1979: 315). Her most revealing remark however, was made in 1940 in a letter to her friend Elizabeth Trevelyan, who perceived the musical qualities of her biography of Roger Fry, Woolf writing that “its [sic] odd, for I'm not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them. [...] Just as you say, I am extraordinarily pleased that you felt this. No one else has I think” (1980b: 426). It is by turning to her first truly through and through “musical” work, her short story “The String Quartet”, that we may trace the seeds of Woolf’s approach to musical expression which were to determine the modalities of her subsequent musicalisation of fiction and the fundamentally musical nature of her aesthetics of prose.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 155

2 The experimental nature of Monday or Tuesday as a whole, which Woolf herself acknowledged as being a milestone in her own stylistic development in her 1925 essay, “Modern Fiction” (1994: 160), as well as its recognised originality within the broader Modernist literary context and the fact that “The String Quartet”, the fifth story in the series, is one of Woolf’s works whose content is primarily and explicitly focused on music and the musical experience, do indeed give rise to certain fundamental questions concerning the underlying musical conception of her style. This is all the more significant as the ambivalent format and the clearly delineated focus of the short story have been seen to play a crucial role in Woolf’s literary development and artistic aesthetics in general. These sketches prefigure the highly original stylistic and formal qualities of her later novels without putting her under the particular constraints brought about by working on a full-length novel. Woolf herself will say of her short stories: These little pieces in Monday or (and) Tuesday were written by way of diversion; they were the treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style. [...] That [...] showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it – not that I have ever reached that end; but anyhow I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach in Jacobs Room, Mrs Dalloway etc – how I trembled with excitement. (1978b: 231)

3 Despite an ambivalent critical reception of the collection as a whole,4 “The String Quartet” in particular was seen to stand out from the other stories and was greatly admired by the poet T.S. Eliot as well as the biographer, author and critic Lytton Strachey, leading Virginia Woolf to report in her diary, on the 7th of June 1921, that “Eliot astounded me by praising Monday & Tuesday! This really delighted me. He picked out the String Quartet, especially the end of it. ‘Very good’ he said, & meant it, I think. [...] It pleases me to think I could discuss my writing openly with him” (1978a: 125). Concerning Lytton Strachey’s words of appraisal, she writes: L[eonard] met me at tea & dropped into my ear the astonishing news that Lytton thinks the String Quartet “marvellous”. This came through Ralph, who doesn’t exaggerate, to whom Lytton need not lie; & did for a moment flood every nerve with pleasure, so much so that I forgot to buy my coffee & walked over Hungerford Bridge twanging & vibrating. (1978a: 109)

4 Virginia Woolf will also be delighted that her friend, the art critic Roger Fry, thought that Monday or Tuesday showed she was “on the track of real discoveries, & certainly not a fake” (1978a: 109).

“Shamelessly impressionistic”? Music and the stream of consciousness

5 On first reading, “The String Quartet”, despite its musical title and backdrop, hardly appears to be about music in any direct or significant way, but on the contrary, seems to be quite a straightforward example of a miniature in what was then the new fashionable Modernist stream of consciousness technique which Woolf was perfecting at that time, an expression of the flow of thoughts, perceptions and experiences of a particular character, in this case, a first-person narrator,5 in a given situation, the public performance of a string quartet. Strangely enough, we are told nothing of the music itself in technical musical terms, we are told very little about the actual playing

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 156

and we have hardly any indication of what is being performed, as we only know indirectly, from a dubious remark made by a fellow member of the audience, that an “early” Mozart string quartet is possibly on the programme. In this story, the music appears to be merely taken as a springboard for the expression of the random and fanciful images conjured up by the narrator as she listens to it.6 It is not surprising that in one of the first reviews in the New Statesman of Monday or Tuesday, written by one of the Bloomsbury members, Desmond MacCarthy (writing under the pseudonym “Affable Hawk”), and published only two days after the collection came off the press, “The String Quartet” will be perceived as “a wonderful description [...] of such fancies as are woven like a cocoon round the mind while listening to music” (MacCarthy 91), reminding us of a similar passage in The Voyage Out when the narrator describes Rachel Vinrace’s musical talent: “If this one definite gift was surrounded by dreams and ideas of the most extravagant and foolish description, no one was any the wiser” (30). In “The String Quartet”, we are however given a full account of the extravagant and foolish dreams of the narrator to the point that the story paradoxically thus appears to be neither about music proper nor to be musical as such because its discursive style does not depart from traditional narrative syntax and structures and is intrinsically literary. T.S. Eliot himself will note Woolf’s indirect approach to the musical performance she is dramatising in “The String Quartet” in a review of Monday or Tuesday in The Dial of August 1921. In this article, he compares different approaches to Modernist narrative fiction and literary expression, from James Joyce’s more direct rendering of the “external world” to what he perceives as a more reflective and contemplative approach, characteristic of Woolf’s style of writing. We cannot help feeling that T.S. Eliot had “The String Quartet” in mind when he wrote of Monday or Tuesday that the craving for the fantastic, for the strange, is legitimate and perpetual; everyone with a sense of beauty has it. The strongest, like Mr Joyce, make their feeling into an articulate external world; what might crudely be called a more feminine type, when it is also a very sophisticated type, makes its art by feeling and by contemplating the feeling, rather than the object which has excited it or the object into which the feeling might be made. Of this type of writing the recent book of sketches by Mrs Woolf, Monday or Tuesday, is the most extreme example. A good deal of the secret of the charm of Mrs Woolf's shorter pieces consists in the immense disparity between the object and the train of feeling which it has set in motion. Mrs Woolf gives you the minutest datum, and leads you on to explore, quite consciously, the sequence of images and feelings which float away from it. (2005: 186)

6 Undeniably “The String Quartet” would appear to be essentially about “the sequence of images and feelings which float away” from the music and so doing, all but obscure the nature of the music being performed, as they show a mind utterly absorbed in its own imaginative experience, a mind “overflow[ing] with images, favourite images of water and wavering fishes” (Blackstone 49), even though the extent to which the images of the fish are the narrator’s “favourite” images remains to be seen. Like T.S. Eliot, Bernard Blackstone argues that “in [...] ‘The String Quartet’, [Woolf] tries to convey the effect of an early Mozart by means of a chain of images” (Blackstone 49).

