Virginia Woolf & The Natural World Book

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Woolf Selected Papers Clemson University Digital Press
2011
Virginia Woolf & the Natural World

Kristin Czarnecki
Carrie Rohman
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Virginia Woolf and the Natural World: Selected Papers from the Twentieth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited
by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2011), xii, 246 pp. ISBN
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Virginia Woolf and the Natural World
Selected Papers from the
Twentieth Annual International
Conference on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf and the Natural
World
Selected Papers from the
Twentieth Annual International
Conference on Virginia Woolf
Georgetown College
Georgetown, Kentucky
36 June, 2010
Edited by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman
CLEMSON UNIVERSITY
DIGITAL PRESS
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ISBN: 978-0-9835339-0-0
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Frontispiece by Cathy Frank.
iv
Table of Contents
Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman Introduction to Woolf and the Natural World ....vii
Acknowledgments .........................................................................................................xi
List of Abbreviations ....................................................................................................xii
Bonnie Kime Scott Ecofeminism, Holism, and the Search for Natural Order in Woolf .... 1
Carrie Rohman We Make Life: Vibration, Aesthetics, and the Inhuman in
The Waves ........................................................................................................... 12
Diana Swanson The Real World: Virginia Woolf and Ecofeminism ............................. 24
Cecil Woolf Virginia and Leonard, as I Remember Them ............................................ 35
Elisa Kay Sparks Everything tended to set itself in a garden: Virginia Woolf s Literary
and Quotidian Flowers: A Bar-Graphical Approach ................................................ 42
Beth Rigel Daugherty Taking Her Fences: The Equestrian Virginia Woolf .................... 61
Laci Mattison The Metaphysics of Flowers in The Waves: Virginia Woolf s Seven-
Sided Flower and Henri Bergsons Intuition ........................................................... 71
Erin Penner Crowding Clarissas Garden ..................................................................... 78
Rachel Zlatkin The Flesh of Citizenship: Red Flowers Grew .......................................... 84
Jane Lilienfeld The Besieged Garden: Nature in Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway and
Willa Cathers One of Ours .................................................................................. 90
Rebecca McNeer Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian: Swimming and Diving as
Metaphors for Writing............................................................................................ 95
Patrizia Muscogiuri This, I fancy, must be the sea: Thalassic Aesthetics in Virginia
Woolf s Writing ................................................................................................... 101
Gill Lowe Wild Swimming ...................................................................................... 108
Vara Neverow The Woolf, the Horse, and the Fox: Recurrent Motifs in Jacobs Room
and Orlando ...................................................................................................... 116
Jane Goldman The Dogs that Therefore Woolf Follows: Some Canine Sources for A
Room of Ones Own in Nature and Art .............................................................. 125
Diane Gillespie The Bird is the Word: Virginia Woolf and W.H. Hudson, Visionary
Ornithologist ....................................................................................................... 133
Jeanne Dubino Evolution, History, and Flush; or, The Origin of Spaniels ................... 143
Kathryn Simpson Lappin and Lapinova: A Woolf in Hares Clothing? ..................... 151
Alice Lowe A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage: Dining Well in Virginia
Woolf s Life and Work.......................................................................................... 157
Kate Sedon Moments of Aging: Revising Mother Nature in Virginia Woolf s
Mrs. Dalloway ................................................................................................... 163
Barbara Lonnquist Homeless in Nature: Solitary Trampings and Shared Errantry in
Cornwall, 1905 .................................................................................................. 169
Xiaoqin Cao Walking over the bridge in a willow pattern plate: Virginia Woolf
and the Exotic Landscapes .................................................................................... 174
Diana Royer Mining with the Head: Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, and
Exploring the Self Through Nature........................................................................ 180
Catherine W. Hollis Virginia Woolf as Mountaineer ................................................. 184
Verita Sriratana It was an uncertain spring: Reading Weather in The Years. ............. 191
v
Elise Swinford Transforming Nature: Orlando as Elegy ............................................. 196
Derek Ryan Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us: Digging Granite
and Chasing Rainbows with Virginia Woolf .......................................................... 202
Dominic Scheck Sundered Waters: Isolated Consciousness and Ostensible Communion
in Woolf s Narration ............................................................................................ 208
Emily Hinnov To give the moment whole: The Nature of Time and Cosmic (Comm)
unity in Virginia Woolf s The Waves......................................................................214
Wayne Chapman Spenglers The Decline of the West and Intellectual Quackery:
Checking the Climate with Leonard Woolf and W.B Yeats ...................................... 221
Luke Reader Listening-in, Tuning Out: Leonard Woolf s Criticism of the BBC During
the 1930s ............................................................................................................ 228
Notes on Contributors .............................................................................................. 236

Conference Program.................................................................................................. 240
vi
Introduction
by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman
F
or the 20th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, people from around
the world gathered at Georgetown College, amid the bluegrass and horses of Cen-
tral Kentucky, to explore the theme Virginia Woolf and the Natural World. The call
for papers included a quotation from The Waves (1931) Sharp stripes of shadow lay on
the grass, and the dew dancing on the tips of the flowers and leaves made the garden like
a mosaic of single sparks not yet formed into one whole. The birds, whose breasts were
specked canary and rose, now sang a strain or two together, wildly, like skaters rollicking
arm-in-arm, and were suddenly silent, breaking asunderthat led scholars, students,
common readers, and creative writers in myriad directions as they explored nature in the
life and writing of Virginia Woolf. Panelists considered the nature of patriarchy, nature
in the city, theories and philosophies of nature, nature as transformative, and science
and technology as gateways into the natural world, among a host of other topics. As can
be seen from the conference program (archived at http://www.georgetowncollege.edu/
Departments/English/Woolf/) and these Selected Papers, nature was vital to Woolf s life
experience and her conception and development of a modernist, feminist poetics.
The conference included an array of special presentations, many of which we are
pleased to publish here. In the first of three keynote addresses, Bonnie Kime Scott dis-
cussed how Woolf s natural imagery, particularly as framed by marginal female characters,
and her representations of earth goddess figures offer holistic, ordered moments. This
pattern resonates with various ecofeminisms, which Scott presented with an eye toward
providing theoretical structure for discussions to follow. Scott also provided an invaluable
synthesis of previous scholarship on Woolf and nature. Carrie Rohman explored how The
Waves describes the nonhuman dynamism of vibrational forces at work in the human
characters, Jinny in particular. Through this reading, she discussed Jinnys creativity as
something rooted in our animal nature and connected to cosmic patterns.Rohmans ap-
proach suggests that the novel acknowledges life itself is an artistic performance, a claim
that takes Woolf s posthumanism quite seriously. Closing the conference was Diana
Swanson, who offered ideas about how Woolf s writing can help further the quest to
develop the non-anthropocentric and non-androcentric understandings of the world nec-
essary to solving the environmental crises of the 21st century. Swanson offered inspiring
ideas about how what we do as Woolf scholars and teachers can help solve the ecological
problems under discussion throughout the conference.
Elisa Kay Sparkss special presentation provided a botanical encyclopedia, or index,
to plant references in Woolf s works, which she found serving as literal natural organ-
isms, as artificial renderings of the natural, and as figurative strategies. Accompanied by
dozens of beautiful photographs and an architectural blueprint for a Virginia Woolf gar-
den based on the frequency of specific flowers, trees, bushes, and fruits in Woolf s works,
Sparkss talk set the stage perfectly for the array of conference panels to come. Similarly,
Beth Rigel Daugherty shared her discovery of Woolf s surprisingly numerous references
vii
to horses. Finding cart horses, dray horses, race horses, plough horses, runaway horses,
dead horses, and many others galloping across the pages of the novels, letters, and dia-
ries, Daugherty discovered the Equestrian Virginia Woolf, one who might, after all, be
at home in the horse capital of the world (nearby Lexington, Kentucky). We were also
honored to have with us Cecil Woolf, publisher of the Bloomsbury Heritage monograph
series, whose talk on his memories of his aunt and uncle was moving, funny, and also
thought-provoking for reminding us that Virginia and Leonard Woolf, while two people
. . . whose lives have become public property, were also real human beings, not charac-
ters in some up-market soap opera.
Gardens, flowers, and parks provided rich fodder for several conference papers. In
analyzing the seven-sided flower in The Waves, Laci Mattison connects Woolf s philoso-
phy to Henri Bergsons concepts of duration and intuition. Images like the flower reveal
Woolf s use of assemblage to create something at once multiple and whole, and Woolf s
conveying of our experience of time that goes beyond the self and even the human. Erin
Penner complicates our understanding of nature in Woolf, suggesting that the natural is
far from synonymous with wild freedom in her works. Rather, the garden in Mrs. Dal-
loway (1925) is a continuation of the social scene[s] that take place indoors, rather than
an escape from it. Rachel Zlatkin argues that in Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smiths
connectedness to nature affords him a means of signification denied him by the rhetoric
of post-war England. Zlatkin draws upon ecocriticism to demonstrate how green space,
such as Regents Park, may be contrived to heal or harm societys most vulnerable citizens.
Jane Lilienfeld also perceives the connections between natural imagery and war. In her
paper on the work of Woolf and Willa Cather, Lilienfeld shows how the landscape at this
historical moment is perfect in propaganda but savaged in battle.
Moving from land to water, Rebecca McNeer highlights the numerous references in
Woolf s oeuvre to swimming and diving as metaphors for writing. Whether diving be-
neath the surface to develop an idea, likening the rhythm of writing to that of the sea, or
describing her brain as variously damp, bubbling, boiling, or freshly flowing, Woolf found
water imagery particularly well suited to depicting and understanding her creative pro-
cess. Patrizia Muscogiuri also addresses Woolf s water and sea references. Taken together,
she states, they constitute a groundbreaking thalassic aesthetics instrumental in shaping
Woolf s political, philosophical, and feminist perspectives. Indeed, Gill Lowe examines
the wild swimming of Rupert Brooke and Woolf, and defines this as the liberation of
entering what might be seen as an outlawed element; a secret skinny dipping.
Animals large and small roam throughout the Selected Papers. Vara Neverow con-
textualizes the many references to horses and foxes in Jacobs Room (1922) and Orlando
(1928), noting that both animals are intrinsically categorized as Other, and references
to them are embedded within discourses that justify abuse and persecution. Neverow also
considers each novels more subversive or metaphorical references to horses, which have
strong sexual connotations, and foxes, which come to represent freedom, wildness, and
danger. In her paper on canine sources for A Room of Ones Own (1929), Jane Goldman
discusses Woolf s adaptation of and departure from historical configurations of dogs in
literature and art. Neither linking disparate species wholly nor reifying the ruptures be-
tween them, Woolf instead tests and complicates the human-animal boundary. Diane Gil-
lespie gives us a sense of Woolf s familiarity and appreciation for the work of naturalist
viii
W. H. Hudson, and specifically links the two writers through their intellectual attraction
to birds. Jeanne Dubinos close look at the canine context of Flush (1933) highlights
the specific role of the spaniel. She notes that Woolf s serious and whimsical account
of the dogs origin includes, among other things, a deep appreciation and knowledge of
Darwinism. With similar attention to historical contexts, Kathryn Simpson shows how
elements of Lappin and Lapinova, with its animalized fantasy world, offer ways to inter-
pret the story in relation to Woolf s experience as a writer, her perception of her work in
relation to the literary market and her political perspective, especially in relation to war.
Writers continue to explore aspects of Woolf, the body, and bodily experience. Alice
Lowe updates our view of Woolf s relationship to eating by emphasizing her apprecia-
tion and enjoyment of food and her own pleasurable experience of cooking. With special
consideration of Woolf s letters and diaries, Lowe suggests that Woolf s priorities, her
loves, were writing and reading, her friends and family, and her daily life, which included
her walks, nature and food. Kate Sedon sees Mrs. Dalloway revising the Western worlds
Mother Nature archetype of the youthful, fertile woman. Through the novels aging fe-
male characters, Clarissa Dalloway, Aunt Helena Parry, Lady Bruton, and the Battered
Woman, Woolf privileges the experiences of aging women while also highlighting their
socially and psychologically precarious position in a culture that devalues them.
Woolf s interactions with landscapes and the environment resonated throughout her
life and work, with varying degrees of personal and political consequence. Barbara Lon-
nquist discusses the profound effect on Woolf of her childhood summers at St. Ives along
with her and her siblings return to Cornwall in 1905. Focusing on Woolf s Cornwall
diary, Lonnquist finds Woolf contending with a longed for yet illusory childhood stability
and a beautiful, beckoning, yet aloof coastal landscape. Xiaoqin Cao explains the role of
the exotic landscape in Woolf s work through the lenses of orientalism, colonialism, and
imperialism. While Woolf was not immune to the influence of Western attitudes, Cao
argues, her work nonetheless functions as a harbinger of change in the perceptions of the
Oriental among British artists. Diana Royer sees a connection between the ways in which
Woolf and Thoreau use nature philosophically to explore the self. Catherine Hollis takes
us into the world of the mountaineer and helps us to speculate about Woolf s would-be
relation to that sport, in part by looking at some of Woolf s short stories. Hollis concludes
that had Woolf taken up mountain climbing, she would have found in the activity what
her father did: mental and physical vitality, friendship, and pleasure. Verita Sriratana
understands the weather in The Years (1937) as a technology of place. By discussing the
weather in relation to practical meteorology in England, she shows how the weather in
Woolf s novel can represent a site of resistance and empowerment.
Several papers yield fresh insights into consciousness, subjectivity, and concepts of
the self and the other in Woolf. Elise Swinford, for instance, views Orlando as a new
kind of elegy. Although it is Woolf s only novel with no deaths, its use of natural myth
and imagery, its linking of literature, gender, and loss, and its would-be poet who must
figuratively replace his predecessor by mourning him through the writing of an elegy
renders it an innovative evocation of melancholia. Derek Ryan addresses a crucial term in
Woolf studies, granite and rainbow, noting that while many scholars believe Woolf used
the term to denote a strict binary, primarily that of truth and fiction, she in fact extends
and complicates the metaphor throughout her writing. Dominic Scheck similarly revises
ix
notions of intersubjectivity in Woolf, arguing that scenes of ostensible communion in her
novels in fact evince the sealed-off nature of consciousness. Our sense of oneness with
those around us is illusory yet crucial for making us feel less alone. Emily Hinnov examines
the question of community in the context of fascism in Woolf s time. She suggests that
narratives like The Waves represent unity among humanity not based upon the hierarchical,
mechanistic collective of fascism that would surely obliterate those designated as other.
We also include here two papers from a panel on Leonard Woolf, illustrating the
growing body of criticism on his intellectual and writing life. Wayne Chapman discusses
both Leonard Woolf s and W. B. Yeatss responses to Oswald Spenglers ideas in the con-
text of Third Reich politics. In doing so, he introduces readers to some of the most recent
digitized resources pertaining to the figures central to his essay. Focusing on Woolf s BBC
broadcasts of the 1930s as well as several of his letters and essays, Luke Reader sees Woolf
as an important public intellectual, challenging, for instance, the BBCs determination to
present only middle and upper class views in its programming.
We wish to conclude our introduction by remarking on the energy and intellectual verve
that writers brought to their scholarly work for this conference. There is indeed something
revitalizing that occurs when we attend to humans dwelling amidst and interacting with
forces beyond the human; Woolf certainly addressed these issues in profoundly important
ways. This collection, therefore, can be situated not only amidst the greening of modern-
ism but also within broadly ecocritical and posthumanist trends in critical thinking. Those
trends revise and reframe our accepted vision of what it means to be human, a project Woolf
seemed entirely committed to. We believe these essays provide just such a bracing plunge for
those who want to (re)immerse themselves in Woolfs world with a fresh perspective.
x
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
What a lark, what a plunge it was to host the Virginia Woolf conference at Georgetown
College! We would like to thank the many faculty, staff, students, and volunteers who gave
so generously of their time, energy, and talents.
We are grateful to Dr. Bill Crouch and Dr. Rosemary Allen, President and Provost of
Georgetown College, respectively, for agreeing to host the conference. Thanks also to the
departments and programs that provided financial support, including English, History,
Biology, Kinesiology and Health Sciences, the Womens Studies Program, the Honors Program,
and Oxford Programs. Deep appreciation goes to the Kentucky Humanities Council and the
National Endowment for the Arts for a grant in support of the conference. The Kentucky
Foundation for Women and the AAUW, Georgetown Branch, also donated to the cause, as
did the International Virginia Woolf Society and Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Miami University. Georgetown College professors Barbara Burch, Holly Barbaccia, Todd
Coke, Christine Leverenz, Homer White, Ellen Emerick, and Brad Hadaway volunteered in
various capacities. We greatly appreciate all of their help and enthusiasm.
A very special thanks goes to the Art Department at Georgetown College. Professor Juilee
Decker, Chair, curated the art and book exhibit, and Professor Daniel Graham built the
cases housing the books. The beautiful art work in conference materials stemmed from
assignments created by Professor Darrell Kincer for his students throughout the year:
Cathy Frank designed the conference poster and logo; Erica Janszen created the floral Web
site design; Abby Watkins designed the conference program; and Ryleyanne Vaughan and
Erica Miller designed the t-shirts. Thanks also to Jessica Shields, our Web master.
Many staff members made invaluable contributions, including Jo Anna Fryman in the
Provosts Office, Shirley College in the Business Office, Dustin Brown in Publishing/
Duplicating, Paula Faught in Auxiliary Services, Holly Hardesty in the campus bookstore,
and Vickie Masterson at the Thomas & King Conference Center. Thanks also go to student
volunteers Jasmine Gregg, Molly Hunter, Kyle Huskin, LeeAnn Haymond, Adriana
Nunez, Elizabeth Pippin, and Sarah Carey, and also to Georgetown AAUW volunteers
Gwen Curry, Linda Kubala, and Mary Ann Gaeddert.
We would like to thank the Program Committee who read and evaluated submissions:
Beth Rigel Daugherty, Mark Hussey, Vara Neverow, Elisa Kay Sparks, Drew Shannon,
Leslie Werden, Jeanne Dubino, Danell Jones, and Joyce Kelley. Thanks also to Wayne
Chapman for his guidance in putting together this book of Selected Papers.
xi
Virginia Woolf
Standard Abbreviations
(as established by Woolf Studies Annual)
AHH A Haunted House

AROO A Room of Ones Own
BP Books and Portraits
BTA Between the Acts
CDB The Captains Death Bed and Other Essays
CE Collected Essays (ed. Leonard Woolf, 4 vols.: CE1, CE2, CE3, CE4)
CR1 The Common Reader
CR2 The Common Reader, Second Series
CSF The Complete Shorter Fiction (ed. Susan Dick)
D The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols.: D1, D2, D3, D4, D5)
DM The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
E The Essays of Virginia Woolf (eds. Stuart Clarke and Andrew McNeillie,
6 vols.: E1, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6)
F Flush
FR Freshwater
GR Granite and Rainbow: Essays
HPGN Hyde Park Gate News (ed. Gill Lowe)
JR Jacobs Room
JRHD Jacobs Room: The Holograph Draft (ed. Edward L. Bishop)
L The Letters of Virginia Woolf (ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Traut-
mann, 6 vols.: L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6)
M The Moment and Other Essays
MEL Melymbrosia
MOB Moments of Being
MT Monday or Tuesday
MD Mrs. Dalloway
ND Night and Day
O Orlando
PA A Passionate Apprentice
RF Roger Fry
TG Three Guineas
TTL To the Lighthouse
TW The Waves
TY The Years
VO The Voyage Out
WF Women and Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of Ones Own
(ed. S. P. Rosenbaum)
xii
ECOFEMINISM, HOLISM, AND THE SEARCH FOR NATURAL ORDER IN
WOOLF
by Bonnie Kime Scott
T
he title of the 2010 Conference, Virginia Woolf and the Natural World, offers a
promising direction for both modernist studies and our understanding of Virginia
Woolf. There have been harbingers of this theme for many years. Natural images, in
phrases provided by Woolf herself, have long interested Woolf scholars and editors, going back
to Aileen Pippetts 1955 biography of Woolf, The Moth and the Star. Granite and Rainbow
graced the title page of a 1958 collection of Woolfs essays and later Mitchell Leaskas biogra-
phy of Woolf. Ellen Tremper argued for Woolfconnections to the Romantics, including their
interest in nature, in her 1998 study, Who Lived at Alfoxton? Gillian Beer, whose titles Common
Ground and Open Fields suggest the power of landscapes as liberating discourse, has provided
numerous essays that connect Woolf to Darwinian plots, the discourse of physics, and the
new geographic perspectives afforded by the technology of the airplane. Holly Henry took on
Woolf and the scientific discourse of astronomy. Both she and Jane Goldman have demon-
strated that Woolfs aesthetics and her sensitivity to the environment definitely mix.
Woolf has also taken an environmental turn in recent conferences. In 2010, as in previous
conferences, Elisa Kay Sparks led us down garden paths to a new appreciation of floral and
horticultural dimensions of Woolf. The 2003 Conference Woolf in the Real World at Smith
College offered an amazing exhibit, Virginia Woolf: A Botanical Perspective. In recent pro-
ceedings we find Sparks, Goldman, Christina Alt, Alice Staveley, Pamela Caughie, and the au-
thor, among others, bringing flowers, insects, dogs, birds, landscapes, and scientific discourses
to our attention, often allied to intersectional analyses of gender, race, and colonialism. Carrie
Rohman has stalked animals as subjects of modernism, demonstrating that in this Woolf had
important modernist company. Marianne DeKoven led off a recent issue of PMLA by taking
stock of the growing field of animal studies, including examples that relate to modernism.
In her own familial and historical contexts, young Virginia Stephen found numerous
approaches to nature. Leslie Stephen encouraged natural history pursuits. He pushed Vir-
ginia toward the typically feminine pursuit of botanizing on walks in the country during
summer holidays, and when in London, strolled his children regularly through Kensing-
ton Gardens, encouraged visits to the Natural History Museum, and entertained them
with animal sketches. Gardening was prescribed as part of her therapy after Woolf s first
breakdown. Woolf knew the zoo and Kew, as well as women who loved their gardens
Caroline Emelia Stephen, with her miniature Kew in Cambridge, Violet Dickinson, and
Julia Stephen, often associated with the gardens at St. Ives.
Thoby Stephen, Woolf s slightly older brother, was both mocked and embraced in
diary and fiction as a collector and observer of nature. His Notes on Birds and Mammals
Observed in England, Wales and Parts of Europe 1902-1906 indicates that, like his sister,
he was keenly aware of the characteristic motions of birds, noting in them behaviors that
could serve human representation and satireas in a sketch of Chinese GeesePompos-
ity. The childrens family newspaper, The Hyde Park Gate News, reports that the juveniles
2 VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE NATURAL WORLD
found and observed, but did not disturb, nests and the eggs in their London environs. The
household comings and goings of cats, rats, and especially dogs are both reported upon
and fictionalized about in this publication, as is their avid collecting of insects. Vanessa
Bell, as both as gardener and painter, was a sister artist with her own uses of nature; her
sensitivity to color, light, abstraction, the interpenetration of interior with exterior spaces,
and novel arrangements were invaluable to Woolf. Further, Woolf had a heritage of Victo-
rian women in natural science, such as Eleanor Ormerod, Mary Kingsley, and Marianne
North. They served her as case histories of womens struggles to gain an education and
enter male-dominated and defined professions, and in some cases, more problematically,
for their collaboration in the explorations of the flora and fauna of empire.

