The Presence of the Past: Medieval Encounters in the Writing of Virginia Woolf and Lynette Roberts
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The Presence of the Past: Medieval Encounters in the Writing of Virginia Woolf and Lynette Roberts Siriol McAvoy Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Literature) School of English, Communication and Philosophy Cardiff University 2016 Table of Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Virginia Woolf, Lynette Roberts and the Presence of the Past Part I: Landscape and Travel 1 Re-writing Romance in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out 58 2 Travelling Medieval Cultures in the Poetry of Lynette Roberts 101 Part II: Re-enchanting Domestic Space 3 Mrs Dalloway, William Morris, and Medievalism: Crafting a ‘Room of 143 One’s Own in the Soul’ 4 ‘Earthbound’: Rootedness and Re-enactment in the Shadow of War 184 Part III: Language and Community 5 Anonymity, Culture and Community in Virginia Woolf’s Writing of the 223 1940s: The Fable of ‘Anon’ 6 ‘Unlocked the Padlocked Lungs’: the Idea of the Vernacular in the Writing 271 of Lynette Roberts Conclusion 320 Bibliography 334 ii Abstract This thesis starts from the premise that medievalism is an important yet under-recognised seam in British modernist culture. Untangling and examining the medieval threads that weave throughout the modern interest in the new, I supply an important link in the chain connecting modernism to postmodernism. Specifically, I consider medievalism through the lens of gender. Suggesting that women’s prolific engagement with medieval culture during the modernist period has been mysteriously neglected, I illuminate modernist women writers’ creative engagement with the Middle Ages by focusing on two writers in particular – Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Lynette Roberts (1909-1995). By means of historicist cultural analysis and close reading, I show that the Middle Ages emerge in their work as an important imaginative structure for thinking about questions of war, gender, and national identity. My central argument is that Woolf’s and Roberts’s representations of medieval culture are strongly implicated in their wider reassessment of national identity and women’s relation to national tradition in the first part of the twentieth century. Re-visioning the Middle Ages from a new angle, Woolf and Roberts recast the foundational myths on which the categories of gender and national identity were based. This project, as I see it, is twofold: recuperating a female-oriented past through a close attention to the ‘details of life’, and inventing a tradition for use in the present day. Returning to the Middle Ages, Roberts and Woolf salvage a ‘usable past’ with which to construct a new form of national culture for the future – one that admits women and ‘outsiders like ourselves’. There is a political, recuperative impulse behind my decision to pair Woolf, a modernist who is ubiquitous and canonical, with Roberts, a writer who, partly due to her gender and Welsh affiliations, remains an obscure and marginalized voice even today. Establishing a dialogue between Roberts’s ethnographic poetry and Woolf’s poetical prose, I use Roberts’s positioning on the cultural margins in order to attain new purchase on Woolf’s complex approaches to empire and national belonging. On the other hand, Woolf’s feminist polemics help to uncover the feminist components of Roberts’s cultural vision, indicating the ways in which her feminism intersects with her nationalist and socialist commitments. I show that, in spite of their cultural differences, Roberts and Woolf both use the medieval past in order to articulate those marginalised experiences, at once ‘travelling’ and ‘native’, that remain unassimilated to the colonial experience. While, for Roberts, the act of iii historical re-writing opens out the possibility for a new, postcolonial awakening for Wales, for Woolf, it provides the basis for reconceiving the nation on new ‘common ground’ for the postwar future. iv Acknowledgements I would like especially to thank my supervisor, Jane Moore, whose support, enthusiasm, and incisive questioning have never failed to provoke new lines of thought. I would also like to offer my thanks to Rhian Rattray, for her guidance and patience. A special thanks also goes to Rob Gossedge, whose perceptive observations first set me on the scent of Jane Ellen Harrison. I am particularly grateful to the community of scholars at the International Association of Welsh Writing in English. Your intellectualism, supportiveness, and egalitarianism provides a model for scholarly communities everywhere. A huge thanks is also due to my friends and colleagues, whose warmth, humour, and kindness have kept me sane and allowed me to continue this project. I would particularly like to thank Marija Grech, Catherine Han, and Chris Müller for their attentive reading of my work in the final stages – and for the endless supply of delicious snacks. My gratitude also goes to Emily Blewitt, Laura Foster, Jernej Markelj, Helen McKenzie, Caleb Sivyer, Rhys Tranter, and Jennifer Whitney, for their sparky conversation, their inclusiveness, and their friendship. I am grateful to the Department of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University for funding a portion of this PhD. Lastly, I would like to give thanks to my parents, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Tony McAvoy, my ‘twin’, Anona McAvoy, my brother, Ioan McAvoy, and my grandparents, Jack and Sidonie Herbert, for your eternal kindness, strength and love. Your belief in me has made this thesis possible. v Introduction Virginia Woolf, Lynette Roberts and the Presence of the Past We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! ...Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.1 Filippo Tomasini Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto Published in 1909, Filippo Tomasini Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto called for a new form of art that, energetic and violent in form, would liberate itself from the ties of the past in order to propel itself into a technological future. For Marinetti, modernist creation is predicated on the destruction of history. Declaring that ‘[w]e will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind’, he announces that a primary aim of Futurism is to free Italy from the reign of ‘the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards’.2 National tradition, in his view, spelt stasis and death: throwing away the heavy baggage that bound one to place and to the past was, for Marinetti, the only way truly to live. In light of pronouncements such as Marinetti’s, medievalism and modernism have for a long time been considered a contradiction in terms. The critical consensus, for much of the twentieth century at least, held that Ezra Pound’s famous dictum ‘make it new’ set the standard for a modernism based on transformation, novelty, and abandonment of the past.3 Writing in 1933, Herbert Read argued that in modernist art, ‘we are now concerned, not with a logical development of the art of painting in Europe, not even with a development for which there is a historical parallel, but with an abrupt break with all tradition’, noting that 1 Filippo Tomasini Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, trans. by R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli, in Marinetti: Selected Writings (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), pp. 39-44 (p. 41). 2 Ibid., p. 42. 3 Malcolm Bradbury and James Macfarlane, Modernism, 1890-1930 (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), pp. 19-23. 1 ‘the aim of five centuries of European effort is openly abandoned’.4 This conception of modernism continued to hold sway at mid-century: in an inaugural lecture delivered in Cambridge in 1954, C.S. Lewis asserted that I do not think that any previous age produced work which was, in its own time, as shatteringly and bewilderingly new as that of the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and Picasso has been in ours. And I am quite sure this is true […] of poetry […]. I do not see how anyone can doubt that modern poetry is not only a greater novelty than any other ‘new poetry’ but new in a new way, almost in a new dimension.5 For critics such as Read and Lewis, modernist art and literature enacted a dramatic ‘shattering’ of history and tradition. In this regard, they reiterated the views of the modernists themselves, many of whom, like Marinetti, saw modernist culture in terms of revolutionary newness. In her 1925 essay ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’, Virginia Woolf suggests that modern literature is necessarily oriented toward the present, for: We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale – the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages – has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed.6 As Woolf makes clear in her critical essays, for the new generation of modernists writing in Britain in the wake of World War I, the tools of their nineteenth-century forebears – realism, aestheticism, historicism – no longer seemed capable of expressing the massive ‘shift in [social] scale’ and unprecedented ‘structures of feeling’ that defined life in a mass, technological society.7 Indeed, modernist writers’ and artists’ seeming disavowal of history in favour of the ‘now’ was partly bound up in their desire to break away from the legacy of 4 Herbert Read, Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and Sculpture, rev. edn (1933; London: Faber & Faber, 1960), p. 88. 5 C.S.