7 Needless to say, this representative approach to the musical experience in terms of dreams and images is highly controversial. As James Hafley has noted, “no musicologist would approve of this story’s narrator, whose voice clearly enough suggests the quartet’s musical structure [...] but responds to that structure in extramusical equivalents of the most shamelessly impressionistic type” (1980: 29). If the “dream-

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 157

sequences” are primarily characteristic of stream of consciousness, and structural parallels between the text and the underlying music remain vague and “impressionistic”, this leads us to ask, what relevance does the musical aspect of the story bear upon the significance of the dreams? On the one hand, reading the dreams on their own proves to be quite unsatisfactory as the narrative discontinuity and certain otherwise incomprehensible shifts of perspective only fully make sense within their musical context, the imagery not only suggesting the music but itself being suggested by the music. As Werner Wolf notes, “it is only with reference to the concept of a musicalisation of fiction that some of the otherwise bewildering aspects of the text can be accounted for” (Wolf 154). On the other hand, if the images are taken to be metaphors of the music and whose finality is to express the music, the reader would be expected to decode the “chain of images” back into a purely musical imaginative performance of a Mozart string quartet. As a mental exercise, this might prove entertaining to a point, but as a significant and profound aesthetic experience, this does seem a bit far-fetched. One might as well simply listen to an early Mozart quartet to enjoy the effect of the music first hand. Should we really be taking for granted the narrator’s delight in imaginative day-dreaming?

Woolf, music and words

8 Concerning the relation between music and words, Virginia Woolf had clearly stated in a review of Wagner’s operas entitled, “Impressions at Bayreuth” and published in 1909 in The Times, that “when the moment of suspense is over, and the bows actually move across the strings, our definitions are relinguished [sic], and words disappear in our minds” (1986: 291-292). Contrast this view with her dramatization of the first few notes of the musical performance in her short story, “The String Quartet”: Here they come; four black figures, carrying instruments, and seat themselves facing the white squares under the downpour of light; rest the tips of their bows on the music stand; with a simultaneous movement lift them; lightly poise them, and, looking across at the player opposite, the first violin counts one, two, three – Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst! The pear tree on the top of the mountain. Fountains jet; drops descend. But the waters of the Rhone flow swift and deep, race under the arches, and sweep the trailing water leaves, washing shadows over the silver fish, the spotted fish rushed down by the swift waters, now swept into an eddy [...]. (1989: 139)

9 In this story, words are certainly made to render the music. In fact, the random, fanciful, irrational, and “unmusical” nature of the narrator’s dreams would even seem to be typical of a “hysterical” type of response to music which Woolf was so critical of in 1915, writing in her diary that “all descriptions of music are quite worthless, & rather unpleasant; they are apt to be hysterical, & to say things that people will be ashamed of having said afterwards” (1980a: 33). It would therefore be quite far-fetched to put down such a striking discrepancy between Virginia Woolf’s understanding of the wordlessness of the musical experience and her far from wordless description of it in “The String Quartet” to any sort of inconsistency in her writing and aesthetics. From an author so conscious of the shortcomings of musical appreciation and aesthetics and “the difficulty of changing a musical impression into a literary one”(1986: 291), it is highly surprising that she herself would then unconsciously set out to write a short story revolving so explicitly round music, and, at first view, so full of those “vague

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 158

formulas, comparisons, and adjectives” which plague musical criticism, without some ulterior motive for doing so. Indeed, she found that even the most knowledgeable of musical appreciation, such as the “descriptive notes in a concert programme”, serve only to “lead us astray” (288). The “musicalisation of fiction”, to use the expression coined by Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point (1963: 108), which Woolf is attempting in “The String Quartet” is not therefore to be taken as being gratuitous and it certainly leads us to ask: what was Woolf trying to do when she wrote “The String Quartet” when it so flagrantly contradicts her own thoughts on musical expression and on the literary expression of music? That the narrator herself will be ashamed of her “silly dreams” points to the fact that Woolf was quite aware of what she was doing in this short story, i.e. deliberately making her narrator respond to the music in terms of “silly dreams”. Certain key aspects of this short story will indeed reveal that it is far from being an understanding of the musical experience as being foremost the art of imaginative free association and emotive sentimentalism, which would go against Woolf’s own lifelong consistent views on music and the musical experience,7 but that Woolf, as we shall show below, is exploring here with great lucidity and insight the entire spectrum of the ways music makes meaning. By failing to perceive Woolf’s inherent satirical vein and detachment in the story, James Hafley, T.S. Eliot and Desmond MacCarthy have not entirely misunderstood the story--”The String Quartet” is indeed also about this “cocoon” of fantasies and the way each image gives way to another within a “stream of consciousness” flow, it is also an exercise de style in interior monologue but it is first and foremost about the way music makes meaning. For an author so preoccupied with the words and meanings which form the raw material of her own literary art, music, being a truly “wordless” art, and this is true in particular of the Mozart string quartet which features in her short story, provides the perfect foil from which to explore artistic expression and communication.

10 By making absolute music represent, Virginia Woolf is hardly seen to be trespassing over any literary boundaries. On the contrary, she is clearly caught trespassing over the boundaries of musical expression, hence the musicologicalobjections made by most critics of “The String Quartet”, fuelled not so much by the irrational dream-sequences in themselves, but by the fact that Woolf is treating Mozart as programme music. Even the narrator is ashamed of her “silly dreams” when the rest of the audience is gauging the stylistic value of an “early” composition and listening to the technique of the violinists. But no reader of this story would have been surprised or shocked if, for example, Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet had been on the programme. Little do they know that the Schubert is in fact the real piece behind the story, the piece which obviously provided Woolf with the idea of the fish and the river narrative.The Schubert “Trout” Piano Quintet, D 667 in A major (composed in 1819), which she heard among other works performed at a concert in Campden,8 was however transformed in the story into an early Mozart string quartet. Virginia Woolf must have had a very good reason for doing so. The references to “spotted fish” can only have been suggested to Woolf by the title of the Schubert “Trout” Quintet she heard in Campden Hill.9

11 By featuring a Mozart string quartet, absolute music par excellence, instead of the programmatic Schubert, I would argue that Woolf is in fact taking a deliberate stance to work away from any potential programmatic justification of the narrator’s dreams. In fact, she is implicitly questioning their relevance and purpose within the framework of a performance of “absolute” music in such a way that a potential musical programme

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 159

cannot be seen to justify the dreams in any way. The dreams are thus clearly about the music and not about any non-musical programme. As a consequence, the relations between the dream-sequences and absolute music in general become also far more significant and universal--rather than having the image of a river full of fish given to the narrator by an extra-musical title which could have justified the imagery and perhaps led to a more superficial “interpretation” of the music, the imagery is here linked with music in general and absolute music in particular if we consider that a Mozart string quartet is being played, thereby serving to highlight certain specific features of the narrative which the melopoetic parallels between absolute music and literature give rise to. Virginia Woolf is here deliberately making words render music in order to go beyond the more typical surface analogies which are usually seen to exist between these two arts in order to dramatize what “beliefs the listener has about music” (Kivy 80-81).