Applying the theoretical approaches of ecofeminism and the ordering principle of holism
to Virginia Woolf poses numerous problems. These include the discursive nature of nature,
the applicability of ecofeminism to Woolf, and the adequacy of holism to describe her modern-
ist form. Another of Woolfs figures, drawn from nature, will haunt this essay: in the hollow
of the wave, a phrase that occurs in the Time Passes section of To the Lighthouse (1927).
Both wave and perhaps surprisingly hollow recur frequently and variously in her writing.
Complex, ambivalent, brief, moving, tenuously secure, the phrase distills the order I seek.
Does ecofeminism offer appropriate theory for Woolf? It is a problem that ecology and
recent theory of sustainability have long shown masculine and capitalist connections and bi-
ases. Stacy Alaimo offers a long list of reasons why feminists have resisted the widely-held
assumption that women are closer to nature; men, to culture, including the ways that nature
has been constructed as maternal and domestic, as well as subject to domination. How nature-
focused was Woolf, given that she sought out places for women in the professions and claimed
cityscapes as significant environment? She and her characters take pleasure in flnerie: looking
at shop windows, viewing crowds, visiting St. Pauls or the British Library, shopping, attending
the cinema, riding the train, watching traffic, spotting an airplane. In writing she repeatedly
strives for incandescenceelectrical light. Much of recent Woolf scholarship, in the tradition
of cultural studies, has attended to aspects of her modernity that are attuned to the mechanical,
the technological, the commercial and the urban. The 2009 conference was themed Woolf
and the City. The city, of course, does offer an environment and nature enters there.
Even if we concede that Woolf s uses of nature are many, and that these have tremen-
dous appeal to feminists attuned to the environment, we cannot and should not claim
current ecofeminist perspectives as hers. How could they be, given the changes to the
environment and global economies that have arisen since 1941, and the new concerns
that have come with the increased intersectionality of feminist analysis in general? The
term ecofeminism is usually dated back only to 1974, and hence is one of many strands of
second wave feminism, which also took up the recovery of neglected women writers and
their potential feminisms. Ecofeminism has divided, evolved, and engaged in self-critique
and even one-upwomanship since its inception. Some strands of ecofeminism problema-
tize holism as an adequate figure for the current global crisis of the environment.
Ecofeminism can be and has been arranged in many ways. I will consider five op-
tions, not all of them distinct from one another:
Ecofeminish, Holism, and Natural Order 3
Cultural and Radical Ecofeminisms

Environmental Justice
Psychological approaches
Philosophical and Sociological approaches
Non-human and post-human concepts
Much of second wave feminism is commonly assigned to cultural and radical categories, and
despite subsequent critiques of its essentialism and revival of goddess rites, cultural feminism
persists. Practitioners evoke womens cultures, experiences and values, rediscovered in lost his-
tories and rituals, and used to challenge the male-biased binaries of power characteristic of
patriarchya favored term for Woolf.1 Arguably, with her theory of an outsiders society,
and evocation of the Classical goddess, Woolf anticipated cultural ecofeminism. Cultural eco-
feminists cite both Woolf and her classicist friend Jane Ellen Harrison, quoting their works.
Environmental justice movements might be traced back to M.I.T.s first woman stu-
dent, Ellen Swallow, with her concern for water purity and sanitation; the 1960s brought
Rachel Carsons assault on the effects of insecticides; the Chipko movement that worked to
spare Indian forests in the 1970s reaches back centuries for its precedents. Today ecofemi-
nists of this strand attend to localized and diverse experiences of women. Organizations, at
the grass roots, are run predominantly by women of color, seeking toxic-free environments
and agriculture. I think it likely that Leonard Woolf, as he tried to account for the decline in
birds songs over the years in Sussex (58), was aware of the work of Rachel Carson; it is clear
in novels such as Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves (1931) that Western impositions on colonial
agriculture were not welcome, or an unqualified success. Though showing a very different
class standpoint, Julia Stephens community work anticipates this line of ecofeminism.
Womens psychological development, particularly in relation to the mother, semiotic
language, and object relations, including relations to the natural world seen as a mother,
figure as psychological contributions to ecofeminism.2 The construction of the self, as
inflected by gender, merged with or distinct from others, non-human others, and the
environment, was an abiding concern for Woolf.
Philosophers and sociologists take ecofeminism into epistemology, critiques of enlighten-
ment ideals of reason, and alternate ways of thinking about binaries, knowledge, and democ-
racy. Karen Warren and Catriona Sandilands offer overarching views and critiques of eco-
feminisms to date. As an ecofeminist literary critic, Alaimo has suggested, via a set of women
writers, an alternate genre of undomesticated nature. One of the major debates in feminist
theory has been over essentialism, seen as reductive, bio- and matra-centric, and determinist,
as opposed to theories of social construction that contextualize and differentiate over time and
geographical location and postmodern theories that bring subjectivity itself into question.
There are diverse approaches to non-human and the post-human ecofeminism. Jose-
phine Donovan and Carol Adams extend Gilligans concepts of womens relational ethic
into an ethic of care directed toward non-human others, their approach refining and
extending cultural ecofeminism. Posthumanities can be represented by Donna Haraway,
who, having started her research with primates, has broached human boundaries in both
cyborg and animal directions, focusing most recently upon the ancient cultural union of
humans with dogs. Communicating with and becoming animal has interested an array
of postmodern theorists, including Jacques Derrida and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guit-
tari, the latter pair showing awareness of Woolf s relentless exploration of various forms
of becoming and her own animal identifications. One of the useful terms Haraway has
provided for new directions in ecofeminism is natureculturesa recognition that, despite
centuries of binary division between these two constructs, they are most profitably under-
stood as a merger, ever dependent upon one another for definition and sustainable order.

The natural world is an enormous system, of which humans are a demanding and an ever
more invasive, dangerous part. When in favorable balance, aspects of nature work together,
providing conditions for sustainable life. Cosmic events and natural disasters may introduce
disorder, and a process of rebalancing of the natural world. Ecologists and ecofeminists are
most concerned with the ways that humans, particularly powerful ones seeking control, have
manipulated natural conditions to favor their own perceived needs, goals and superiority, usu-
ally to the detriment of non-human beings, less dominant peoples, and the female gender.
There are numerous possible ideas of holistic order just as there are numerous ecofemi-
nisms. Deep ecology has long worked with the concept. Aldo Leopolds celebrated 1949
essay, The Land Ethic, describes a holistic biotic community, of which man is . . . only
a member (204-5). In decentering of man, Leopold may have had the generic man (men
and women, anthropocentrism) in mind, though feminist philosopher Plumwood points
out that through much of history anthropocentrism has really meant androcentrism. Posi-
tive and negative aspects of holism have been actively discussed among ecofeminists, whose
theorizing is far from complete. In cultural ecofeminisms, such as the work of Carol Christ,
Charlene Spretnak and Starhawk, sacred female figures associated with the earth, seen in the
holistic concept of the Gaia, or the earth goddess, were recovered and their myths renewed.3
Mother earth has a presence in the writing of innumerable Native Americans such as Leslie
Marmon Silko and Marilou Awiatka, particularly in works that repudiate disrespect for
the environment. French feminist analysis, as a practice related to deconstruction, has also
contributed alternative models of environmental order, most notably in maternally-based
rhythmic and flowing semiotic language, seen as the precursor and essential foundation for
the symbolic language of the father, and manifested in criture fminine. Ecofeminists hold
out the hope that nature may be used to establish a different order, based on alternative eth-
ics, boundaries, and democratic principles.
For concepts of the contingent and transitory nature of environmental order, Woolf
could turn to new understandings of science in her day. Contemporary physics, inclusive of
Einsteins theories of relativity, wave theory and quantum mechanics, is now generally ac-
cepted as an influence on Woolfs writing, its primary effect being to serve her more abstract
renditions of nature, most notably in The Waves. Of particular interest to Woolf was wave-
particle theory, which was useful in exploring an alternate concept of reality, and served her
stylistic move away from realism (Beer, Physics, Sound and Substance 113). Woolf and
these scientists held in common the idea that life is transitory and successive (115) and that
simultaneity and rhythm were basic physical principals. They further endorsed working
outside of closed epistemologies. Ann Banfield encourages us to think of waves of sound and
light, not just water, as unsensed physical causes (124). She suggests that, in accordance
with alternate particle theory, Woolf sees an alternation of fluid and solid in the shape of
the world (127), synthesized in Woolfs metaphor of granite and rainbow (148).
In literary writing quite generally, nature is used to stock similes, metaphors, and sym-
bols. We began by noting several of Woolfs memorable phrases built from natural images,
but applied to conceptual matters. Many natural images form a strong relation to the pri-
mordial, as presumably they have been basic conceptual materials for the mind since the
dawn of consciousness, experience Woolf explores through children such as Jacob Flanders
and the six characters of The Waves. Such images promise fundamental needs of food and
shelter, or warn of threatening creatures (including humans) to avoid. Evolutionary psy-
chologists led by Edward O. Wilson suggest that language evolved from mental activities
centered on these natural concerns. Observation of nature also provides orderly tropes of the
human life cycle with images of fecundity, growth, ripening, decay, and of the passage time,
or movement through the seasons. Such patterns are visible in the spring festival and other
seasonal rites in early Greek drama, as presented by Jane Harrison in Ancient Art and Ritual.
The flowing or recurring rhythms of nature are further suggestive of musical and linguistic
forms. Complex sacred female figures combine these images and offer explanatory narratives
involving them. Metaphors provide range for imaginative interpretation and collaboration
between reader and writer. In some instances nature may provide a model of organic unity
that literary forms aspire to, reject outright, or submit to parody and play.
Woolf uses nature to assist her fresh approach to epistemology, in which she copes
with the damned egotistical self. We can follow this in her diaries, through the research-
er of A Room of Ones Own (1929), in tropes of authorial silence as early as The Voyage Out
(1915), via Bernard in the course of The Waves, and even in her late essay, set in a primeval
forest, Anon. In reordering things of the earth, Woolf may disperse the self into them,
enter a collective of creatures, deconstruct patriarchal ideas of power and domination, and
at least briefly defy spiritual defeat and death.
Ecofeminists have since the 1970s cultivated the holistic myth of Gaia, an early Greek
earth mother who brought forth the earth and its creatures from a void (Merchant 3). As
Merchant notes in her own history of the figure, the Gaia myth was moved into the area of
scientific popularization by James Lovelock, who encouraged a view of the earth as a sin-
gle living entity, capable of manipulating the earths atmosphere to suit its overall needs
and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts (qtd.
in Merchant 4). The goddess in her triple aspect represents life, death, and rebirth, and
may be associated with sacred groves of trees, or caves evocative of the womb. Though the
mythic approach is dismissed as dated cultural feminism by some ecofeminists, Gaia or
Demeter/Persephone remains invaluable for studying Woolf s uses of nature, as a resource
for modernist/feminist reinvention of the classics and of Oedipal-based psychology. Jane
Harrisons work on primitive rituals attended to people who heeded the periodicity of
nature. The Greeks celebrated the annual renewal of spring through Persephone, rising
annually from the earth. Forest people created rituals involving the sacred tree, which if
paraded through the community brought promise of fruit.
Woolf s characters enter such sacred natural spaces. In Mrs. Dalloway the aging Peter
Walsh seeks peace as a solitary traveler on an imaginary forest ride beneath sky and
branches he rapidly endows . . .with womanhood. Peter constructs a mother earth figure:
this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from the troubled sea . . . as a
shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands com-
passion, comprehension, absolution (Mrs. Dalloway 56). In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe
associates Mrs. Ramsay with images of a secret treasure chamber, a large jar, or a beehive dome
(54-55), images that have been interpreted within lesbian ritual as well as maternal metaphor
(Cramer 178-9). Similarly suggestive of female anatomy and defiant of heterosexual norms for
nature, the contemporary novelist Mary Carmichael lights up serpentine caves as she shows
us two women working in a laboratory who like one another in A Room of Ones Own (83).
Consistent with her own assessment of history in A Room of Ones Own, Woolf is much more
apt to visit flower fields in the company of mother or daughter figures than battlegrounds con-
tested by male heroes. The cultural power of the hero interests her, but Woolfs study takes in
the other, more marginal, migratory members of society that surround the hero, sometimes
constructing, sometimes deconstructing his values, as with Percival, the school friend idolized
by his contemporaries in The Waves. Woolf is cognizant of the cultural pressures imposed on
others, and imagines where they may derive their own strength.
The girl or the woman in a field of flowers suggests the myth of the great earth moth-
er, Demeter (granddaughter of Gaia) and her daughter Persephone, and a collaboration of
mother and daughter in rewriting myth and sustaining life. Elizabeth Abel and Madeline
Moore, with their work on Woolf, were among the early second wave feminists who in
the 1980s found a strong and affirmative alternative to the male hero in the great goddess,
with Moore selecting Harrisons Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion as a possible
source for Woolf s renewed sense of this mythology (42). With Woolf, both mothers and
independent little girls find their place in fields, collecting flowers, as did Persephone ex-
ploring her world. Demeter searches those same fields in a season of loss, after her daugh-
ters abduction and rape, and arranges her seasonal recovery to the earth. These are fields
frequented by many of Woolf s characters, as they imagine loved ones bearing images of
flowers, and then make the cyclic descent into death.
Cam in To the Lighthouse collects Sweet Alice that she is reluctant to relinquish to the
familys guest, Mr. Banks. In a fuller expression of the myth, Mr. Tansley fantasizes Mrs.
Ramsay with stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets . . .Step-
ping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that
had fallen (18). He interrupts his own story with the thought of how ridiculous it is, applied
to a 50 year old mother of eight. Lily imagines Mrs. Ramsay at the time of her death rais-
ing to her forehead a wreath of white flowers with which she went (184). She constructs a
similar mythic landscape for Prue Ramsay, following her death soon after marriage: She let
her flowers fall from her basket, scattered and tumbled them on the grass, and, reluctantly
and hesitatingly, but without question or complaint . . . went down too. Down fields, across
valleys, white, flower-strewnthat is how she would have painted it (201). Thus Lily has
artistic uses for this myth of nature, which also may serve as a consolation for death in a cycle
of nature. Similarly Woolf herself thinks of Katherine Mansfield putting on a white wreath
& leaving us, called away; made dignified, chosen (D2: 226), when facing the death of a
writer whose dignity she did not always serve while she lived. Isa in Between the Acts (1941)
is a grown woman and a mother, but echoing Swinburne, she reenacts Persephones journey:
Where do I wander? she mused. Down what draughty tunnels? Where the eyeless wind
blows? And there grows nothing for the eye. No rose. To issue where? In some harvestless
dim field where no evening lets fall her mantle; nor sun rises (154-55). She is less assured.
Woolf s occasional crones offer another aspect of the triple goddessthe most no-
table examples being the old woman stationed by the tube station in Mrs. Dalloway, her
song resembling an ancient stream soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages
(80), and Lucy Swithin of Between the Acts, finding her way back into her primordial
origins in great rhododendron woods via her reading of The Outline of History. While
these figures retain much of their magic for Woolf, other goddesses do not. The goddess
of proportion and the goddess of conversion, as evoked by the narrator of Mrs. Dalloway,
are fearsome forms associated with the power of the medical profession and the church,
functioning quite apart from and to the detriment of nature. Through her entire career,
Woolf likes to remind us of the oozing loam, decaying leaf matter, and remains of prehis-
toric creatures that precede civilization, and in her last novel, Between the Acts, what might
follow when civilization expires. Indeed, the primordial is a stronger category with Woolf
than the more familiar modernist trope of the primitive. In selecting the primordial, she
escapes some of the most questionably racist overtones of modernist primitivism or social
Darwinism and merges human, with animal, with earth itself. There is some comfort to
be taken in accepting the continuity as well as the transience of all life.
Unity was quested and found in much Woolf criticism up through the 1980s. A gen-
eration of critics, striving toward the order and balance sought in the poetry favored by the
new critics, did find reassuring aesthetic order in Woolf s novels. Alan Wilde suggests that
into her middle phase, inclusive of The Waves, Woolf was offering aesthetic closure that
tended to leave behind the phenomenal world (142). More attuned to natural images,
James Naremore finds that In the face of the inevitable tragedy of time and death, she
offered the consolation of nature seen from a cosmic perspective, as in the inter-chapters
of The Waves (244). It seems to me that the cosmic order, as presented by Woolf, just as
often seems to offer cosmic indifference, not consolation. Though interested in the quest
for unity, Madeline Moore presents the temporary sense of order achieved by characters
in terms of a cycle of thought: In The Waves, the representative range of human pos-
sibilities focuses upon an inevitable cycle wherein individuals are momentarily united
with nature, experience both its exaltation and its nothingness, and, in order to preserve
their autonomy, reemerge into the present of human effort (219). Moore is skeptical of
the achievement of unity by mature individuals. To her mind, the pastoral tradition fails
adults. Seeking unity from community, they find it only symbolically.
Gaston Bachelard attributed an epistemological break to the new physics that
emerged in the early twentieth century. This decentered human consciousness as the
source of knowledge, leaving the human subject with the feeling of being transcended
by something beyond human control, yet also feeling nourished and sustained by it
(McAllester Jones 4). Bachelards idea of the new literary mind working out approxi-
mate knowledge through the use of interwoven images bringing together image and
idea applies well to Woolf s uses of natural images (107-11). Indeed, he offers his own
analysis of the image of the tree in Woolf s Orlando (1928). By attending to the observer
of nature, in the form of her characters, Woolf may show us the accumulation of images
and ideas that work toward merger or unity, even if they do not achieve and sustain them.
Images extracted from nature range in complexity from simple phrases to intricate associa-
tions and holistic formations. Image clusters involving flowers and plants or water are per-
vasive. Human and non-human creatures (mammals, snails, birds, fish, insects) become
involved holistically with these clusters and with one another. Woolf s most memorable
natural images rarely stand alone; they fuse with the identity of the animals or human be-
ings who perceive them, or the birds and insects that move among them, many with their
own perceptions and uses of natures offerings.
Among the most memorable and frequently cited examples of unity with nature in Woolfs
writing is her own organic perception from early childhood. As recounted in A Sketch of the
Past and echoed in Between the Acts: I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it
seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was
the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower. It was a thought I put away as be-
ing likely to be useful to me later (MOB 71). In seeing the flower whole her consciousness was
brought to sudden awareness, emerging from the cotton-wool of everyday experience.
A mature Mrs. Dalloway offers a puzzling flower image that suddenly draws attention
to deeper matters of identity. Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match
burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard
softened. It was overthe moment (32). This perception is paired with Clarissas memory
of having felt what a man might feel for a woman, a description that suggests orgasm even
more strongly: a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one
yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the
world come close, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture
which spit its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the
cracks and sores! (31). The match generates sudden illumination and exciting heat, another
sensation. As a sudden illumination, it is fleeting, and Clarissas thoughts of her narrow bed
remind Judith Roof of her advancing age, and her half-burnt candle (98-99). But Woolf s
images here naturalize lesbian feelings; with this acknowledgment comes a soothing cure.
Leaves, whether they are growing on plants or trees, or dispersed by human or natural
forces have creative and/or protective significance in many of Woolfs texts: Anon leads a troop
of leaf-clad celebrants. Peter Walsh fantasizes a ride through the forest. Septimus Smith reads
beauty in waving, brandishing, sun-dappled leaves of Regents Park, until the trees part to re-
veal the horror of his beloved friend, Evans, dead in the war. In his last vision of Rezia, lovingly
packing away his notes, she has all of her petals . . . about her. She is as a flowering tree, . . . a
lawgiver, who had reached a sanctuary where she feared no one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a
miracle, a triumph, the last and greatest (MD 144). Mrs. Dalloway is one of Woolfs strongest
proponents of a holistic view, seen when she imagines being laid out like a mist between the
people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist,
but it spread ever so far, her life, her self (9). Orlando takes The Oak Tree as her long-term
and final challenge as a writer, the roots of an actual tree seemingly merging with her self as she
lies beneath it. Louis compares himself to a green yew tree and feels rooted in the middle of
the earth. Finally, Cam trails a leaf when she reluctantly responds to her mothers summons in
the first segment of To the Lighthouse and its image stays with her in the final pages of the book,
as she strives for a sense of order beyond what her parents have offered.
Cam has been much worried over by the critics, including Louise DeSalvo, who sees
her as a victim of maternal neglect. Cam shares the aqueous imaginary of Rachel in The
Voyage Out and Rhoda in The Waves, both characters who die in the course of their novels.
Mrs. Ramsay compares Cams mind to a deep well with clear but distorting waters (TTL
58). Mrs. Ramsay has some idea of the sorts of images that distract her youngest daughter,
and many of these are taken from nature: It might be a visiona shell, of a wheelbar-
row, or a fairy kingdom on the far side of the hedge; or it might be the glory of speed
(57). That evening she describes a fairy landscape to help Cam overcome her horror of a
sheeps skull hung in the nursery, and soothe her into sleep. Years later, as they sail to the
lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay tries to get Cam to identify their house, receding on the shore,
and tries to engage her in discussion about a new puppy. Instead, as she drags her fingers
through the water, Cam draws from an array of images, reaching back to the leaf she had
trailed behind her at the start of the Ramsays story:
All had streamed away. . . . From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there
spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that
she should be alive, that she should be there). And the drops falling from this
sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here and there on the dark, the slum-
berous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realized but turning in their
darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constanti-
nople. Small as it was, and shaped something like a leaf stood on its end with the
gold-sprinkled waters flowing in and about it, it had, she supposed, a place in
the universeeven that little island? (192)
As would be true of characters in The Waves, Cams looking into the depths, and her
image of the fountain of joy that spurted up are shared by other characters. Nancy is
another gazer into the depths of the sea, on the small scale of the tidal pool. Her mother
is associated with the ability to pour erect into the air. . . a column of spray (TTL 40).
Cam finds her own sense of place, and Woolf leaves us to wonder whether she will be able
to bring forth this beautiful mental collage into the negotiation of a realized world.
Woolf is attracted to hollow, sheltering spaces as they occur in nature, protecting
butterflies, flowers, mushrooms, birds, rabbits, or houses. She selects the word sixty times
at important junctures in her novels. The image of the hollow of the wave comes from a
brief sequence in the Time Passes section of To the Lighthouse: So soon a bird sings, a
cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave (127).
The leaf makes the wave not quite hollow, and the wave bestows motion on the leaf, like
a miniature world, briefly whirled. Though the birds are audible, it is doubtful that any
human is present to apprehend this event. Nearby in the text, Autumn trees . . . take on
the flash of tattered flags, reminding us of a war that could doom human life (127). Still,
inspiring the leaf/wave simile, green, life quickens, begins anew. This set of leaf/wave
bird images, though more active, is resonant with an earlier, simpler simile from Mrs. Dal-
loway, where Rezia Smith is shown in all her vulnerability like a bird sheltering under the
thin hollow of a leaf (65). The bird and the human of the simile are equally dependent
upon the leaf to sustain them, but the leaf provides a scant, fragile shelter at best. The hol-
low disappears as a wave crashes on the shore, but is ever present farther out.
Many of Woolf s most brilliant natural images occur in such collages of modernist
fragmentsbits and pieces, or a rapid series of apprehensions. These are often the con-
ceptions of characters in crisis or survivors of traumaoutsiders in search of a survivable
system. The relevant passages also alarm readers concerning the sustainability of culture
and the environment. In some cases, a character has the hope of regaining balance and
sustaining existence. The hallucinations of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, the work
Rhoda does with abstract shapes, water, and bundles of flowers in The Waves, and the men-
tal collages of Cam in To the Lighthouse, Sara in The Years, and Isa in Between the Acts all
fall into this category. The leaf turning in the hollow of the wave is representative of Cam
at the close of To the Lighthouse. It involves gesture, performance, recollection, continua-
tion. Cam, like many other struggling characters, is sustained by collecting and arranging
complex images of nature to reconstruct an environment. There is some hope that, by
touching back to the primordial, the semiotic, sensual, or material, and by interlacing one
character or creatures set of perceptions to anothers, a new and different cycle of human
nature, or (to use Haraways term) natureculture, may arise.
Notes
1. Well-know examples include Mary Dalys Gyn/Ecology, Susan Griffins Woman and Nature: The Roaring
inside Her, Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orensteins anthology, Reweaving the World: The Emergence
of Ecofeminism, and Carolyn Merchants Earthcare: Women and the Environment.
2. Important texts are Julia Kristevaa Desire in Language, Nancy Chodorows The Reproduction of Mothering,
Carol Gilligans In a Different Voice, and Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland, eds.
The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Developmentits very title derived from Woolf s first novel.
3 See for example their work as contained in Diamond and Orenstein, eds., Reweaving the World: The Emer-
gence of Ecofeminism.
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. The Waves. 1931. Annotated Edition. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006.
Woolf, Virginia, and Vanessa Bell with Thoby Stephen. Hyde Park Gate News. Ed. Gill Lowe. London: Hes-
perus Press, 2005.
WE MAKE LIFE: VIBRATION, AESTHETICS AND THE INHUMAN IN
THE WAVES.
by Carrie Rohman
W
hen I first learned that Woolf s provisional title for The Waves (1931) was The
Moths, I was reminded of an anecdote one of my dance colleagues passed
along to me several years ago. Legend has it that someone once asked Merce
Cunninghamthe late and extraordinarily great godfather of postmodern dancewhy
he so often set his movement to silence. Reportedly, he pointed to a moth that was flitting
around a light, and he left it at that. I want to evoke that moment at the beginning of this
paper to think about movement, attraction, and the other-than-human in Woolf s novel.
Since The Waves is so often noted for its poetic qualities, I will begin this discussion with a
claim about poetics. The question of the animal or of the inhuman as it is represented in poetry
interests us particularly because poetics participates in the musical, the rhythmic, and the incanta-
tory. More pointedly, as Jorie Graham repeatedly reminded her audience at the 2006 Geraldine
R. Dodge Poetry Festival, poetry must be understood as bodily experience. Graham was at some
pains in her discussions that weekend to emphasize that reading and hearing poetry are not pri-
marily mental, but corporeal processes. This claim is fairly startling; it gives us pause and opens
onto a number of fascinating questions about the literary, the bodily, and even the creaturely.
Elizabeth Groszs recent discussions of art and the organic help us situate Woolf s
poetics. Working among theories ranging from Deleuze, to French feminism, and her
own re-reading of Darwins evolutionary theory, Grosz asserts in an interview with Julie
Copeland that we need to understand art as the revelry in the excess of nature, but also a
revelry in the excess of the energy in our bodies (The Creative Impulse 2).1 Grosz makes
the distinctly posthumanist claim that were not the first artists and were perhaps not
even the greatest artists, we humans; we take our cue from the animal world. So what ap-
peals to us? Its the striking beauty of flowers, its the amazing colour of birds, its the songs
of birds (2). Rather than being fundamentally about concepts or representation, Grosz
maintains that arts fundamental goal is to produce sensations, and its about feeling
something intensely [while] there may be the by-product of a kind of understanding (3).
In what may first seem a counterintuitive locating of the artistic outside of human prax-
is, Grosz claims that the intersection of life itself with earthly or even cosmic forces serves as
the occasion for what is fundamentally an aesthetic emergence. Grosz describes the produc-
tive explosion of the arts from the provocations posed by the forces of the earth . . . with the
forces of living bodies, by no means exclusively human, which . . . slow down chaos enough
to extract from it something not so much useful as intensifying, a performance, a refrain, an
organization of color or movement that eventually, transformed, enables and induces art.2
In the aforementioned interview, Grosz goes on to emphasize the way that her ideas decenter
the traditional attribution of art to a transcendent, human function:
I think whats radical about what Im saying is that art isnt primarily or solely
conceptual, that what it represents is the most animal part of us rather than the
We Make Life 13
most human part of us. Frankly, I find it really refreshing, in a way, that its not
mans nobility that produces art, its mans animality that produces art, and thats
what makes it of potential interest everywhere. (3)
Just as compelling is Groszs further claim that sexual difference lies at the heart of aesthetics.
This idea is especially fascinating given Groszs well-known work in the areas of feminist and
queer theory, disciplines which have tended to resist the biological framing of sexuality
and gender. Pivotal to her position is understanding nature as dynamic rather than static,
as something that is always opening toward the new and the future in a process of becom-
ing. She emphasizes that, because animals attract mates through various vibratory forces,
through color and through dance, through song and cadences, the aesthetic is linked to the
workings of sexual difference in evolution. While I cannot rehearse Groszs entire argument
here, I want to give you a sufficient sense of this element of her discussion. In her discus-
sion of music and sex, Grosz makes much of Darwins claims that mammals use their voices
to attract mates. For Darwin, music is seductive and dangerous; it intensifies and ex-
cites (Chaos, Territory, Art 32).3 Thus there is something about vibration, or resonance, or
rhythm, even in the most primitive of creatures, that generates pleasurable or intensifying
passions, excites organs, and invests movements with greater force or energy (33). Birdsong,
for instance, exists at a crossroads between sexuality and creativity.
It is important to clarify how Grosz suggests that reproduction does not need to be
viewed as the primary telos of these processes. Rather, Grosz speculates that [perhaps]
sexuality is not so much to be explained in terms of its ends or goals (which in sociobio-
logical terms are assumed to be the [competitive] reproduction of maximum numbers of
[surviving] offspring, where sexual selection is ultimately reduced to natural selection) as
in terms of its forces, its effects . . . which are forms of bodily intensification. Vibrations,
waves, oscillations, resonances affect living bodies, not for any higher purpose but for
pleasure alone (33). We need not see sexuality as biologically determined or rigidly
heteronormative, but rather as a fluid process of becoming that emphasizes pleasure.
Grosz goes on to note that sexuality itself needs to function artistically to be ad-
equately sexual, adequately creative, that sexuality . . . needs to harness excessiveness and
invention to function at all (64-65). Referencing the work of Alphonso Lingis, Grosz
discusses the forces of sexual selection and the bodily manifestations of those forces as
creatures invest in enhancing the bodys sexual appeal (66):
This calling to attention, this making of ones own body into a spectacle, this
highly elaborate display of attractors, involves intensification. Not only are or-
gans on display engorged, intensified, puffed up, but the organs that perceive
themears, eyes, noseare also filled with intensity, resonating with colors,
sounds, smells, shapes, rhythms. (66)
Thus taste, pleasure, performance and staging all enter into the aestheticization of the
body in sexual selection and evolution: Art is of the animal precisely to the degree that
sexuality is artistic (70).
Groszs claims can be located within the Deleuzian framework that she outlines in
her own discussion of the artistic. Deleuze rejects the notion that art is primarily to be
understood in terms of intention or representation. Rather, as Grosz explains, he suggests

