Department of English and American Studies English Language And
Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Naděžda Suchá
Bloomsbury Group: Its Influence and Controversy
Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: prof. Mgr., Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. 2009
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
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Naděžda Suchá
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank my supervisor, prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A., for her kind and valuable advice and help. I would also like to thank my friends Jana and Bára for proofreading the final text.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………….………..…..1
2. What Was the Bloomsbury Group? ...... 4
2.1. Origins……………………………………………………………………………………………….……….…...6
2.1.1. Principia Ethica ………………………………………………………………………….……….……6
2.1.2. The Apostles……………………………………………………………………………….………...7
2.1.3. Cambridge in Bloomsbury………………………………………………………….…..……..7
2.1.4. Memoir Club ………………………………………………………………………………..…..…...8
2.2. Members…………………………………………………………………………………………………..……9
2.3. Controversy of the Bloomsbury Group……………………………………………………...... 18
2.3.1. “Intertwined” Relationships in the Bloomsbury Group………………………..19
3. Virginia Woolf…………………………………………………………………………………………………...... 21
3.1. Influence…………………………………………………………………………………………….……..…21
3.2. Feminism………………………………………………………………………………………….…….…...22
3.3. Stream of Consciousness……………………………………………………………………..………27
3.4. Woolf’s “Ladylikeness” According to Angus Wilson………………………….………….30
3.5. Virginia Woolf and Fascism…………………………………………………………....……………31
4. Bloomsbury Artists………………………………………………………………………..……..…………….33
4.1. Fry and the Post-Impressionists…………………………………………..………..…………..33
4.2. The Omega Workshops………………………………………………………………………..……..35
4.3. Influence…………………………………………………………………………………………….……...36
4.4. Criticism…………………………………………………………………………………………….....……37
4.4.1. Wyndham Percy Lewis and Vorticists versus the Bloomsbury Group….37
4.4.2. D.H. Lawrence and Duncan Grant……………………………………………………….39
4.4.3. Clive Bell and Formalism……………………………………...... 40
4.4.4. G.B. Shaw and Clive Bell……………………………………………………………………..41
4.5 War Art………………………………………………………………………………………………………..42
5. Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………….45
6. Works Used and Cited…………………………………………………………………………………………47
1. INTRODUCTION
The Bloomsbury Group was an informal circle of intellectuals who were all born in the
19 th century. Its members, called Bloomsburies, were mainly writers and artists from the
English upper class. Bloomsbury biographers do not share a common view on who actually belonged to the Bloomsbury Group. In my thesis, I will go along with a Bloomsbury biographer, Leon Edel, who regards Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, John
Maynard Keynes, Desmond MacCarthy, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and
Roger Fry as the members.
The circle was based in the district of Bloomsbury in Central London, and its members used to meet from 1905 until the beginning of the Second World War. During these meetings they were engaged in discussions on current topics and new courses in art, literature and politics as well as a timeless philosophical analysis of “the Good,” “the
Beautiful,” and “the Truth,” which they derived from Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903). This book could be labelled “the Bible” of the Bloomsbury Group. Apart from Prinicipia Ethica there was no ideology or doctrine that would connect Bloomsburies. In my thesis, I will present some ideas from this book that inspired them.
Bloomsburies were often accused of snobbism and elitism due to their class origins.
Their critics claim that as they did not experience much difficulty in their lives, because they led carefree, comfortable, bohemian lives consisting only of plenty of leisure time; their work does not reflect the reality of life and thus is not reliable.
During the First and Second World Wars they were despised for their pacifism.
1 Generally they were condemned for their homosexuality, 1 swapping partners and non- nuclear family arrangements.
Bloomsbury group was not only criticized but also praised and, more importantly, its members were perceived as inventors and pioneers within certain fields. They were undoubtedly foresighted, progressive, open-minded, and audacious people. They helped to create modern views on Modernism, feminism, sexuality, pacifism etc.
The aim of this thesis is to present both sides of the debate—the praise and the criticism; and to seek the arguments that would weaken the criticism. There are many types of “harshness” of life and everybody experiences different ones. As long as we are aware of the difficulties of others and approach our own problems with humility, we are capable of seeing the true and down-to-earth reality of the world. One should not be blamed or his/her work derogated for having a different kind of experience such as the class origin.
Bloomsbury has been criticized for various reasons, and I would like to prove that those views are irrelevant and that the critics’ disapproval is insignificant in comparison with their immense contributions.
The thesis is divided into three parts: Bloomsbury—Introduction, Influence and
Controversy; Virginia Woolf—Influence and
Controversy, and Bloomsbury Artists—Influence and
Controversy
1 Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry were self-proclaimed homosexuals.
2 In the first chapter, I will introduce the nine “original” members of the group, according to Edel; then roughly sketch the circle’s development and touch on Moore’s Principia Ethica so as to provide the reader with a more profound insight. Further on, in the same chapter, I would like to discuss the particular features of the Bloomsbury controversy such as pacifism, elitism etc. and their overall influence on modern society.
The second chapter concentrates on Virginia Woolf and her influence and controversy.
I will present the criticism of her concept of androgyny; her early concerns with women’s place in society, and the reaction of modern feminists to this issue; her invention of a new narrative mode—“the stream of consciousness” and the criticism it received from other authors.
The chapter about Bloomsbury artists Vanessa and Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan
Grant will describe the artistic development of the painters and Fry’s influence on them as well as on the society. I will write about the Omega Workshops and the two Post-
Impressionist exhibitions in London organized by Fry with help of other Bloomsburies which introduced the Post-Impressionism to Britain. In this chapter, I will present the critical views of G.B. Shaw and D.H. Lawrence on Bloomsbury art.
2. WHAT WAS THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP?
The Bloomsbury group was an informal circle of upper-class intellectuals. Among its members were writers, artists, critics, politicians, and an economist. The circle’s influence reached its peak in the 1920s. The group definitely played an important role in modernizing the liberal opinion and their thoughts had an impact on the 20th century society.
3 The members of the circle were not connected by any doctrine or aim; however, they shared admiration for the moral philosophy of G. E. Moore, a Cambridge don, born in 1873
Stanford Rosenbaum states that “Bloomsbury members were critics of capitalism, imperialism and war, materialistic realism in painting and literature, and of sexual inequality, discrimination and repression” (Hanna 30). According to the poet Stephen Spender, “Not to regard the French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters as sacrosanct, not to be an agnostic and in politics a Liberal with Socialist leanings, was to put oneself outside
Bloomsbury” (Foster et. al. 73). Bell adds that Bloomsbury believed, in fact, "in pacific and rational discussion” (Bell 104).
There are many opinions on who actually belonged to the group. According to Edel,
“there are nine characters in search of an author in Bloomsbury” (11): Virginia Woolf,
Leonard Woolf, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant,
Desmond MacCarthy, and Roger Fry. Quentin Bell, another biographer of Bloomsbury, almost entirely falls in with Edel’s account of the Bloomsbury members with an exception of
Desmond MacCarthy (14).
Some Bloomsbury reviewers also consider E.M. Forster 2 to be a member but Edel disagrees. “Was E.M. Forster really Bloomsbury? I think not, for his life did not become intertwined with the nine originals” (12). Stephen Spender also doubts whether Forster belonged to the group. “It is more difficult to say why E.M. Forster does not quite fit. He was perhaps too impish, too mystical, too moralizing” (Rosenbaum 393). Hillis Miller defines the group as a much wider selection of people. She includes people who did not attend
2 Edward Morgan Forster, (1879-1970): novelist, essayist, critic, biographer, Apostle, close friend with Bloomsburies. His major novel is A Passage to India published in 1924 (Rosenbaum 2007: 232).
4 Bloomsbury meetings but were more or less connected with it. “The Bloomsbury group included Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, J. McT. E. McTaggart, J.M. Keynes, E.M.
Forster,
Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Lytton Strachey, but Virginia Woolf was the centre and cohesive force” (445). As there are many versions of the actual membership, I have decided to go along with Edel’s selection of the “nine originals” when talking about the Bloomsbury group or Bloomsburies.
Originally they called themselves "Thursday Group" according to the weekday when they used to hold their meetings. Later they became known as the Bloomsbury Group for the district of London where Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia and Adrian Stephen had chosen to live.
Henry James described this area as "an antiquated exfashionable region" (Edel 94). The centre of this area has been University College London.
All of the nine Bloomsburies were influential within their fields and some of them significantly altered the course of those fields’ developments: Virginia Woolf in prose, Lytton
Strachey in biography, Roger Fry in Art and Maynard Keynes in economics. As many other groups at that time, Bloomsbury revolted against some of Victorian values. Because of their revolutionary, unconventional minds and thoughts they have not only been seen as progressive but also as controversial and by quite a number of critics they are still viewed in a rather negative light.