Through the looking-glass: musical transcendence in Woolfian aesthetics

12 Interestingly, the verbalisation of the music does not fail because it plays on the more typical musico-literary planes: the technical parallels remain incredibly clear. It is relatively easy to decode from the highly descriptive dream-sequences the corresponding musical features of the piece, to follow step by step the musical moments--from the initial flourish of the bows, the sustained ostinato and the interweaving melodic lines to the delineation and internal structures of the movements themselves. Words are chosen to describe the tempo, speed and textures of the music. From there, Woolf dramatises the meanings usually attributed to these otherwise purely technical and abstract notions. A fast tempo is made to signify happiness (first dream-sequence), the slow movement in a minor key is expressive of melancholy (second dream-sequence), counterpointed themes are understood as a dialogue between two characters (third dream-sequence), and musical form is evocative of architecture (fourth dream-sequence).10 Music, in this story, is first made to be representative and thus the whole gambit of potential musical “meanings” is put before our very eyes, but under closer scrutiny, it appears that Woolf also surreptitiously warps these meanings, undermines the narrative and puts into question the whole experiment: at the close of each dream-sequence, the narrator is dissatisfied. None of her responses are satisfactory because they are either too literal or they are too literary. The narrator is dismayed as she can only describe metaphorically what for her was a very intense experience. Leaping fish and raging torrents were the only way she could find to express the energy and motion which the music suggested to her, but her musical experience is not about the leaping fish and raging torrent. In a similar way, her response in the second dream-sequence is about the incommensurable fusion of a complex and unnamed emotion beyond the moonlit river trip, it isthe expression of tension between two contrasting genders beyond the romantic story between a lady and her lover, and finally, it is the abstract pattern of a fluid architecture of sound beyond the visions of the firm marble pillars of a great city.

13 Thus symbolically marching into the desert at the close of the performance, the narrator discards all her emotional and imaginative crutches11 and leaves far behind any hermeneutic signposts as images, metaphors and words finally fail her and she falls

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 160

back in despair, “eager no more, desiring only to go”. Werner Wolf notes this negative ending, but puts it down to the “dawning consciousness of her and the other concert- goers’ real situation” which “undermines the positivity triggered by the imaginative reception of the music” (Wolf 160), but I would argue that this final negative response should be taken as quite the opposite, i.e. as an indication of the narrator’s dissatisfaction with her own expressive and linguistic powers and her failure to verbalise the intensity of her experience of the music. As Woolf herself noted, such a type of cross-art verbalisation is “so formal, so superficial, that we can hardly force our lips to frame it; while the emotion is distinct, powerful, and satisfactory. [...] we try to describe it and we cannot; and then it vanishes, and having seen it and lost it, exhaustion and depression overcome us; we recognise the limitations which Nature has put upon us” (1966: 242-243). Does this not describe precisely the way Woolf dramatised the close of the performance in ‘The String Quartet’? The “emotion” of the narrator’s musical experience in this short story was surely “distinct, powerful and satisfactory” but her final despair is surely not, as Werner Wolf argues, a sign of dissatisfaction with the “reality” of London versus the sort of transcendent musical paradise of the performance. It was indeed “between the acts” (or rather between the movements) and not during the performance, that the narrator came closest to expressing the effect of the music in a description of significantly wordless actions: “I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink sharp wine” will she exclaim in delight after the first movement. The second movement will make her see the world with a child’s sense of wonder, everything appearing “very strange, very exciting”, out of proportion, a new world to be explored and apprehended in terms of the rhythms, patterns and internal correspondences of a musical composition. For Woolf, the effect of music therefore lies not in its capacity to rouse images as the narrator describes (and despairs of) what after all were cheap emotions and easy thrills. Neither “despair” nor “hope”, “sorrow” nor “joy” were terms which could ever come close to expressing the intensity and complexity of the musical experience in the second dream-sequence. As Woolf argues, any description which verbalizes our response to a work of art “is not a description at all; it leaves out the meaning” and so she asks, as we do, “but what sort of meaning is that which cannot be expressed in words?” (1966: 243). The narrator in “The String Quartet” has not come to the concert to just let herself be submerged by pleasant thoughts and dreams in a form of escapism into some form of musical “paradise”, as Werner Wolf believes (Wolf 162),12 but she has, on the contrary, come to consciously analyse and assess the power of music in her search for something more fundamental, something which goes beyond the surface, the conventions and the appearances, and which transcends the moment, something which is not outside each and every one of us but something which we are part of. As she asks just before the start of the performance, looking around the concert hall, “there are signs, if I’m not mistaken, that we’re all recalling something, furtively seeking something” (1989: 139, my italics). The superficial pattern of convention, time neatly segmented, people sitting in rows on gilt chairs, processions, pins which keep the ties straight, all this apparent (conventional) pattern and order is taken apart, reassessed in the light of the musical experience. Even though the shortcomings of the narrator’s verbalisation of her musical experience undoubtedly causes her to finally despair, she will nevertheless want to go out back into the world with a new way of seeing things, and thus greet the applewoman and speak to the maid—people who are very often taken for granted—, oblivious to the fact that it is this new way of seeing things which is the very essence of

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 161

the musical experience, the answer to the question she first asked herself before the start of the performance: why listen to music?

14 Music is understood by Virginia Woolf to be neither an analogy for the stream of consciousness or the emotions, nor a metaphor for a (better) transcendent world. On the contrary, music is seen in this story to determine the creative modalities of a consciousness which can itself shape the world differently. The essence of the musical experience could be summed up in the words of Bernard in The Waves: “who is to say what meaning there is in anything? [...] All is experiment and adventure” (1980c: 84). Paradoxically, we come to the conclusion that Woolf’s understanding of music is utterly formalist because her dramatisation of the various facets of the musical experience in her short story “The String Quartet” reveals that what is important in music is its purely musical characteristics: the fact that it is a complex “composition” of acoustic phenomena which gradually emerges as we listen. The rest—the feelings, the words, the images and the metaphors which we associate with music or which we use to describe what is after all a highly individual and incommunicable experience—, remains secondary. Therein lies for Woolf the paradigmatical nature of musical expression.