that the arts produce and generate intensity, that which directly impacts the nervous
system and intensifies sensation. Art is the art of affect more than representation, a system
of dynamized and impacting forces rather than a system of unique images that function
under the regime of signs (Chaos, Terrirory, Art 3). Readers will recognize the Deleuzian
emphasis on intensities here, and Grosz reminds us that the idea of the affective in De-
leuze involves a linkage between bodily forces and cosmological forces, a linkage that
emphasizes human participation in the nonhuman.4
Grosz also reminds us of Deleuzes conceptualization of the refrain and helps to clarify
its function. She writes, The refrain is a kind of rhythmic regularity that brings a minimum
of livable order to a situation in which chaos beckons (52).5 In music, for instance, the re-
frain wards off chaos by creating a rhythm, tempo, melody that taps chaos by structuring it
through the constitution of a territory (53). It is in her discussion of the Deleuzian refrain
and the connection between cosmic and bodily forces that Grosz points to the very life
rhythms that Woolf seems to recapitulate through her attention to waves: These rhythms
of the bodythe rhythms of seduction, copulation, birth, deathcoupled with those of
the earthseasons, tides, temperaturesare the conditions of the refrain, which encapsu-
lates and abstracts these rhythmic or vibratory forces into a sonorous emblem, a composed
rhythm (Grosz 55). The impact of this rhythm is most powerfully felt by bodies of the same
species, but as Grosz often points out, these refrains are transmuted and transferred from
cosmos to earth, from animal to animal, from animal to human and back, etc. In the case of
Woolfs novel then, we want to ask after circuits of vibration, refrains that oscillate between
the living and the cosmic, that open life onto excess and the artistic.
Perhaps most apparently, Deleuzes concept of the refrain gives us a way to read
the interludes. These repetitions mark the most overt natural material in the text.
The interludes attest to the inhuman rhythms, the cosmological forces that in one sense
stand outside of narrowly human or conventionally humanist preoccupations.6 Early
discussions of The Waves made claims to this effect. Frank D. McConnells 1968 essay,
for instance, calls the interludes deliberate and highly effective attempts to present a
phenomenal world without the intervention of human consciousness, a world of blind
things which stands as a perpetual challenge to the attempts of the six monologists to
seize, translate and realize their world (qtd. in Goldman 82). While McConnell is
clearly correct in one sense, he goes on to suggest that the very final waves that crash on
the shore at the novels end are simply and sublimely irrelevant to Bernard, as Bernard
to [them] (Goldman 83). But the text, I think, does not suggest this kind of final dis-
connect between the natural world and Bernards world. It may be the case that Bernard
is less connected than some of the other characters. McConnell goes on to characterize
the nature of the italicized passages as neither the anthropomorphic and sympa-
thetic nature of the pastoral nor its malevolent but equally anthropomorphic contrary
(Goldman 83). It is here where Deleuzes claims can help us, and really where concepts
of the post-human open up a reading that need not be trapped by views of nature as
either sympathetic and sentimentally human or hostile and violently anti-human.
Because, as Grosz points out, the refrain allows us to understand how even the human
is organized through vibrational patterns that are the most elementary cosmic forces.
Here is Grosz on vibration and the refrain. Keep in mind that while she often uses the
We Make Life 15
musical refrain as her key example, she is aware throughout her discussion that these
concepts apply to creativity and life forces in the broadest sense:
Refrains, then, are rhythmic, melodious patterns, small chants, ditties, that shape
the vibrations of milieus into the harmonics of territories, the organization of a
wall or barrier. Music is the reverse movement, the liberation of these harmonic
and rhythmic patterns from their originating location and their placement into
a double movement, both musically, beyond the smallness of the refrain and on,
to the song, the tune, the sonata, the duet, the symphony, other forms of music,
genres, and so on, to forms as yet not even conceivable on the plane of compo-
sition; and spatio-temporally, beyond territory, to individuals, peoples, races,
bodily movements, performances. (54)
I want to emphasize the permeability or double movement that Grosz outlines here to
give us a way to think about the relationship not only between the interludes and the regu-
lar text, but also the relationship between the waves and Woolf s human characters. If the
interludes function as a refrain, notice their relationship to the normative text. The small
chant or dittie is released from its originating location, and there is a vibrational movement
between refrain and song. The continued elaboration of this pattern becomes eventually the
symphony. Suzette Henke recently noted that the novel might be compared to a musical
symphony, whose theme is introduced in the lyrical interludes, then fully elaborated via
the free indirect discourse of each personas introspective soliloquies (128). The Deleuzian
refrain helps us make even more sense of this notion, and The Waves as symphony strikes
me as a particularly useful way to understand the novel. Moreover, the well-known fact that
Woolf claimed to be writing the novel to a rhythm not to a plot is a powerful testament to
the role of vibration in Woolfs creative process (qtd. in Henke 128).
Interestingly, Patrick McGee notes in his discussion of political dynamics in the novel
that the interludes make a significant return of the repressed in the main body of Bernards
final monologue. No longer italicized, no longer safely confined to the margins, he contin-
ues, the voice of the interludes erupts from within the discourse of the imperialist subject
(386). If we understand the interludes as the refrain, then it would only make sense that
they appear and reappear in the main text. But we also need to address McConnells notion
that the waves are utterly indifferent to Bernard. In an extremely rigid sense, this may be
true, but one of the deep ideological claims of Woolf s novel is in fact quite the opposite.
Woolfs characters, albeit to varying degrees, participate in the vibrational forces that the
waves monumentalize. The movement of the refrain and its resonance makes its way into
individuals, and these forces are in fact the very roots of aesthetics. This is the direction of the
investigation I want to undertake in Woolfs highly unconventional narrative.
It is a commonplace that children are closer to animals and nature than adults,
and Freud gives us one means of theorizing this idea through his discussion of organic
repression, which I have discussed elsewhere.7 Woolf sets up much of the novels natural
and cosmic terrain in the opening section where the six figures are young children. Sight
and sound dominate the lines that introduce the six characters. While there are too many
impressions to recount here, looking at a few of them reveals how the aesthetic is already
rooted in the oscillations of the natural world at the novels opening. The children notice
rings that hang and quiver in loops of light, leaves that gather like ears, islands of
light that swim on the grass (9). There is also a distinct emphasis on rhythm and vibra-
tion. Rhoda hears a sound, cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down (9). Louis
of course hears something stamping, [a] great beasts foot is chained. It stamps, and
stamps, and stamps (9). I simply want to take note of the movement and rhythm that
characterize Woolf s images. We have phenomena that quiver, gather, swim, stamp, and
oscillate in scale.
Louiss much-analyzed vision of himself as a stalk rooted down to the depths of the
world reinforces the claim that the aesthetic finds its roots in the forces of nature. I am
all fibre, Louis notes, All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my
ribs (12). He goes on to claim that he hears tramplings, tremblings, stirrings round me
(12). Louis is comfortable at this level, acknowledging his participation in the tremors of
the earth. What Louis is uncomfortable with, but cannot avoid, is the sexualization of art
that Woolf and Jinny, especially, insist upon throughout the novel.
Woolf establishes Jinnys centrality to the earthly or exo-human aesthetic discourse
Im interested in immediately in the novel, and she does this in part through an empha-
sis on sexuality. As readers recall, one of the more emphatic and powerful motifs of the
opening pages is the kiss, the kiss that Jinny gives to Louis, that Susan observes and is
devastated by. Notice first how Louis narrates the encounter: She has found me. I am
struck on the nape of the neck. She has kissed me. All is shattered (13). Jinnys version of
the kiss highlights, among other things, the energy that Grosz connects with sexuality and
creativity. Jinny was running, rather than standing still; she sees leaves moving, and they
go on moving despite the seeming absence of a bird in its nest. She is frightened, running
faster and faster, asking What moved the leaves? What moves my heart and legs? (13). In
these early moments, the power of sexual energy is frightening to Jinny on some level, but
notice how she connects, through her questioning, the movement of her own body with
the movement of the natural world. By the paragraphs endafter she kisses Louis with
her heart jumping under her pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though
there is nothing to move them (13)she seems to accept the spiraling together of force,
sexuality, and the impulse to excess, all of which are grounded in nature, animality and
evolution. The paragraph ends with these revealing lines: Now I smell geraniums; I smell
earth mould. I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering
flung over you (13). Think of Cunninghams moth here.
We should note several elements of this passage. Flowers are masterful at evolutionary
excess. Why are flowers so eternally a symbol of sexuality? Because in addition to offering
their aromas as pheromones to all who pass by, they also produce excessively attractive
sexual organs, if you will, that are on display for potentially pollinating insects and for
lovelorn humans to experience. And all of this, as Grosz points out in the interview I
opened with, is manifested through a startling range of shape and color. Jinny smells gera-
niums. And lest we be tempted to read the flowers only in their abstracted sense, Jinny also
smells earth mould. Her connection to nature is of the earth, not merely symbolic. Im
going to bracket the questions of dance and rippling since I want to treat those later in the
essay. But note the paragraphs final lines, I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie
quivering flung over you. In these lines we should recognize a sexual territorializing that
is not without its element of constraint, control, and captivity. Louis is caught in Jinnys
We Make Life 17
net, but it is a net of light, so we mitigate this sense of capture to some degree; light seems
less constraining than other more material nets we can imagine. Perhaps in one sense
Jinnys net of light functions more like a spotlight that reveals Louis in a way he dislikes.
Another significant moment in the opening pages comes about when Rhoda is de-
picted with her basin of petals. She wants white petals that float when she tips the basin
up (18). She drops a twig in as if it is a raft for a drowning sailor and uses a sprig of
Sweet Alice to serve as lighthouse (18). This image is fascinating because we see Rhoda
creating her own imaginary world, but in a sense more literal than we typically indicate by
that phrase imaginary world. Rhodas is a tiny earth, replete with the powerful forces of
tides and the respite of islands that her own ship reaches. That is, she fashions a miniature
world of waves; demonstrating the act of artistic territorializing, she frames her own set of
vibrations. This process is most clearly revealed when Woolf writes from Rhodas vantage:
And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the
waves (19). Rhoda seems to create her own waves in an isolated system. Perhaps this in-
sulated recapitulation of the vibratory is meant to be contrasted to Jinnys intertwining
of her own bodily system with the actual forces of the earth, to borrow a concept from
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In other words, Rhoda may retreat toward a more artificial and
representational world of her own because the forces that surround her are too overpower-
ing. Jinny, while initially frightened by those forces, is nonetheless revealed as a character
who becomes vibratory, or accepts her own becoming vibratory.
Words even take on an animal and oscillating nature in Woolf s opening segments.
This development clearly connects the literary to the animal in Woolf s experimental text.
After a passage in which Louis connects language to social and national distinctions and
anxieties, three other characters reflect upon the nature of words. For Susan they are like
stones, but for Bernard words flick their tails right and left as I speak them . . . They wag
their tails; they flick their tails; they move through the air in flocks, now this way, now that
way, moving all together, now dividing, now coming together (20). Dogs and birds, some
of Woolfs favorite creatures, are used here to once again emphasize movement. The living
quality of language, perhaps even the bodily quality of language that Jorie Graham empha-
sizes seems literal in these moments. We should recall Garrett Stewarts discussion of Woolf s
stylistic drift here: Stewart was quick to remind us that Woolf claimed to want to make
prose move as never before in this novel (qtd. in Goldman 129). The becoming-animal of
language seems parallel to Woolfs intention. And this becoming is linked to enunciation
for Bernard. As I speak them, he claims, words flick their tails or move in flocks. Perhaps
Woolf uses the image of pack to emphasize the communal qualities or intertwining qualities
of spoken language. I speak and you hear, and the words are carried as vibratory units that
connect our bodies. Add to this Jinnys claim that the words are yellow and fiery and we
have language that takes on a Jackson Pollock quality: it moves, it is full of color. It dances
it splashes. When I saw the film Pollock, directed by and featuring Ed Harris, I realized that
Pollock was dancing with painthe wasnt just paintingand Woolf s depiction of lan-
guage here seems quite similar. We might say Woolf dances with language.
Given all of this flocking and darting of language, it would be useful to turn at this
moment to the relationship between birds, birdsong, music and art. We might want to ask
how Woolf understands language as a kind of song, and Ill continue to suggest that we
have to recognize movement itself as crucial to Woolf s aesthetic in the novel.
Birds and birdsong are featured throughout the interludes, and these descriptions reveal
how birds in Woolf point to the inhuman elements of aesthetics. But first, let me detail how
Elizabeth Grosz thinks about such questions. Darwin, Grosz reminds us, argues that music
did not evolve through natural selection but primarily through sexual selection (Grosz
35). Music functions in evolutionary terms by creating pleasure and attracting one creature
to another. In this sense, for Darwin, it is perhaps birdsong that most clearly reveals the
sexual nature of song, the productive role of sexual selection in the elaboration of the arts,
and the mutual entwinement of the arts of decoration, performance, staging, and so on,
with each other (Grosz 36). Birdsong marks territory, highlights skills in the singer, attracts
and mesmerizes other birds and creatures of other species. It also emphasizes emotion and
marks the cultural acquisition of skills that are not reducible to instinct (37-38). Grosz make
an important clarification when she explains, my claim is not that the bird influences the
human, but that the songbird (and the songs of whales) accomplishes something new in
its oratory, a new art, a new coupling of (sonorous) qualities and milieus that isnt just the
production of new musical elements . . . but the opening up of the world itself to the force
of taste, appeal, the bodily, pleasure, desirethe very impulses behind all art (39). Here is
one of Woolfs descriptions of birdsong, from one of the novels interludes:
In the garden the birds that had sung erratically and spasmodically in the dawn
on that tree, on that bush, now sang together in chorus, shrill and sharp; now
together, as if conscious of companionship, now alone as if to the pale blue sky.
They swerved, all in one flight, when the black cat moved among the bushes,
when the cook threw cinders on the ash heap and startled them. Fear was in their
song, and apprehension of pain, and joy to be snatched quickly now at this in-
stant. Also they sang emulously in the clear morning air, swerving high over the
elm tree, singing together as they chased each other, escaping, pursuing, pecking
each other as they turned high in the air. (73-74)
Its not that Woolf s description replicates precisely Groszs Darwinian vision of birdsong,
but rather that we notice the way in which Woolf s passage emphasizes elements such as
the elaboration of emotion, the role of pursuit or sexual play, and the movement of natural
musicalities, or as Grosz explains, the playing out of a certain number of musical themes
. . . to create natural sonatas, love songs, requiems (39).
In a later interlude, Woolfs description emphasizes even more clearly the forcefulness or
excessive quality that Grosz identifies in the becoming-artistic of the animal and natural worlds.
She also pays attention to the coloration of birds, a sexual/artistic quality addressed by Darwin:
Each sang stridently, with passion, with vehemence, as if to let the song burst out
of it, no matter if it shattered the song of another bird with harsh discord. Their
round eyes bulged with brightness; their claws gripped the twig or rail. They sang
exposed without shelter, to the air and the sun, beautiful in their new plumage,
shell veined or brightly mailed, here barred with soft blues, here splashed with
gold, or striped with one bright feather. They sang as if the song were urged out of
them by the pressure of the morning. They sang as if the edge of being were sharp-
ened and must cut, must split the softness of the blue-green light. (109)
We Make Life 19
Here we have passionate song that bursts out of the creature, with enough power to shat-
ter the tune of a fellow crooner. Or more powerfully, the song is represented as the edge
of being . . . sharpened and ready to cut. This particular image, of being itself as a knife
slicing through creation, is especially provocative for our purposes as it emphasizes a kind
of sculpting or carving out of new energies and ontologies through a creative and sexually
competitive activity.
But how do we connect such inhuman forces to the novels human characters? We
do so by asking this question: how do Woolf s characters relate to the vibrational? How
do the characters function as forces of creative rhythm, or in relation to forces of creative
rhythm? And interestingly, it is Jinny who attracts one most in this respect. It is Jinny
who seems most vibrational, and ultimately then, perhaps most creative or artistic, in
the posthumanist sense. This claim runs contrary to our received wisdom about the char-
acters, since Bernard and Louis are the novels practicing writers, and since Bernard and
Rhoda are often linked to Woolf herself in a kind of quasi-biographical, quasi-theoretical
register in Woolf criticism. Moreover, Jinny is sometimes reduced to the bodily, the sexual,
and has famously been labeled a prostitute in Jane Marcuss postcolonial reading of The
Waves. More recently Henke characterizes her as a manic and careless moth whose activi-
ties amount to restless modes of escape.8 These readings of Jinny seem reductive and may
overlook her significance as a character. We need to think more deeply about Jinny, aes-
thetics, and the forces behind Woolf s waves.
So let us return to Jinny, whose natural happiness others clearly envy in the novel
(W 201). Jinny is characterized by undulating movement and her connections to move-
ment, by the bodily as such and her attraction to materiality, and by an awareness of and
appreciation for qualia, or qualitative experiential states. What I am calling Jinnys to-
temic fantasy in The Wavesthe vision that seems to characterize her in the novels terms
and that recurs throughout the texthelps us open our discussion of her character. In the
novels second chapter, Jinny muses, for winter I should like a thin dress shot with red
threads that would gleam in the firelight. Then when the lamps were lit, I should put on
my red dress and it would be thin as a veil, and would wind about my body, and billow
out as I came into the room, pirouetting. It would make a flower shape as I sat down, in
the middle of the room, on a gilt chair (34). At first glance, we might consider Jinnys
musings superficial, concerned with conventional notions of female beauty and fashion.
We might even be tempted to spurn her attention to sexual attractiveness, secretly scold-
ing her for catering to heteronormative definitions of womens beauty and sexual avail-
ability. These temptations lead many readers to view Jinny as shallow. But we should
not overlook the aesthetic-evolutionary aspects of Jinnys fantasy. Normally, in winter, we
cover ourselves with heavy clothes, but Jinny wants a dress that is thin as a veil, that bil-
lows about. This detail suggests a more intimate connection between Jinnys body and the
dress; it moves with her, it reveals her physicality even in winter, it is part of her energetic
field in some sense, vibrating right along with her. And consider the final image of this
totemic passage in relation to the dress: It would make a flower shape as I sat down, in the
middle of the room, on a gilt chair (34). Again, here, the flower serves as a signal of the
excessive, sexualized nature of aesthetic force. The flower-dress envelopes Jinny, presents
her in a performative gesture to her audience of onlookers. She is indeed center stage in
this pirouetting presentation of self, and we know from Groszs work that performance
can be a central element of animal aesthetics. Moreover, the gilt chair reminds us how
Jinnys earthly, passionate becoming-flower is nonetheless accomplished through her at-
tention to couture, in what must be a drawing-room of sorts. High-art or culture finds its
roots in natures excesses, and we are reminded of Donna Haraways recent discussion of
naturecultures.
Jinnys sensibilities are revealed in connection to affect and movement, and she ex-
plicitly links her sense of aesthetics or creation to the inhumanto animality, the floral,
and even to birdsong. In one passage that occurs near the center of the novel, when the
characters are in their thirties, Jinny articulates what I would call one of the deep ideologi-
cal premises of the text that has to do with creative forces manifested through what seem
to be wildly divergent natural and cultural arenas:
In one way or another we make this day, this Friday, some by going to the Law
Courts; others to the city; others to the nursery; others by marching and forming
fours. . . . The activity is endless. . . . Some take train for France; others ship for
India. Some will never come into this room again. One may die tonight. Another
will beget a child. From us every sort of building, policy, venture, picture, poem,
child, factory, will spring. Life comes; life goes; we make life. So you say. (176)
There is much to say about this passage, especially in terms of the role of the mundane
in relation to art, a theme addressed repeatedly in Woolf s work and in Woolf criticism.
I want to emphasize the final suggestion: we make life. If we pause to consider this seem-
ingly straightforward assertion in Woolf s text, we recognize that it makes a claim utterly
salient to our thesis. We dont make art, or literature. We dont live life or experience life.
We make life. We create life. Could Jinny be recognizing the becoming-artistic of life itself
in its inhuman manifestations? The paragraphs that follow this moment suggest as much.
In the next passage, Jinny links her bodily attunement with her Umwelt (or environ-
ment) to movement and change in a specifically animal register. She seems even to reject a
kind of representational or symbolic relation to the world around her. [W]e who live in the
body, she begins, see with the bodys imagination things in outline. I see rocks in bright
sunshine. I cannot take these facts into some cave and, shading my eyes, grade their yellows,
blues, umbers into one substance. I cannot remain seated for long. I must jump up and
go. The coach may start from Piccadilly. I drop all these factsdiamonds, withered hands,
china pots and the rest of it, as a monkey drops nuts from its naked paws. I cannot tell you
if life is this or that. I am going to be buffeted; to be flung up, and flung down, among men,
like a ship on the sea (176). The cave seems to be Woolfs metaphor for a reductively sym-
bolic or conceptual aesthetic that transmutes too drastically the qualities of various colors.
This kind of creativity, the overly representational, is a stagnation for Jinny; it requires too
much sitting or stillness. Like a monkey, she drops facts and moves into the crowd where
she can join the larger forces of the people, to be flung about like a ship on the sea.
Once Jinny has entered the fray, she essentially exhibits for us the process of sexual selec-
tion, with all the elements of taste, attractiveness, battle, territory and marking that Grosz (vis-
-vis Darwin) tells us originate in the animal world and reveal to us the fundamentals of art:
We Make Life 21
For now my body, my companion, which is always sending its signals, the rough
black No, the golden Come in rapid running arrows of sensation, beckons.
Some one moves. Did I raise my arm? Did I look? Did my yellow scarf with the
strawberry spots float and signal? He has broken from the wall. He follows, I am
pursued through the forest. All is rapt, all is nocturnal and the parrots go scream-
ing through the branches. All my senses stand erect. . . . We are out of doors.
Night opens; night traversed by wandering moths; night hiding lovers roaming
to adventure. I smell roses; I smell violets; I see red and blue just hidden. (177)
Notice how the pedestrian scene is suddenly transfigured into one that takes place in the
forest at night. Jinny, like a monkey in the previous passage, is now surrounded by screaming
parrots, pursued by her mate. Her scarf signals in yellow and red whisps like a birds bright
coloration. In fact, later in the passage, she generalizes the scenes meaning by explaining that
she hears the crash and rending of boughs and the crack of antlers as if the beasts of the for-
est were all hunting, all rearing high and plunging down among the thorns (177). One has
pierced me, she continues, One is driven deep within me (177). We should be reminded
here of the significance of territory in Deleuzian terms. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, the
artist is the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark. Property, collec-
tive or individual, is derived from that, even when it is in the service of war and oppression.
Property is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard. As Lorenz
says, coral fish are posters. The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive.9 Grosz
helpfully glosses this concept by reminding us that the boundary is not self-protective but
erotico-proprietorial: it defines a stage of performance, an arena of enchantment, a mise-en-
scne for seduction that brings together heterogeneous and otherwise unrelated elements:
melody and rhythms, a series of gestures, bows, and dips, a tree or a perch, a nest, a clearing,
an audience of rivals, an audience of desired ones (Grosz 48).
And if we have any doubt about Jinnys experience, the following sentences near the
end of this passage seem incontrovertibly to link her sensibilities to the becoming-artistic
of the animal and inhuman worlds: Now let us sing our love songCome, come, come.
Now my gold signal is like a dragon-fly flying taut. Jug, jug, jug, I sing like the nightingale
whose melody is crowded in the too narrow passage of her throat (177).
As we continue to think about creating life, about movement and affect, Ill turn to
another crucial scene for Jinny in the novel. This is in fact the coming to fruition of what I
called her totemic fantasy earlier in this essay. Woolf signals or hails this fantasys mani-
festation not only when she begins the scene with the phrase Here are gilt chairs in the
empty, the expectant rooms but even more bluntly when later in the passage she has
Jinny claim, This is what I have dreamt; this is what I have foretold. I am native here. . . .
This is the most exciting moment I have ever known (101-102). Just as the earlier fantasy
has led us to expect, the moment is a social one dominated by taste, appeal, the bodily,
pleasure, [and] desire (Grosz 39). It is also especially compelling because of the central
role that movement and dance play in it. You will remember that Jinny has arrived after
dark at what seems to be a socially respectable dance hall. She describes her prepared self
in sensory and artistic terms throughout the passage: My silk legs rub smoothly together.
The stones of a necklace lie cold on my throat. . . . All is exact, prepared. My hair is swept
in one curve. My lips are precisely red (101). And once again, in what would seem a spe-
cifically cultural milieu, where men are checking their ties and pocket-handkerchiefs, we
have the most organic description of Jinnys state of mind or of being: I now begin, she
claims, to unfurl, in this scent, in this radiance, as a fern when its curled leaves unfurl
(102). She continues in this scene to characterize herself as a plant that is rooted, but yet
flows: I flutter. I ripple. I stream like a plant in the river, flowing this way, flowing that
way, but rooted, so that he may come to me (102). Dance may represent the most per-
plexing of artistic forms to those who attempt to separate aesthetics from the bodily. In
its way this is an obvious claim since for dancers the body is the instrument. The formal
execution of forces, speeds, qualities and shapes all must be rendered by the body. Dance
helps us think about the vibrational in its specificity as bodily, and about the bodys re-
sponse to and participation in forces and qualities that are clearly other than human. In
Jinnys totemic fantasy come true, dancing to music with her partner among the gilt chairs
seems to frame a moment of the becoming-artistic of her life. Once she has settled on her
partner, they begin their dance:
Now with a little jerk, like a limpet broken from a rock, I am broken off: I fall with
him; I am carried off. We yield to this slow flood. We go in and out of the hesitat-
ing music. Rocks break the current of the dance; it jars, it shivers. In and out we
are swept now into this large figure; it holds us together; we cannot step outside its
sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his hard,
mine flowing, are pressed together within its body; it holds us together; and then
lengthening out, in smooth, in sinuous folds, rolls us between it, on and on. (103)
We can read the figure here as a frame. Notice how it functions to cordon off a space
of sexual performance in which the life-forces of two bodies interact in a creative duet.
The framing created by the music and dance seems clearest when Woolf writes, it holds
us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly
encircling walls (103). For Jinny, then, it makes sense that dance, the most bodily of
aesthetic practices, figures so prominently in her totemic moment of becoming-artistic.
Jinny is, after all, the one who spins, and pirouettes, and flutters. Her attraction to dance
emphasizes the active force in art, the affective, that which resists hardening into concepts.
So we might understand Jinny as being positively tied to or actively participating
in the vibrational. As the scene above demonstrates she makes life itself artistic; she is in
herself, in the unfolding of her own life or being, perhaps the most creative character in
The Waves, if we understand the artistic as the opening up of life itself to rhythm, desire,
and excess. And if we understand the artistic to have its roots or its tentacles well beyond
the human. Thus, when we are told that Louis has known little natural happiness, we
instinctively think of Jinny as his foil. The formally or conceptually artistic in this text are
potentially less creative than Jinny, who some suspect may be a call-lady.
All of this opens our awareness to one of Bernards observations, a statement that re-
veals his own recognition of Jinnys mode: We are creators. We too have made something
that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats
and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can
subjugate and make part of the illumined and everlasting road (146). But the creations
here are hardly restricted to human worlds. Rather, the creative force that Woolf reveals,
We Make Life 23
especially in characters like Jinny, opens the human onto its own participation in the in-
human. Woolf understands that force, intensity, art and movement connect the human,
the animal, the earth, and the cosmos.
Notes
1. Elizabeth Grosz, The Creative Impulse, interview by Julie Copeland, Sunday Morning Radio National, 14
August 2005, 2.
2. Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia, 2008), 3.
3. All subsequent citations of Grosz are from Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth.
4. See Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),169.
5. For further discussion of the refrain, see especially chapters ten and eleven in Gilles Deleuze and Flix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1987).
6. It is important to note here the Deleuzian reading of The Waves that Beatrice Monaco presents in her recent
book Machinic Modernism: The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce (New York: Pal-
grave, 2008). Monacos reading has points of overlap with my own, and she compellingly discusses Woolf s
novel as a narrative organism which pulses with cosmic, territorial and artistic life (162). Monaco
emphasizes the machinic elements of the novel, while I am more interested in the aestheticization of life.
7. See the introductory chapter in Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (Columbia University
Press, 2009).
8. See Henke, p. 135.
9. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 316.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
___. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Goldman, Jane. Columbia Critical Guides: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, The Waves. New York: Columbia
Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008.
___. The Creative Impulse. Interview by Julie Copeland. Sunday Morning Radio National. August 14, 2005.
<http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/s1435592.htm>.
Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Henke, Suzette. The Waves as Ontological Trauma Narrative. Virginia Woolf and Trauma: Embodied Texts. Ed.
Suzette Henke and David Eberly. New York: Pace University Press, 2007.
Marcus, Jane. Britannia Rules The Waves. In Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century British
Literary Canons. Ed. Karen R. Lawrence. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. 136-62.
McGee, Patrick. The Politics of Modernist Form; or, Who Rules The Waves? Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader.
Ed. Maren Linett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Monaco, Beatrice. Machinic Modernism: The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce. New
York: Palgrave, 2008.
Rohman, Carrie. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
THE REAL WORLD: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND ECOFEMINISM
by Diana L. Swanson
T
hank you, Vara, for that very generous introduction. Its an honor and a pleasure
to be giving the closing keynote for this wonderful conference. Thank you, Kris-
tin, for inviting me to give this talk. Everyone, please join me in thanking Kristin
for all the work she did to organize this 20th annual conference and congratulating her on
its success!
I titled this talk the real world because Woolf uses the phrase to describe what she
tries to capture in words. I also chose this title because I believe that real oak treesto go
back to an opening exchange at this conferenceare more important than our words. But
our words can help determine whether oak trees survive.
As ecofeminism teaches us, whether oak trees survive also has much to do with
whether we, as a species, confront and do away with the misogyny and male dominance
that mark most if not all of our societies.
So what might be the relationship of Woolf s thought to ecofeminism? Woolf is un-
doubtedly a formative thinker in the history of feminism in Western civilization. But can
Woolf offer insights and approaches useful to us as we grapple with the ecological crisis of
the 21st century and the ways that patriarchal gender ideology and arrangements contrib-
ute to human destruction of environments and species?
You see from these opening questions that, for this presentation and the discussion I
hope will follow, I am not so much interested in using ecological feminism and ecological
literary criticism to analyze Woolf s literary works. Rather I am asking how Woolf can
help us today in our quest to develop the non-anthropocentric and non-androcentric
understandings of the world necessary to changing human behavior towards the other-
than-human world. Can Woolf be a guide or at least a helpful fellow hiker on the trail as
we learn to live in ecologically responsible ways?
I believe that the solution to our global and local environmental crises lies in chang-
ing our modes of thinking and therefore our actions. We need a paradigm shift that de-
centers both man and homo sapiens. To misquote Thoreau: in imagination is the salvation
of the world.
Thinkers as diverse as Australian ecofeminist philosopher and environmentalist Val
Plumwood and American Christian theologian and Biblical interpretation professor Wal-
ter Wink confirm this idea that we must call upon imagination. In Environmental Culture:
The Ecological Crisis of Reason, Plumwood points out the widespread ecological denial that
diverts human energy and resources into debates about whether there really is a serious en-
vironmental problem (and apparently in some political circles right now the seriousness of
the Gulf oil spill is being questioned) rather than in taking action on solutions to climate
change, pollution, habitat destruction, etc. She asserts that the ecological crisis is not
just or even primarily a crisis of technology, but is rather a crisis of rationality, morality,
and imagination (97-98). Walter Wink makes a similar point in different language: We
The Real World 25
are living in an apocalyptic time disguised as normal, and that is why we have not responded
appropriately. If we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction, as some scientists tell us
we are, our response so far has been scarcely commensurate to the challenge (161). Both
Plumwood and Wink assert that rationalism as we know it is not an adequate response to
our environmental crisis. I underline as we know it because I am not arguing against rea-
son or science but rather taking up Plumwoods distinction between reason and rational-
ism as a particular form of reason that is radically detached and oppositional to the body.
Plumwoods major argument in her first book, Feminism and the Mastery of Na-
ture, is foundational to much of ecofeminist thought and similar arguments have also
been developed and supported by many other feminist thinkers of various schools of
thought. This argument goes as follows. Human/nature, mind/body, subject/object du-
alism and the identification of reason and mind with the human (and man in particular)
and instinct, the body, emotion, and irrationality with women and the nonhuman has
been a major cause of our ecological problem. This dualistic worldview has concep-
tualized other-than-human beings as passive, inferior natural resources legitimately
available for human use and exploitation. This way of thinking assigns the status of
subject to men and object to everyone and everything else, living and nonliving. Our
ethical systems, seeing only human beings as thou, see all else as it, thus justifying
our destruction of nonhuman lives and of the natural environment. More recently, the
technological developments of the last 100 years have so intimately shaped our daily
lives, at least in the so-called developed world, that we experience ourselves as largely
separate from and independent of nature. We have become so distanced that we must
learn once again to see, hear, and feel the rest of nature and to imagine the nonhuman
as connected to us and ourselves as part of the natural world. According to Plumwood,
in this dilemma we can turn to certain kinds of imaginative literature which write na-
ture as agent, re-subjectivising and re-intentionalizing the non-human as an ethical and
intentional subject of narrative (53-54).
Walter Wink also asserts the importance of imagination. In his book, The Human Be-
ing: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man, he uses the nuclear crisis during the Cold
War as an example of the failure of rationality and the success of imagination in confront-
ing an overwhelming problem.
Nothing can save us that is possible, the poet W. H. Auden intoned over the
madness of the nuclear crisis.We who must die demand a miracle. The miracle
we received came about because people like the physician Helen Caldicott re-
fused to accept nuclear annihilation. She forced her hearers to visualize the ef-
fects of their inaction. Imagination . . . is the sole organ capable of conveying a
truth so overwhelming that we cannot take it in. (160)
Carol Cohns now-classic study, Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense
Intellectuals, supports Winks view. As a participant observer at a university center on de-
fense technology and arms control, she discovered a world of extraordinary abstraction
in which intellectuals built the reasoning used to explain why it is not safe to live without
nuclear weapons (688) and in which there seems to be no graphic reality behind the
words, as they speak of first strikes . . . and limited nuclear war (690); over and over
I found I could not stay connected, could not keep human lives as my reference point
(708-709). Dualistic, rationalist, and technology-driven visions led us to this ecological
moment. Science and technology as usual will not solve the ecological crisis. Masculinist
rationalism disconnected from emotion and the body, modes of reason that conceptualize
feeling as opposed to rationality, will not chart a new direction.
Imaginative literature can help us break out of the subject/object dualism that struc-
tures and constrains our worldview in Western culture. We need literature that calls us to
participate in ecological ways of seeing and to reimagine the real world. We need literature
that can teach us how to pay attention to the reality of beings and things beyond the man-
made environmentsboth physical and virtualin which we now spend so much of our
time. We need literature that can help us imagine nonhuman beings as having perspec-
tives, meaning, and purposes. We need literature that models for us a practice of praise for
and wonder at what is beyond us.
So I have two central questions:
1) Can Woolf s work help us to understand how feminism is important for en-
vironmentalism, that is, how solving the problem of gender and womens oppression
is necessary for solving the environmental crisis? As an aside here, my point is not that
doing away with the oppression of women will, lo and behold, solve the environmental
problem too, but rather that if we dont address the oppression of women and the femi-
nine we wont fully address environmental destruction and vice versaeach is necessary
though not sufficient to the other.
2) Can Woolf s writing help us imagine the reality and subjectivities of other-
than-human beings?
I: ECOFEMINISM AND WOOLFS FEMINISM
Clearly, not just any literature will do in order to help us develop ecological imagi-
nations and de-activate our dualistic thinking. Metaphors, such as Mother Earth and
the Virgin Land, and narratives of the hero, of exploration, adventure, and the frontier,
among others, have participated in creating the instrumentalist, exploitative mode of see-
ing the natural world as studies such as Annette Kolodnys The Lay of the Land: Metaphor
as Experience and History in American Life and Letters have shown. These metaphors and
narratives imbue various literary genres from epic to lyric to drama to the novel, and from
canonical fiction to science fiction and fantasy. (The violence and destruction perpetrated
by the English scientists and adventurers in Arthur Conan Doyles science fiction novel
The Lost World [1912] offers just one example contemporary to Woolf.)
So how do we tell things differently? Science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le
Guins Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction offers, I think, part of an answer. In this essay, Le
Guin tells us that, while researching and planning Three Guineas (1938) Woolf wrote a
Glossary in her notebooks, and among the entries are heroism, defined as botulism,
and hero, defined as bottle (150). Apparently Woolf identified the hero or warrior as
poisonous to life. Le Guin agrees, and in place of the story of the spear, the hero, the
hunter, the warrior, Le Guin offers the story of the carrier bag, the gatherer, the trickster,
the survivor. Le Guin says:
The Real World 27
The trouble is, weve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we
may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that
I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story . . . the life story. . . . People
have been telling the life story for ages, in all sorts of words, and ways. Myths of
creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels. . . .
The Hero has decreed . . . first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that
of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its
mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including
the novel, is conflict, and third, that the story isnt any good if he isnt in it.
I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper,
fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words.
Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding
things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us. (152-153)
The novel as carrier bag or container. The narrative as not confined to a story of conflict in
the form of exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement. Le Guin clearly connects
the male-centered anthropological theory of Man-the-Hunter with the conflict-centered
theory of what makes a good story. The two go together. The inaccuracy of these theo-
ries is that they exclude women and the feminine from the human and the valuable; the
danger of these theories is that they valorize violence, war, death, and sacrifice for abstract
goals such as honor, freedom, and nation while they negate cooperation, peace, survival,
and the maintenance work of daily living.
Le Guins ideas are consonant with Woolf s ideas about the novel and women. One
of the common complaints about Woolf s novels is that they lack action, plot, even char-
acter. What people are identifying is that her novels lack heroic action, plot, and character,
and even go so far as to mock heroismperhaps the most famous example being her
characterization of Mr. Ramsays heroic approach to philosophy and to life. (Paula Gunn
Allen in Kochinnenako in Academe from The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine
in American Indian Traditions argues convincingly that what constitutes a story at all is
culturally defined and can differ greatly.) In A Room of Ones Own (1929), Woolf was one
of the first critics to point to the masculine bias of the literary canon: it is the masculine
values that prevail. . . . This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with
war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-
room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shopeverywhere and
much more subtly the difference of value persists (77). In her case, whether or not it was
true for all the moderns, Woolf s endeavors to make the accent [fall] differently from that
of old, as she puts it in Modern Fiction, have much to do with shaping an unheroic
narrative in which there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or
catastrophe in the accepted style (CR1: 150).
Like Le Guin, Woolf also describes the novel as a container for emotions and mean-
ings, only Woolf tends to use architectural imagery. In A Room of Ones Own, for example,
she describes the novel as a
structure leaving a shape upon the minds eye, built now in squares, now pagoda
shaped, now throwing out wings and arcades, now solidly compact and domed
like the Cathedral of Saint Sofia at Constantinople. This shape. . . starts in one
the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it. But that emotion at once blends
itself with others, for the shape is not made by the relation of stone to stone,
but by the relation of human being to human being. (74)
However, interestingly, Le Guin describes home as another, larger kind of pouch or

