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How Should One Be an Outsider?: Virginia Woolf's Common Reader As

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How Should One Be an Outsider?: Virginia Woolf's Common Reader As HOW SHOULD ONE BE AN OUTSIDER?: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S COMMON READER AS A THEORY OF SUBJECTIVITY IN INTERWAR ENGLAND A Dissertation Submitted to the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English In the Department of English University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon By MARTIN E. WINQUIST Ó Copyright Martin E. Winquist, August, 2020. All rights reserved. PERMISSION TO USE In presenting this thesis/dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis/dissertation in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis/dissertation work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis/dissertation or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis/dissertation. Requests for permission to copy or to make other uses of materials in this thesis/dissertation in whole or part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of English University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 Canada OR Dean College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies University of Saskatchewan 116 Thorvaldson Building, 110 Science Place Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5C9 Canada i ABSTRACT This project examines Virginia Woolf’s conceptualization of the outsider as a political position with recourse to the figure of the common reader she theorizes early in her writing career. Woolf’s common reader, I argue, is first and foremost a response to the interwar “battle of the brows.” Unique in their belief in the common reader, Woolf’s early essays on form and aesthetics ask readers to consider their position as consumers in relation to the writers who insisted upon the discourse of the great divide between high and middlebrow art. This project suggests the common reader is more than Woolf’s contribution to the “battle of the brows,” however, and it presents the common reader as the precursory figure in a theory of intersectional subjectivity that is the foundation for Woolf’s politics of everyday life, which reached maturity late in her career with the “Society of Outsiders.” Viewing the common reader this way helps connect Woolf’s later works, which are generally viewed as her more political writings, with her early, formally experimental works by way of a theory of subjectivity that makes one’s discursive subject position central to an outsider politics based on performative subversion. Woolf’s focus on subject positions and performative subversion marks hers as a politics of the body, and this work explores the role various social institutions, including the university, the military, the family, and the asylum, play in disciplining subjects and their bodies in Woolf’s fiction and essays. In texts including Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas, Between the Acts, as well as a number of Woolf’s shorter essays, I examine Woolf’s depictions of subjects, their bodies, and the institutions that shape and mould them, and through her theorization of the common reader and society of outsiders explore Woolf’s theory of subjectivity designed to confound and subvert these institutions using the very same bodies they sought to discipline and optimize to serve their ideological purposes. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, thank you to my family, all of whom played their own role in this project. To Ryan, who can always make me laugh, Paul, who hired me every May and fired me every August throughout undergrad, and to my mother and father, who supported me in ways too numerous to count and who never stopped believing, I owe you my eternal thanks. I must also thank my supervisor, Dr. Ann Martin. That she introduced me to Woolf so many years ago and is here to see the completion of this project is testament to her ability as an instructor and to her skilled and careful supervision of this project. Pathologically humble, Ann will never admit how much credit she also deserves for this work, so I will simply say that to have worked with a teacher who challenged me so profoundly and with a mentor who guided me so selflessly has been my privilege and honour. Thank you, as well, to the members of my committee: Dr. Pamela L. Caughie (External Examiner, Loyola University Chicago), Dr. Ella Ophir (Specialist Examiner), Dr. Len Findlay (Departmental Examiner, Professor Emeritus), Dr. Melanie Morrison (Cognate Examiner, Department of Psychology), and Lindsey Banco (Examining Committee Chair and Graduate Chair). Your feedback during this project was invaluable and will help shape this project and others in the future. Thanks also to the Department of English for their generous support during the completion of this project. iii DEDICATION If not for a simple question asked by the right person at the right moment, this work would not exist. But let us not call it fate, for that would imply we knew where the answer would lead. And neither of us could have imagined this. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PERMISSION TO USE i ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii DEDICATION iv TABLE OF CONTENTS v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE – How Should One Sell a Book?: High- and Middlebrow Marketing Strategies Between the Wars 20 CHAPTER TWO – “His deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out”: Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader as a Theory of Intersectional Subjectivity 78 CHAPTER THREE – “To see what the other side means”: Woolf’s Bildungsroman of the Patriarchal Machine 134 CHAPTER FOUR – “The greatest of Mankind”: Septimus Smith as Post-war Scapegoat in Mrs Dalloway 197 CHAPTER FIVE – “It is worse perhaps to be locked in”: Positioning Oneself in A Room of One’s Own 231 CHAPTER SIX – “Those also serve who remain outside”: The Society of Outsiders and Disruptive Politics in Three Guineas 274 CONCLUSION 304 WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED 315 v INTRODUCTION Tuesday 22 November, 1938. I meant to write Reflections on my position as a writer. […] apparently I’ve been exalted to a very high position, say about 10 years ago: then was decapitated by W[yndham] Lewis & Miss Stein; am now I think—let me see—out of date, of course; not a patch, with the young, on Morgan; yet wrote The Waves; yet am unlikely to write anything good again; am a secondrate, & likely, I think, to be discarded altogether. I think that’s my public reputation at the moment. It is based on C. Connolly’s Cocktail criticism: a sheaf of feathers in the wind. How much do I mind? Less than I expected. But then of course, its all less than I realised. I mean, I never thought I was so famous; so don’t feel the decapitation. Yet its true that after The Waves, or Flush, Scrutiny I think found me out. W.L. attacked me. I was aware of an active opposition. Yes I used to be praised by the young & attacked by the elderly. 3 Gs. has queered the pitch. For the G.M. Youngs & the Scrutineers both attack that. And my own friends have sent me to Coventry over it. So my position is ambiguous. Undoubtedly Morgan’s reputation is much higher than my own. So is Tom’s. Well? In a way it is a relief. I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work & feel most braced with my back to the wall. Its an odd feeling though, writing against the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall. (V. Woolf, Diary 5 188-9) Looking back from our contemporary vantage point, where she exists as a literary, feminist, and intellectual icon, Virginia Woolf’s anxiety about her position as a writer in this diary entry is difficult to understand. After all, quite apart from the fact that her novels are touchstones in English Literature courses around the world and A Room of One’s Own is considered a foundational text for feminism, Woolf’s image is emblazoned upon everything from mock Saint Candles, to postcards, to t-shirts in what has practically become a cottage industry of cultural iconography (Silver 9). But here she is contemplating her fame after the poor reception of Three Guineas, comparing herself to T.S. Eliot (Tom) and E.M. Forster (Morgan), fearing what F.R. and Q.D. Leavis (the Scrutineers) and Wyndham Lewis think of her might be true, apprehending middle age (she was 56 at the time) as that transition between annoying the old and frustrating the young, and worrying about once again having to writing criticism to support 1 herself. The Woolf of this passage is so far away from the Saint Virginia popular culture imagines that she is barely recognizable, yet it is perhaps the Woolf of this diary passage that I like the most. It is not that the passage somehow reveals the “real” Woolf, but rather that Woolf brings her existential crisis and the chaotic swirl of discourses that converge on her in this diary entry into order using the single word “outsider.” While the word outsider has become fundamental to understanding Woolf’s work, her conception of identity, and her politics, she did not take the label on officially until quite late in her life.
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