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The Development of Virginia Woolf's Late Cultural Criticism, 1930-1941

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The Development of Virginia Woolf's Late Cultural Criticism, 1930-1941 The Development of Virginia Woolf’s Late Cultural Criticism, 1930-1941 Alice Wood A PhD thesis submitted to De Montfort University June 2010 Contents Page Acknowledgements iv Abstract v Abbreviations vi Introduction Woolf in the 1930s and Beyond 1 What is Cultural Criticism? 3 Literature and History in the 1930s 8 Woolf in the 1930s and After 15 Scholarly Discussion of Woolf as a Social and Political Thinker 23 A Genetic Approach to Woolf 36 Chapter 1 Writing Women’s Lives: 42 Woolf’s Early Cultural Criticism, 1904-1931 Introduction 42 Woolf‘s Biographical Journalism, 1904-1920 44 Woolf‘s Collective Life of Women, 1920-1929 55 Writing Difference: Life As We Have Known It 68 Conclusion 83 Chapter 2 Changing Tack: 86 Woolf’s The London Scene, 1931-1932 Introduction 86 Good Housekeeping, its Readers, and Woolf‘s Reputation in the Magazine 93 The Female Consumer and Commodity Capitalism 100 Monuments and the Modern City 111 Women, Power and Politics 118 Conclusion 123 ii Chapter 3 The Evolution of Three Guineas: 125 Woolf’s Critiques of Patriarchy, 1931-1938 Introduction 125 Critical Discussion of The Years and Three Guineas 129 Using Genetic Criticism to Trace the Evolution of Three Guineas 134 Planning and Writing and Changing Direction, 1931-1937 143 The Composition of Three Guineas: Organising and Dating the Dossier 158 The Scrapbooks 161 The Drafts 173 The Evolution of Woolf‘s Feminist-Pacifist Viewpoint in the 1930s 181 Conclusion 198 Chapter 4 Facing the Future: 201 Woolf on Art in Times of Chaos, 1932-1941 Introduction 201 The Textual and Contextual History of Between the Acts 209 Art in Times of Chaos 214 England: Past, Present and Future 228 Conclusion 238 Conclusion Woolf and Late Modernism 240 Woolf as a Late Modernist 243 Genetic Criticism and Woolf Studies 252 Appendix A An Annotated List of Pre-Publication Texts 261 Relating to The Years and Three Guineas Appendix B A Transcription of the ‗1910‘ After-Dinner Scene 264 in the Holograph of The Years Bibliography 274 iii Acknowledgments A number of people have directly or indirectly enabled me to complete this thesis. First and foremost, I would like to thank my two supervisors, Professor Andrew Thacker and Professor Heidi Macpherson, whose guidance, expertise and thorough feedback on drafts have deeply enriched this project. I also gratefully acknowledge the contribution of my original supervisor, Professor Julia Briggs, whose enthusiastic input shaped this thesis in its initial stages and helped secure the funding needed to undertake it. I greatly appreciate the assistance of a De Montfort University Research Student Bursary during this period of study. In addition I owe a large debt to family, friends and, in particular, Alexei Lambley-Steel, for their tolerance, understanding and regular provision of welcome distractions in the final year of this project. Finally, special thanks to my parents for their unwavering encouragement and support. A version of Chapter 2 of this thesis has been published in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 32: 1 (2010). A revised section of Chapter 4 appears in Virginia Woolf Miscellany 76 (2009). iv Abstract This thesis explores the development of Virginia Woolf‘s late cultural criticism. While contemporary scholars commonly observe that Woolf shifted her intellectual focus from modernist fiction to cultural criticism in the 1930s, there has been little sustained examination of why and how Woolf‘s late cultural criticism evolved during 1930-1941. This thesis aims to contribute just such an investigation to the field. My approach here fuses a feminist-historicist approach with the methodology of genetic criticism (critique génétique), a French school of textual studies that traces the evolution of literary works through their compositional histories. Reading across published and unpublished texts in Woolf‘s oeuvre, my genetic, feminist-historicist analysis of Woolf emphasises that her late cultural criticism developed from her early feminist politics and dissident aesthetic stance as well as in response to the tempestuous historical circumstances of 1930-1941. As a prelude to my investigation of Woolf‘s late output, Chapter 1 traces the genesis of Woolf‘s cultural criticism in her early biographical writings. Chapter 2 then scrutinises Woolf‘s late turn to cultural criticism through six essays she produced for Good Housekeeping in 1931. Chapter 3 surveys the evolution of Woolf‘s critique of patriarchy in Three Guineas (1938) through the voluminous pre-publication documents that link this innovative feminist-pacifist pamphlet to The Years (1937). Finally, Chapter 4 outlines how Woolf‘s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), fuses fiction with cultural criticism to debate art‘s social role in times of national crisis. The close relationship between formal and political radicalism in Woolf‘s late cultural criticism, I conclude, undermines the integrity of viewing Woolf‘s oeuvre in two distinct phases – the modernist 1920s and the socially-engaged 1930s – and suggests the danger of using such labels in wider narratives of interwar literature. Woolf‘s late cultural criticism, this thesis argues, developed from rather than rejected her earlier experimentalism. v Abbreviations All references to the following works by Virginia Woolf in this thesis are to these editions unless otherwise stated. AROO A Room of One’s Own. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach, 1-149. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. BA Between the Acts. Edited by Stella McNichol with an introduction and notes by Gillian Beer. London: Penguin, 2000. CE 1-4 Collected Essays. Edited by Leonard Woolf. 4 Vols. London: Hogarth, 1966-1967. D 1-5 The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell with Andrew McNeillie. 5 Vols. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977-1984. E 1-5 The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke. 5 Vols to date. London: Hogarth, 1986-. HH A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction. Edited by Susan Dick with an introduction by Helen Simpson. London: Vintage, 2003. JR Jacob’s Room. Edited by Sue Roe. London: Penguin, 1992. L 1-6 The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 Vols. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977-1982. MB Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind with an introduction by Hermione Lee. London: Pimlico, 2002. MD Mrs Dalloway. Edited by Stella McNichol with an introduction and notes by Elaine Showalter. London: Penguin, 1992. O Orlando: A Biography. Edited by Brenda Lyons with an introduction and notes by Sandra M. Gilbert. London: Penguin, 2000. PA A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909. Edited by Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1990. vi PH Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts. Edited by Mitchell A Leaska. New York: University Publications, 1983. RF Roger Fry: A Biography. Edited by Diane F. Gillespie. Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1995. TG Three Guineas. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach, 151-414. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. TP The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years. Edited by Mitchell A. Leaska. London: Hogarth, 1978. TTL To the Lighthouse. Edited by Stella McNichol with an introduction and notes by Hermione Lee. London: Penguin, 2000. VO The Voyage Out. Edited by Lorna Sage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. VW: MA Virginia Woolf: Major Authors. Edited by Mark Hussey. CD-ROM. Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Media, 1997. W The Waves. Edited by Kate Flint. London: Penguin, 2000. Y The Years. Edited by Hermione Lee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. vii Introduction: Woolf in the 1930s and Beyond To many she must have appeared as an angular, remote, odd, perhaps rather intimidating figure, a fragile middle-aged poetess, a sexless Sappho and, as the crisis of the decade drew to its terrible conclusion, oddly irrelevant – a distressed gentlewoman caught in a tempest and making little effort either to fight against it or to sail before it. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972)1 Quentin Bell‘s depiction of Virginia Woolf in the 1930s as ‗a distressed gentlewoman caught in a tempest‘ has long been rewritten. A more recent biography of Woolf casts her as ‗a serious political thinker‘ in her late writings.2 Scholarly conceptions of Woolf, her novels and her criticism have been transformed in the forty years since Bell‘s biography of his aunt was published through the insights of feminism, new historicism, post-colonialism and cultural studies. While all Woolf‘s writings have been radically re-evaluated, her late output has received the most dramatic reinterpretation. The decade in which contemporary critics once caricatured Woolf as frail, apolitical and obsolete is now, paradoxically, the decade in which she is perceived to have been most socially and politically active. Merry M. Pawlowski (2001) describes Woolf‘s 1938 polemic Three Guineas as ‗the strongest example in her oeuvre of Woolf working as a contemporary cultural critic‘; Linden Peach (2007) refers to Woolf‘s ‗―social realist‖ work of the 1930s.‘3 The representation of Woolf as a social and political commentator in the 1930s is now so familiar in Woolf studies that to observe that she directed her attention away from experimental fiction in this period to concentrate on unravelling the links between patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism and war has become something of a cliché. Yet the question of why and how Woolf emerged as a public critic of British society and politics in this historically eventful decade has never been comprehensively addressed; there has hitherto been no detailed examination of the thinking and writing processes through which Woolf‘s cultural criticism evolved in the years 1930-1941. 1 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 Vols. (London: Paladin, 1987), 2: 185.
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