bag, a container for people and the shrine or museum as containers for the sacred (152).
Architects themselves talk about buildings as containers creating certain shapes and se-
quences of spaces that evoke certain feelings and enable certain kinds of activities within
them. The meaning of the architecture is discovered, and in part created, by the user.1
Woolf often says similar things about the novelthat its meanings are not conveyed di-
rectly, expositorily, but rather the reader apprehends through reading, through experienc-
ing the text and putting the pieces together. Mark Hussey in The Singing of the Real World
discusses Woolf s interest in writing about nonverbal states, experiences, and realities and
describes this aspect of Woolf s novels as follows: the meaning can only emerge as part
of its overall context; by shaping round what is unsayable, it is said in the act of reading
(111). See also Patricia Laurences important study The Reading of Silence.
In A Room of Ones Own, Woolf warns that the overly masculine narrative, single-
focused and ego-focused, obscures everything beyond the masculine I. Her narrator
describes reading a new novel by Mr. A and says that after reading a chapter or two
a shadow seemed to lie across the page . . . . a shadow shaped something like the letter
I. One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it.
Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking, I was not quite sure (103). Thus,
this insistently masculine and privileged vision (polished for centuries by good teach-
ing and good feeding at the great public schools and universities [104]), which Woolf
contrasts to her ideal of androgyny and incandescence, obscures both women and nature,
making them both unreal and secondary to the hero.
Thus, I hope Ive started to answer my first question; Woolf s ideas about fiction help
to clarify the connection between the ecological crisis and patriarchy. If the stories that
drive our culture have been Man Against Himself, Man Against Society, Man Against
Nature, then Woolf critiques these master narratives and argues that we need alternatives.
Woolf s novels offer alternative narratives that de-valorize the story of the hero and
revalue the story of life. Her first two novels, I think, are structured in somewhat more
traditional and teleological ways than her later ones. In The Voyage Out (1915) Woolf uses
the bildungsroman and in Night and Day (1917) she uses the courtship plot, although
various critics have pointed out how Woolf chafes against and to some degree rewrites the
requirements of these genres. From Jacobs Room (1922) on, however, Woolf creates nar-
rative structures that do not present us with a central conflict and lead usTHOK!to
a clear resolution. Her later novels, rather, focus on connections, disconnections, conti-
nuities, discontinuities; their narratives are webs of time, people, places, animals, plants,
insects, and things that are woven, broken, and rewoven.
We all know that each of Woolf s novels has a different structure and a different
method and thus addresses the challenge of creating a nonpatriarchal plot differently; I
dont need to belabor that point. There isnt time to look at every novel, so I am taking
The Years (1937), one of my favorite novels, and one I think is still under-appreciated, as
The Real World 29
an example. Tonya Krouse, in her paper on the politics of nature in The Years on Friday,
offered a significant analysis of how the novel moves away from a teleological model of
time. She showed how the descriptions of the natural world intrude on the plot, displace
conventionally significant events, interrupt conversations, disrupt urban and domestic
spaces, as well as connect scenes to one another. I would add that the motif of Eleanors
dot with rays, which repeats throughout the story as she does the household accounts, sits
at a committee meeting, attends the family party at the end of the novel, is emblematic
of the narrative trajectory of the novel which is patterned on the moon and the sun that
rise and fall and slowly, wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the weeks, the
years [that pass] one after another across the sky (4), conveying a sense of time as cycling
and repetitive, a kind of spiral dance. The sunflower on the tiles decorating the buildings
Eleanor had built for the poor repeats this shape of a center with rays coming out from it
and thus connects this narrative structure with the projects of housing and helping that
Eleanor pursues and with the focus on cooperation, the maintenance work of living, and
the cycles of birth and death that Le Guins life story is about.
A Room of Ones Own connects this literary experimentation to womens emancipa-
tion and to nature. At the end of the book, she advises the young women who make up
her audience to escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not
always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the
trees or whatever it may be in themselves (118). I find it very suggestive that Woolf says
the sky, too, and the trees. Earlier in the book, her narrator says that, when she inherited
500 a year, my aunts legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and
imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration,
a view of the open sky (39). Woolf is certainly not alone in English literature for con-
necting the open sky or the open sea with freedom. Conventionally, however, the freedom
referred to is freedom from the domestic, the feminine, the repetitive. Woolf, however,
connects the sky with the emancipation of women and with her critique both of womens
forced restriction to the domestic sphere and of the devaluation of domestic creativity.
She asks women to look out the window and, more, to walk out and find out what their
own way of seeing tells them about the sky and the trees. For women, she says, are not
even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally,
will pass a tombstone or a signpostor a tree?without feeling an irresistible desire to
cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert or Chas. must do in obedience to their instinct, which
murmurs if it sees a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est moi. And, of course,
it may not be a dog, I thought, . . . it may be a piece of land or a man with curly black
hair (52). Here Woolf suggests that womens turning our eyes to the sky or the trees may
be in the service of finding a non-possessive, non-imperialist approach to our relations as
human beings to the earth and the sky as well as other people. IF, that is, we hold on to
the differences of psychology, perspective, and knowledge that our unpaid-for education
has developed, as Woolf warns us in both A Room of Ones One and Three Guineas; if we
try to form feminist visions that offer true alternativesfor all sexes and gendersrather
than ask for equal participation in the same old story, the same old plot, the same round
and round of the mulberry tree.
In the language of current standpoint theory, we might say that Woolf s challenge to
women is a challenge to develop the subversive potential of womens social location into a
counter-hegemonic ecological standpoint and we can extend that challenge to all of us to

find subversive epistemological potential in our own social locations.
II: THE REALITY AND SUBJECTIVITIES OF OTHER-THAN-HUMAN BEINGS
2. So we come to my second question: the question of how to see, how to reimag-

ine the real world, how to look at other-than-human nature in a way that promotes
ecological relations between ourselves and the rest of the world. Can Woolf show us
ways of seeing that are not possessivenot my woman, my land, my dog, my lumber,
my oil? Can Woolf s writing help us imagine the reality and subjectivities of other-
than-human beings?
Several of Woolf s short stories from the years between Night and Day and Jacobs
Room experiment with ways to get beyond the human-centered point of view. In The
Mark on the Wall, Woolf s narrator, unlike Mr. A, does not obscure the tree but tries to
imagine the life experiences of a tree:
the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the
slow, delicious ooze of sap. . . . The song of birds must sound very loud and
strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make
laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin
green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut
red eyes. (CSF 82-83)
Rather than personifying the tree, that is, imagining what a human being would
feel like being a tree, the narrator tries to imagine how a tree feels. Thus, this narrator
imagines the subjectivity of a nonhuman being, taking seriously the possibility that a
treeusually excluded from subjectivity even more than animals and birdshas a per-
spective on the world. Note the phrases must sound, must feel, which indicate the
speculativeness of this passage. The narrator thus indicates awareness of the uncertainty
of her tree portrait and openness to another view. In this way, the narrator is starting
to imagine the world from a nonhuman perspective, starting to shift the human from
the center.
Perhaps the most stunning short story in this regard is Kew Gardens. The third
person narrator is settled firmly in one flower bed and describes the people walking past
only to the extent that they are within ear and eye shot of the flower bed. The patches of
sunlight and shade play over the backs of the human beings as they do over the pebbles
and the snail in the flower bed beneath the red, blue, and yellow blooms. The human be-
ings are in the same relation to the sun and Kew and its trees as the snail is to the sun and
the flowers. Woolf also creates a snails eye view of the world:
brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat blade-like trees that waved
from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin
crackling textureall these objects lay across the snails progress between one
stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the
arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other
The Real World 31
human beings. np.
And again we hear bits and pieces of human conversation.

