“OUT OF THE HEART OF SPRING”: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE CHANGING SHAPES OF PASTORAL 1928-1938 A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English by Shilo Rae McGiff December 2018 © 2018 Shilo Rae McGiff “OUT OF THE HEART OF SPRING”: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE CHANGING SHAPES OF PASTORAL 1928-1938. Shilo Rae McGiff, Ph. D. Cornell University 2018 This dissertation reads Woolf’s engagement with the changing shapes of pastoral in the decade between 1928-1938 with individual chapters on A Room of One’s Own (1929), and The Waves (1931), and one combined chapter on The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938). In them, I argue that Woolf utilizes pastoral modes to frame large scale ideological concerns with artistic subjectivity, feminist historiography, and national belonging. In this endeavor, Woolf’s self-consciously-deployed pastoral poetics function as critical social theory. In each chapter, I identify a feminist poetics for Woolf that intervenes at both institutional and individual levels of significance. On the institutional level, Woolf largely uses forms of pastoral to demystify female subordination and to challenge its imbeddedness in the British cultural imaginary. On an individual one, she proposes pastoral experience as an agent crucial both to self- and societal transformation. In following the protean forms of Woolf’s pastoral, this inquiry practices and enacts a similar kind of poetic wandering to offer sustained close readings of Woolf’s own world of rich intertextual reference and to explore the intensification of Woolf’s pastoral commitments as they emerge from a classical literary context and intend on politics, aesthetics, and history. The Woolf that emerges from these woods into pastures new is one dedicated to pastoral, not just as a vehicle for poetic authority in the classical sense, but as mode of cultural critique and ontological possibility—a resource on which she draws to work out a more radical poetics of being in relation to reconfigured communal understandings with radical emancipatory prospects at its heart. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Shilo McGiff is a poet, teacher, and literary critic living in Ithaca, NY. She manages to thrive amidst many failures of goodness, has an impeccable eye for all things beautiful, is the companion you’d most want on a road trip involving Emily Dickinson’s grave, and will be known as Doctor for all the rest of her days. She teaches at Wells College in Aurora, NY !v DEDICATION For Keegan and Liam (my warp and my weft) !vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ________________ “Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces…” At least so the biographer of Orlando asserts as Orlando looks out the window and tries to match precisely the green of a laurel bush growing outside to the green of his poetic imagination…and fails. This endless tension, however, between nature and letters, between physis and poiesis, will furnish the ground where Orlando’s poem, “The Oak Tree,” 400 years in the making, finally takes root and grows. Much like Orlando’s “Oak Tree,” this project has had a long genesis. In this sense, it is, perhaps, the sum of its most productive failures. It started off as a dissertation about William Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, and Virginia Woolf and its scope was once praised by Patricia Parker at a cocktail reception for the Shakespeare Association of America—which might account for my refusal to abandon its immensity even in the face of advice from those who knew much better than I did what a project of that magnitude might entail. It may account also for the number of my close colleagues and long-term collaborators that went on to defend and to jobs before I did—one with the exasperated suggestion that I had material for two dissertations, or possibly three. Yes, Adhaar Desai, it is finally finished. In all the thinking that precedes it and in the deep intertextual references that remain, if only as echoes, this dissertation may contain multitudes, but it has at last found its footing on the good advice of Shirley Samuels and the gentle persistence of Neil Saccamano, !vii who suggested that my work on Sterne was interesting, but that, in thinking about Virginia Woolf, my writing truly came alive. For the final shape of this project, I am indebted to the committee members who provided essential guidance and support in its varying stages: Rayna Kalas, Philip Lorenz, Jenny Mann, and Walter Cohen. I feel an eternal debt of gratitude to Rick Bogel for his sharp thinking, which has always made my own thinking better, and for his constancy as a mentor and