2.1. Origins
Friends and fellow students from Trinity College, Cambridge—Leonard Woolf, Thoby
Stephen, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes—discovered for themselves, while studying at university, a new philosophy which was based on Principia Ethica published in 1903 by G.E. Moore, a philosopher-don of Edwardian Cambridge (Esty 2). Moore was a
5 former Cambridge student and a member of a university semi-secret society, Apostles, where he presented at least twenty-one papers for discussion between 1894 and 1900
(Klagge 583). The real “cradle” of the Bloomsbury Group was thus actually Trinity
College at Cambridge University.
2.1.1. Principia Ethica
George Edward Moore was an influential British Realist, philosopher and professor who approached mainly ethical problems. In his major work—Principia Ethica , he viewed
“the good” as something that is knowable by direct apprehension. Consequently he became known as the “ethical intuitionist” (“G.E. Moore”). He claimed that “efforts to decide what is
‘good,’ which are not themselves of an ethical nature, e.g., analyses of the concepts of approval or desire, are false” (“G.E. Moore”).
All the Bloomsbury members felt addressed by the moral laws in Principia Ethica for their interpretation seemed to correspond with the group’s unconventional way of life.
Regan states that in particular, they read Chapter Five as “proving that the conditions for the application of moral rules are vague, and that it should be left to reflective, individual human judgment to decide on the proper course of action in a given moral situation” (Stroll 307).
Other philosophers have seen Principia as embodying a commonsense and conservative morality. Contrary to that, the Bloomsbury Group saw it as morally liberating, unconventional. “Someone seems to have misread Principia, and it is Regan’s contention that it is the philosophers” (Klagge 583). Regan argues that the Bloomsbury understanding of
Moore is the correct one, but Stroll opposes that, “Careful reading of Chapter Five shows that according to Moore, the answer to the question, ‘What kinds of actions ought we to perform?’ is that we ought always to follow the dictates of common morality” (Stroll 307).
6 2.1.2. The Apostles
All young men-members of Bloomsbury apart from Clive Bell and Thoby Stephen were members of a selected semi-secret Cambridge society known as The Apostles (Bell 37).
In 1903 Maynard Keynes was elected to the Apostles when Lytton Strachey and Leonard
Woolf had already been members. The Apostles were typical for their little rituals, special vocabulary, addiction to an ideal of “truth” and ban on pedantry ( ibid. 38).
The Apostles used to meet regularly to discuss various topics. Typically one of them presented a thesis and others reacted to it. At the time when Leonard Woolf and others studied at Cambridge, Principia Ethica was a popular source of these discussions (Edel 115).
Virginia Woolf characterized the Apostles as “the society of equals enjoying each other’s foibles, criticizing each other’s characters, and questioning everything with complete freedom” ( ibid. 38). Later meetings of the Bloomsbury group very much resembled those of the Apostles, where the members used to meet regularly and took turns in presenting their papers. It is quite obvious that the Apostle gatherings had inspired the Bloomsbury meetings.
2.1.3. Cambridge in Bloomsbury
After they have finished university, Thoby Stephen announced to all his Cambridge friends that he would be at home at 20 Gordon Square, on Thursday evenings to carry on the university discussion club tradition. He basically established the Bloomsbury Group (Edel
120).
At the beginning the Bloomsbury discussions, according to Edel, tended to be “abstract and philosophical” and the thoughts about Moore’s philosophy of “the Truth,” “the Good,” and “the Beautiful” were developed (125).
7 Although Vanessa and Virginia shared the house with Thoby, they had not started to attend the meetings until later. At that time it was still inappropriate for women to participate in men’s intellectual discussions. It was only after a few months when “the very serious young men recognized that the little Cambridge-in-Bloomsbury not only had a new setting, but was destined to be ‘coeducational’” (Edel 123). The sisters lacked university education, which other people in the room had obtained; therefore, they were rather reserved at the beginning. They were silent: “No conversational opening seemed good enough“( ibid. 124). However, this had changed after few occasions, and Woolf became well- known for her mockery, sharp tongue, and fierce fighting for her point.
The Thursday evenings were well established by the summer of 1905 (Edel. 127). In response to those highly academic Thursday evenings, Vanessa Bell organized “Friday Club” in the same year.
2.1.4. Memoir Club
As the members of Bloomsbury grew older they worked more individually in various fields and did not feel the need to attend regular intellectual meetings. “With peace,
Bloomsbury individuals, publishing, writing, painting, active in economics and politics exercise wide influence but are unaware of collective power, which is considerable” (“G.E.
Moore”). In 1920 Molly MacCarthy, a wife of Desmond MacCarthy established a Memoir
Club to bring the group back together by writing short stories for the amusement of one another. This reminiscence of Bloomsbury meetings lasted until Clive Bell’s death in 1964
(Rosenbaum 2007: 235). Apart from the original members there were also some new people, but those people have not been regarded as Bloomsbury members.
8 2.2. Members of the Bloomsbury Group
Leonard Sidney Woolf (1880-1969)
Leonard Woolf was a left-wing political journalist, author, editor and publisher. Later in his life he became a member of The Fabian Society; joined the Labour Party, and was active in a League of Nations Society.
Leonard Woolf was born in 1880, London. His father was a Jewish immigrant and worked as a defence lawyer. Woolf attended a boarding school in Brighton; then won a scholarship at St. Paul's, and later at Trinity College Cambridge (“Leonard Woolf:
Bibliographical Notes”). The early death of his father caused serious financial troubles in the family. Leonard was not, in contrast with his Cambridge friends, fully materially supported by his family, “At Cambridge he had less of a formed self than the assured young sons of the
Establishment, or the wealthy and indulged young like Clive. Leonard would have to make his own world within their ready-made world” (Edel 43).
After he had received too few points in the exams to qualify for a domestic Civil Service position, he applied for Civil Service in Ceylon. There he started to work in Jaffna 3, the flat desert area. His task in Ceylon was to govern on his own about 100,000 people in a territory of approximately 1,000 square miles. 4 Originally an unorthodox Jew and later an agnostic, discovered a new religion in Ceylon: “If one had to have a religion, Buddhism was superior to all others” (Edel 115).
When he returned from Ceylon, Woolf proposed three times to Virginia Stephen, and every time she rejected him. Finally, in 1912, they got married. Throughout their whole life
3 Jaffna is a port in northern Sri Lanka situated on a flat, dry peninsula (“Jaffna”).
4 Edel, Leon. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions . London: Hogarth, 1979.
9 together Woolf spent a lot of his time caring for his wife, who was suffering occasional manic-depressions. As a remedy for her illness, he bought a small printing press in 1915, and they established the Hogarth Press 5 in Richmond, which eliminated the restraints and obstacles of publishing for Virginia Woolf as she did not have to subordinate her work to publishers’ demands anymore. Since then she could publish whatever she wished. They also printed books by Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot and later Sigmund Freud (“Leonard Woolf”).
Another Leonard’s contribution to the reputation of his wife was revealing of her unpublished documents to Virginia’s nephew, Quentin Bell, in order to write her biography.
Leonard Woolf published several novels without any significant success. The best known are The Village and the Jungle (1913) and The Wise Virgins (1914). Woolf’s most enduring accomplishment is probably his multi-volume autobiography 6 which closely describes the life of Bloomsbury. With the outbreak of the First World War he became more involved in politics. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society. 7 He never became a conscientious objector 8 like Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant or John Maynard
Keynes.
After the First, World War Woolf was foreseeing some great League, “some union that might make war impossible” (Edel 201). In spite of this he states that he had never been a pacifist, “I was in a sense, against the war, but I have never been complete pacifist; once the
5 Hogarth Press was founded by the Woolfs in 1917 originally to print poems and short stories rejected by commercial publishers (Rosenbaum 2007: 233).
6Growing: an autobiography of the years 1904-1911 (1961), Beginning again: an autobiography of the years 1911-1918 (1964), Downhill all the way: an autobiography of the years 1919-1939 (1967) (Project Gutenberg).
7 Fabian Society was committed to gradual rather than revolutionary means for spreading socialist principles . "Fabianism." -Ologies & -Isms . 2008. The Gale Group, Inc. 27 Apr. 2009
8 Conscientious objector is one who opposes bearing arms or who objects to any type of military training or service on religious, moral or ethical grounds (“Conscientious objector”).
10 war had broken out it seemed to me that the Germans must be resisted and I therefore could not be a conscientious objector” (Edel 201). His work helped to lay the foundations of the policy of the League of Nations (“Leonard Woolf”).
Clive Bell (1881-1964)
Clive Bell was an English art critic who helped popularize the art of the Post-
Impressionists in Great Britain (“Clive Bell”). He came from a family of productive coal miners. Bell was a pacifist who could not accept churchgoing and was worried about the nature of civilization (Edel 30). In 1928 he published Civilization , where he elaborated on a theory of a superior civilization. To define such a civilization had become his life quest ( ibid.