Thus, the rhythm of the story goes back and forth between the human wanderers
in Kew and the nonhuman. The story asks us to give up our focus on people and their
desires and goals which are implicitly compared to the snails goal, and the thrushs and
the butterflies. Instead of giving us insights into and resolutions of the human beings
relationships and problems, the story asks us to be open to the possibility that the other-
than-human beings present in the same place as the human characters also have goals
and problems and make decisions. The story also asks us to experience rhythm, shape,
color, light, texture, and to experience them from the snails perspective as much as from
the perspective of the human beings. Reading this story is a sensuous and contemplative
experience rather than the pursuit of a linear narrative and the fate of a character. Woolf
asks us to sit still and pay attention to the nonhuman as well as the human and to pay
attention to our bodily senses, especially to sight and sound, and the experiences and thus
the knowledge our senses give us.
Historians of science have traced the role of Kew Gardens in the development of botany
and of empire building. In each of their studies, historians Lucile H. Brockway, Richard
Drayton, and John Gascoigne show how Kew, which began as a royal pleasure garden that
displayed the culture and power of the king, became a center of botanical research in the ser-
vice of the empire as well as a public park. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, botanists
were sent out from Kew around the world to gather specimens and study the flora of the
globe and eventually to create a network of botanical gardens throughout the empire. This
work and expense was justified to the government by putting Kew and the other botanical
gardens around the empire to work for the benefit of commercial agriculture, making pos-
sible viable plantation production of such valuable goods as cinchona (quinine), rubber, and
sisal. Woolfs story Kew Gardens suggests that what has been viewed instrumentally as
natural resources has its own presence and subjectivity, lives alongside us and with us even
as we use and study it for our own purposes whether commercial or aesthetic.
G.A. Cohen in Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality defines an agentic being, a
being that has agencyas an independent centre of value, and an originator of projects
that demand my respect (qtd. in Plumwood 239). In this sense of the termas beings
that have independent value, as beings who are ends in themselves not just means to our
human ends, and as beings that originate their own actions and purposesother living
beings, from snails to birds to dogs, even to bacteria, do have agency. In Kew Gardens,
Woolf writes of all living beings as indeed having agency that we can and should respect.
Woolf s story The Mark on the Wall also shows a snail as having agency through
the revelation at the end of the story that the mark on the wall is a snail. This discovery
jerks the narrator out of her musings, requires the narrator to get out of her own mind and
realize the impossibility of human control of the other-than-human world. She cannot
control where snails go nor entirely what they mean. In Chapter IV of Jacobs Room, while
Mrs. Pascoe is inside her cottage, a bumble-bee visits a foxglove; while Mrs. Pascoe goes
to her well for water, the bee visits the teasle and then buzzes back to Mrs. Pascoes garden
patch, and a peacock butterfly spreads its wings on the teasle. The bee and the butterfly
are doing their chores, too.
The number and variety of references to the nonhuman world in Jacobs Room are re-
markable. These references include a St. Johns Wort bush, more butterflies, snow, fields,
wind, streams, rooks, trees, moss, convolvus moths, clouds, furze bushes blackened by frost,
a bunch of twigs floating down a stream and catching on a rock, dawns and sunsets, waves,
stars, storms, sparrows, wild red cyclamen, tortoises, a flock of wild ducks. Some of these
references may develop symbolic meanings, such as the bee in Mrs. Pascoes garden which
may reference bee goddesses of the ancient Mediterranean worldBonnie Scott mentioned
these goddesses in her keynote; the purple aster beaten to the ground in the first chapter as
well as the many other purple flowers in the book foreshadow death and mourning as Elisa
Sparks so graphically demonstrated in her presentation; and the wild grasses and the foxes
on Dodds Hill certainly suggest untamed sexualities in Mrs. Jarvis and Mrs. Flanders as
Judith Allen and Vara Neverow have discussed. However, the presence, variety, and detail
of these references to animate and inanimate parts of the nonhuman world are in excess of
what would be sufficient for symbolic uses. Also, they do not, for the most part, instigate
or develop any human events or conversation among the human characters but seem to be
present for the readers to notice, to pay attention to. Im reminded of one of the mantras of
this conference: Nothing is simply one thing. As Mayuko Nakazawa pointed out earlier in
this conference in her discussion of trees in The Waves (1931), these nonhuman presences
are both part of the outer world and part of the human symbolic world. Jacobs Room repeat-
edly calls attention to what usually goes unnoticed by human beings at least in the industrial
world of Woolfs England and the postindustrial world of Europe and North America today.
By repeated references to the nonhuman, the novel calls attention to the fact that plants,
animals, and insects, waters, winds, and sky are there, are always with us whether we notice
them or not. Reality, life itself, includes the nonhuman in its ongoing, unending being
and variety. Thus Woolf creates a constant weaving in and out of the nonhuman presence
throughout the books fabric, a repeated reminder that the world is larger than human be-
ings, their relationships, and their creationsbe those creations a stone cottage on a cliff in
Cornwall or the Acropolis in Athens.
Similarly in The Years, the pigeons coo at various points in the novel, coming and
going on errands and in relationships of their own. Pigeons shuffled in the tree tops, let-
ting fall a twig or two on the first page of the novel (3) and the pigeons were shuffling
on the tree tops on the second-to-last page (433). In between, the pigeons croon, Take
two coos, Taffy, take two coos . . . . tak over and over. Kitty hears them in Oxford; Elea-
nor, Sara, and Rose hear them in London; Edward has trouble hearing them although he
does tell us they are wood pigeons (433). The opening scenes of each chapter describe the
weatherthe wind, sun, rain, clouds, cold, warmthand their effects on the landscape,
birds, animals, insects, and people, repeated reminders that all of us, human and nonhu-
man alike, are subject to these natural, cosmic forces beyond our control. In Plumwoods
words, we human beings are positioned equally and along with the whole cast of non-
humans in the drama of the ecological world (51-52). This understanding of ourselves as
equally a part of the ecological world is what we need to fully take in and act upon if we
are to respond adequately to the ecological crises of our time.
Thus, the snails, the pigeons, the cows, the trees, the asters, the bees, the wind and
rain are synechdoches for the nonhuman and at certain pointsas many papers at this
conference have shownthey are symbols of human ideas or concerns. However, the
The Real World 33
use of synechdoche and symbol does not require that these nonhuman beings and things
become merely literary objects of human use. Although they create meanings in Woolf s
texts through representing the vast and various reality of other-than-human being and
sometimes through referencing literary and philosophical traditions, they are still also
meaningful as individual snail, thrush, aster, bee. Their identities do not merge with hu-
man identities. Woolfs texts underline their material presence and subjectivity at the same time
as they operate as synechdoche or symbol. In fact, the synechdoches could not work and mean as
they do without the snail, thrush, flowers, bee retaining their specificity and subjectivity.
Woolf asks us to read in a way that challenges conventions: first, to refrain from as-
suming nature is a metaphor for human concerns; and second, when images of nature do
work metaphorically, to see the vehicle and the tenor, the bee and the mythic vision of
female divinity and creativity, as equally real and significant, both as the unity that cre-
ates the metaphor and as distinctone a living being and one a human idea. Pigeons are
members of the dove family and thus their presence in The Years underscores the novels
theme of war and peace. In a more irreverent manner, so do the sparrows and starlings
making their discordant chatter round the eaves of St. Martins, [whitening] the heads
of the sleek statues holding rods or rolls of paper in Parliament Square (89). However,
the pigeons, sparrows, and starlings, I argue, are also references to pigeons, sparrows, and
starlings and their co-residence in this world with human beings. Functioning as a symbol
does not negate the specificity of the particular being described.
Woolf s texts ask us to recognize and pay attention to other-than-human beings as
our fellow inhabitants of this earth and to imagine their subjectivities and purposes; her
texts ask us to recast our understanding of ourselves as a species that is equally part of the
ecological world. Woolf s writing also asks us to reimagine the plots of our livesboth in-
dividual and collective. If we were actually to rise to these challenges, we would radically
change our decision-making about our own projects. (We would also behave differently in
our own backyardsliterally. I highly recommend Sarah Steins wonderfully written and
innovative Noahs Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards.) We would think
very differently about progress and success. We would think very differently about
ethics and the cost-benefit ratios of economic developmentsay of deep-water off-shore
oil drilling, for example. At this point in time, we dont enter the lives of algae, birds,
fish, shrimp, marsh grasses, trees into our ethical and economic calculus as valuable in
themselves and with a right to their lives. And we should. As teachers of and writers about
Woolf s novels, essays, and short stories, we can invite our students and colleagues to en-
gage in the reimagining of the life story of this earth and participate in what may be the
most important work at handcreating a new ethos of respect for, attention to, wonder
at, and delight in the other-than-human world. We can help to birth the paradigm shift.
Notes
1. Conversation with my brother, Scott M. H. Swanson, architect.
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Allen, Paula Gunn. Kochinnenako in Academe : Three Approaches to interpreting a Keres Indian Tale. The Sa-
cred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. 222-244.
Brockway, Lucile H. Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. American
Ethnologist 6.3 (1979): 449-465. <http://www.jstor.org/> Accessed 14 June 2004.
Cohn, Carol. Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals. Signs 12.4 (1987): 687-718.
Dick, Susan, ed. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
Drayton, Richard. Natures Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the Improvement of the World. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Gascoigne, John. Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age
of Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Hussey, Mark. The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf s Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State
Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor As Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel
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Laurence, Patricia Ondek. The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition. Stanford: Stanford
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. The Ecocriticism Reader. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and
Harold Fromm. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996. 149-154.
Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London and New York: Routledge,
2002.
Stein, Sarah. Noahs Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards. Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1993.
Wink, Walter. The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002.
Woolf, Virginia. Jacobs Room. (1922) NY: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950.
. Kew Gardens. (1919) A facsimile edition of the 1927 Hogarth Press edition with decorations by Vanessa
Bell. London: Hogarth (Chatto & Windus), 1999.
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. Modern Fiction. The Common Reader: First Series. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. NY: Harvest/ Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1953, 1984.
. A Room of Ones Own. (1928) NY: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957.
. The Years. (1937) NY: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965.
VIRGINIA AND LEONARD, AS I REMEMBER THEM
by Cecil Woolf
O
f the one or two questions in life that I prefer to duck, perhaps the most frequent
comes from that daunting and amiable creature, the Bloomsbury enthusiast.
What was she like? they ask.
In an essay on Dr. Johnsons friend, Mrs Hester Thraleone of the last things she
wroteVirginia says, The more we know of people the less we can sum them up. Just
as we think we hold the bird in our hand, the bird flutters off. You wont be surprised
when I tell you that it never crossed my mind, all those years ago, that one day I should
have to stand up in front of an illustrious audience, many of them Woolf specialists, and
speak to them about those pivotal members of Bloomsbury, Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
Leonard was my uncle, one of my father, Philips, elder brothers.
I wonder if by a concerted effort of imagination, we can go back mentally over sev-
enty years to the late 1930s, the eve of the Second World War, when I was a schoolboy of
about twelve or thirteen. Let us visit the small Sussex village of Rodmell, where Leonard
and Virginia had their country house. They had bought it in 1919 and until the war came,
used it as a weekend and holiday home. Most of the village consists of The Street, as its
called, which runs off the main Lewes-Newhaven road. On either side The Street is lined
with chalkbound flint garden walls, behind which are cottages, most of them inhabited by
farm workers. This is a time before Rodmell, like so many villages, became gentrified dor-
mitories where residents commute daily to London. Then it had a Post Office, a general
store, a blacksmiths and a pub. Only the pub has survived.
After a few minutes walk we reach a long, two-storey wooden clapboard house on
the right, which lies a few yards back from the road. Pushing open the garden gate of
Monks House is the signal for what seems like a pack of furiously barking dogs to descend
upon us. A brick path leads past the end of the house to a huge garden and orchard.
The garden is a kind of patchwork quilt of trees, shrubs, flowers, vegetables, fruit, roses
and crocus merging into Brussels sprouts and gooseberry bushes. In the background one
glimpses garden statues among the undergrowth, like peeping toms. This leafy, flowery
Eden, which died with Leonard himself, deserves a study in itself.
From one of the several greenhouses my uncle emerges to welcome us with a warm,
friendly smile. Knowing what children like, he fumbles in a capacious pocket and pro-
duces a bag of his favourite mint humbugs. Leonard is in his early sixties, of medium
height, lean, still tanned from the Ceylon sun and weatherbeaten by the English climate,
with a shock of silver hair. His eyes are bright blue, deep set under bushy eyebrows, and
his face is deeply lined. His head, which juts forward, is long and spare: he has the rug-
ged profile of an Old Testament prophet, Isaiah smoking a pipe. He is wearing ancient
corduroy trousers and his jacket is of coarse tweed. His country shoes are heavy, made of
good leatherlooking back Im reminded of Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouseand one
notices that round his woollen tie is an opal ring. His voice is tremulousthe voice of a
man perhaps twenty years older. I almost forgot to tell you that perched on his shoulder
is a tiny monkey, a marmoset called Mitzi. Such is the interest today in Bloomsbury that
someone has written a book about this endearing pet.
Puffing on his briar pipe, which requires frequent relighting, Leonard takes us round,
proudly showing his Worcester Permains, Coxs Orange Pippins, his prize marrows, the
extensive collection of succulents, the lupin plant that has become a tree and so much
more. He is a huge enthusiast and an expert horticulturist.
In a small wooden cabin on the far side of the garden, where she writes, the watch
propped against the inkpot and the barking dogs tell my aunt that it is time to break for
lunch. Virginia strolls across the lawn, and looking back I wonder what it was she was
writing that day. Was it her biography of Roger Fry, or her last novel, Between the Acts, or
just a talk to be given to Rodmell Womens Institute, of which she was honorary treasurer?
Both Leonard and Virginia took an active part in the life of the village.
I remember her figure as tall and slim. Her pale face is very pointed and dominated
by large, hooded eyes, which fix one and penetrate sometimes uncomfortably. She is no
longer the beauty we all know from Beresfords iconic photograph, but still an attractive
woman. Her hair is grey and wispy. Her clothes are long, dark and dowdy; here in the
country her stockings may have a large hole or two and she wears a dreadful, long mackin-
tosh. If that sounds like the stage version of the goose-girl, let me say that her bearing and
demeanor is unmistakably that of the grande dame. The impression is of an intense per-
sonality. I doubt whether many people took liberties with her. Her manner is friendly but
undemonstrative; she looks at you directly, her speech is incisive. It is an individual voice,
developed before the great British flattening, when peoples manner of speaking might,
quite apart from any affectation of class, become personal speech. Her talk is shrewd and
speculative, withholding nothing. She is unhurried in what she saysconfident, very
confident: I wonder if memory misleads me here: but perhaps that apparent confidence
covers a great depth of insecurity.
As we go into the house, the impression we have is how cluttered and untidy it all is.
The walls are lined with books, there are books on the tables and chairs and piles of books
on the floor. Between the shelves are pictures, mainly by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and
Roger Fry. The books even climb up the stairs to the upper floor. Monks House always
seemed an appropriate name for such a chilly house in winter, though it wasnt until his
last year that Leonard discovered that no monk had ever lived there! After Leonard died
the house and garden passed to the University of Sussex, who rented it out to visiting
scholars. One of the tenants was the novelist Saul Bellow, who unwisely came in winter
and found the house so cold and draughty that he moved out after about a week. Not for
the feint-hearted.
At a time when grown-up relatives expected their well brought-up nephews and niec-
es to address them as uncle, aunt or cousin, it was a mark of Leonard and Virginias lack of
formality or stuffiness that they were just plain Leonard and Virginia to me.
Lunch is brought in by a servant and helpings are decidedly meagreperhaps ham
or a small portion of white fish; Virginia eats very little. Conversation is lively, boisterous
even, full of surprises, of unpredictable questions, fantasy, books, politics and laughter. Im
reminded of Ezra Pound in his Cantos:
VIRGINIA AND LEONARD, AS I REMEMBER THEM 37
And they want to know what we talked about

Of letters and tragedies and music,
Both of ancient times and our own,
And men of unusual genius,
Both of ancient times and our own,
In short, the usual subjects of
Conversation between intelligent men.
We talk of everything, that is, except Virginias own writing. She has an enormous cu-
riosity about other peoples lives. Observe perpetually, Henry James advised the aspiring
novelist. She fires salvos of questions at me and seems genuinely interested in the answers.
She is fascinated by the detail and has a minute eye for inconsistency. Despite her rather
somber appearance, Virginia could be extremely humorous. The image she has in some
peoples minds of a sad and deeply depressed woman is false. (Nicole Kidman in the movie
The Hours springs to mind.) Depressed she certainly was at times, but she was not gener-
ally sad. Quite the contrary. Leonard remembered that during the First World War, when
they sheltered in the basement of their London lodgings from enemy bombing, Virginia
made the servants laugh so much that he complained he was unable to sleep. My own
clear recollection of her is of a fun-loving, witty and at times malicious person. Leonard
himself had a dry and laconic sense of humour. He had a nice sense of the ridiculous and
liked now and then to break out. To many people Virginia appeared an intimidating and
formidable figure and they were mortally afraid of her. Certainly she had an unfortunate
way, at times, of causing acute embarrassment. Virginia was writer and woman, but first
and foremost writer. In one of her diaries she says, I want fun. I want fantasy. New
acquaintances were sometimes devastated when she had fun and fantasy at their expense.
The Woolfs knew some people called Easedale whose son was a talented young musi-
cian. Leonard and Virginia had attended a concert at which his music was performed. Mrs.
Easedale had, most unwisely, told Virginia that she had mentioned her son to the famous
conductor Sir Henry Wood. Some time later, at a social gathering, Virginia announced to
the assembled company, Mrs. Easedale is the bravest woman I knowshe went into a big
London restaurant straight up to Sir Henry, who was surrounded by a crowd of admiring
ladies and said, Sir Henry, my son is a geniusnow you go on with the story, Virginia
continued in that charming, playful way of hers. Of course, she continued herself: You see,
she has a son who is an unknown, distinguished composer. Next she talked of the recital;
the most interesting she had ever attended; the Easedales were the most advanced family in
the world, setting to music words no one else would dare; and the most modern of music
all this delivered in a half-serious, half-humorous way. This trick of blowing up a few facts
into something quite different and then inviting a bystander to go on with the story was
not uncommon with her, and while friends may have thought it amusing, to the uninitiated
it was excruciatingly cruel. I dont think she was aware of the cringing embarrassment such
behaviour caused. Neither can I recall ever being the victim of what Leonard called her tak-
ing offusing a prosaic incident or statement to create a mountain of fantasy.
These takings off were, I suppose, partly the novelist giving full rein to her imagi-
nation and partly a manifestation of that child-like freedom from everyday banality and
inhibition which were part of her nature.
In the morning, when I stayed at Monks House, I would take up my aunts breakfast
to her bedroom. I sometimes noticed scattered on the floor small scraps of paperthese
were notes she had jotted down in the night, a phrase or a word to be used in her writing.
Monks House is a museum now. Like Hawarth Parsonage and other literary shrines,
you get little sense of the house in which those two people lived and worked. Inevitably,
everything has been tidied; theres no aroma of wood smoke, flowers and pipe tobacco, all
of which made Monks House a charming place.
My own home was in the Buckinghamshire countryside, where my father was what
was called an agent, or land agent, to a wealthy landowner, James de Rothschild. Jimmy
Rothschild was a Cambridge-educated Frenchman, member of the banking family and
Liberal member of parliament, who had married my fathers first cousin, Dolly Pinto. My
father managed Jimmys vast estate at Waddesdonvery much a full-time job. Leonard
and Virginia visited us from time to time before wartime petrol rationing made such jour-
neys difficult. I remember on one such visit, I must have been quite small, leading Virginia
by the hand to show her a very curious grotto or cave which had been built into the side of
a steep hill, about ten minutes scramble from our house. Try to envisage a chamber with
a vaulted roof, say ten feet by ten with about two feet of water and a stone pedestal in the
centre. It was reputed to go back to the dawn of history. My aunt was clearly entranced by
this mysterious place and the stillness. To demonstrate the echo, I called her name, Vir-
ginia, and she called back Ce-cil.
While Leonard and my father puffed on their pipes in another part of the grounds,
talking no doubt of books and the gathering political storm in Europe, when she returned
from the grotto Virginia might be talking to my mother. She invariably steered the con-
versation round to the Rothschilds. Like Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia knew the rich are
different from you and me and relished every indiscrete detail of their privileged lives.
In those pre-war years and early in the Second World War, I also stayed with Leon-
ard and Virginia at their house in Bloomsbury, 52 Tavistock Square, where they rented
two floors at the top of the house and carried on their publishing business, the Hogarth
Press, in the basement. The Woolfs had started their publishing business in 1917 as a kind
of hobby. That basement was a center of frantic activity; clerks toiled, telephones rang,
authors and sales representatives (known in those days as travellers) came and went, car-
riers delivered and when the packer failed to keep pace, no onenot even Virginiawas
exempt from this chore. I needed no encouragement to join in and I can remember my
fingers becoming red and cut with doing up parcels of books. Those were the days before
jiffy bags and cellotape. The office staff and packer worked on a large table, like a ping-
pong table, at the front. The manager occupied what in Victorian times had been a butlers
pantry. The basement of 52 Tavistock Square was uncompromisingly functional and the
atmosphere informal. As for the dcor, the walls were a dingy cream and the lights had
dark green shades. It doesnt sound in the least exciting, I know, but to a schoolboy it was
all very exhilarating.
At the rear, built over what had once been a back yard, I remember a large room lit
by a skylight which my aunt used as her studya room not quite of her own. Here were
stored the stock, vast piles of books wrapped in dusty brown paper, some bound and oth-
ers in the form of flat sheets. Anything that was not required immediately or could not be
found room for elsewhere was stacked herepictures by Vanessa and other artists, books,
manuscripts, old records and files. Here my aunt would write steadily from about 10
till one every day, oblivious of her surroundings, uninterruptible when deep in thought,
but ready enough when her watch showed that she had finished her work, to take part if
needed in the bustle of activity going on outside her studio.
Virginia did not mind so long as her own writing table was inviolate and no one
touched her vast pile of notebooks, rough drafts, time sheets, and manuscripts in various
stages of completion. She might mislay all sorts of personal belongings or forget some
small domestic errand but she could always, I think, find just the book or paper she need-
ed for her own work from the midst of apparent confusion. John Lehmann, the poet, who
was their manager at that time, confirms my recollection of the studio as a forest and also
the holiest part of the house. To Winifred Holtby, the novelist, it was a submarine cave in
which one moved among books and papers as among rocks and ledges of that underwater
world which so fascinated Virginias imagination.
As in Sussex, so in London Virginia was an energetic walker. I had the strong feeling,
however, that London was where she belonged naturally. I remember a number of regular
walks we took together, notably to the British Museum Library, which was virtually round
the corner from Tavistock Square, and to the London Library. Virginia had close links to
the London Library, since her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, had been President of the Library.
She had made friends with one of the staff there, a Mr. Cox, who had known the great
Victorian essayist, Thomas Carlyle.
The Hogarth Press was a very personal business, as every good publishing house should
be. I didnt know it then, but looking back I think of the basement of 52 Tavistock Square as
where in a sense I began my publishing careera lifelong love affair with books and publish-
ing. Other occupations intervened briefly, like some years of soldiering and years in a family
stock jobbing business and some years in the antiquarian bookselling world before I set up
my own publishing imprint, fifty years ago in 1960. And perhaps a quick word on Leonard
himself as a publisher. He was humane and had good literary judgement, a healthy respect
for money and the ability to make crude commercial decisions.