15 If “The String Quartet” can be understood to be an exploration of the shortcomings of the verbalisation of music, it also re-establishes the inalienable non-verbal specificity of the musical idiom. “The String Quartet” was undoubtedly reworked by Virginia Woolf to feature in The Waves, in a passage with which it bears striking similarities. Both texts, read in parallel, shed light on each other. Both Rhoda in The Waves and the narrator in “The String Quartet” are finally dissatisfied with their original imaginative response to the music. Rhoda, after Percival’s death, finds solace by going to a concert in the Bechstein Hall but is frustrated at not being able to express in words her musical experience:

16 Then the beetle-shaped men come with their violins; wait; count; nod; down come their bows. And there is ripple and laughter like the dance of olive trees and their myriad- tongued grey leaves when a seafarer, biting a twig between his lips where the many- backed steep hills come down, leaps on shore. “Like” and “like” and “like” — but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? (1980c: 116) Though Rhoda’s imaginative response draws on different images from those of “The String Quartet”s’ narrator, and the passage itself is shorter and more concise, the same progression from the literary representation of music (the hills covered in olive trees, the seafarer jumping ashore, etc.) to hearing the music in itself, as pure pattern and abstract structure, occurs in Rhoda’s musical experience in The Waves: There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation. (116)

17 If in the words of Rhoda, language can only express the “like and like and like” of a metaphorical illusion of reality, then music, because it does not function according to the representative principles of language, may possibly get us closer to “the thing which lies beneath the semblance of the thing” (116). But what is the thing which lies beneath the semblance of the thing? As Woolf’s very first hero stated in The Voyage Out: “What I want to do in writing novels is very much what you want to do when you play the piano, I expect”, he began, turning and speaking over his shoulder. “We

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 162

want to find out what’s behind things, don’t we?—Look at the lights down there,” he continued, “scattered about anyhow. Things I feel come to me like lights. . . . I want to combine them. . . . Have you ever seen fireworks that make figures? . . . I want to make figures. . . . Is that what you want to do?” Now they were out on the road and could walk side by side. When I play the piano? Music is different. . . . But I see what you mean.” (1974: 221-222)

18 In Woolf’s aesthetics, music is thus a bridge between the “silent territory” of pure disembodied “meaning” (‘Walter Sickert’, 1966: 242, 243), a meaning which we apprehend before we find words to describe it, and a verbalised, highly representative literary expression of this meaning. By seeking “some design more in accordance” with those moments which escape linguistic definition (1980c: 169), Woolf therefore turns to music to express “what is startling, what is unexpected, what we cannot account for” (172). Escaping the constriction of words, music is thus seen to express in its own non- verbal way that which escapes those words which cheat us so often because they are too “facile”, “artificial, insincere” (59), as we revealed in our reading of “The String Quartet”, thus giving us the key to understanding the role and function of music in Woolf’s writing.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf – A Biography, Vol. 1. London: The Hogarth Press, 1972.

---. Virginia Woolf – A Biography. Vol. 2. London: The Hogarth Press, 1973.

Blackstone, Bernard. Virginia Woolf: A Commentary. London: Hogarth Press, 1949.

Brown, Calvin S. ‘Musico-literary Research in the Last Two Decades’, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 19:6 (1970): 5-27.

Child, Harold. Unsigned Review (attributed to Harold Child). Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 1921. Virginia Woolf, the Critical Heritage. Ed. Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin. London: Routledge, 1997. 87-88.

Eliot, T.S. “London Letter”. July/August 1921. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. 183-187.

Hafley, James. “Virginia Woolf’s Narrators and the Art of “Life Itself'”. Revaluation and Continuity. Ed. Ralph Freedman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Huxley, Aldous. Point Counter Point, London: Chatto & Windus, 1963.

Jacobs, Peter. “The Second Violin Tuning in the Ante-Room: Virginia Woolf and Music”. The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Diane Gillespie. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. 227-260.

Kivy, Peter. Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Silver, Brenda R. “'Anon' and 'The Reader': Virginia Woolf's Last Essays”. Twentieth Century Literature, Virginia Woolf Issue. Autumn-Winter 25.¾. (1979): 382-398.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 163

Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1951.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Reading: Vintage, 1997.

MacCarthy, Desmond (writing as ‘Affable Hawk’). Review: New Statesman, 9th April 1921, in Virginia Woolf, the Critical Heritage. Ed. Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin. London: Routledge, 1997. 91.

Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: a Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.

Wordsworth, William. ‘The Prelude’. The Complete Poetical Works. London: Macmillan and Co., 1888; Bartleby.com, 1999. 14 Dec. 2007 www.bartleby.com/145/.

Woolf, Leonard. Letters of Leonard Woolf. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990.

Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. London: The Hogarth Press, 1960.

---. Collected Essays. Volume II. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966.

---. The Voyage Out. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974.

---. The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. I.. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: The Hogarth Press, 1975.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. II. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1978a.

---. A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vol. IV. London: The Hogarth Press, 1978b.

---. The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vol. V. London: The Hogarth Press, 1979.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. I. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1980a.

---. Leave the Letters Till We're Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf.Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vol. VI. London: The Hogarth Press, 1980b.

---. The Waves. London: The Hogarth Press, 1980c.

---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. V. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984.

---. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 1. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1986.

---. “The String Quartet”. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: The Hogarth Press, 1989.

---. A Passionate Apprentice – The Early Journals. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. London: The Hogarth Press, 1990.

---. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1994.

NOTES

1. Virginia Woolf undoubtedly had a fair share of technical musical knowledge. When she was eleven years old, her sister, Stella, noted in her diary that “Ginia” was learning music and she herself was sight-reading Beethoven sonatas (qtd. in Lee 33) and the seventeen-year old Virginia used to play fugues with her sister Vanessa(1975: 5). This contradicts both Leonard Woolf’s and