31).
In January 1904 Clive Bell left London for Paris in order to discuss his dissertation on
British foreign policy with the Vicomte de Chateaubriand. This came to be the determinant experience for the young art critic. Bell became acquainted with Morrice, who took him to the galleries and systematically showed him how an artist, an impressionist, looked at the world […]. Morrice had known Toulouse-Lautrec, Conder, Monet, Whistler, Bonnard,
Vuillard, and later would be friend of Matisse (Edel 105). In Paris, Bell met people who helped to open his eyes and who became a source of his inspiration.
Bell’s most important contribution to art criticism was the theory of “significant form,” which has become the basis of Formalism, as described in his books Art (1914) and Since
Cézanne (1922).
Lytton Strachey (1880-1932)
Giles Lytton Strachey was an English biographer and critic who opened a new era of biographical writing. Strachey proposed to write lives with “brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant” (“Lytton Strachey”). He is best
11 known for his biographies: Eminent Victorians (1918), Queen Victoria (1921), and Elizabeth and Essex (1928).
Strachey's father was a general who had been in India (Edel 35). He was the eleventh child and grew up among sisters ( ibid. 35). Strachey's attitude towards love relationships seems to be somewhat parental “very early he found that his best claim to masculinity lay in conquering young boys, in giving them love, and in being motherly as his mother had been with him” ( ibid . 36). Desmond MacCarthy once remarked that Lytton’s friendships at
Cambridge were more like loves—taking possession of his friend […] manipulative ( ibid . 46).
“He felt, also, in his emotions, queenlike—like his mother, Jane Maria Strachey, or like
Victoria 9, or Elizabeth, or even Florence Nightingale ( ibid . 36). These womanlike feelings inside himself probably helped him to gain profound empathy with the women he was later writing about.
Paradoxically, his long-term companion became an artist Dora Carrington with; they also lived together for some time.
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
Keynes was an English economist, journalist, and financier who was best known for his economic theories—“Keynesian economics.” 10 In short, Keynesian economics argues that in case of crisis or inefficiency in private sector, the public sector should intervene.
As a graduate from Cambridge he started to work as a civil servant for the India Office in
Whitehall. There he gained experience for his first major work, Indian Currency and Finance
(1913).
9 Queen Victoria and queen Elizabeth I
10 Keynesian economics is a body of ideas se forth by John Maynard Keynes in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935-36) and other works, intended to provide a theoretical basis for government full-employment policies ( "John Maynard Keynes").
12
During World War I Keynes worked in the National Treasury, and in 1919, he attended the Versailles Peace Conference as an economic adviser; however, he resigned his post because he disagreed with the burdensome policies imposed upon the defeated Germany— he realized that German economy would collapse and that would have negative impact on whole Europe (“John Maynard Keynes”). The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) by
Keynes describes possible effects of the decisions made in Versailles.
The Keynesian model lost its prominence in late 1980s as the economists have become more informed about inflation and unemployment (“John Maynard Keynes”).
Edel suggests that in comparison with Bloomsbury, Keynes was in some ways a spiritual
“outsider”—unafraid. “He was his own authority […] he could be devastatingly rude. [...] he was a natural leader, […] he knew how to say things, how to meet social conditions” (50). His parents 11 raised him to become “aware of disciplines of the mind without falling into permissive” (Edel . 49).
Keynes was a pacifist and admired logic and Darwin. According to him, Principia Ethica was a stupendous and entrancing work and he draws from Moore’s work in My Early Beliefs
(1938) (Edel 52) . His most important work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and
Money , where Keynes presents some suggestions of how to solve the unemployment by government interventions, was published in 1936.
11 John Neville Keynes, a father of Keynes was a British philosopher and economist and later and academic administrator at the Kings’s College, Cambridge. Keynes’s mother was one of the first female university graduates (“John Maynard Keynes”).
13 Charles Otto Desmond MacCarthy (1887-1952)
Sir Desmond Charles Otto MacCarthy used Desmond for his first name and MacCarthy for his surname. He was an English journalist, weekly columnist and later drama critic for the
New Statesman known as the “Affable Hawk.” During the First World War he served with the
Red Cross in France. He was one of the three male members of Bloomsbury who did not become a conscientious objector.
MacCarthy is the only member of Bloomsbury of mixed ancestry background. He was part Irish, French, and German. Edel sees him as “European,” cosmopolitan—he did not have traditional English reserve (57).
His visionary and open mind helped promote unknown or new authors including Henrik
Ibsen and Anton Chekhov (“Sir Desmond MacCarthy).
Virginia and Vanessa Stephens’ childhood
Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson Duckworth were both widowed when they married in
1878. Besides four children from their previous marriages, they brought up four of their own children: Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia and Adrian (in order of the year of the year of their birth).
Leslie Stephen, an editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, had certainly a great influence on his children. There were many important thinkers and artists of that time surrounding Stephen's family. Leslie Stephen was Thackeray's son in law (from the first marriage with Harriet Marion); he used to go for walks with Henry James; regularly hosted many successful Victorian authors including Henry James, and George Eliot; visited
Washington to talk with Abraham Lincoln about slavery and made his friend, an American minister in London, Virginia’s godfather. Having such experience it was easier to for the
Stephen's siblings to discuss intellectual topics with such people later on.
14 There was an even more crucial aspect of Leslie Stephen’s personality—he believed in emancipation. “Every man ought to be feminine, i.e., to have quick and delicate feelings; but no man ought to be effeminate, i.e. to let his feelings get better of his intellect and produce a cowardly view of life and the world” (Edel 67). Stephen allowed his daughters to read anything they wanted in his voluminous library. “Read what you like,” he said when Virginia was 15 (Edel 91). This was really unconventional then as daughters may have read only books explicitly chosen by their fathers—in most cases romances. Also, Leslie Stephen used to take his daughters Vanessa and Virginia to visit their brother Thoby at Cambridge; there they first met Leonard Woolf and Lytton Strachey and experienced what it is like to at least stand on the academic ground.
No. 22 Hyde Park Gate, the house where all the Stephen's children of the second marriage were born, could be called “a haunted house” as four family members died there within twelve years. The loss of both parents in the early stages of their lives had a great impact on the sisters’ mental stability.
The father died nine years after the mother when the children were in their early twenties. Thoby and his brother Adrian had been able to “run” away to study at university, which saved them from the melancholy that fell on their sisters (Edel 100).
During their teenage years the sisters not only suffered from the deaths of their parents but also from abuse of their half-siblings, the Duckworth brothers. For Vanessa, painting was the therapy; for Virginia, it was writing.
Vanessa Stephen (1879-1961)
The two sisters had quite different personalities: Vanessa was self-contained, mature, uncompromising and in many ways “natural” for she decidedly believed in nature and freedom. She seemed to be passive and distanced to most people in contrast to Virginia who
15 was “deeply involved with people in her eternal quest to be loved” (Edel 76). However,
Virginia once said that "Vanessa has volcanoes underneath her sedate manner" ( ibid. 77).
Vanessa declared that she herself was “in reality the most critical and rational of all the
Stephens” ( ibid . 82).
Before Vanessa was twenty she was working in a studio of Sir Arthur Cope who taught her to draw. Later she was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools (Edel 83). She was also closely associated with the Omega Workshops and became involved in the First and Second
Post-Impressionist Exhibitions, organized by Roger Fry. She exhibited her paintings independently for the first time in 1922, at the Independent Gallery (Archive Journeys:
Bloomsbury ). Her major work of art “Studland Beach counts as a landmark in the painter’s development and was one of the most radical works of the time in England” (Shone 72).
Virginia Stephen (1882-1941)
In 1905 she started to write articles and essays, and became a book reviewer for the
Times Literary Supplement . She also taught teaching English and Literary History at Morley
College in London (Merriman).
Of the two artist-sisters, we know that Vanessa possessed the sanity of art, which is one kind of greatness, whereas Virginia possessed the madness of art, which is another (Edel
82). Virginia’s frequent lapses from sanity were most probably, as Edel explains, the result of her mother's sudden death when Woolf was only thirteen, her father’s temper, and “boyish sexual treatment” (85) by one of her half brothers. This could have damaged her emotional life or even lead to madness. During her life the attack of depression usually came after one of her books had been published. Some of her lapses from sanity led to suicidal attempts. In
1941 Woolf drowned herself in the river Ouse near her country house in Sussex.
16 Duncan Grant (1885-1978)
Grant was a Post-Impressionist painter and designer. He was involved in the Omega
Workshops and the two Post-Impressionist exhibitions.