I was a schoolboy at boarding school when I learnt of Virginias death in 1941. I had
been privileged to be taught by and become a friend of an outstanding English teacher,
the Shakespearean and Miltonian critic, G. Wilson Knight. It was he who told me of her
last, lonely walk along the swollen River Ouse and her decision to end it all. She had left
a suicide note and her walking-stick was found floating in the river. At an inquest held
later, the Coroner, who was evidently unaware of her long history of mental breakdowns,
attributed her death to the general beastliness of things happening today.
In 1941 Virginia Woolf s death was not headline news, particularly at that stage in
world history. When an author dies obituaries are published in the newspapers and those
who had dealings with him or her write to The Times, to place on record their memories.
In a short time the author is no longer news and is quietly consigned to oblivion. Then,
if he is fortunate, after a certain number of years, perhaps few, perhaps many, depending
often on circumstances having nothing to do with literary merit, he or she will be remem-
bered and restored to public favour. Virginia Woolf is, of course, a notable example of
this. In her case, it was twenty years before her writings were rediscovered by a multitude
of readers worldwide.
The end of the Second World War found me a young soldier. When I eventually
resumed life as a civilian, Leonard offered me a flat in his London house, the house he
leased in Westminster after the house in Bloomsbury was bombed and Virginia had died.
The Hogarth Press was at about that time to become part of the larger publishing house of
Chatto and Windus. Leonard still worked several days a week at the press. I saw him fre-
quently, and over the years we both got to know each other a great deal better. I think, to
some extent, he came to regard me as a surrogate son, the son he and Virginia never had.
I think he regretted not having children, but it was a decision they had made. Leonard
had consulted doctors early in their marriage, and because of Virginias history of mental
instability, been advised against having children.
After business, he would knock on my door at teatime and we would indulge in the
ritual of strong tea and buttered toast. All his life he, and other members of the Woolf
family, suffered from a pronounced inherited tremor, which particularly affected his hand.
As he raised the teacup his hand would shake to such an extent that, at times, he would
put his handkerchief round the back of his neck and use it to haul the tea to his mouth.
(As children this procedure was something that had caused a great deal of suppressed
amusement.) Virginia believed that his tremor had altered his life.
Sometimes we would go out for a hot curry in an Indian restaurant, or to the theatre.
Leonard was always very good company. No one who writes or talks about him, however,
can avoid mentioning his carefulness and austerity. It has to be admitted that my uncle did
not enjoy a worldwide reputation for doling out largesse. Everyone who knew Leonard
had stories of his over-developed sense of economy, particularly with money, and most of
us came to regard this as an endearing foible. I was at the theatre one evening with him.
Sitting next to Leonard was an elderly clergyman who, throughout the first half of the
play, was eating from a box of chocolates with unusually noisy wrappings. When the lights
went up for the interval and his neighbor left his seat, Leonard spotted a chocolate which
had fallen on the floor at his feet. He promptly produced a handkerchief, dusted down the
chocolate and popped it in his mouth. When Leonard wrote a letter or paid a bill, I dont
think he ever used a new envelope. He invariably crossed out the old name and address,
wrote in the new one, pasted it down at the back and posted it. Even the blank back of
a letter you had sent him would be recycled for the carbon copy he often kept of his cor-
respondence. An example to us all in these environmentally conscious times.
I was staying at Monks House in the 1950s and after a particularly austere supper, I
strolled out to the village pub, the Abergavenny Arms, in search of nourishment. I asked
the landlord if he could provide a sandwich or a pieanythingand in the course of con-
versation he asked me if I happened to be staying at Mr. Woolf s. When I admitted that
I was, he wagged his head knowingly, Yes, they all come in here for a bite after dinner.
T.S. Eliot once told me that Leonard had once invited him to lunch at 24 Victoria Square.
Lunch, it turned out, was a greasy pork pie and a bottle of ginger pop!
It must have been about this time that I accompanied Leonard to Brighton, where
he went round the bookshops, soliciting orders for Hogarth Press publications. In those
days publishers would make a point now and then of visiting booksellers themselves. After
a long morning tramping round the town, Leonard asked me if I was ready for lunch.
When I said that I was, he disappeared into a nearby bakers shop. A few minutes later he
emerged and produced from his pocket a notebook in which he wrote, in a shaky hand,
what he had bought for our lunchTwo bread and butter rolls 2 pence.
Now, I mention this incident not only to illustrate Leonards carefulness with money,
but also to show his obsession with accounting for his expenditure. Everything was re-
corded. The yield of every fruit tree in his orchard; the score of games of bowls on the
lawn; the profit or loss of every Hogarth Press publication; the cost of every holiday, less,
of course, the notional expenditure had they stayed at home. Those of you who know his
highly readable five-volume autobiography will probably agree that much of the interest
lies in the detail. Was this habit of recording the minutiae of everyday life a habit he had
formed when he was a district officer in that outpost of the British Empire, Hambantoto,
or was he one of natures administrators, with the heart and soul of an accountant?
But these are surely trivia in the broad sweep of things. Without withdrawing a word
of what I have just said, I must tell you that Leonard was not a mean man. The truth is
that he was an extraordinarily good, warm-hearted and generous mana loveable man
whose unstinting devotion to his wife not only kept her alive but happy and enormously
creative for some thirty years of their marriage.
I have talked of two people every detail of whose lives has become public property.
But it is sometimes forgotten that these were real human beings, not characters in some
up-market soap opera. Their marriage was a very loving one and very productive. Virginia
had written in her last note to Leonard, You have given me the greatest possible happi-
ness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I dont think two people could
have been happier . . . They both worked enormously hard writing their books, sitting on
all those committees and, not least, building a fine publishing house. When I think of Vir-
ginia, I think of her as I remember her, rather than as I have so often read of her. I know
that a great deal eludes me, as it eludes all of us who have ever thought of the strangeness
of being. At fourteen and less, few, very few people are sufficiently mature to take in and
fully treasure the experience of meeting and enjoying the company of someone touched
if not by the hand of God, then at least by genius. But what is important above all else is
that her books have given her a future she could never possibly have imagined.
And when I look back on all this, I wonder how on earth I could have failed to record,
for you, every single word that was spoken in those far-off days. In extenuation, I would
like to remind you of what Virginia herself said about being a child at 22 Hyde Park Gate
when the poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson dined with her parents and remembering
the great man saying only, Please pass the pepper. Like her, I was in the happy trance of
youth, almost exclusively self-absorbed, or at any rate myopic.
EVERYTHING TENDED TO SET ITSELF IN A GARDEN:
VIRGINIA WOOLFS LITERARY AND QUOTIDIAN FLOWERS
A BAR-GRAPHICAL APPROACH
by Elisa Kay Sparks
I
n Avrom Fleishams early (1975) monograph on Virginia Woolf (a book which repays
re-reading) he describes Woolf s practice of what he calls, after Northrop Frye, an en-
cyclopedic modernist style dependent on a vast network of allusions (xi), and quotes
William Empsons plaint If only there was an index, showing what had been compared
with what (ix). As the daughter of a biologist, I am naturally drawn to large taxonomic
schemas, and so in this paper what I am going to try to do is provide something of a
botanical encyclopedia/index to plant references in Woolf s fiction and some of her non-
fiction, correlating these published and shaped references as much as possible to mentions
of actual plants in her diaries and letters. For this talk I will focus in particular on flowers,
though of course flowers do inevitably turn into fruit, and trees also often burst into flow-
er, so rigid categories are not always possible. When I first set out to locate and record all
these plant references (some five years ago), I began by simply counting and making lists.
But after a while, I began to realize I needed to make some further distinctions. Flowers
(and plants in general) appear in at least three different registers in Woolf s work: as literal
natural organisms, as artificial renderings of the natural, and as figurative strategies. My
statistical flower counts dont make these distinctions, but my subsequent analysis does.
Id like to begin with some general, overall discoveries, including a grounding in
Woolf s sources of knowledge about flowers and the plant world in general. Then I will
proceed to talk through the use of flowers in more or less chronological order, starting
with the diaries and moving from novel to novel. I will end by showing you a design for a
potential Virginia Woolf Garden, an idealized rendering of a garden space incorporating
the plants she mentions most often. (See Fig. 2).
I suspect we all have the sense that there are a lot of flowers in Woolf s work and that
generally speaking they probably mean something. Previous scholarship on Woolf s blos-
soms has been incidental and pretty fragmented, mostly written in response to individual
works, Kew Gardens and Mrs. Dalloway having perhaps garnered the most commentary.
This ground-breaking work by Pat Cramer , Lee Edwards, Diane Gillespie, Jane Goldman,
Justyna Kostkowska, Bonnie Kime Scott, Kathryn Simpson, Janet Winston, and Marilyn
Zorn (among others) has established several thematic trends in Woolf s use of flowers and
flower imagery, analyzing how flowers appear in Woolfs work as traditional literary/arche-
typal allusions, as microcosmic, subterranean versions of the subconscious, as mechanisms
for linking people, as lesbian codes, as references to painting and to her sister, as structural
device/design elements, for their color as part of symbolic clusters of color relations. My
paper will develop and elaborate on these trends, in particular on Woolf s use of flowers as
part of a complex of images describing initiation into adult sexuality and her concomitant
ambivalence about flowers as symbols and instruments of female gender socialization.
Literary and Quotidian Flowers 43
FIRST FLOWERS
Flowers are an integral part of Woolfs life from early childhood. Her late autobio-
graphical A Sketch of the Past begins with a series of early memories or scenes, all of which
are associated with flowers. Her first memory was of seeing a pattern of red and purple and
blue anemones on the black fabric of her mothers dress (MOB 64). The next memory, of
lying in the nursery at Talland House in St. Ives and hearing the waves break behind a yellow
blind, is also associated with flowers, the great starry blossoms, with purple streaks and large
green buds of the passion flowers growing up the wall to her mothers balcony (MOB 66).
Her third memory is of the sensual rapture she felt looking down on the red and gold apples,
the pink flowers, and the grey and silver leaves of the gardens, which gave off a murmur of
bees (MOB 66). Numerous other statements establish the garden at St. Ives as Woolf s own
private Eden, the beginning of all her memories: There at the end of the avenue still, are the
garden and the nursery (MOB 67). And she returns to the site as many have documented,
again and again, from Jacobs Room, to To the Lighthouse, to The Waves.
Lets go back to the literal flowers of Virginia Stephens early world. Her father, Leslie
Stephen, was her first flower master. As early as July 1892 (when she was ten), the Hyde
Park Gate News reported that Mr. Stephen is a botanist on a minor scale. He is now
endeavoring to teach his children the names of the plants in the neighborhood [of St.
Ives] (qtd. In Lowe 79). A few days later we learn that he is pressing plants previous to
transmitting them to an album (Lowe 834). The young reporters add, This habit of
collecting flowers makes it necessary for him to take numerous walks in which he delights
(Lowe 84). From an early age then, Virginia was exposed to flowers from a scientific, bo-
tanical perspective, and looking for and naming plants as part of long walks was a practice
that lasted throughout her life (as is amply demonstrated in the diaries). Young Virginias
ready absorption of her fathers teaching is also shown by the specificity with which she
names the remembered plant life of Cornwall: not only the escallonia hedge, Jacamanna
clematis and passion flowers, but also the mesembryanthemums and Osmunda she cata-
logues in A Sketch of the Past (MOB 111, 76, 115).
All the horticultural knowledge and floral raptures Virginia Stephen stored up in
Cornwall were, however, initially quite separate from her botanical experiences in the city
of London. The first mention of flowers in Woolf s own writing comes in January 1897,
when at age 15 she and her half-sister Stella go to buy flowers to take to a tea party (PA
19 ), inaugurating the association of buying flowers with parties (Mrs. Dalloway thought
she would buy the flowers herself ). In her study of Favored Flowers Catherine Ziegler
presents four practices characteristic of the late nineteenth-century culture of flowers:
One group of practices helped establish class identity and social status through
elaborate displays of flowers. . . in the decoration and presentation of the home.
A second category of flower work involved customs related to female identity and
sexuality, particularly the practice of women wearing fresh flowersoften the gifts
of male admirers. Rituals and religious practices dominate another economically
important group of floral activities connected with birth, death, marriage, and
motherhood. (23)
This first journal mentions flowers in all of these contexts. Tulips, violets, daffodils, and
anemones are taken as gifts to parties or visiting (PA 56, 51); white roses, red tulips, and
carnations are among the many flowers bought for Stellas wedding (PA 68). Flowers are also
mentioned as (often competitive) projects grown by Virginia and Vanessa in the small, ashy
garden in the back of 22 Hyde Park Gate where they planted pansies, lobelia, sweet peas and
geraniums (PA 89, 99) and as seasonal markers in nearby Kensington Gardens where, after
her mothers death and her own subsequent breakdown, Virginia was assigned to walk daily
(almond trees and crocuses are the first harbingers of spring [PA 39, 48, 52 ]).
In these early diary entries we begin to pick up a major theme in Woolf s treatment
of flowers: a certain ambivalence derived from her association of flowers with the enforced
serenity of bucolic therapy and also the stifling rituals of the social world. As she would
later record in A Sketch of the Past, she always associated the smell of flowers with her
mothers funeral: The hall reeked of flowers. . . . The scent still brings back those days of
astonishing intensity (MOB 92). This memory appears in several novels including in The
Voyage Out where the smell of broom brings back to Rachel the sickly horrible sensation
of her mothers funeral (VO 35), in The Waves where Bernard imagines Percival covered
over with lilies and exuding this lily-sweet glue (265), and in The Years where, after her
mothers death, Delia is pent up for days in the half-lit house which smelt of flowers,
lilies, white tulips, white lilac, and even more lilies (85, 83, 84).
VIOLET DICKINSON AND FRIENDS
A certain ambivalence about flowers carries over into Virginias relations with her
second flower master, Violet Dickinson, who, according to Ellen Hawkes, came to play
a major part in Woolf s life, serving as a surrogate mother, an older sister, a confidant,
and tutor in her reading and a mentor for her writing (Hawkes 271). A redoubtable
gardener who was friends with Kate Greenaway as well as William Robinson, whose
treatises on the wild garden began the 19th-century garden fashion we now call Eng-
lish cottage style, 1 and later a devoted fan of Gertrude Jekyll, its leading exponent,
Violet Dickinson offered Virginia an alternative to the botanical instruction of her fa-
ther, a legacy of delight in color and design, while at the same time intensifying her
suspicions about conventional associations of flowers and femininity.
As Virginias friendship with Violet deepened in the years following Stellas death,
there is evidence that Virginia had at least heard of the leading fashionable gardeners in
Dickinsons circle. In April 1903 the Stephen family stayed in Surrey near several Jekyll
gardens (Rudicoff 131), only about four miles from Munstead Wood, Jekylls own home
and garden showplace. On January 28, 1905, Virginia notes in her diary that she actu-
ally met Mr. Robinsonthe gardener and designer of grates, an interesting man while
visiting Violets house in London (PA 231). By 1907, Virginia was familiar enough
with gardening personalities to tease Violet about her preoccupation with her Jeyklls,
[her] new puppies, and [her]budding trees (L1: 291). And Jeykll was also well-known
to Woolf s later friends. Ethyl Smythe was one of a trio of musicians who performed at
Munstead Wood in 1923 (Festing 238). Roger Fry commissioned Jeykll to design the
garden at Durbins (Spalding 110), at least some features of which were adopted in the
garden at Charleston.
I want to take a couple of minutes here to digress a bit about Gertrude Jekyll and
speculate on her possible influence on Virginia Woolf. Trained as a painter, Jekylls main
claim to fame was as a colorist. 2 It was she who began to arrange flowers in the garden
in clumps of complementary and adjacent colors. (Complementary colors are opposite
each other on the color wheel, like red and green; adjacent colors are next to each other,
like green and blue). She massed red, yellows, and oranges together to form hot cores
for perennial borders, put purple, pinks, and blues together for cool contrast, and used
greys and whites to provide a neutral background at the ends of flower beds. I know it
may be a little far-fetched, but in recording all the appearances of flowers in Woolf s
work, I did notice a consistent predominance of red and yellow pairings: Rodney has a
jar full of red and yellow tulips and there is a bowl of tawny red and yellow chrysanthe-
mums at Katherines house in Night and Day (73, 98); a bowl of red and yellow dahlias
appears in the Times Passes section of To the Lighthouse (130), and Candish arranges
yellow and red roses and red carnations in Between the Acts (35). (And this is a very ab-
breviated list. ) Woolf also often displays Jekylls trick of contrasting a clump of bright
color against white or grey: think of how the red, blue, and yellow of the flower petals
in Kew Gardens are reflected upon the smooth grey back of a pebble or disappear into
the silver grey of a water drop (CSF 90).
Gertrude Jeykll was, as was Violet Dickinson herself, a powerful model of an inde-
pendent woman who made a space for herself in the world. In Friendships Gallery, her
1907 tribute to Violet Dickinson, Virginia Stephen described her friends building of a
cottage of her own as one of historys great revolutions (Hawkes 288). But Violet was
also friends with an older, more conservative set of gardening women, among them Kate
Greenaway. I bring in Kate Greenaway because in addition to her charming childrens
books, she also compiled a fascinating little guide to the Language of Flowers, the Victorian
code by which lovers could communicate their otherwise unspeakable feelings.
I dont have time to fully explore the connections here, but Ive made a digest of
some of the more interesting flower meanings for you (see Appendix I: Digest of Flower
Symbolism). Woolf often uses flowers in ways which clearly correspond to these sym-
bolic conventions, many of which are still in common use: red roses signify passion-
ate love, white roses and lilies, innocence; asphodels are associated with death, as are
willows and yews. But there are some interesting specificities in Greenaways catalogue
which shed some possible new light on Woolf s associations with certain flowers. The
anemone, so often associated with her mother, signifies forsaken(8); the China Rose is
Beauty always new (12). The repeated appearance of cherry trees in Friendships Gal-
lery seems much more appropriate when we learn that they signify Good education
(Greenaway 12), and it is certainly provocative that the checkered frittillary, mentioned
twice in Friendships Gallery and later associated with Vita Sackville-West, is identi-
fied by Greenaway with persecution (12).
The other old-fashioned gardening friend of Violet Dickinsons that I want to men-
tion is Mrs. C.W. Earle, author of Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden, which Virginia
read in the summer of 1897 (PA 118). Earles chatty semi-memoir is a good example
of the conservative cast of late nineteenth-century flower culture for in it Earle argued
against formal schooling for the upper-class girl because she feared it would destroy . .
. her adaptability for a womans highest vocation. . . marriage and motherhood (328).
Perhaps it is this advice on raising daughters that caused Virginia to object to Violets
staying with Mrs. Earle in March 1904 when she claimed that I never read such positive
nonsense as her books are (L1: 133).
THE WORKS
The issue of womens education and the association of flowers and gardening with
womens growth, development, and socialization becomes a major motif in Woolf s mature
work. Very early on, she had begun to play with the image of young women coming of age
as flowers beginning to bloom in ways quite parallel to how Amy Kings Bloom (2003) docu-
ments the systematic use of floral metaphors to discuss feminine sexuality throughout the
nineteenth century. In July 1903, in a brief exercise entitled Thoughts upon Social Success
(which the editor speculates was originally sent to Violet Dickinson for criticism) (PA 167,
n. 4), Virginia Stephen fantasizes that the young women she sees at parties only come into
existence after dinner: They spring up all over the drawing room like hyacinths in June. By
daybreak they are fadeda little crumpled perhapsnever mindthey fold themselves in
sleepto wake once more when the sun has set (PA 1678).
THE VOYAGE OUT (1915)
As Woolf s first novel, The Voyage Out confirms the foundational significance of the
garden and floral imagery as part of a complex of images often associated with processes of
growth and initiation. Perhaps in part because of its conscious imitation of post-impres-
sionist visual technique, especially the abstraction of visual fields into patches of primary
color, relatively few flowers are specifically named. Instead Woolf gives us patches of color
and light and mostly generic plants: a shrub bearing among sparse leaves a voluminous
purple flower (91), bushes with wax-like flowers (91), the trees and the landscape
appearing only as masses of green and blue (173). Those flowers and plants that are
mentioned by name are most frequently evoked in association with England or civiliza-
tion and are often artificial or imagined, such as Clarissa Dalloways fantasy of fields of
hollyhocks and violets in the mid-ocean (42). Once the party has landed, they repeatedly
compare the tropical vegetation to that of England, imagining that chilly crocuses and
nipped violets are starting to grow in the early spring (VO 96). Mrs. Thornbury tells the
story of how a Mrs. Umpley triumphed over adversity by growing roses (113), and Mrs.
Flushing dreams of a little house in Ireland where one could lie in bed in the mornin and
pick roses outside the window with ones toes (199).
Only a few plants in South America are named, and these are almost all trees: cy-
press, cedar, olive, and the flowering magnoliathe plant which, despite being named
only twice, is most frequently associated with Rachel, often in contrast to unnamed red
flowers. This juxtaposition of white and red is clearly symbolic of Rachels liminal status.
The gigantic white flowers of the magnolia are repeatedly described as waxy, while the red
flowers are often already picked, severed at their stalks. At the very beginning of the novel,
there is a last view of England where: In thousands of small gardens, millions of dark-red
flowers were blooming, until the old ladies who had tended them so carefully came down
the paths with their scissors, snipped through their juicy stalks, and laid them upon cold
stone ledges in the village church (31). Rachel repeats this clipping and arranging action
in the middle of the novel when she sits in the shade of a tree and pick[s] the red flow-
ers with the thin green leaves which were growing beneath it, laying them side by side,
flower to flower and stalk to stalk (174). The image of Rachel herself as a flower who is
cut off before the moment of her full bloom, before any fruit can set, is also presaged early
in the novel when Helen Ambrose pulls the tight little buds of chrysanthemums out of
a vase on board ship and lays them on the table cloth arranging them fastidiously side
by side while accusing the servants of mistreating them (15); one assumes that they did
not condition them before putting them in the water, so they will not open out into full
bloom, which is precisely Rachels problem. When Rachel and Hewett return from their
visit to the jungle, newly engaged, The red flowers in the stone basins were drooping with
the heat, and the white blossoms which had been so smooth and thick only a few weeks
ago were now dry, and their edges were curled and yellow (326). Rachel can survive nei-
ther as the waxy preserved virgin nor as the independent, passionate red blossom.
NIGHT AND DAY (1919)
A more conventional novel, Night and Day only slightly extends Woolf s use of flow-
ers and flower imagery. The range of plants (twenty-four named varieties) is slightly larger
than in The Voyage Out (eighteen), with no need to fake an unfamiliar exoticism. 3Al-
though Night and Day is, like The Voyage Out, a female initiation story, there is little use
of the blossom motif to describe Katherines progress towards marriage. Since the novel is
set in London, most of the flowers are already cut, and appear as incidental decorations in
vases or bowls or tucked into buttonholes. The one place where flowers get really interest-
ing is near the end of the book when Denham and Katherine meet in Kew Gardens
which as I have said before often functions in Woolf s work as a liminal, democratic space
where different classes can mingle (see my Loopholes of Retreat). While sitting on a
bench with Katherine, Denham uncovers with the point of his stick a group of green
spikes half smothered with dead leaves (330). His knowledge of the Latin name of the
plant inaugurates a new phase in their relationship, revealing his hidden botanical lore and
promoting him to a level of expertise which helps to balance his stature with Katherine.
Katherine sees flowers only as variously shaped and coloured petals but to Denham they
are living things endowed with sex, and pores, and susceptibilities (331). At this mo-
ment, Katherine is described in the text as being in the flower of youth (331), but inter-
estingly in light of the failed botanical process in The Voyage Out, the identification of the
woman with flowers is critiqued and refused. While visiting the Orchid House, Denham
has a momentary vision in which Katherines beauty is strangely emphasized by the fan-
tastic plants, which seemed to peer and gape at her from striped hoods and fleshy throats
(331), but instead of indulging in the comparison, he looks beyond it to appreciate Kath-
erines autonomy, her contemplative, considering gaze, her lack of need of anything he
could give her (332). It is this ability to grant Katherine her independence that lays the
foundation for their agreement to have a perfectly sincere and perfectly straight forward
friendship (337), which of course opens up the possibility of their eventual union.
MONDAY OR TUESDAY (1921)
As experimental works, the short stories in Monday or Tuesday return to some of the
painterly effects sought in The Voyage Out, especially inKew Gardens where the red,
blue, and yellow flowers act as a kind of complementary color wheel that gradually turns
into the adjacent colors of blue and green, dissipates into white butterflies, and returns
again into yellow, red, and blue, repeating the typical sequence of colors in a Jekyll gar-
den. Some of the plants mentioned in these stories seem to evoke Woolf s immediate
environment. The only plants she mentions in diaries and letters as growing in the sizeable
garden behind Hogarth House are apple trees and the red rambler roses. At Asham, as
in A Haunted House, apples are often mentioned, along with a number of traditional
garden flowers. One interesting addition is a definite note of sarcasm towards Victorian
botanical conventions in the way that Aspidistras and ferns are used as comic screening
devices in An Unwritten Novel.
JACOBS ROOM (1922)
There is a significant efflorescence of flora in Woolf s next novel, Jacobs Room, a jump
from forty-two different species in Night and Day to fiftyin a novel three-fifths as long.
In terms of flowers the harvest is an order of magnitude greater, from fourteen varieties
to thrity-six (see Appendix II: Bar Graph of Plant Frequencies over Time). In fact, there
are more different kinds of flowers mentioned in Jacobs Room than in any other novel
by Woolf, one of those surprising facts you come across when you start doing statisti-
cal surveys.4 Some of this has to do with the many locations of the novelCornwall,
Cambridge, London, Greecebut some is certainly associated with the move to Monks
House in 1919 and Woolf s absorption in the pleasures of a country garden. In April
1921, as she is planning to start writing Jacobs Room, she remarks that the hyacinths are
blooming (D2: 28); in May the gladioli are standing in troops (D2: 43); in August she
is picking sweet peas and roses (D2: 57); and in September, the asters are beaten to the
ground by rain (D2: 66). A year later, two months before she writes the last words of the
novel, she describes the garden at Monks as a perfect variegated chintz: asters . . . zinnias,
geums, nasturtiums (D2: 138). I see Leonard as Woolf s third plant master, and under
his tutelage, her knowledge of flowers increased exponentially, as we will see in subsequent
novels.
Although, like The Voyage Out, Jacobs Room is the story of a failed initiation, a trun-
cated bildungsroman (McNees liv), flowers are not used to describe Jacobs maturation,
confirming the gender association of the blooming metaphor with femininity. Instead
Woolf uses the conventional, pastoral symbolism of purple flowers being emblematic of
the premature death of young men. There is a preponderance of purple flowers early in
the book, many of them growing wild, with phallic spikes or spires. In the first chapter
alone we find three appearances of a purple aster: first lit up on the lawn as Mrs. Flanders
and Jacob come home from the beach (JR 12); then trembling violently in the wind of
an on-coming storm (13) and finally (as in the garden at Monks) beaten to the earth by
the pouring rain (14). Sea-holly and blackberries are also mentioned in this chapter (10,
11). Both have spiky, composite structures: sea holly (Eryngium maritimum) is a silvery
lavender thistle with a cone-shaped flower-head; blackberries, while not flowers, have the
same shape, fierce thorns, and their juice is certainly purplish/red. Lilacs droop in the
churchyard where Mr. Flanders is buried in the next chapter (16), and appear twice in the
Cambridge chapter (35, 40) as do chestnut blossoms (38), which are white or pink, but
have a torch-like shape similar to sea holly and lilac. In Chapter Two, Johnny finds and
brings a brown-spotted orchid leaf to Mrs. Flanders on Dods Hill (19); one wonders if
this is a misplaced variety of the common Cornish spotted orchid Dactylorhiza fuchsii var.
cornubiensis which has a large composite spike of lavender flowers and grows in marshy
areas. Purple clover and teasle (JR 24) continue Woolf s unorthodoxly weedy procession
of purple flowers: purple or red clover (Trifolium pretense) has an inflorescence shaped very
like blackberries, and the teasle (Dipsacus fullonu) is, like sea holly, a form of thistle with
greener foliage but a similar lavender flower head, shaped something like a pine cone.
Other purple flowers in the novel include violets, which appear five times, iris, cherry pie
(otherwise known as heliotrope), pansies, and passion-flower.
One other notable trend in Jacobs Room is the increasing appearance of artificial
flowers, in particular the paper roses with which Jacob is be-decked, like a king or sac-
rificial victim (JR 75; Neverow li). And it is only a few pages later that the little bright
lives and swift dooms of the artificial paper flowers which open on touching water
are compared to the fading of real flowers (JR 83). Here we learn that chrysanthemums
are the worstfade most quicklywhile carnations pay bestlast longest (83).
One wonders if it is a coincidence that when Woolf returned to London in December
of 1920, right in the middle of writing Jacobs Room, she had recorded women in the
Strand crying out, Remember the Glorious Dead & holding out chrysanthemums
(D2: 79). Chrysanthemums, while not purple, continue the elegiac motif of associating
flowers with premature death.
About this time, I am sure you are all looking at your watches and wondering how
I am going to make it through the next six novels, not to mention a Room of Owns Own
and A Sketch of the Past. I know I have over-lingered on the first works, but I hope
Ive given you some idea of the potential insights that can be gained from a compre-
hensive look at flower images. For the next works, I am going to have to streamline my
remarks, contenting myself with some statistical observations and quick suggestions.
MRS. DALLOWAY (1925)
While usually thought of as the most floral of all Woolf s novels, Mrs. Dalloway in
fact has only forty plant varieties, fewer than Jacobs Room, or any of the novels which
followed except Flush and The Years (See Appendix 2: Plant Varieies Over Time). With
twenty-three named species, it also has fewer varieties of flowers than the previous novel
(which had thirty-five), and nearly the same number as Orlando (twenty-five), The Waves
(twenty), or The Years (twenty-two). However, in terms of sheer numbers of flowers named
in the text, it does tower over the rest with a total of 103 flowers mentioned.(See Appendix
3: Number of Flowers per Book.) What is particularly notable in Mrs. Dalloway is the in-
sistent predominance of roses, which appear thirty-nine times, in contrast to their nearest
competitor, the also vibrantly red carnation, which appears ten times. Roses are the single
most frequent flower in all of the works I investigated for this paper, the only flower that
appears in every single work (See Appendix 4: Rose Frequency). One of the reasons for
the persistence of the rose in Woolf s work is its versatility: of course there are multiple
symbolic meanings for roses (they take up an entire page in Greenaway), but Woolf also
deploys them in more symbolic registers than any other flower, and Mrs. Dalloway can
serve as a prime example of this. Roses appear most frequently in Mrs. Dalloway as cut
flowers, figuring prominently in the scene in the florist shop where they are laid out in
wicker trays in a way reminiscent of the regimentation in The Voyage Out (13). Often
bought as gifts (as by Richard for Clarissa or by Rezia to brighten the room she shares with
Septimus), they are also surprisingly often brandished like weapons: while dreaming of the
solitary traveler, Peter has visions which are dashed in his face like bunches of roses (57),
and crossing Green Park, Richard defends himself from a female vagrant by bearing
his flowers like a weapon (116). This violent gesturing with roses seems somehow aligned
with their hyper-reality/artificiality. Noticing how many women now use make-up, Peter
thinks, Every woman, even the most respectable, has roses blooming under glass, lips
cut with a knife (71). And of course the roses on Septimuss wallpaper also become
hyper-real; though the red flowers begin to grow through his flesh in Regents Park, they
are immediately associated with the thick red roses which grow on [his] bedroom wall
[paper] (68).
Mrs. Dalloway also returns to a critique of the blooming motif of Woolf s early work,
not just in Elizabeths aversion to people calling her a hyacinth or a garden lily (134),
but also in Peters recognition of womens new, post-war freedom: that shift in the whole
pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immoveable. On top of [young
people] it had pressed; weighed them down, the women especially, like those flowers Cla-
rissas Aunt Helena used to press between sheets of grey blotting paper (162).
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927)
Im not sure I have that much new to say about To the Lighthouse. Of course it is the
locus classicus of all Woolfs Cornwall references: from the geraniums growing in the pots on
the terrace to the jacmanna clematis and passion flowers growing up the walls, and the red-
hot pokers marking the view to the bay. 5 The blooming motif is brought up tangentially:
Cams refusal to give a flower to William Bankes could be read as an assertion of autonomy,
and as Jane Goldman points out, the white and purple flowers associated with mourning
and Mrs. Ramsayhyacinths and lilies (TTL 184); violets and asphodel (211)are also
evoked in the imagery of Prues one-year marriage: dropping the flowers from her basket,
she disappears across valleys, white, flower-strewn (Goldman 180, 182; TTL 204).6
One particularly notable use in To the Lighthouse concerns the association of flowers
with the Victorian past through evocation in snippets of 19th-century poetry. The same
device is used in A Room of Ones Own, where the frequency of passion-flowers, roses, and
apples derives from quotations by Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, and is turned into farce
in Freshwater, where the exuberant repetition of a limited number of insistently English
flowersdaisies, primroses, and rosesis part of the parodic humor of the piece.
ORLANDO (1928)
Because it is so much a country book, almost all of the plants in Orlando are wild or
garden-grown, and like Jacobs Room, it represents another quantum leap in the extent of
Woolf s plant lore. There are a total of sixty-two different species mentioned in Orlando,
as opposed to fifty in Jacob and forty in Mrs. Dalloway. Although its concentration on
English history makes Orlando a book dominated by oak trees and roses, since it was
dedicated to and written for Woolf s fourth flower-master, Vita Sackville-West, it shows a
new interest in woodland plants and a botanical palette that reflects Vitas love of both the
Kentish and the Persian countryside. Besides the twenty-five different species of flowers
mentioned, there are nine species of flowering trees, enough to constitute a new category
of flora, as many fruit and vegetables as in To the Lighthouse, and a greater variety of
other trees and bushes than any previous novel. (See counts in Appendix 2.) Some of the
plants are used by Woolf to characterize different ages of British history and literature,
but Woolf s knowledge of garden history is at best sketchy and is sometimes conflated
with her much more detailed knowledge of the history of English prose style. (See my
Bloomsbury in Bloom). One topic I wish I had time to develop, however, is her use of
vegetables as comic relief from what sometimes becomes the over-earnest solemnity of
flower references.
THE WAVES (1931)
As the most encyclopedic of all Woolf s novels, The Waves encompasses the larg-
est variety of plants, a total of seventy-two named species. The garden motif reappears
regularly in the interludes as part of Woolf s attempt to keep the sound of the sea and
the birds, dawn, & garden subconsciously present, doing their work underground (D4:
1011). Of obvious interest are the ways that particular plants are parceled out among
the various characters: Jinny, described by Bernard as like a crinkled poppy (252),
is also associated with cultivated geraniums, ferns, and azaleas (13, 101, 74). Louis,
with his deep knot of oak roots, sees fields of golden bristle and red poppies (66) and
imagines sinking down into green depths flecked with dahlias or zinnias (167). Neville,
of course, compulsively remembers the apple tree he associates with death (24, 124).
Susan is connected to roses and the hollyhocks which were Vanessas favorite flowers
(41, 98, 100, 172, 192), but also with the farming fecundity of Leonard; responsible for
the over-growth of cabbages in the novel (54, 99, 172 ), she has pear-shaped eyes, full
of turnips and cornfields (211). Rhoda continues the association of white and purple
flowers with death from Jacobs Room and To the Lighthouse: as a child, she chooses the
white petals over the red ones (18), and is drawn to daisies (45, 64); the wreathes she
weaves of cowbind and May are also colorless, and it is she who memorializes Percival
with violets (159, 164).
But to me, the most interesting aspect of the botanical imagery in The Waves is the
development of what I call the Urpflanze themethe image of the flower as a unifica-
tion of consciousness. This is embodied primarily through the red carnations which are
usually evoked by Bernard (59, 127, 229). At the reunion dinner at Hampton Court
Bernard remembers the red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant
when we dined together with Percival and expresses the unity of the group saying it has
become a six-sided flower made of six lives (229). Each of the six characters experiences
this moment differently: for Neville it is a consolidation of monarchy, for Louis a return
to children holding hands, for Jinny a brief triumph over the iron gates of devouring
time (TW 228), for Susan an affirmation of love, and for Rhoda, a momentary vision of a
structure that makes sensethe square . . . stood on the oblong that reoccurs through-
out The Waves as the image of a our dwelling place (TW 228; also 163, 205), which I
always interpret as a house standing over an oval gardenperhaps a memory of that first
garden at Talland House.
THE YEARS (1937)
The Years is one of Woolf s most floral novels, with almost as many varieties of flower
as Orlando and more actual flowers mentioned than any novel except Mrs. Dalloway.
(See Appendix 2.) It is also the third highest on rosesnot counting all the times that
the character Roses name is mentioned. I think the thing I find most interesting about
Fig. 1: Ordinance Survey of Talland House