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 164

Clive Bell’s assumptions that she had no technical knowledge of music (L. Woolf 528; Bell 1: 149). The numerous references to musical terms in her diary show us that she was far from being musically illiterate and she did not hesitate to make critiques of the interpretations of the performers she used to hear. 2. Virginia Woolf usually attended several concerts a week, but even though the social aspect of concert-going fascinated her and was the subject of many of her more satiric sketches in her diaries, novels and short stories, the opening pages of “The String Quartet” being an example in case, it also distracted her mind from the actual music being performed. The newly invented gramophone provided her with an ideal alternative. After her acquisition of one of the newest models in 1925 (Bell 2: 130), Virginia Woolf spent a lot of time listening to music in the less distracting surroundings of her sitting-room (D5: 73, 161), whilst working on her literary projects, the music thus becoming “a background to her musings, a theme for her pen” as her nephew Quentin Bell put it (Bell 1: 149). Leonard Woolf recalls indeed that his wife was “very fond of music and we used to listen to the wireless and gramophone – classical music – practically every night” (L. Woolf 528). 3. This was perhaps to be a part of her “Common History” project, of which only two draft chapters were written: “Anon” and “The Reader” (see Silver 382-398). 4. Woolf will be exasperated by the incomprehension and puzzlement of some of the critics of Monday or Tuesday, leading her to complain that “they don’t see that I’m after something interesting”(D2: 106, 8th April 1921). This comment probably refers to a review attributed to Harold Child in the Times Literary Supplement of Monday or Tuesday, published on the 7th of April 1921. Though Child reveals the affinities between Woolf's innovative use of prose and, the new style of “unrepresentational art which is creeping across from painting” and music, he will nevertheless give a critical and ironic account of Woolf’s style of writing, arguing “not that it means too little that is intelligible to the plain mind, but that it cannot help meaning too much for its purpose. Prose may 'aspire to the condition of music'; it cannot reach it” (Child 87-88). 5. As we are not told explicitly the gender of the narrator, we shall, for convenience’s sake, consider the gender as feminine. See also Werner Wolf’s discussion of the matter (Wolf 148-149). 6. As the narrator herself speaks of the “silly dreams” she imagines for each of the movements of the quartet, I shall refer to these as the “dream-sequences”. 7. Speaking of hearing Wagner’s Parsifal, she will indeed show herself to be well aware of the difference between impressions derived from the music in itself and those which spring from cultural or extra-musical associations: “how much of the singular atmosphere which surrounds the opera in one’s mind springs from other sources than the music itself it would be hard to say. It is the only work which has no incongruous associations” (1986: 290). 8. Woolf was working on most of the short stories which were to form the collection Monday or Tuesday in 1920 and 1921. When Woolf first thought of writing this short story in March 1920, she went to listen to a performance of “the S[c]hubert quintet” at a concert given in Campden Hill in the vaulted music room of George Booth’s house (whose wife Margaret was a violinist) in order to “take notes for my story” (1978a: 24). Woolf thus deliberately set out to record her own impressions and responses to the music during this real performance. Among the works played that evening in George Booth’s house by the English String Quartet (founded in 1915 by Frank Bridge) was also a Beethoven trio. According to Booth’s diary: “English String Quartet. Beethoven Trio. Schubert Quintet. Crowds” (qtd in Woolf 1978a: 24). 9. Even though the “Trout” Quintet is not directly “programme” music, it is nevertheless associated with the lied of the same name, Schubert’s musical setting of a poem by Christian Friedrich Schubart, since the fourth movement of the quintet is a set of variations based on the melody and accompaniment of Schubert’s earlier song “Die Forelle”. It is irrelevant to consider here the musical accompaniment to the Schubart poem in Schubert’s lied, or even the poem itself, which Virginia Woolf did not necessarily know, as the musical setting of the poem in the

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 165

lied is hardly relevant within the context of the fourth movement of an otherwise musically “absolute” quintet whose only purely musical link with the lied is that of a musical theme. Schubert indeed often took themes and reworked them into different pieces regardless of their original context, purely for their musical potential. 10. We break down the various moments which compose the narrator’s response to the music as follows: after springing out in fountains and jets from under a flowering, burgeoning pear tree, the stream cascades down from the top of the mountain into the deep and swift bubbling currents of the river Rhone, then, eddying into fish-laden pools, flows under the stone arches of ancient cities past laughing fishwives. This we call the first dream-sequence. After the first interval, in the second dream-sequence, the narrator imagines she is on a boat, slowly floating along a slow “melancholy” river which runs through osier beds in the darkness, the moon shining through the willow branches, before capsizing, the souls of the drowned passengers rising as wraiths into the sky. After the next interval, what is now a gentle stream meandering through the grounds of a Southern European, possibly Spanish medieval castle, has become mere background, the narrator turning away from it to focus rather on the action of the scene between the two lovers and the Prince. This we term the third dream-sequence. At last, after the “escape” of the lovers, rather than flowing to the sea, the river strangely turns back on itself. The narrator, thus feeling the end of the performance approaching, seems to look back upon her dreams, retracing her steps through the imagery back to the fish of the opening dream-sequence, in a short transition towards what we call the fourth and final dream-sequence, the waters of the river gathering into a “moonlit pool” which then “dissolves” into the “opal sky” of the new dawn, the iridescent rainbow-like colours and the oval shape associated with “opals” itself suggesting an aerial reflection of the surface of the pool. This then gives way to the last scene, the mirage of an impressive and stately citadel and the final dry, hot, barren and significantly waterless desert scene. 11. For a discussion of imaginative or visual experiences of absolute music, see Langer, who uses the term “crutch” to describe such responses (Langer 242). 12. In fact, after the revelation of the final dream-sequence in ‘The String Quartet’, the narrator, at the end of the concert, will significantly seek out “those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world”, the simple happy characters of the applewoman and the maid, modern-day fellows of the simple “jolly fishwives” which she imagined so good, carefree and happy in the first dream-sequence.

RÉSUMÉS

La musique joue un rôle important dans l’esthétique woolfienne. Pour cette raison la musicalité de sa prose est une préoccupation constante, quoique non toujours bien définie, des études woolfiennes. Woolf elle-même a toujours été fascinée par la musique tout au cours de sa vie. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que ceux et celles qui s’intéressent à son œuvre soient amenés à étudier cet aspect de son esthétique. Mais cette « musicalité » est particulièrement difficile à évaluer, et on l’a souvent interprétée d’une façon simpliste et impressionniste. En prenant comme point de départ sa nouvelle, « Le Quatuor à cordes », nous montrerons que l’expérience musicale, telle qu’elle est décrite dans ce texte par Virginia Woolf, est loin d’être une simple évocation superficielle de rêves, d’images ou de sentiments musicaux, mais, qu’au contraire, Woolf explore ici avec beaucoup de discernement et d’intelligence, le sens même de la musique, sous toutes ses

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 166

facettes. Cette nouvelle démontre surtout le rapport de la musique avec la conscience, l’imagination, le langage et l’expression littéraire, en nous amenant à sa potentielle fonction ontologique et transcendantale.

AUTEURS

ÉMILIE CRAPOULET University of Surrey

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 167

Reflections on a Cinematic Story

Abbie Garrington

1 Woolf’s fictional sketch “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection” was first published in Harper’s Magazine in December 1929. Following a second publication in Harper’s Bazaar the following month, it was collected in the posthumous A Haunted House and Other Short Stories in 1944. As Julia Briggs has noted, the story is likely to have been written in May 1929, the date recorded in one of its typescripts, and to have been inspired by a visit to the home of painter and society hostess Ethel Sands (Briggs 173). The sketch form was used repeatedly by Woolf at this difficult stage in her writing life, as she prepared herself for the exhausting experimentation of The Waves. Sketches allowed the author to put off the greater writing challenge of her new novel, while additionally operating as a kind of literary limbering up process, enabling the exercise of her skills of observation and expression. However, while less intimidating a task than the novel project, the sketch form as undertaken by Woolf has particular aims, and brings with it particular challenges.