Duncan Grants’ paintings were often highly esteemed for successfully capturing both movement and emotion as in Bathing . His art mentor, a French painter Simon Bussy, taught him that art was regularity, not waiting for inspiration (Edel 150). Duncan Grant had a first solo exhibition in 1920, at the Carfax Gallery (Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury ).
D.H. Lawrence saw Duncan Grant as “a dark-skinned taciturn Hamlet of a fellow;” he also depicted him this way in Lady Chatterley's Lover (Edel 141). David Garnett said about him that he “was the most original man I have ever known. […] he is a genius who can only do things in his own way” ( ibid. 141). Duncan Grant and Wyndham Percy Lewis shared a dislike for each other. Lewis saw Grant as "a little fairy-like individual who would have received no attention in any country except England" ( ibid. 144).
Roger Fry (1866-1934)
Roger Fry came from a long line of Quakers (Edel 158). As the eldest Bloomsbury of the nine “originals” he had most experience. From painting he went to art criticism and writing reviews about exhibitions, which made him better known in the United States, where he later spent some years helping the Metropolitan Museum acquire masterpieces ( ibid. 158).
Bell points out that it was under Fry’s influence that Bloomsbury became Francophile as he established connection with Parisian artists (53).
He was treated by some Bloomsburies, e.g., Clive Bell, rather as a tutor and an object of admiration. Fry was quite sceptical about Impressionism, and together with Bell saw the future in form and design (Edel . 161). Fry had never been a disciple of Moore (Bell 53).
17
His major achievements are the two Post-Impressionist Exhibitions, foundation of the
Omega Workshops, and his critical work Vision and Design (1920 ).
2.3. Controversy of the Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury group was mostly criticized by followers of conventionality because of their class origins, elitism, satire, atheism, pacifism, oppositional politics and liberal economics, modernist fiction, and their non-nuclear family and sexual arrangements
(Bloomsbury at Charleston ).
Most of the pacifist Bloomsburies became conscientious objectors during the First
World War and the rest served the government in various ways. However, none of them was enthusiastic about the war or, as Bell puts it, “believed in” the war (69). Many people began to despise Bloomsburies after World War I for their pacifism.
One of Bloomsbury Group’s fiercest critics was a member of another intellectual group, called Rebel Artists and later Vorticists, 12 Wyndham Lewis. Lewis was a painter, a writer and a founder of Vorticists. His professional contempt and personal antipathy for the members of Bloomsbury (Rosenbaum 332) became a part of earning his living (Rosenbaum 332). In contrast with the Bloomsbury members the leading Vorticists 13 were all foreign born.
“Poverty and marginality made them bold by necessity, but also more dependent on self- enforced publicity” (Hansen 361). Vorticists never appreciated the work of Bloomsbury as they did not “believe” the life experience of upper classes could be deep or truthful.
12 Vorticist group were radical Futurist artists. For Vorticism see p. 4.4.1. 13 An American poet and critic Ezra Pound and a sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
18 In his magazine Tyro , Lewis regularly published critical articles mainly focused on
Bloomsbury painters but he did not leave other members out. In his novel The Apes of God , he satirizes the new bohemian classes of London whose rich members create an “untrue” art in their leisure time (to ape the real artists) and thus confuse the public who identifies them with true art and intelligence (Rosenbaum 333). Lewis and other Vorticists disapproved of
Bloomsburies’ comfortable lives and were not able to think of their art as real because the artists had never experienced any kind of harshness that life can bring. The end of Lewis’s story is rather perplexing. Shortly before his death, Sir John Rothenstein reported him as saying that “Roger Fry and his ‘Bloomsbury’ circle had ruined his life and that had he known how much he would have suffered, in his own words, ‘by a sneer hatred or by a shy
Bloomsbury sniff,’ he would never have attacked Roger Fry” (Rosenbaum 334).
2.3.1. “Intertwined” Relationships in the Bloomsbury Group
Many Bloomsbury contemporaries criticized them for their unconventional relationships arrangements. It is true that their relationships seem to be much intertwined but one should first think of nature of the Bloomsbury group before making any judgments.
Bloomsburies were extremely open to one another. Most of their views and opinions were so innovative and controversial, that they could not be shared by majority. This mutual understanding drew them even closer together.
Quentin Bell, a son of Vanessa and Clive Bell develops a theory on Bloomsbury exclusivity (elitism), “The accusation is both true and false. Between them there was a special relationship, an affinity that can hardly be described in words and now, writing of it, I am not sure to what extent it actually existed, and yet I think that there was something that might be felt—and magnified—by the outsider” (Bell 70).
19 Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant had been lovers until Grant abandoned him for J. M.
Keynes with whom they lived and travelled together as a couple (Edel 135). Their friendship endured beyond Duncan’s love for Vanessa and Keynes’s marriage to Lydia Lopokova, a
Russian ballerina. Moore never criticized the homosexual activities of some of the
Bloomsburies (Stroll 3).
Vanessa Bell married Clive Bell for reason right after Thoby had died, “Clive would help to make life tolerable again” (Edel 135). Vanessa had said she could be happy living “with anyone whom [she] did not dislike, if [she] could paint and lead the kind of life [she] likes”
(ibid. 135). She had two sons with Bell and one daughter with Duncan Grant. The three of them pretended that the child was Bell’s. Later on she also lived with Roger Fry but then she broke off this extra marital affair to spend the rest of her life with Grant.
Vanessa and Virginia shared Clive Bell as they used to share their brother Thoby. In spite of the fact that Clive Bell was Vanessa’s husband, Virginia clung to him and fought over his affection with Vanessa. Bell did not mind this as he wrote in a letter to Virginia Woolf,
“though we did not kiss…I think we ‘achieved the heights’ as you put it” ( ibid. 136).
3. VIRGINIA WOOLF
Woolf began writing professionally in 1905 for the Times Literary Supplement . Her first book Voyage Out was published in 1915 by the Duckworth press owned by her half-brothers.
Duncan Grant noted that “The voyage out was Virginia’s. This shyness and fierceness was necessary self-defence in her war with the world” (Edel 149). The nervous breakdown that lasted till June followed after the book’s publishing (Bell 229). Some claim that there is a connection between the collapse and the sudden publicity that mainly brought
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up the pressure. There were quite a few periods of insanity in Woolf’s life during which her husband, Leonard Woolf, had always been a great support to her.
3.1. Influence
Woolf was a very innovative and influential writer of the 20 th century for she is one of the pioneers of Modernism in literature. She further developed the modernist literary technique known as a “stream of consciousness.” 14
Virginia Woolf’s achievement has been observed quite differently in the United States and in Great Britain. Hermione Lee shares her experience from the United States, where she held a discussion on her book about Woolf, “Questions were much more venerating of
Woolf. […] There was, it seemed to me, much more of an assumption on the part of general readers and reviewers that Woolf was worth writing about again—and again” (14). Another feminist, Carolyn Heilbrun, talks about what Virginia Woolf had meant to generations of
American women, “For us in the United States, she has become the major modernist voice countering the relentless male modernists and their fear of women” (Lee 14).
In contrast to that, in Britain there is still a strong hostility to Woolf, having roots in the
1930’s class-attacks on her life and work and deriving also from an over-exposure to
“Bloomsbury” (Lee 14). However, Woolf has also had admirers among British critics—an
English critic Rachel Bowlby says that:
Woolf is the only twentieth-century British woman writer who is taken
seriously by critics of all casts […]. Like the Bible, Woolf’s texts provide ample
support for almost any position; she is taken to hold the key to the meaning
14 Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique in non-dramatic fiction. TO represent the full richness, speed, and subtlety of the mind at work, the writer incorporates snatches of incoherent thought, ungrammatical constructions, and free association of ideas, images, and words at the pre-speech level (“Stream of Consciousness”).
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of life and the proper nature of women; who is the object of both veneration
and vehement hatred. (Lee 14)
Bowlby herself characterizes Woolf as a feminist writer who questioned masculinity and patriarchy in all aspects of her work.
Those above mentioned quotations show that the discussion on Virginia Woolf still raises a controversy—across the nations and even generations (as she is still controversial nowadays). Even though some critics might contempt Woolf for her—in their view—class assumption or other reasons, she was, as Heilbrun suggests, the most significant woman
Modernist, who was able to face the men Modernists (Lee 14).
3.2. Feminism
In the 1970s, women’s literary history began to be written 15 and Woolf was its first author and in many ways its first subject (Visvanthan 3016). Her most acclaimed work of non-fiction, A Room of One’s Own (1929), is today regarded as a classic feminist book.
Margaret Ezeel, too, sees the development of women’s literary history as grounded in A
Room of One’s Own (Visvanthan 3016).
Feminists have praised the book because of its appeal to lack of women novelists in the history of literature. Not many writers had until till then been concerned about this issue. It was always perceived as a normal situation that women had limited choices outside their marriages and were discouraged from education. Due to this fact women were always assumed to be less capable of intellectual thinking.