flowers in The Years is how they are implicated in temporal transitions. Whether the blue
flower in the painting of the first Rose Pargiter can be seen or not seems to be something
of an index of the vision of freedom in the book: in 1908 Martin notices that the flower
in the grass has been obscured by dirty brown paint (149); when the war is over in the
Present Day section, the painting has been cleaned and the little sprig of blue is visible
again (325). But the flowers of the past will not do for the present; Eleanor looks at the
picture of her grandmother as if to ask her opinion, but as in A Room of Ones Own the
characters are cut off from the comforting Victorian floral legacy of their ancestors: her
grandmother has assumed the immunity of a work of art. . . smiling at her roses. . . indif-
ferent to right or wrong (327). Delia seems to demonstrate how the younger generation
deals with flowers, her ambition to do away with the absurd conventions of English
life (398) being embodied in the party she gives at the Estate Agency, where the office
tables are strewn with flowers: carnations, roses, lilies, and daisies flung down higgledy-
piggeldy (398). They may not live long out of water, but they are cheap and their beauty
is easily replaceable.
BETWEEN THE ACTS (1941)
If I had time to do justice to the floral imagery of Between the Acts I think I would
return to Monks House, and explore how that garden provides a setting for the novel by
correlating the plants mentioned to the record of plants Leonard bought in the later thirties.
Asparagus is certainly Virginias favorite vegetable; Leonard ordered fifty roots in February
of 1936; geraniums were and are everywhere at Monks House; Leonard ordered clematis
in 1935 and 1938perhaps one of them was the variety known as Old Mans Beard (ref-
erenced in Between the Acts). He also ordered carnations, hydrangeas and new varieties of
roses (mostly climbing) every year from 193540, and fritillaries in September, 1938. (All
plant order information comes from Leonard Woolfs Garden Account Book, LWP II 3 I,
Sussex University).
Considering that Between the Acts is Woolf s shortest novel (not counting Flush), it
mentions quite a variety of plantsfifty in all, as many as appear in Jacobs Room, though
fewer than in Orlando or The Waves. The twenty-one varieties of flowers named are on a
par with The Years (twenty-two), The Waves (also twenty-one) and Orlando (twenty-five).
As is common in Woolf s works, and as might be expected in a book so concerned with
the history of England, roses predominate, appearing twice as many times (twenty-four)
as lilies, the next most frequently mentioned species, which appear twelve times (not dif-
ferentiating between water lilies and land lilies and not counting the six times Sir Lilyliver
Spaniel is mentioned by his full name). Geraniums show up four times, rhododendrons
three times, violets and carnations twice (if you count carnations and pinks as the same
species). Despite its reputation for elegiac despair, Between the Acts is one of the fruitiest of
all Woolf s novels, with almost as many different kinds (eight) as The Waves. Among other
types of plants, lavender appears most frequently (seven times)usually in connection
with memories and the Victorian Ageand hay, straw, and corn appear six times each
(unless hay and straw are seen to be the same species.)
CONCLUSION
So what do we make of these many flowers and their probable meanings? Statistically
there are some conclusions. Woolf refers to, by my count, ninety-four flowers by name
(see Appendix V: All the Flowers Named). The rose is by far the most frequent flower, in
part because of its liminal use as both a natural plant and an artificial representation of one
on teapots and wallpaper and in paper. This fictional frequency is paralleled by the popu-
larity of roses in the flower trade at the end of the nineteenth century (Ziegler 2). Even
now, according to Amy Stewarts 2007 study of the flower business, Flower Confidential,
roses account for more than double the amount spent on the next most popular flower,
chrysanthemums, in todays market (126).
Violets are the next most frequent flowers; often sold by beggars on the street and
prized for their scent they were one of the most popular flowers for women to wear at
the turn of the century (Ziegler 27), and in Woolf are often associated as well with other
purple flowers of mourning.7 They are actually tied with carnations, the long-lasting mod-
ern substitute for the rose (by 1950, according to Zeigler, the most popular of all cut
flowers [36]).8 Next come lilieswhite and associated with both innocence and death.
After that, there is a big drop to the next tier of flowers: geraniums, tulips, lilacs, dahlias,
crocuses, and hyacinths.
And the meanings of all these blossoms? They are of course various. But I like to think
of flowers as part of the scaffolding in the background that Woolf refers to in A Sketch
of the Past (73). And I find myself agreeing with Bonnie Kime Scott that flowers often
provide a strategy for writing about the body (Scott, Husk 375). While Woolf rejects
the Victorian identification of young girls blooming into sexuality as too dangerous, con-
sidering how often such blossoms are prematurely cut and regimented into arrangements,
she retains a version of that image in her vision of the flower in the garden as the whole,
also recorded in A Sketch of the Past: I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves;
and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring
enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower (MOB
71). This moment of being gives Woolf a feeling of satisfaction which she compares to
the sense of wholeness she gets from putting things into words, a way of seeing the pat-
tern of how we are all connected behind the cotton wool of life (MOB 72). Plants and
flowers, then, are part of the very web of life that Woolf weaves, independent yet con-
nected to everything else in her world and work.
Fig. 2: Design for a Potential Virginia Woolf Garden
Notes
1. On William Robinson see Uglow, A Little History of British Gardening 246 and Chapter Seven of Gardens
of the Arts and Crafts Movement by Judith B. Tankard, 98114, which deals with both Robinson and Jekyll.
2. For a brief introduction to Jekylls career see Bisgroves Introduction to the New Illustrated Edition of
Jekylls Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden.
3. My flower counts for this paper are as accurate as I could make them; however, I have been combing
through the books again, using the CD-Rom to verify, and I continue to find flowers I had missed. Flower
counts in my forthcoming book for the Bloomsbury Heritage Series should be even more comprehensive
(and will include all of the short stories as well).
4. Orlando, The Waves, and Between the Acts all have more species of plants but not nearly the variety of flow-
ers.
5. Further study has convinced me one of the flaws of a too autobiographical account of the novel is the circu-
lar habit of reading the garden in To the Lighthouse back into St. Ives, assuming that if a flower is mentioned
in the novel, it must have grown at Talland House.The trailing geraniums in the urns along the terrace
where Mr. Ramsay stalks and rants are never named by Woolf as being grown at Talland House. Photos
of the front of the house show us urns filled with flowers (Smith, plate 37f ), but since they are in black
and white, it is impossible to confirm they are geraniums. Geraniums did and still do grow in profusion at
Monks House. Similarly, the red hot pokers that stand sentry at the break in the hedge (not specified in the
novel as escalonia) are never mentioned in A Sketch of the Past or other sources documenting the flora
at Talland House. Perusal of the gap in the hedge between the upper and lower gardens at Talland House
shows no signs of pokers (Smith College 37c). They do grow now, along the path to the beach that leads
down from Talland House, and we know that they were and still are a prominent feature of the garden at
Monks House from photos taken of Virginia and Leonard standing next to a spectacular clump of them
(Humm, Snapshots 129)
6. Goldman also points out that purple and green have more positive and energizing connotations as suffrage
colors (see Goldman 6871, 179, 180, 1923 and passim).
7. Ziegler points out the importance of fragrant flowers in the 19th century, especially primroses, stocks, car-
nations, violets, roses, [and] tuberoses. The latter, with their strong scent and waxy texture, often appeared
at funerals.
8. More carnations are sold than roses, but more money is spent on roses.
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APPENDICES
APPENDIX I
Digest of Flower Symbolism from

THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS
Kate Greenaway. London: Routledge 1884.
Rpt. Dover, 1992.
8 Garden Anemone . . . Forsaken Laurel . . . Glory

Apple . . . Temptation 27 Lilac, Purple . . . First emotions of
Asphodel . . . My regrets follow you to the love
grave Lily, White. . . Purity. Sweetness
10 Bud of White Rose . . . Heart ignorant of Lime Trees (Linden) . . . Conjugal
love love
11 Cabbage . . . Profit 31 Oak leaves . . . Bravery
Carnation, Deep Red . . . Alas! For my Oak Tree . . . Hospitality
poor heart Osier . . . Frankness
Carnation, Yellow. . . Disdain Osmunda . . . Dreams
12 Cherry Tree . . . Good education 32 Passion Flower. . . Religious Supersti-
Chequered Fritillary. . . Persecution tion
China Rose. . . Beauty always new Pea, Sweet . . . Departure
Chrysanthemum, red . . . I love Pear Tree. . . Comfort
Chrysanthemum, Yellow. . . Slighted 33 Plane Tree . . . Genius
Love Plum Tree . . . Fidelity
13 Colchicum . . . My best days are past Pomegranate . . . Foolishness
Corn . . . Riches Poppy, Red . . . Consolation
14 Cypress . . . Death. Mourning Poppy, Scarlet. . . Fantastic extrava-
15 Dahlia. . . Instability gance
Daisy . . . Innocence 34 Primrose. . . Early youth
16 Elm. . . Dignity Evening Primrose . . . Inconstancy
17 Fern. . . Fascination Pyrus Japonicus. . . Fairies fire
18 Foxglove . . . Insincerity 36 Rhododendron . . . Danger. Beware
19 Germanium, Scarlet . . . Comforting. 39 Southernwood. . . Jest. Bantering
Stupidity 41 Tulip . . . Fame
20 Goats Rue . . . Reason 42 Violet, Blue . . . Faithfulness
21 Hollyhock . . . Ambition. Fecundity 43 Water Lily . . . Purity of Heart
22 Hyacinth, White. . . Unobtrusive loveli- 44 Willow, Weeping . . . Mourning
ness 45 Yew . . . Sorrow
23 Iris . . . Message 46 Zinnia . . .Thoughts of absent friends
Ivy. . . Fidelitiy. Marriage
26 Laburnum . . . Forsaken.
20
40
60
80
0
100
120
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
FriendGall
Voyage
Night & Day
M or T Voyage
Jacob
Mrs. D Night & Day
Lighthouse
Orlando M or T
Room
Waves Jacob
Flush
FreshW Mrs. D
Years
# of Flowers
Sketch Lighthouse
BTA
Orlando
Room
APPENDIX III: FLOWER TOTALS