2 In the plastic arts, the sketch is drawn in haste, often as a preliminary or preparatory measure, offering only an outline account of what is observed, and postponing the details of pictorial description in the interest of capturing the moment. Such an understanding of the sketch form as preparatory or provisional is pertinent to Woolf’s literary sketching at this time, given her need to prepare for the approaching task of The Waves. Further, the purpose of the pictorial sketch as an attempt to capture the moment is crucial to the literary sketch in Woolf’s hands. “The Lady in the Looking Glass” expands from a moment’s thought on the part of the narrative voice, a moment of reflection, in which it is observed that “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime” (Woolf 2003: 215). The fact that the story expands from this moment is emphasised by a return to the same line at the close of the sketch, in which the reader is reminded that “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms” (Woolf 2003: 219). With this book-ending of the sketch by a single moment of reflection, indicated by a repeated phrase, Woolf allows her story to blossom out from a point in time. A similar task is undertaken in the well-known sketch “Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points’”, where again the strategy of a repeated phrase

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 168

in the first and last line is used. We begin with “ ‘Slater’s pins have no points – don’t you always find that?’ said Miss Craye, turning round” (Woolf 2003: 209), and end with “ ‘Slater’s pins have no points,’ Miss Craye said” (Woolf 2003: 214). Again, the story blossoms from a moment of observation (here, the narrative voice remarking upon Miss Craye’s own observation regarding Slater’s pins), and returns to that moment to complete the sketch. The “Moments of Being” of the title of this sketch of course reinforces the connection between the literary sketch form and the capture of a moment.

3 The subtitle of “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection” draws attention to the pondering moment which initiates the piece, with an obvious, punning secondary meaning which places the reflecting mirror centre-stage. Again, the aim of the capture of the moment is evident: “One must fix one’s mind upon her at that very moment. One must fasten her down there” (Woolf 2003: 217). For Briggs, the reflection at the centre of this story is a musing upon the respective capacities of art and literature to describe, illuminate and immortalise a moment of being. The sketch, she claims, “plays with the cliché of art as the mirror of life, bringing out both the mastery and the loss involved in the act of recording” (Briggs 173). The fastening down of Woolf’s own phrase implies loss in its description of an artificial tethering. In Briggs’ reading, the mirror, representing plastic art, offers a static picture which fails to capture the flux of life. The dark room, in which sits Woolf / the observer of the mirror, represents the darting imagination which can better be captured in words. The reader is told that “there were obscure flushes and darkenings too [ . . . ] and the room had its passions and rages and envies and sorrows coming over it and clouding it, like a human being. Nothing stayed the same for two seconds together” (Woolf 2003: 215). Thus, for Briggs, “The still world of the mirror is opposed to the constant motion of living thoughts as they flush and darken in rhythm with the fluctuating feelings within the room” (Briggs 173). It is the literary form which is best equipped to express such fluctuations: “the looking glass had evoked the stillness of the plastic arts in contrast with the flux of words” (Briggs 174). Briggs therefore suggests that words may be adequate to the task of describing, or reflecting, the imagination, but plastic art makes static, reifies, chops and slices, just as the mirror’s frame slices the image of the lady herself, Isabella Tyson, as the observer notes her passage down the garden: “Half an hour ago the mistress of the house [. . .] had gone down the grass path in her thin summer dress, carrying a basket, and had vanished, sliced off by the gilt rim of the looking-glass” (Woolf 2003: 216). Briggs’ reading is perceptive, persuasive and engaging. However, through her use of the sketch medium and its capture of the moment, Woolf in fact seems to be drawing her writing closer to the work undertaken by plastic art. This may hint to the reader that more complex claims are being made than the construction of a clear binary opposition between painting and writing.

4 Stephen Howard, in a further development of Briggs’ observations, sees “The Lady in the Looking Glass” as primarily concerned not with writing’s capacities when contrasted with those of plastic art, but with the possibilities of different forms of life writing. Noting that the mirror appears repeatedly in Woolf’s oeuvre, Howard remarks that it “functions variously as a surface upon which the self – or alternative selves – might be reflected or envisioned, and as a metaphor for the processes of autobiographical writing” (Howard 44). When the observer of “The Lady in the Looking Glass” finds inadequate her own comparison between Isabella and a plant of the

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 169

convolvulus genus, support is found for Howard’s claim that Woolf is concerned to explore the problems inherent in any attempt to grasp a human life in writing: The comparison showed how very little, after all these years, one knew about her; for it is impossible that any woman of flesh and blood of fifty-five or sixty should really be a wreath or a tendril. Such comparisons [. . .] come like the convolvulus itself trembling between one’s eyes and the truth. There must be truth; there must be a wall (Woolf 2003: 216).

5 The convolvulus comparison, a likeness, simile or mirror, trembles before the observer and prevents their access to the truth, just as any mirror blocks an observer’s view of the truthful wall, by interposing an image of similitude, a reflection. However, as Howard makes clear, the mirror symbol operates most effectively as a denotation of the moment of self-reflection, and therefore specifically represents autobiography. While in this sketch Woolf is concerned with the problems of accurately capturing Isabella through artistic means, the origins of the story in Woolf’s own experience, and her appearance as an observer figure, mean that she is simultaneously concerned with a form of autobiographical expression. The sketch can be read as the imaginative expansion of a diary entry, and the eye of the observer aids the recording of a moment that is Woolf’s as much as it is Isabella’s. Further, if we follow the critical deduction that Isabella is the cipher of the painter Ethel Sands, then the image in which she is finally framed within her hall mirror could be read as a kind of self-portrait, the plastic arts’ equivalent of the autobiography.

6 While the readings of Briggs and Howard usefully draw attention to the importance of “The Lady in the Looking Glass” within Woolf’s thinking on the nature and purpose of literature and its ability to capture a life, whether one’s own or another’s, it is possible to construct an alternative reading which suggests that there is a third contender, beyond art and literature, which offers a further representational possibility. Not reifying art, not faltering literature, but cinema is crucial to this sketch. “The Lady in the Looking Glass” makes use of a complex system of views. Through the eyes of the observer figure,1 the reader is able to see the darkened room in which she sits,2 the hall with its large mirror, and the images captured by that mirror, be they within the hall itself, or in the garden behind the house. From a single point of view, therefore, a number of scenes are available to the observer, and thence to the reader. As the gilt frame of the mirror helps to indicate, framing devices are crucial to the form of this sketch, with a view of the life of Isabella framed by the mirror, captured by the retina of the observer and, via Woolf, conveyed to the reader through the medium of text. The observer begins with remarks that clearly support Briggs’ reading of the artistic questions raised by the sketch: “But, outside, the looking-glass reflected the hall table, the sunflowers, the garden path so accurately and so fixedly that they seemed held there in their reality unescapably. It was a strange contrast – all changing here, all stillness there” (Woolf 2003: 215). This stillness of the mirror, i.e. of painting as a form, is deathly, since life’s movement is lost in the transition from reality to representation, from life to art. The deathliness of life’s capture in the work of art is emphasised when the observer notes that “in the looking-glass things had ceased to breathe and lay still in the trance of immortality” (Woolf 2003: 216). Painting and lifelessness are equated, and writing and its potential to represent flux and change provide a solution.