15 1970’s—The second wave of feminism—Modern Feminism
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Suddenly, there appeared somebody who declared that the situation was rather warning; began to examine the causes and suggested a solution. Considering that A Room of
One’s Own was written at the time when women had just recently gained the right to vote in
Britain, 16 the arguments and the whole thesis that appears in the book are quite progressive.
Woolf almost certainly owed this foresightedness to her father’s personality and his way of bringing his children up.
Feminists had not only praised Woolf. Although her theories have been regarded as important and most feminists observe them as the beginning of the feminist history, there have appeared many critical opinions of her as well. The modern feminists 17 disagree about
Woolf’s idea of androgyny in order to support the role of women. They doubt whether her suggestions and judgment are trustworthy if, according to them, Woolf lacks the negative life experience or whether such experience is not necessary to claim the truth.
Elaine Showalter—one of the well-known critics of Woolf—attacks nearly all the aspects of Woolf’s writing. She believes that because of Woolf’s class origin she must know too little about the “real” state of things, therefore she cannot influence those of her readers, who know the day-to-day life. Showalter also considers Woolf’s opinions to be insufficiently (as for a feminist writer would be appropriate) involved with politics, and rejects the “deconstructive” form of narration in Woolf’s novels.
16 The act of 1918 gave the vote to all men over age 21 and all women over age 30, which tripled the electorate. The act of 1928 extended the franchise to women aged 21–30. ( "Representation of the People Acts").
17 Modern Feminism started in the 1970s.
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Androgyny vs. Lesbianism
Coleridge 18 says “that a great mind is androgynous and claims that when this fusion takes place, the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties,” (“Virginia Woolf”). In the last chapter of A Room of One’s Own Woolf refers to Coleridge, 19 "Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine" (Woolf 128).
Perhaps the only reason why Elaine Showalter reviews Woolf as a feminist writer is her perception of androgyny, which Showalter comprehends as “a full balance and command of an emotional range that includes male and female elements” (263). This idea corresponds with the attitudes of some modern feminists. One of them, Nancy Topping Bazin, also notices the idea of androgyny rather than lesbianism in Woolf’s work, and reads the writer’s concept as the union of masculinity and femininity (Moi 14). Woolf’s nephew and a biographer, Quentin Bell, thinks that “within the terms not only of her fantasy but also of her real life, Virginia Woolf imagines a solution of human affairs based upon androgynous affections”(99).
Jane Cummins explains that although Woolf has been accused of “imperialism, elitism, and intellectual snobbery like the whole Bloomsbury group; […] in popular culture Woolf’s sexuality and feminism are perceived as her biggest threats. […] Woolf’s lesbianism, in particular, is seen as frightening” (21).
Woolf’s concept of androgyny is expressed in a novel/biography Orlando . Feminists have argued whether Woolf presents here the ideal of androgyny or lesbianism as the book
18 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798) written with William Wordsworth started English Romantic Movement (“Samuel Taylor Coleridge”).
19 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798) written with William Wordsworth started English Romantic Movement (“Samuel Taylor Coleridge”).
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was inspired by Woolf’s close friendship with Vita Sackville-West, who was said to be
Woolf’s lover.
According to Cummins, there are three types of reviewers of Orlando (1928), a book which is most often discussed for sexuality and feminism. Most mainstream publications, according to Cummins, inform that Orlando is modelled after and dedicated to Vita Sackville-
West “with who Woolf was madly in love.” The second group of reviewers does not mention
Sackville-West at all and the last group points out that whatever relationship these two women had shared, it is now “almost totally irrelevant” (22). Cummins herself argues that
Orlando is not about lesbians but androgyny and “gender-bending,” because Orlando never expresses desire for the same sex while his/her own constantly changes (21).
Class-Assumption
Probably the most frequently discussed critical points of Woolf’s manifest essays 20 are the disconnections with “real lives” of most of the readership, i.e., with their authentic social frameworks. Showalter is very critical about Woolf’s essays as she does not see any direct experience of Woolf being transmitted to the reader, simply because she thinks that as an upper-class woman, Woolf lacks such a kind of negative experience. In Showalter’s view,
Three Guineas and A Room of One’s Own fail as feminist essays because they are short of the author’s own experience:
Here [in Three Guineas ] Woolf was betrayed by her own isolation from female
mainstream. Many people were infuriated by the class assumptions in the
book, as well as by its political naiveté. More profoundly, however, Woolf was
cut off from an understanding of the day-to-day life of the women whom she
wished to inspire; characteristically, she rebelled against aspects of female
20 Manifest essays by Woolf discussed in this thesis: Three Guineas (1928) and A Room of One’s Own (1929).
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experience that she had never personally known and avoided describing her
own experience. (294)
Showalter can only see a true feminist in a woman with a convincing personal experience coming from an adequate social background.
Another point Showalter makes in her criticism of Virginia Woolf is the unsatisfactory import of the author’s theories into politics. As a feminist, Showalter thinks, Woolf should argue more aggressively for the importance of public discussion on the women rights (294).
Toril Moi describes closely Showalter’s strong feelings about the connectedness of feminist art with politics and her opinion that (feminist) artists should most importantly produce political art. Moi takes a critical look on Showalter’s limited view on fighting against women oppression:
Showalter’s insistence on the need for political art is limited to the struggle
against sexism. Thus she gives Virginia Woolf no credit for having elaborated a
highly original theory of relations between sexism and fascism in 1936; nor
does she appear to approve of Woolf's attempts to link feminism to pacifism
in the same essay. (5)
Woolf totally exceeds Showalter’s viewpoint as she goes along with a Bloomsbury ideal of the “separation of politics and art,” 21 (Showalter 288) which is, as Showalter claims, something that is evident in the fact that Woolf “avoided describing her own experience” in her writing (294). Moi stands up for Woolf as she does not think that the feminist art should be politically appealing to either catch attention of people or influence them, “If feminist
21 The separation of politics and art was the Bloomsbury ideal which derived from Moore’s theory of truth and beauty.
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critics cannot produce a positive political and literary assessment of Woolf's writing, then the fault may lie with their own texts“ (Moi 9).
On the other hand, Jane Marcus 22 notices aggressiveness in the appeal of Woolf’s writing as she calls her “a guerrilla fighter in a Victorian skirt,” and sees in her a champion of both socialism and feminism: “Writing, for Virginia Woolf, was a revolutionary act. Her alienation from British patriarchal culture and its capitalist and imperialist forms and values, was so intense that she was filled with terror and determination as she wrote” (Marcus I).
Another feminist critic of Virginia Woolf, Patricia Stubbs, criticizes Woolf’s literary work, because “there is no coherent attempt to create new models, new images of women,”
(231). Woolf perhaps does not elaborate on creating a new model of woman, but she definitely invents a new point of view to look at women as we can see in A Room of One’s
Own , where she critically describes the causes that led to the current social status of a woman.
3.3. Stream of Consciousness
Showalter also disapproves of Virginia Woolf’s writing method—stream of consciousness—a new style which rejects all the conventional forms of the novel such as an omniscient narrator, a significant plot line, etc. Showalter misses the secure ground of
Woolf’s texts. She claims it is more contributory and easier for a reader to orientate and interpret the meaning if he/she knows what point of view the author holds—which perspective he/she judges the world from.
22 Jane Marcus is a feminist critic.
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On the other hand, Fleishman argues for the benefit of Woolf. He labels her narrative experiment as “perspectivism” 23 (719). Fleishman explains that:
The essential characteristic of the technique represented by Virginia Woolf is
that we are given not merely one person whose consciousness (that is, the
impressions it receives) is rendered, but many persons, with frequent shifts
from one to the other […] The multiplicity of persons suggests that we are
here after all confronted with an endeavour to investigate an objective
reality. (719)
It is not clear who is the major character or a narrator; therefore we cannot assume what opinion the author stands for.
Another feature of the stream of consciousness that Showalter finds distracting is the insignificant plot line of a story—a so called “deconstructive” form. Showalter deems this form of narrative puzzling for the inexplicit interpretation.
Toril Moi describes Woolf’s refusal of the traditional literary technique as a reflection of her personal experience: “Woolf’s own periodic attacks of mental illness can be linked both to her textual strategies and to her feminism. For the symbolic order is a patriarchal order” (Moi 11). Moi further explains that Woolf “flees fixed gender identities not because she fears them, but because she has seen them for what they are. She has understood that the goal of the feminist struggle must precisely be to deconstruct the death-dealing binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity” (13). Feminist Julie Kristeva agrees with Moi that
“a theory that demands the deconstruction of sexual identity is indeed authentically feminist”(14).
