Virginia Woolf and the Tools of Visual Literacy. Janice M
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1994 The Thousand Appliances: Virginia Woolf and the Tools of Visual Literacy. Janice M. Stein Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Stein, Janice M., "The Thousand Appliances: Virginia Woolf and the Tools of Visual Literacy." (1994). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 5906. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5906 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced frommicrofilm the master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough,margins, substandard and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Z eeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 THE THOUSAND APPLIANCES: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE TOOLS OF VISUAL LITERACY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Janice M. Stein A.A., Delgado Community College, 1978 B.L.S., Loyola University of New Orleans, 1984 M.F.A., Louisiana State University, 1989 December 1994 UMI Number: 9524486 UMI Microform Edition 9524486 Copyright 1995, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 For Dan ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my gratitude to two groups of people without which this dissertation could not have come to fruition. The first is comprised of the members of my dissertation committee. Dr. Panthea Reid, my advisor, always generously shared of her time and resources while working on her own soon-to-be-published Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf. Dr. Anna Nardo's sharp critical eye and practical advice helped solve numerous rhetorical problems in my early drafts, while Dr. Addie Russo's theoretical perspectives challenged my thinking. And Dr. James Bolner and Dr. Susan Ryan brought to the project the all important perspectives of readers from outside the literary discipline. The second group of people who were indispensable to my work is my family. My children, Jeannine, Scott, Gretchen, and Ross, graciously set aside some of their claims on "Mom" and made my project a family goal. Dan, my husband, proved himself my most loyal friend and needed partner. To describe my indebtedness to him, "gratitude" is not a large enough word. TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ............................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.......................................... iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS..................................... v ABSTRACT ................................................. vi CHAPTER 1 BETWEEN SEEING AND WRITING: AN INTRODUCTION................................. 1 2 METAPHORS OF THE PEN: WRITING TOOLS AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS . 36 3 SOLID WORDS: VISIBLE SIGNS AND THE SE L F ................... 70 4 BETWEEN BEAUTIFUL BOARDS: TEXTUAL ITY AND CONCEPTUAL SPACES............ 121 5 BEHIND THE PAGE: WOOLF'S VISUAL LITERACY ................... 167 WORKS CITED ............................................. 220 VITA...................................................... 226 iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS The following abbreviations refer to frequently cited texts by Virginia Woolf: CDB The Captain's Death Bed CE The Collect Essays, 4 vols. D The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols. EVW The Essays of Virginia Woolf HH The Haunted House and Other Stories LVW The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols. MOB Moments of Being PA A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals TLC "Friendships Gallery" and "'Anon' and 'The Reader'" in Twentieth Century Literature. v ABSTRACT The texts of Virginia Stephen Woolf are rife with references to writers' tools, which she referred to in her diary as "the thousand appliances one needs for writing even a sentence." This dissertation examines the exact nature of Woolf's "need" for the tools of her craft and their influence upon her thought and art. Pens, and by association, ink and the writer's hands, were the center of all her authorial experiences and provided the literal link between the idea of art and its fruition as a work of art. The graphic shapes of words and paralinguistic devices such as punctuation and textual arrangement were Woolf's medium of choice, her most important appliance. For her, written language was the physical manifestation of a writer's consciousness, and she habitually substituted text for writer, book for body. This word/flesh association forced her to limit her experiments with visible language to effects that did not violate the conventions of reading. After prolonged attempts to fill pages with written language and to fit a prescribed number of words into a specific space, Woolf discovered correspondences between narrative time and textual space. Collectively, Woolf's ideas about her appliances shaped her critical theories about individual literary works and the history of literature itself, habits of thought characteristic of "visual literacy," hyperawareness of the physical scene of vi writing and a text's materiality or madeness. Woolf's hyperawareness is best demonstrated fictionally in Orlando, her most sustained treatment of the writing process. Both Orlando and the Biographer share a measure of Woolf's visual literacy. In her critical writing, Woolf drew heavily upon the scene of writing with its "thousand appliances" and the bibliographic features of written language. In her notes and drafts for Turning the Page, the "new" history of British literature, uncompleted when Woolf died, she recorded her plans to explore the "connection between seeing and writing" and the significance of widespread printing of books, which signalled an orality-to-literacy shift. Solid word objects at once made language more durable and writers more vulnerable under the public's eye. CHAPTER ONE BETWEEN SEEING AND WRITING: AN INTRODUCTION 1 Peter Burger begins his Theory of the Avant-Garde with practical advise for an introduction to a study such as I undertake: I believe it would already be a significant step forward in scholarly and scientific discussion if it became a matter of course for every scholar and scientist to advance reasons for the choice of his [or her] topic and the problem to be dealt with. (3) In justifying my own choices, I begin by stating an assumption that serves as the theoretical basis for my analysis of Virginia Stephen Woolf's thought and art, the contention that written language, all written language is a visible medium. The assumption is both mine and Woolf's. To test its validity, the current reader needs only to refocus the eyes so as to look at the graphics on this page, the irregular shapes of the letters and words, the thick intersecting margins framing a rectangular block of dark then light then dark horizontal stripes. Of course, to focus thus exclusively on the material properties of written language is to retard the lexical function of words; to read, we must resist the temptation to look too intently at the page. However, the knowledge of the materiality of the textual surface, while often repressed, is never completely forgotten, and our experience of a text is a delicate balance between looking and reading, seeing 1 2 and writing. At times during the reading or writing process, the knowledge may resurface like a distant memory, and the book, the page once again appears as an object in the physical world. It is such moments in the life of Virginia Stephen Woolf that I adopt as the subject of my study. The problem I presently address takes the form of a question that Woolf found herself asking at moments when written language's visibility was uppermost in her mind, a question about the exact nature of "the connection between seeing and writing." Shortly before her death, she made the following entry in her Notes for Reading at Random: "The connection between seeing & writing: Michael Angelo, Leonardo, Blake, Rossetti, a twin gift. Wh[ich] shall be born, depends on Nin Crot & Pulley" (TLC 377). Brenda R. Silver, editor of the first published version1 of these notes, explains that Woolf's "Nin Crot & Pulley" were her "fanciful names for the complex of economic, political, cultural, and personal forces that influence the writer" (TLC 360). In The Sisters' Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Diane Filby Gillespie cites this note as indication that Woolf possessed a capacity for what she terms "dual creativity," the ability both to write and to draw or paint.