7 Yet, while these early stages of the sketch reinforce Briggs’ claims about the opposition between deathly art and life-capturing literature, there is a crucial point at which the sketch clouds the clarity of the distinction, and enters into a more nuanced debate

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 170

about forms of artistic expression and their representational capacities. This point comes when Woolf tries, as she so often does, to reach the truth of her subject, in this case of Isabella, in writing. Isabella remains a mystery. The room in which Woolf sits, which had previously swirled with life, becomes a kind of biographical museum. The ineffectual nature of the museum as an attempt to express a life is noted elsewhere in Woolf’s oeuvre. The museum is equated with conventional biography which, however exhaustive, fails to capture the essence of the person catalogued or described. In Night and Day, the velvet-curtained side room of the Hilbery residence haunts the family, but makes a feeble attempt to account for the lives of their ancestors, just as the never- ending biography of their great forebear Richard Alardyce will always miss its mark, and his life escape.3 This museum metaphor had originated in one of Woolf’s early short fictional works, “Memoirs of a Novelist”, in which we are told, of the inept biographer Miss Linsett, that “to read her therefore is to leave the world in daylight, and to enter a closed room, hung with claret coloured plush, and illustrated with texts” (Woolf 2003: 68). It seems that darkened, museum-like rooms may be associated both with death, and with an inability to capture life.

8 At the moment when the darkened room in which the observer sits becomes a museum which fails to express the passions and particularities of Isabella, the mirror springs into life: “A large black form loomed into the looking-glass; blotted out everything [. . .] and was gone. But the picture was entirely altered. For the moment it was unrecognisable and irrational and entirely out of focus” (Woolf 2003: 217). In perhaps the most well known passage of Woolf’s 1926 essay “The Cinema”, a looming form is described which bears a striking resemblance to that seen in Isabella’s mirror: at a performance of [The Cabinet of] Dr. Caligari the other day a shadow shaped like a tadpole suddenly appeared at one corner of the screen. It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged, and sank back again into nonentity. For a moment it seemed to embody some monstrous diseased imagination of the lunatic’s brain. For a moment it seemed as if thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than by words. The monstrous quivering tadpole seemed to be fear itself, and not the statement ‘I am afraid’. In fact, the shadow was accidental and the effect unintentional. (Woolf 1950: 169)

9 In the latter case, the looming shape is a fault on the film, or within the projecting equipment, which creates a surprising shadow. In the case of “The Lady in the Looking Glass”, it is discovered to be merely a man delivering post. In both passages, however, the revelation of a prosaic explanation for the startling image does not assuage the impression of the episode on Woolf or the observer, who go on to develop their thinking about representational possibilities in response to the episode. In “The Cinema”, Woolf muses on the potential of the cinema, as yet untapped. In “The Lady in the Looking Glass” cinematic modes of writing / viewing are worked out within the narrative itself. Reading the looming shape episode within the sketch in relation to Woolf’s essay, written just three years earlier, foregrounds the author’s interest in cinema as a third potential mode of artistic expression.

10 The structure of “The Lady in the Looking Glass” is intricately designed and its particular shape draws attention to the greatly significant moment of the delivery of the post. The repetition of the first phrase of the story within the last line, noted above, suggests a symmetrical structure. This is further reinforced by the repetition of animal imagery in the description of the drawing room / consciousness of Isabella. At first it is noted that “The quiet old country room [. . .] was full of such nocturnal creatures. They

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 171

came pirouetting across the floor, stepping delicately with high-lifted feet and spread tails” (Woolf 2003: 215). Later, the observer remarks that “Her mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately, spread their tails” (Woolf 2003: 219). Isabella moves away down the garden (Woolf 2003: 216), and returns (Woolf 2003: 219). In this way, the very structure of the sketch resembles a reflection, with a central mirror allowing the opening out of two worlds on either side of its plane. The mirror-point or centre-point must therefore be read as of considerable significance, particularly given that it makes striking use of the mirror, in facilitating the appearance of the looming shape.

11 Susan Dick has commented that “the line separating Virginia Woolf’s fiction from her essays is a fine one” (Dick 2). Indeed, “The Lady in the Looking Glass” seems to demand comparison with the essay “The Cinema”, given their common language, imagery and concerns. The sketch’s spectatorial structure itself recalls the cinema; an observer sits in a darkened room looking out at a screen, on which images are flung which are drawn from a source beyond that darkened room. The looming shape of “The Cinema” and “The Lady…” startle the observer “For a moment” (Woolf 1926: 169), and “For the moment” (Woolf 2003: 217) respectively. The interest in the capture of the moment attributable to the sketch is also present throughout “The Cinema”, in which Woolf refers to the “momentary assembly of colour, sound, movement” (Woolf 1926: 171), and concludes “But it is for a moment only” (Woolf 1926: 171). The description of Isabella’s drawing room / consciousness is recalled in Woolf’s summary of film-viewing experiences: “it was thus that we danced and pirouetted [. . .] thus that the sun shone and the clouds scudded” (Woolf 1926: 167). Having established this sketch-to-essay connection, a reading of Isabella’s return from the garden to the hall can be reconsidered, and seen as a cinematic episode: She was so far off at first that one could not see her clearly. She came lingering and pausing, here straightening a rose, there lifting a pink to smell it, but she never stopped; and all the time she became larger and larger in the looking-glass, more and more completely the person into whose mind one had been trying to penetrate. [. . .] There were her grey-green dress, and her long shoes, her basket, and something sparkling at her throat. (Woolf 1926: 219).

12 Isabella can be seen moving into frame – here the mirror’s own frame echoes the frame of camera view rather than the physical frame of a work of art. The filmic representation of the mirror records her ceaseless movement (“she never stopped”), and eventually presents the observer with a close-up (“she became larger and larger”). The mirror, previously representing the habit of painting to chop and slice, here provides a moving image akin to that of the cinema, which presents “more and more completely” the person whom painting, life writing and the museum have failed to express.