23 Perspectivism is the view that all truth is truth from or within a particular perspective.
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Another opponent of the stream of consciousness in Woolf’s novels was writer Angus
Wilson, who reproached Woolf for the fact that “her technique had disintegrated the novel's form” (71). The incomprehension of Virginia Woolf had also made him angry.
Later in his life Wilson changed his opinion about Woolf's writing and, eventually, he began to admire her innovative narrative; however, this had been a long lasting battle with himself and his prejudices against Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.
On his first talk on BBC Radio, he chose to make Virginia Woolf the target of his attack.
Even then he recognized how deeply he had been influenced by reading her novels, for he announced brashly that “it was always necessary for a new generation of writers to bite the hand that fed it,” (70) and admitted that his novel The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot (1958) “owes everything in conception although nothing in form to Mrs. Dalloway ” (Wilson 71).
Wilson gradually learnt that by a constant criticism of Virginia Woolf’s deconstructive writing he somehow got over the frustration from reading her books and started to learn and benefit from her innovative approaches. What he first found to be confusing and purposeless considering Woolf’s narrative, he later discovered to be “assuredly under the control of author's mind, which is taking the reader exactly where she wishes him to go”
(74).
In his last book written in the traditional form, No Laughing Matter (1967) he was
“thoroughly conscious that the teacher to whom (after Dickens and Dostoevsky) [he] owed most was Mrs. Woolf herself; it was she who showed [him] how to preserve narration. […]
She is, [he] believed, the master of twentieth-century narrative technique” (72).
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3.4. Woolf’s “Ladylikeness” According to Angus Wilson
Angus Wilson further blames Woolf for Victorian elitist attitudes since he found it hard to believe, similarly to Showalter, that a person who belonged to the upper middle class could oversee the whole reality and make an honest connection with the world “beyond her class,” “[Her] ladylikeness was a trouble then to those of us who found her insight and her vision transforming, for it undercut the reality of her vision and undermined the liberalism of her sympathy” (68).
Similarly to Fry’s strategy, Woolf also considered the close relationship to the common reader to be important. She tried to bridge the gap between the author and the readership by giving speeches at the Women's Cooperative Guild. 24 Caine states that although “she was clearly aware of herself as part of the intellectual elite, she sought ways of refuting the idea that intellectual elites were necessarily upper class, and that there was an unavoidable gulf between the intellectual elite and the mass of ordinary readers” (372).
Angus Wilson contrasts the “ladylikeness” and elitism of Woolf with the authenticity and modesty of Katherine Mansfield, a contemporary and competitor of Woolf on the literary field: “To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway was “fine” literature, in which real life such as there was (in any case, remote, wealthy, vaguely aristocratic oddities) had been rarefied into some poetry that left one exalted and bemused and, if this were not a contradiction, also a little bit flat, for it was all so very ethereal and clever” (67).
Wilson often compares Woolf to Katherine Mansfield, who had, according to him, experienced the hardship while living the adult life in poverty. He thinks of Mansfield as a
24 Women’s Cooperative Guild was founded in 1883 and became the largest association of English working class women. Its policies were progressive and feminist (Rosenbaum 2007: 240).
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representative of a lower class; however, she had in contrast with Woolf studied at university. Wilson declares that Woolf's writing is “not witty and ‘smart’ and down-to-earth like Katherine Mansfield’s. Woolf is using words in the same manner although more magically” (66). Even the amount of suffering during Woolf's periodic insanities cannot be, in
Wilson’s opinion, compared to Mansfield's long “more palpable” tubercular illness (68).
Wilson claims that he could understand Woolf only once in his life; when he led the same style of life, “For some years flourished on an inheritance as a young cultured aesthete
[…] I ‘read’ history as my academic subject and also read all the fashionable books that mattered, e.g., The Waves ” (68). He approved of it and called it “a pure work of art” (68).
However he found the book “superficial and elegant—and so the book was seen by very many young contemporaries, […] ‘The Waves is an enchanting book, we all piped’” (69).
3.5. Virginia Woolf and Fascism
Angus Wilson as well as many young writers and intellectuals of his time was remonstrating
Woolf for:
not identifying herself more closely with the anti-Fascist Front—she loathed
and feared all that the Nazis stood for—but she would not join protests and
march in processions; that was “The Big Bow Noise,” which the private values
of Bloomsbury, the concern for personal relationships and the contemplation
of beauty, had always despised. She stood by her pacifist guns. And to my
generation she lost all our sympathy by doing so. (Wilson 69)
Virginia Woolf perhaps did not actively participate in an anti-Fascist movement; however, she and her husband, Leonard Woolf, were aware of the dangerous situation— they were thinking of committing suicide if Germans invaded Britain, mainly for Leonard
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Woolf’s Jewish origin. During the Second World War the Woolf’s began to doubt whether pacifism was the right attitude in such situations, “The Woolfs asked themselves a question—could one allow the Germans to invade England and do nothing? Virginia noted,
‘Rather like Napoleonic times’” (Edel 201).
It is true that Virginia Woolf was a well-off upper-class woman with at least some education 25 in contrast with majority of women. Because of the money she inherited from her aunt she was not entirely dependent on the income from publishing her books. Her husband believed in her talents and “seemed to have displayed none of the common desire of husbands to concentrate all his wife’s energy and capacity on himself” (Holtby 27). As a member of the upper class Woolf had servant who did all the housework. Provided such circumstances it was possible for Woolf to write and even to experiment in her prose. It was quite impossible for a woman without education or financial independence to write at that time; Woolf elaborates on this fact in A Room of One’s Own .
Logically most of the female writers till then had been of upper middle or upper class.
Even Katherine Mansfield, Woolf's contemporary and a rival, whose “poverty” Angus Wilson contrasts with Woolf’s “nobility” was a daughter of a successful businessman and grew up in upper middle class setting. 26 Even though most of her adult life she lived in poverty, she had received, as one of few women at that time, university education; this was financed by her parents (“Katherine Mansfield”). Therefore Woolf’s achievement should not be devaluated
25 Virginia Woolf could read Greek and Latin. 26 Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was born in Wellington, New Zealand and left for England in 1903 to study at Queen’s College (“Katherine Mansfield”).
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on the basis of her class origin. Not only because she was one of only a few female writers then, but also because of her contribution in literature—promotion of the “stream of consciousness,” was far advanced then.
4. BLOOMSBURY ARTISTS
Vanessa Bell announced founding of “Friday Club” in 1905. This club was a response to
‘the lofty academicism’ (Edel 130) of the Thursday evenings. 27 Edel suggests that “[Thursday meetings] were too philosophical, we judge, for a painter” (130). The advantage of Friday evenings was perhaps the absence of too lengthy intellectual, philosophical and rational discussions; also it was a good opportunity to exhibit their works. Bloomsbury painters needed their own space. The original members were all artists from the Bloomsbury Group:
Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry.
Hamilton claims in Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880-1940 that “The twentieth- century English art would have been quite a different matter had not Duncan Grant,
Wyndham Lewis, C.R.W. Nevinson, Ben Nicholson, William Roberts and Matthew Smith seen
Fauvism and Cubism at first hand before 1914 ” (425). Hamilton means Roger Fry's and Clive
Bell's earlier experience from visiting Paris, where they met the European advanced artist
(Edel).
4.1. Fry and the Post-Impressionists
Bloomsbury Artists became better known after the First Post-Impressionist
Exhibition—“Manet and the Post-Impressionists” organized by Roger Fry. It was held at the
London Grafton Gallery from November 1910 to January 1911. Apart from Manet the artists
27 Thursday evenings were the original meeting s of all Bloomsbury members as opposed to Friday meetings which were attended mainly by the artists.
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such as Cezanne, Monet, Pissarro, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rouault, Derain, Friesz, Picasso,
Matisse and Maurice Denis were represented at the exhibition. It was the first time they were brought to the "incredulous London public,” (Foster et. al. 73) even though some of them, e.g., Cézanne had already been many years dead by then. Fry labelled them Post-
Impressionists for they came after Impressionists.
The reaction of the press unsurprisingly stood in behalf of convention. Edel gives an example of reviews in The Times : "Sir Charles Holmes accused the painters of gaining simplicity by throwing overboard the long-developed skill of past artists. ‘The primitive,’ said
Holmes, ‘belonged to primitives, since their art came into being unconsciously.’ But
‘deliberate’ primitivism seemed to him regressive” (Edel 161). Similar reactions came also from other critics, e.g., Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Wifrid Blunt, who called the show
“pornographic” (Rosenbaum 260). Edel explains that “by the time of the second exhibition
Manets became acceptable; the Van Goghs aroused derision and were treated as the work of a madman” (164).