friend, which has made being a human better. I am thankful to Michelle Mannella and Kara Peet for their unerring advocacy and guidance through the paperwork labyrinth. I feel the deepest of gratitude to my chair, Neil Saccamano, for taking on an itinerant project and guiding it home with rigor, compassion, and grace. Over the years, I have been additionally fortunate in the wit and kindness of several benevolent spirits. Without them, I could not have walked this far. Their brilliance has impressed me and their encouragement has made indelible marks on my heart. Tonia Sutherland and Giffen Maupin have given their own hearts, eyes, and expertise to this project in its various iterations, over many miles, and in countless ways. Their solidarity and sisterhood has meant everything. Sarah Ensor and Ingrid Diran continue to motivate me with our shared search for common ground in this peripatetic life and that sweet a(cu)men. My colleagues and mentors at Wells College —Catherine Burroughs, Bruce Bennett, Dan Rosenberg, and Alicia Rebecca Myers— have sustained me with their intellectual companionship, laughter, shared commitment to teaching, and open classroom doors. Kerry Quinn and Gerard Aching have modeled hospitality in its truest sense and galvanized me with their creativity, determination, !viii and eloquence. Ashley Cake has shown me what it means to make theory praxis and to find space for dreams. Amina Omari and Ken Hill have read the cards and brunched with me. Lori Freer and Zöe Freer-Hessler have given me joy and companionship when I most needed it. Stacey Snyder has kept me in the ring. Jennifer Russler has kept me sane. All have kept imagination various and hope alive. In the academy, as in “real life,” the community we have is the one that we make. I am grateful to Bryan Alkemeyer for sharing his commitment to teaching and mentorship with me as we worked on the Mentoring Program for Graduate Students in English together. I am likewise grateful for the collaboration and companionship of the Early Modern Reading Group, whose numbers also included Matt Bucemi, Melissa Figueroa, Abigail Fisher, Molly Katz, Matthew Kibbee, and Jennifer Row. I asked for interlocutors and a wider forum for our thinking as early modernists and Douglas McQueen-Thompson helped me build it with both panache and aplomb. If Douglas helped me build it, the collegiality of Adhaar Desai helped me sustain it. Adhaar worked closely with me on both the Mentor Program and EMRG, and he dreamed and schemed along with me on more than one Gottschalk Symposium. I have counted on him for spark and snark in equal measure, and I hope to do so for many years to come. My time spent as an early modernist was time spent among friends, and it has made me a better reader of Woolf than I ever could have anticipated. To the the friends and colleagues who rallied around me to create a rotating childcare schedule so I could TA my dream course in the evenings, who invited me to their soirées, who laughed with me at The Chapter House, who made valentines with !ix my children, who participated in a series of ill-fated soccer games, who hiked with me, fought with me about Kant, ignored my emails about Nietzsche, and filled nights with raucous piano music, cartoons, and poetry, I am thankful: Cecily Swanson, Celeste Pietrusza, Danielle Haque, Stephanie DeGooyer, Lily Cui, Jacob Brogan, Jess Keiser, Ben Glaser, Pelin Ariner, Steve Chang, Michael Garrett, and Corinna Lee have each given me something essential and irreplaceable of the irresponsible and irrepressible. I am grateful for the friendship of the inimitable and unapologetic Caetlin Benson-Allot, and that of dancing philosopher, Cristina Dahl. These women were two of my first friends at Cornell, and they remain scholars and humans that I both respect and admire. Finally, an extended dedication: To my grandmothers, Maria de la Luz Martinez (1925-2008) and Edie McGiff (1927-2003), whose lessons live in me — To my parents, Mary Lou and Thomas McGiff, who never doubted that I could do this, even when I did: I am forever grateful for your faith and love—and for the fighting spirit and depth of heart that you have modeled for me every day of my life— To my brothers, Timothy and Josh, who have cheered me on, taken shameless advantage of my professional skill set—and justified my vocational calling by building excellent lives for themselves in the process— To my partner, Justin Johnson, who, in his brilliance, drive, and unwavering support has made this very moment possible— To Keegan Bakos and Liam Summers, who have grown as I have grown, who !x are the warp and weft of my labor and love, my raisons d’être, and who make me endlessly proud— This dissertation is for you.