13 Outlining the potential of the cinema in her essay, Woolf notes that filmic images: have taken on a quality which does not belong to the simple photograph of real life. They have become not more beautiful in the sense in which pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life? We behold them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it. (Woolf 1926: 167)

14 Exceeding the capacities of beautiful painting and insufficient language, film presents a “different reality”, which can be compared to the second world presented by a mirror.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 172

The cinematic observer gains privileged access to life as it occurs without them, just as the observer figure of “The Lady in the Looking Glass” gains access to the life of Isabella from her seat in the darkened drawing room. The observer’s cinematic position, watching a screen from the darkness, unseen by the actors whose images are flung upon it, is in the latter part of the sketch rewarded with a cinematic image of Isabella’s return. Woolf’s hopes for the cinema, outlined in her essay, are that it will move beyond a parasitic relationship with literature, and cease to represent only surface detail, registering instead “emotions that have so far failed to find expression” (Woolf 1926: 169). The cinema’s attempt to represent the emotional turmoil of Anna Karenina, Woolf claims, focuses superficially and misleadingly “upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet” (Woolf 1926: 168). A cinema which capitalises on its great potential for the representation of emotion will do away with such surface detail, mere mirrored likeness, and express the complexity of the inner life of its characters. In “The Lady in the Looking Glass”, with its use of a cinematic system of views, and its common phraseology with “The Cinema”, some of the questions of cinema’s potential are worked out alongside more long-established concerns of Woolf’s, such as the power of literature versus art, and the difficulties of life writing.

15 Isabella’s appearance on the cinematic screen of her hall mirror at first appears to have fallen into just the kind of misleading habits of surface detail about which Woolf is so concerned in “The Cinema”. Instead of Anna Karenina’s teeth, pearls and velvet, we are shown Isabella’s dress, shoes, basket and jewellery. However, these details are stripped away as she stands fully in frame, or rather in close-up: “Everything dropped from her – clouds, dress, basket, diamond – all that one had called the creeper and convolvulus” (Woolf 2003: 219). Continuing with Briggs’ reading, this final appearance of Isabella within the frame would seem to represent her incorporation into a painting, a work of art which divests her of the particularities of her existence, and denies those facts that the observer has told us to be true: “She stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody” (Woolf 2003: 219). While it is possible to read this final image of Isabella as her petrification or absorption into a static work of art, it is also possible to suggest that the cinematic representation of her return to the garden has provided an access to the truth of her life – a truth which has escaped the observer’s other attempts to describe her existence by means of looking at the contents of her drawing room. When the observer notes that “At once the looking-glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the unessential and superficial and to leave only the truth. It was an enthralling spectacle” (Woolf 2003: 219), it seems that a connection has been made between the third expressive possibility of the cinematic spectacle and access to truth, the wall behind the mirror / screen.

16 Woolf’s dreams for the cinema were that it would provide just such access to the truth of the inner life of its characters, a direct emotional connection to the viewer without an interposing or obscuring representation of surface detail. Such dreams can be seen in relation to her experiments with stream of consciousness narrative methods, with which she attempted to explore the mental landscape of her fictional characters. Following Joseph Frank’s oft-quoted essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”, writers making use of the stream of consciousness technique have been referred to in critical readings as “cinematographic”, a designation intended to emphasise the breaking free of the temporality of literary form in the work of such authors. For Frank, these

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 173

cinematographic authors included James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. In the case of Woolf, it can be argued that the connection between her literary work and cinematography was deeper than one of mere analogy. Rather than attempting to reflect in a literary context the swift forward flow of the cinema’s moving image, and its capacity for spatial rather than linear representation, Woolf was aiming to make use of the cinematic model in order to access what we may call the wall behind the screen, the truth of the lives she aimed to present. The claim that Woolf writes cinematographically, and with particular expressive aims in mind, can usefully be begun by analysing the literary moment when her only extended attempt to address the cinema in writing comes to have the greatest direct influence on her fictional work, in this carefully crafted literary sketch of 1929.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Briggs, Julia. “ ‘Sudden Intensities’: Frame and Focus in Woolf’s Later Short Stories.” Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006. 172-189.

Dick, Susan. Editor’s Introduction. A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Vintage, 2003. 1-6.

Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review 53 (1945): 221-239.

Howard, Stephen. “The Lady in the Looking Glass: Reflections on the Self in Virginia Woolf.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 8.2 (2007): 44-54.

Woolf, Virginia. Night and Day. (1919). London: Penguin, 1992.

--- A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction. Ed. Susan Dick. London: Vintage, 2003.

---.“The Cinema.” (1926). The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays.Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth, 1950. 166-171.

NOTES

1. I use the term “observer” rather than the “narrator” term customarily used in critical readings of this text, in order to underscore the cinematic or spectatorial relationship between this figure and the unfolding narrative. 2. I here presume the female gender of the observer, given the roots of the story in the author’s autobiographical experience. 3. It should also be noted that the Hilbery museum contains several oval mirrors, their shapes perhaps recalling portraits or miniatures. See (Woolf 1992: 8).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008 174

RÉSUMÉS

La nouvelle de Virginia Woolf, “The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection”, qui fut publiée en décembre 1929, est souvent analysée comme une esquisse que lui aurait inspirée l'artiste Ethel Sands à qui Woolf avait rendu visite peu de temps auparavant. Plutôt que de considérer cette nouvelle comme une esquisse, cet article propose de la lire à la lumière de l'essai que Woolf écrivit en 1926, “The Cinema”. Il apparaît que par sa forme et son contenu, son cadrage et son sujet, cette nouvelle rencontre les préoccupations de cet essai qui, bien que connu, est souvent considéré comme marginal par rapport au reste de l'œuvre de l'auteur. L'étude des éléments filmiques dans “The Lady” et du dialogue fructueux que la nouvelle entretient avec l'essai sur le cinéma montre que, par bien des côtés, cette nouvelle s'intègre pleinement à la recherche que mène Woolf d'une forme “cinématographique”, selon les termes qu'emploiera Joseph Frank. En outre, loin de se contenter de simples analogies entre texte littéraire et film, Woolf forge dans cette nouvelle un style littéraire nouveau qui mobilise des éléments filmiques à même de saisir la complexité d'une vie. Il apparaît alors évident que dans “The Lady”, le statut de Woolf est celui d'un pionnier du mode cinématographique.

AUTEURS

ABBIE GARRINGTON Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, where she is working on a project entitled “Touching Texts: The Haptic Sense in Woolf and Richardson”. This project considers the role of the haptic concept in modernist literature at the level of content, form and reader experience, with a special focus on the work of Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. She is a founder member of the Dorothy Richardson Society, recently formed with the support of the British Academy.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 | Spring 2008