The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition was held from November 1911 to January
1912. It can be said that the first exhibition concentrated on Manet and the second presented Cezanne as a major artist. At the second one, there were also some canvases by
Fauves, Picasso and Matisse. Fry had not only brought a new wave of art to Britain but he also endeavoured to show the artists among the English intellectuals how to perceive this art. To Henry James, Roger Fry patiently explained “that Picasso was doing for art what
Flaubert had done for the novel” (Edel 170). This Fry’s attitude stands against the argument of Bloomsbury critics that the group was an elitist clique with closed membership.
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4.2. Omega Workshops
Roger Fry opened the Omega Workshops at 33 Fitzroy Sq., London in July 1913. He decided to do so after an incident with Duncan Grant, who failed to turn up for the meeting with potential dealers of his art, because he could not afford the fare (Edel 170). Fry came up with an alternative way of earning the living for young artists—producing decorative art. “If they could not sell the pictures then they might decorate chairs” (Bell 54). The young artists were provided with an opportunity to present their skills and ideas while decorating furniture, textiles, china and various household accessories; painting murals, mosaics, stained glass, and later even by producing book jackets. Fry also aimed at the spread of the new styles such as Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Fauvism, for he believed that those particular styles were capable of decorative purposes. Together with Fry, there were other founders of Omega, e.g., Clive Bell and G.B. Shaw. However, Roger Fry is considered a founder and a leader of the company.
Fry as well as all the Bloomsbury artists rejected the traditional distinction between fine and decorative art, which was at that time a controversial opinion. Some critics saw an influence of the female members of Bloomsbury behind this belief. Vorticist Wyndham Lewis declared that “the production of useful and decorative art was an absurdity that signalled and alarming influx of women into the art world” (Tilghman 8).
The conception of Omega was based on anonymity of the artists since Fry felt that objects and furniture should be bought for their aesthetic qualities rather than the reputation of the artist. Omega supported the young avant-garde talents, who had been sought out by Fry at art schools and exhibitions, in producing their own, signed fine art.
Among the young artists working at the Omega were painters Frederick and Jessie
Etchells, Henri Doucet, Nina Hamnett, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and David Bomberg,
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sculptors Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and later Omega major critic—
Wyndham Lewis (“Vorticism”).
Dispute in Omega
In October 1913 Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth and Cuthbert
Hamilton left the workshops after a disagreement over the Omega contribution to the Ideal
Home Exhibition. 28 This dispute became known as the "Ideal Home Rumpus." Accusing letter they circulated, known as the “Round Robin,” certainly did not improve Omega’s profile in the eyes of their shareholders and patrons. These internal struggles that threw a bad light on the company partly led to Omega’s decline. After he left, Lewis formed The Rebel Art Centre, a decorative workshop and a Vorticist movement as the opposition to Bloomsbury.
Decline of Omega
Although the idea seemed to be ingenious and well-considered, it was not carried out and/or run efficiently as the whole project collapsed mainly because of the financial issues.
The major causes were wasteful techniques and usage of expensive materials, but there were also “internal wrangles and mediocre press coverage which went on throughout
Omega’s six-year existence” (Bell 105). In 1919 Omega Workshops Ltd was finally forced to close down and on 24 July, it was officially liquidated.
4.3. Influence
Roger Fry used to give lectures on art for the Workers Educational Association. He argued that “all you needed to appreciate art was sensitivity to its formal value” (Dawtrey et. al. 22)—which is nowadays, as we can read in Investigating Modern Art , “the prime object of the accusation of elitism” ( ibid. 22). However, as the authors of this book suggest “it can also
28 The first Ideal Home Exhibition was organized in 1908. The event has been a showcase for new accessories for the modern, 'ideal' home (“Ideal Home Exhibition”).
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be read as an argument that in order to appreciate art you do not have to have attended the right public school, nor do you need to have received a classic education: that all you needed were your eyes, and that everyone had them, not just the well-lettered” ( ibid.
22). This is certainly an undeniable justification and it also implies that some members of
Bloomsbury were definitely not elitist snobs since they made the effort to bring art closer to laymen or people without high education.
Virginia Woolf describes the artist in his biography Roger Fry as gifted and talented:
He had only to point to a passage in a picture and to murmur the word
"plasticity" and a magical atmosphere was created. [...] He made the audience
see--"the gem-like notes. Somehow the black-and-white slide on the screen
became radiant through the mist, and took on the grain and texture of the
actual canvas. He added on the spur of the moment what he had just seen as
if for the first time. That, perhaps, was the secret of his hold over the
audience. […] He could lay bare the very moment of perception. (Foster et. al.
73)
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4.4. Criticism
4.4.1. Wyndham Lewis and Vorticists versus the Bloomsbury Group
Percy Wyndham Lewis is closely associated with the creation of Vorticism, 29 a London branch of the Cubo-Futurists, a British avant-garde movement introducing art to the machine age. 30
Lewis was a leader of the group, a poet-critic Ezra Pound helped to found and named the movement, which was formed (as well as the Bloomsbury Group) as a reaction to Victorian and Romantic conceptions of art.
The poet-critic T.E. Hulme was also associated with the Vorticists. He divided the modern art into two opposed styles--the organic (emphatic) that had been dominant since
Renaissance and placed man at the centre of the nature, and a steely anti-humanist geometric (abstract) style which emerged in Vorticist art (Foster et. al. 88). In the Vorticist novel Tarr , Pound defined Vorticism as “a Mechanics" of “maximum energy,” “greatest efficiency,” and “primary forms” (Tilghman 8).
The movement was indebted to the Italian Futurism 31 of F.T. Marinetti and to the
British formalism of Roger Fry. It met only with moderate success and it had never the impact on the public’s perception of modern art in Britain as Bloomsbury did. But Vorticists did not seem to regret this, because “Lewis was scornful of the public’s ability to appreciate
29 Vorticism comes from the word Vortex. Vorticist movement sought to relate art and literature to the industrial process (“Wyndham Lewis”).
30 Machine Age, era of invention and machine-based change in society that began with the Industrial Revolution. "Machine Age," Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopaedia . 2009. 17 March
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good art” (Tilghman 8). In contrast with Fry, who gave a number of lectures on art at the Workers Educational Association, Lewis did not care much about the public opinion.
Lewis together with Pound edited Blast where they published manifestos on British twentieth-century art and literature. They frequently criticized the attitudes represented by the Bloomsbury Group. A novel by Lewis—The Apes of God (1930) was a satire on the bohemian classes (including the Bloomsbury Group), purely of Victorian origin who “confuse public, because their art is not ‘real’ art” (Edel 215). He mainly disparaged them for their feminization of art and their pacifism. Lewis’s art is the opposite of anything that might be called feminist or pacifist. His paintings evoke a rather heavy, mechanical and dehumanized feeling, e.g., Timon (1914) or The Enemy of the Stars (1913) . Lewis saw dehumanization as a solution as much as a problem. In his text, “The New Egos,” published in Blast (1914) he says,
“if the modern age is to survive its own dehumanization, it must dehumanize further; it must take ‘strangeness, and surprise, and primitive detachment’ to the limit” (Foster et. al. 89).
His feelings about art perhaps reflect Lewis’s experience from the First World War front where he acted as a war painter (“Lewis”).
4.4.2. D.H. Lawrence and Duncan Grant
Lawrence is often described as a critic of Bloomsbury; however, as Bell says, he felt strong aversion mainly to Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes (Bell 71).
He was not befriended with any of the members but came across the work of Duncan
Grant when their mutual friend David Garnett invited him and his wife Frieda to Grant’s studio. Lawrence had mixed feelings about Grants’ paintings, “It was not simply that the pictures were bad—hopelessly bad—but they were worthless because Duncan was full of the wrong ideas” (Bell 71). Lawrence was very frank with Grant and gave him an extended
39
“lecture” in order to open his eyes. The day after his visit to Grant’s Studio, Lawrence wrote a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell 32 saying that he really liked Grant; however, he had to disagree with his “doing the silly experiments in the futuristic line with bits of colour on moving paper” (Rosenbaum 365).
Lawrence believed that the task that lay before all artists was to find an “Absolute,” “a statement of the whole scheme,” and “a whole conception.” Therefore he recommended
Grant “to seek out the terms in which he shall state his whole conception” (Rosenbaum
365). To Lawrence it seemed impossible to “make a picture out of geometric figures” for
“one cannot build a complete abstraction, or absolute, out of a number of small abstractions or absolutes. One can only build a great abstraction out of concrete units” (Rosenbaum 365).
Lawrence was not, able to find anything innovative, progressive or modern in Grant’s formalism. He looked at Grant's usage of that particular style as a retrograde step.
In his letter to Morrell, he insists on warning Grant against the unavoidable waste:
“Rembrandt, Corot, Goya and Manet have been preparing us our instances now for the great hand which can collect all the instances into an absolute statement of the whole”
(Rosenbaum 365). Obviously we are not able to say how those above mentioned artists would approach the abstract painting.
4.4.3. Clive Bell and Formalism
Bloomsbury artists gradually moved closer to abstraction and later they were all labelled formalists. Out of the theory about “the significant form” came a new style known as Formalism of which Bell was a founder. In Formalist art it is not the content or expression that plays the major role but the forms of its components such as lines, curves, shapes and
32 Lady Ottoline Morrell was a contemporary of Bloomsbury; patron of the arts and a hostess to the Bloomsbury Group. She was surrounded by her own intellectual circle among its members were e.g. D.H. Lawrence.
40
colours. Formalists were not without their opponents and critics. One of them Georgy
Lukács, 33 claimed that “a formalist was anyone who believed that form even affected content” other adversary of Formalism was Bertold Brecht 34 who said that “a formalist is anyone who cannot see that the form is inseparable from content” (Foster et. al. 33).
Fry's writing has been labelled "formalist" as it focused exclusively on the formal character of a work. This was caused by Fry’s conviction that “aesthetic experience could be communicated by bringing another to perceive a works’ organic unity ( ibid. 73).
Another art critic does not see Bell's new point of view on art so hopelessly. “With Mr.
Clive Bell's Art —the starting point of a generations’ discussions, [Bloomsbury members] finished their first circumference, closed their first circle with a masterpiece of their own”
(Butts 23). Barthes was denying the claims of the antiformalist champions that “formalist critics, in bypassing ‘content’ to scrutinize forms were retreating from the world and its historical realities” (Foster et. al. 32).
Lawrence ridiculed the theory of a “significant form” which Clive Bell elaborated on in his book Art and which said that:
All art produces in the viewer an emotion. This emotion is not different but
the same for all people in that it is known as the Aesthetic Emotion. The
common factor that produces the emotion is a form. Significant form is a term
used by Bell to describe forms that are arranged by some unknown and
mysterious laws. Thus, all art must contain not merely form, but significant
form (Lotito)
33 György Lukács (1885-1971)—a Soviet Marxist philosopher (Foster et. al. 32).
34 Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)--a German Marxist playwright (Foster et. al. 33).
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Naturally, it is impossible for a piece of art to produce the same emotion in everyone.
Bell, too, never defined the “unknown and mysterious laws” we could use to distinguish a formalist art. Therefore, as Lotito suggests, "we have no reasonable basis for assuming his theory of art, Formalism, to be accurate” (1).
4.4.4. G.B. Shaw and Clive Bell
There was a quarrel between G.B. Shaw and Clive Bell that was connected to religion.
Most Bloomsburies were atheists and Darwinists; Bell said about the creationist theory, “I have no patience with the snobbery that is forever deploring or denying our disreputable ancestry” (Rosenbaum 372). Shaw did not believe in Darwinism and, as opposed to Bell, thought that “Love and Art or anything else is affected by the absence of religion” ( ibid. 372).
In his essay “The Creed of an Aesthete,” Bell explains to Shaw that “the people who really care for beauty do not care for it because it comes from God or leads to anything. They care for it in itself; what is more, that is how they care for all the fine things in life” ( ibid. 372).
4.5. War Art
Roger Fry was, as well as many other Bloomsbury members, a pacifist. He totally despised the war enthusiasm during the First World War and criticized the intellectuals who could not see the absurdity of the war and who got carried away by propaganda: “To win the war or to hide safely among the winners became the only preoccupation. Abroad was heard only the sound of guns, at home only the ceaseless patter of propaganda utterly indifferent to truth” (Bell 66). Fry was also controversial during the First World War for seeing the removal of German art and music from public life as disadvantageous and unnecessary.
Lewis Dickinson shares with Fry the disgust for these “blinded” intellectuals. Dickinson finds it shocking that some intellectuals should have embraced so easily a system of belief
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(that war was great) in which there was no place for intellectual virtues (Bell 68). Even
D.H. Lawrence who was well known for his pacifism, deep hatred of war and a controversial marriage to a German woman, said later—probably under the pressure of society, “I am mad with rage myself. I would like to kill a million Germans—two millions” (Bell 69).
Bloomsbury artists, as pacifists, were of course against the war and refused to participate in producing war propagandistic paintings; however, they were not alone in their disdain as there were some “turn-coaters" during WWI even among the war painters themselves. One of them was Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, a Futurist painter, associated with Vorticists before WWI and later with Marinetti. In 1914 he had gone to
France with the Red Cross and few months later he returned to Britain—invalidated. In 1917 he was commissioned as an Official war artist.
Because of what he had seen in the war he lost his ideals and could only see the
Futurist Art as an appropriate way to express the “brutality of the emotions seen and felt on the present battlefields in Europe” (Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury ).
At first he used to produce enthusiastic and loyal war paintings; then he had gradually came closer to the reality. His Returning to the Trenches, dated 1914-1915 depicts soldiers who “looked huddled and burdened, grimly caught up in a process over which they have no control” (Cork 72). Cork observes that “the motion that impels the marching soldiers does not seem to be leading them towards a Futurist victory” (72).
Nevinson, perhaps without fully realising it, started to use his art in a rather contradictory way to the official war propaganda (Cork 72). Although he was only depicting the true conditions in the trenches, it was too dark and pessimistic for the government
43
propaganda. Exhibiting such pictures by a war veteran could have decreased the chances of recruiting new soldiers. Therefore some of his paintings were banned from an exhibition. 35
Officials in England managed to keep up the complacent atmosphere about war because in 1915 war was still considered a sport. The church supported the war as it was regarded to be the finest form of self-sacrifice, and the press called for paintings offering a morale-raising view of the war. 36 This attitude made Nevinson angry: “Back I went to
London, to see life still unshaken, with bands playing, drums banging, the New Armies marching and the papers telling us nothing at all” (Cork 72).
During WWI the automatic weapons were used for the first time in a conflict and
Nevinson realized that this had changed the character of the war conflict forever—“to me the soldier was going to be dominated by the machine. Nobody thinks otherwise today, but because I was the first man to express this feeling on canvas I was treated as though I had committed a crime” (Cork 73).
Another Nevinson’s painting portraying the “horrors” of war called Paths of Glory had been banned from an exhibition in 1918. Nevinson refused to take his painting down and received a reprimand form the War Office. His approach to war art was criticised by diehard patriots as well as avant-gardes who considered the war a “vulgar” subject for an experimental artist. Bloomsbury artists dismissed Nevinson’s war canvases for being “merely melodramatic” (Cork 73).
35 This will be explained later in this chapter.
36 Cork, Richard. A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War . London: Yale University Press in association with Barbican Art Gallery, 1994.
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There could be a discussion based on “who had done more harm.” Whether one should blame the pacifists who had distanced themselves from the war enthusiasm right from the beginning (as they foresaw the absurdity of the Great War), or those who referred to the principal of self-sacrifice and tried to sustain the complacent and morale-raising view even though they knew they had no idea what was happening over the front, or perhaps those returned artists—war veterans, aware of the reality but lost and without ideals, who originally supported the war propaganda but after their return from war they started to show the real “horrors” of the war.
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5. CONCLUSION
In my thesis I talked about Woolf's contribution to modern feminism. She laid the foundation of feminism by writing nonfiction concerned about the women’s place in society and by her idea of androgyny, i.e., ideal human, a blend of male and female. The concept of androgyny is presented in Woolf’s novel Orlando . Virginia Woolf's literary work has been criticized by many because the literary style that Woolf promoted—“stream of consciousnesses” was seen as purposeless. In the discussion on this literary style I presented
Wilson’s developing approach which was originally very critical. However, towards the end of his writing career Wilson began to appreciate and benefit from Woolf’s innovative literary style.
The Bloomsbury painters, and most significantly Roger Fry, introduced Post-
Impressionism to Britain and modified the public opinion about the art which, according to him, serves well not only when being exhibited in galleries in form of paintings or sculptures, but also when it is applied to everyday life in decorative objects of everyday use. By founding the Omega Workshops he helped many young artists to become famous; among those who benefited from this were Vorticists who, ironically, later became fierce critics of Omega’s concept of decorative art.
Fry should be also appreciated for making the effort when bringing the Post-
Impressionism to sceptical British audience. He in contrast to Lewis drew the modern art closer to public as, in case of the lectures on art at Workers Educational Association, which were misunderstood and depreciated by one of his fiercest critics—Wyndham Lewis.
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Bloomsbury members’ origins certainly might be a thorn in their critics’ flesh. From the first impression, for most people hard to believe that those upper class intellectuals could somehow be contributory to “ordinary” people. However, despite Blomsburies’ presumed easy lives and their alleged lightness of being, they had proved—by what they had achieved—that they were capable of seeing the world in “true” colours and that their work was not superficial, but profound and meaningful for their immense contribution and influence on the views of modern society.
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