Waves
# of Flowers
Flush
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
0
5
Years
FriendGall
Voyage Sketch
Night & Day
M or T
BTA
Jacob
Mrs. D
APPENDIX II: PLANTS OVER TIME
Lighthouse
Orlando
Vegs
Room
Fruits
Waves
Roses
Flush
FreshW
Years
Sketch
Trees & Bushes
APPENDIX IV: ROSES

Flower Varieties
BTA
Literary and Quotidian Flowers
Variety of Total Plants
Roses
59
APPENDIX V
All the Flowers Named in Fictional Works + ROOM and THREE GUINEAS
Anemone Fritillaries Pansies
Asphodel Fuchsia Passion-Flower
Aster Peach Blossom
Autumn Crocus Gentian Plantain
Azalea Geranium Primrose
Gorse Poppy
Begonia Purple Clover
Broom Heather Purple Nightshade
Bluebells Heather Bells Pyrus Japnica (Japenese
Bog Myrtle Hibiscus Flowering Quince)
Broom Hollyhock
Buttercup Hyacinth Red-Hot Pokers
Hydrangea Rhododendron
Camillia Rose
Carnation Iris
Cherry Blossom Sea-Holly
Cherry Pie (Heliotrope) Jacamanna (var. of clematis) Snowdrops
Chestnut blossom Jonquil Southernwood
Chrysanthemum Sweet Alice
Clematis Laburnum (flowering tree) Sweet Peas
Clover Larkspur Sunflower
Convulvous (Morning Lilac Syringa
Glory) Lily
Cowbind (Bryony) Lily of the Valley Teasle
Cow Parsley Thistle
Cyclamen Magnolia Tobacco Plant
Crocuses May (Flowering Hawthorn) Tulip
Meadow Sweet
Daffodil Mesenbrantheum (Ice Plant) Verbena
Dahlia Violets
Daisy Nasturtium
Dandelion Water-Lilies
Delphiniums Old Mans Beard (possible Wisteria (sp. wistaria)
var. of clematis)
Eglantine Brown-spotted Orchid Zinnia
Elder Blossom Orchid
Escallonia Orchis
Evening Primrose Osier
Flags (yellow Iris)

Forget-me-not
Foxglove
TAKING HER FENCES:
THE EQUESTRIAN VIRGINIA WOOLF
a reading by Beth Rigel Daugherty
F
irst, I want to thank Kristin Czarnecki for asking me if I knew of any horse refer-
ences in Virginia Woolf. My casual reply, that I had noticed a repeated phrase about
Woolfs taking her fences, led to my being here right now!
I must also thank Mark Hussey without whose CD-ROM I could never have put this
narrative together. But many times I wanted to curse! Do you realize how many references
to horses there are in Virginia Woolfs work? All sorts of horsescart horses, dray horses,
race horses, plough horses, runaway horses, dead horses. Who knew? Like Elisa Sparks with
her flowers, I was overwhelmed by what I found. By the time I skimmed through all the hits
for horse in the letters and diaries and the novels, I had fourteen handwritten pages of lists,
one reference per line. I then looked up and typed those I thought were most representative
or interesting, which gave me a pool of 35 double-spaced pages of quotations. Please real-
ize, too, that although it occurred to me to search for other words, like steed and gallop,
and pony, I stopped with taking fences and horse! I also never got to the essays, which
means I will not be using the passage about the thoroughbred from Middlebrow.
From my original pool of quotations, I have cobbled together (another Woolfian
phrase) a reading, not an analysis. I have had to leave out a lot of other good passages. But
here, in 52 passages, in her own words, is the Virginia Woolf who might, after all, be at
home in the horse capital of the world. I will not interrupt her words with comments or
context, but I have occasionally inserted a name in place of a pronoun and I have often
cut out bits to save time. Except for the prologue and the epilogue, the passages follow a
rough chronological order. The source for each passage follows it.
PROLOGUE
And as I watched her lengthening out for the test, I saw, but hoped that she did not
see, the bishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the patriarchs and the peda-
gogues all at her shouting warning and advice. You cant do this and you shant do that!
Fellows and scholars only allowed on the grass! Ladies not admitted without a letter of
introduction! Aspiring and graceful female novelists this way! So they kept at her like the
crowd at a fence on the race-course, and it was her trial to take her fence without looking
to right or left. If you stop to curse you are lost, I said to her; equally, if you stop to laugh.
Hesitate or fumble and you are done for. Think only of the jump, I implored her, as if I
had put the whole of my money on her back; and she went over it like a bird. But there
was a fence beyond that and a fence beyond that. (AROO 93-4)
The streets were full of horses. The streets were littered with little brown piles of
steaming horse dung which boys, darting out among the wheels, removed in shovels. The
horses kicked and reared and neighed. Often they ran away. Carriages crashed together
I remember in High Street; horses went sprawling; they shied; they reared; wheels came
off. The street rocked with horses and smelt of horses. The horses were often gleaming,
spick and span horses, with rosettes in their ears; the footmen wore cockades in their hats;
foam flecked the bright silver harness; coronets and coats of arms were painted on panels
and among the sounds of the streetthe tap of hoofs, the rush of wheelsone heard a
jingling and metallic noise as the harness shook and rattled. (A Sketch of the Past 122)
II
When father was reading to us in the evening, Enid MacKenzie in her night gown
and Mr Ms fur coat came in. Their servants room had caught fireGerald rushed over,
and poured pails of water over the placeThen came roaring down the street a fire engine
shouting and halloaing. The men jumped off in a moment and found that the fire had
succumbed to pails of water before their arrival. Leaving three of their men, they galloped
off againA crowd had followed them, and stood gaping in the street. Then came four
more fire enginesthe men swearing at finding nothing to do. Soon they mounted, the
crowd yelled and the horses cantered awaySo ends the fire.(PA 20; 20 Jan. 1897)
III
Down I came one winters evening about 1900 in my green dress; apprehensive, yet, for a
new dress excites even the unskilled, elated. [. . .] [George] at once fixed on me that extraordinari-
ly observant scrutiny with which he always inspected our clothes. He looked me up and down for
a moment as if I were a horse brought into the show ring. Then the sullen look came into his eyes;
[. . .] It was the look of moral, of social, disapproval, as if he scented some kind of insurrection, of
defiance of his accepted standards [. . .] He said at last: Go and tear it up. He spoke in a curi-
ously tart, rasping, peevish voice; the voice of the enraged male [. . .] (A Sketch of the Past 151)
IV
I have been splashing about in racing society since I saw youthat is dined with
George at Lady Carnarvonsyoung Lady C. this time, thank God. It was the night of the
Kemptown races, and we talked about horses all night, which are probably more interest-
ing than books (L1 189; May 1905, to Violet Dickinson)
[. . .] but tonight I was fairly whirled round by the wind & the rain. The only guide I had
was the crunch of gravel beneath my feetI could neither see nor hear. Suppose a cart advanced
I should embrace the horse before I saw him. (PA 381; 1908, Wells and Manorbier)
VI
I almost went to see the British horses yesterday with Violet. But every ticket was
soldit would have been a sight, and Violets knowledge of horseflesh is profound I
Taking her Fences 63
expect. Besides, she would have known half the country squires. There is something very
racy about her. (L1 399; 6 June 1909, to Nelly Cecil)
VII
Ive just been riding in Richmond with Leonard. Great fun, though the horse was
surprised. (L1 505; July 1912, to Violet Dickinson)
VIII
We want to buy 2 horses. Can you recommend any? Isnt there a hunting peeress of your
acquaintance who would part with a thoroughbred on condition we loved him? I only know one
huntress, and she is now incapable, owing to marriage. [. . .] We sew [sic] articles over the world
Im writing a lot for the Times too, reviews and articles and biographies of dead womenso we
hope to make enough to keep our horses. (L2 23; 11 Apr. 1913, to Violet Dickinson)
IX
Tomorrow we go down to Asheham, where we have first to survive a visit from

Lytton-Desmond, and then to relapse peacefully into a rural life, which now centres
round a horseto buy a horse seems to be as difficult as to write a novel, but I think we
may be on the track of one now. (L2 26; 16 May 1913, to Ka Cox)
We are very hot, having chased a horse vainly round a field. It is a wonderful night, and
you I suppose are attending some great ball [. . .] (L2 30; [?28] May 1913, to Nelly Cecil)
XI
Even at tea the floor rose beneath their feet and pitched too low again, and at dinner the ship
seemed to groan and strain as though a lash were descending. She who had been a broad-backed
dray-horse, upon whose hind-quarters pierrots might waltz, became a colt in a field. (VO 70)
XII
There will soon be very few hansom cabs left, said Mrs. Elliot. And four-wheeled
cabsI assure you even at Oxford its almost impossible to get a four-wheeled cab.
I wonder what happens to the horses, said Susan.
Veal pie, said Arthur.
Its high time that horses should become extinct anyhow, said Hirst. Theyre dis-
tressingly ugly, besides being vicious.
But Susan, who had been brought up to understand that the horse is the noblest of
Gods creatures, could not agree, and Venning thought Hirst an unspeakable ass, but was
too polite not to continue the conversation.
When they see us falling out of aeroplanes they get some of their own back, I ex-
pect, he remarked. (VO 133)
XIII
On Saturday we saw the horse show, & I had a look at Queen Alexandras poor old
effigy, still painted like a wildrose, though she is about 75 [. . .] (D1 288-89; 8 July 1919)
XIV
And it isnt what our husbands get, but what they are. I used to dream of white horses
and palanquins, too; but still, I like the ink-pots best. And who knows? [Mrs. Hilbery] con-
cluded, looking at Katharine, your father may be made a baronet to-morrow. (N&D 212)
XV
[Mary] loved the steep cliff of [Ralphs] forehead, and compared it to the brow of a
young Greek horseman, who reins his horse back so sharply that it half falls on its haunch-
es. He always seemed to her like a rider on a spirited horse. And there was an exaltation to
her in being with him, because there was a risk that he would not be able to keep to the
right pace among other people. (N&D 227)
XVI
A real Bank Holiday [ . . .] & we spent it properly going to Hurlingham to see polo [.
. .]. You get the impression that the turf is india rubberso lightly do the horses spring
touching it & up againCaptain Lockit galloping down with his stick like a Persian rider
with a lance. A large white ball is then thrown in the midst. The horses twirl [. . .] dance
their paws, twist on their tails like cats; [. . .] only as they come past you hear a roar in the
nostrils. But the bounce & agility of them all knotted together pawing the ball with their
feet indescribable; passing in a second from full gallop to delicate <dribbling> trot as the
ball is dribbled almost between their feet. [. . .] The horses become suddenly big when
they gallop straight at you & their pace alarming. At a little distance the most graceful &
controlled of movements. (D2 41-42; 24 May 1920)
XVII
A few moments before a horse jumps it slows, sidles, gathers itself together, goes up
like a monster wave, and pitches down on the further side. Hedges and sky swoop in a
semicircle. Then as if your own body ran into the horses body and it was your own fore-
legs grown with his that sprang, rushing through the air you go, the ground resilient, bod-
ies a mass of muscles, yet you have command too, upright stillness, eyes accurately judg-
ing. Then the curves cease, changing to downright hammer strokes, which jar; and you
draw up with a jolt; sitting back a little, sparkling, tingling, glazed with ice over pounding
arteries, gasping: Ah! ho! Hah! the steam going up from the horses as they jostle together
at the cross-roads, where the signpost is, and the woman in the apron stands and stares at
the doorway. The man raises himself from the cabbages to stare too.
So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the hunt, and
rode by himself eating sandwiches, looking over the hedges, noticing the colours as if new
scraped, cursing his luck. (JR 101)
XVIII
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately;
fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to havepositivelya rush of friendship
for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go
hangthere is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often. (JR 141)
XIX
And as usual I wantI wantBut what do I want? Whatever I had, I should always
say I want, I want. Yet it comes over me that to sit on the grass at the Horse Show tomor-
row with Leonard will be very contenting. (D2 247; 13 June 1923)
XX
& altogether we have worked at full speed since May & that is Im persuaded the root
& source & origin of all health & happiness, provided of course that one rides work as a
man rides a great horse, in a spirited & independent way; not a drudge, but a man with
spurs in his heels. (D2 259; 28 July 1923)
XXI
Well, and whats happened to you? [Clarissa] said. So before a battle begins, the hors-
es paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines on their flanks; their necks curve. So Pe-
ter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each other. (MD 43)
XXII
They were going to Sir William Bradshaw; she thought his name sounded nice; he would cure
Septimus at once. And there was a brewers cart, and the grey horses had upright bristles of straw in
their tails; there were newspaper placards. It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy. (MD 81)
XXIII
The principle which I find intermittently guiding my life isto take ones fences.
Heaven knows how Ive dreaded them! (D3 42; 14 Sept. 1925)
XXIV
All the rest of the news is motor car gossip. We flash through Sussex almost daily;
drop in after dinner; visit ruins; muse by retired moats, of which Sussex is full; surprise
Colonelsit is a perfect invention. What we did without it passes comprehension. Most
of the Victorian horror seems explicable by the fact that they walked, or sat behind stout
sweating horses. (L3 418; 3 Sept. 1927, to Lytton Strachey)
XXV
Heaven be praised for it, the problem of space remained, [Lily] thought, taking up
her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that
weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one
colour melting into another like the colours on a butterflys wing; but beneath the fabric
must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffle with
your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses. (TTL 171)
XXVI
I think of Vita at Long Barn: all fire and legs and beautiful plunging ways like a young
horse. (L3 479; 13 Mar. 1928, to VSW)
XXVII
Stretching her arms out (arms she had learnt already, have no such fatal effects as legs)
[Orlando] thanked Heaven that she was not prancing down Whitehall on a war-horse,
not even sentencing a man to death. (O 119)
XXVIII
[Orlando] rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again,
though bold and active as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger
brought on the most womanly palpitations. (O 139-40)
XXIX
Once, presumably, this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings, and the
chapel itself was marsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Teams of horses
and oxen, I thought, must have hauled the stone in wagons from far countries [. . .] (AROO 9)
XXX
How to end, save by a tremendous discussion, in which every life shall have its
voicea mosaica. I do not know. The difficulty is that it is all at high pressure. I
have not yet mastered the speaking voice. Yet I think something is there; & I propose to
go on pegging it down, arduously, & then re-write, reading much of it aloud, like poetry.
It will bear expansion. It is compressed I think. It iswhatever I make of ita large &
potential themewh. Orlando was not perhaps. At any rate, I have taken my fence. (D3
298; 28 Mar. 1930)
XXXI
The sun, risen, no longer couched on a green mattress darting a fitful glance through wa-
tery jewels, bared its face and looked straight over the waves. They fell with a regular thud. They
fell with the concussion of horses hooves on the turf. Their spray rose like the tossing of lances
and assegais over the riders heads. (TW 108)
XXXII
He is dead, said Neville. He fell. His horse tripped. He was thrown. [. . .] His horse
stumbled; he was thrown. The flashing trees and white rails went up in a shower. There
was a surge; a drumming in his ears. Then the blow; the world crashed; he breathed heav-
ily. He died where he fell. (TW 151)
XXXIII
And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a
new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and
then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I
ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It
is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young
mans like Percivals when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I
will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! (TW 297)
XXXIV
And weve been to a village wedding and seen the bridal party perched on kitchen
chairs driven off in a great blue wagon, drawn by colossal farm horses with ribbons in
their tails, and little pyramids of bells on their foreheads. (L4 338; 27 May 1931, to VSW)
XXXV
And now we have been to Lewes races & seen the fat lady in black with parts of her
person spilling over the shooting seat on which her bulk is so insecurely poised: seen the
riff raff of sporting society all lined up in their cars with the dickies bulging with picnic
baskets: heard the bark of bookies; & seen for a second the pounding straining horses
with red faced jockeys lashing them pound by. What a noise they madewhat a sense of
muscle hard & stretch--& beyond the downs this windy sunny day looked wild & remote;
& I could rethink them into uncultivated land again. (D4 120; 5 Aug. 1932)
XXXVI
Ive been asked to write in the Times about my father for his Centenary. [. . .] but at
the moment my head is full of him. One thing you would have likedhis extreme sincer-
ity; also unless Im partial, he was beautiful in the distinguished way a race horse, even an
ugly race is beautiful[. . .] (L5 100; 7 Sept. 1932, to Ethel Smyth)
XXXVII
And then all this incandescence led to the galloping horses in my heart the night before
last. I lay in bed reasoning that I could not come smash. Death I defy you, &c. But it was a
terrific effort, holding on to the reins. So at 2.30 I woke L. & asked, very reasonably, for ice,
which he got me. And my horses calmed downhe was so sensible. (D4 129; 2 Nov. 1932)
XXXVIII
Lord Lord, why cant I what is called seize life by the forelock and ride it like a race
horse? Why must I eat through a vast incoherent dinner now this instant? Why is it cold,
why am I fated to wear silk stockings for the American friends of a friend who is the
dumbest man in the world? Why must Leonard put on a dinner jacket and a black tie?
(L5 186; 30 Mar. 1933, to Ethel Smyth)
XXXIX
[. . .] now, tomorrow, I mean to run it off. And suppose only nonsense comes? The
thing is to be venturous, bold, to take every possible fence. One might introduce plays,
poems, letters, dialogues: must get the round, not only the flat. Not the theory only. And
conversation; argument. How to do that will be one of the problems.
And I am once called out to draw lots in our Derby sweepstakes. No favourite this
year they say. (D4 161; 31 May 1933)
XL
[driving in a downpour through Wales and onward through] much green & prosper-
ous country, till we reached Worcester & took up lodging for the last time at the Star.
Leonard told me not to stare so at the other tea drinkers, but I find it difficult not to gaze
at these real English, these dwellers in the very heart of the land, who talk of horses &
games all the time, & meet their men friends in the lounge, & sit drinking & laughing
& bandying county gossip under pictures of famous race horses. Horses rule England, as
salmon rule Ireland. (D4 218; 8 May 1934)
XLI
The death of Kipling has set all the old war horses of the press padding round their
stalls. (D5 8; 19 Jan. 1936)
XLII
I am Pargiter of Pargiters Horse, [Rose] said, flourishing her hand, riding to the rescue!
She was riding by night on a desperate mission to a besieged garrison, she told herself. She
had a secret messageshe clenched her fist on her purseto deliver to the General in person.
All their lives depended upon it. [. . .] All their lives depended upon her riding to them through
the enemys country. Here she was galloping across the desert. [. . .] She had only to cross the
desert, to ford the river, and she was safe. Flourishing the arm that held the pistol, she clapped
spurs to her horse and galloped down Melrose Avenue. (TY [1880] 27-28)
XLIII
[Eleanor] was late. [. . .] She ran; she dodged. Shopping women got in her way. She
dashed into the road waving her hand among the carts and horses. The conductor saw her,
curved his arm round her and hauled her up. She had caught her bus. (TY [1891] 101)
XLIV
All along the silent country roads leading to London carts plodded; the iron reins
fixed in the iron hands, for vegetables, fruit, flowers travelled slowly. [. . .] On they plod-
ded, down this road, that road, keeping close to the kerb. Even the horses, had they been
blind, could have heard the hum of London in the distance; and the drivers, dozing, yet
saw through half-shut eyes the fiery gauze of the eternally burning city. (TY [1907] 129)
XLV
It was hotter than ever. Horses noses hissed as they drank from the troughs; their
hoofs made ridges hard and brittle as plaster on the country roads. (TY [1911] 192)
XLVI
[Martin] fixed his eyes on a pillar-box. Then he looked at a car. It was odd how soon one
got used to cars without horses, he thought. They used to look ridiculous. (TY [1914] 235)
XLVII
Streets empty. Faces set & eyes bleared. In Chancery Lane I saw a man with a barrow
of music books. My typists office destroyed. Then at Wimbledon a Sirenpeople began
running. We drove, through almost empty streets, as fast as possible. Horses taken out of
the shafts. Cars pulled up. Then the all clear. (D5 317; 10 Sept. 1940)
XLVIII
For [Isas] generation the newspaper was a book; and, as her father-in-law had dropped
the Times, she took it and read: A horse with a green tail . . . which was fantastic. Next,
The guard at Whitehall . . . which was romantic and then, building word upon word,
she read: The troopers told her the horse had a green tail; but she found it was just an
ordinary horse. And they dragged her up to the barrack room where she was thrown upon
a bed. Then one of the troopers removed part of her clothing, and she screamed and hit
him about the face. . . . (BTA 20)
XLIX
That, [Bartholomew] indicated the man with a horse, was my ancestor. He had
a dog. The dog was famous. The dog has his place in history. He left it on record that he
wished his dog to be buried with him.
They looked at the picture.
I always feel, Lucy broke the silence, hes saying: Paint my dog.
But what about the horse? said Mrs. Manresa.
The horse, said Bartholomew, putting on his glasses. He looked at the horse. The
hindquarters were not satisfactory. (BTA 49)
Every one of our male relations was shot into that [great patriarchal] machine at the age
of ten and emerged at sixty a Head Master, an Admiral, a Cabinet Minister, or the Warden
of a college. It is as impossible to think of them as natural human beings as it is to think of
a carthorse galloping wild maned and unshod over the pampas. (A Sketch of the Past 153)
EPILOGUE
On the whole I like the young womans mind considerably. How gallantly she takes her
fences--& my word, what a gift for pen & ink! (D2 17; 4 Feb. 1920, upon rereading VO)
Works Cited
Hussey, Mark, ed. Major Authors on CD-ROM: Virginia Woolf. Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Media, 1997.
CD-ROM.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. 1941. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1969.
. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie. 5 vols. New York: Har-
court, 1977-1984.
. Jacobs Room. 1922. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1978.
. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt, 1975-1980.
. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Orlando: Harvest/Harcourt, 2005.
. Night and Day. 1920. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1948.
. Orlando, A Biography. 1928. Ed. Maria DiBattista. Orlando: Harvest/Harcourt, 2006.
. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals: 1897-1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt, 1990.
. A Room of Ones Own. 1929. Introduction Mary Gordon. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1981.
. A Sketch of the Past. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. 2nd ed. San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt, 1985.
. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Foreword Eudora Welty. New York: Harvest/Harcourt, 1981.
. The Voyage Out. 1920. New York: Harvest/Harcourt, 1948.
. The Waves. 1931. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1978.
. The Years. 1937. New York: Harvest/Harcourt, 1965.
THE METAPHYSICS OF FLOWERS IN THE WAVES :
VIRGINIA WOOLFS SEVEN-SIDED FLOWER AND HENRI BERGSONS
INTUITION
by Laci Mattison
V
irginia Woolfs The Waves (1931) questions epistemology and ontology and, in so do-
ing, becomes a novel concerned with the thing-in-itself. Kant, in Critique of Judg-
ment (1790), posits that we can never reach the thing-in-itself because the intuition
which would give us a full understanding or experience of this thing is impossible. However,
within the framework of modernist philosopher Henri Bergsons theory of metaphysics, we
will recognize how we might intuit the thing-in-itself. Rhoda asks in The Waves: Like
and like and likebut what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? Like
Rhoda, we want to see the thing (163), and, while we have been told by Kant and others that
we will never be able to approach the thing fully, Woolfs writing suggests otherwise.
In the first dissertation on Woolf, published in 1935, Ruth Gruber writes that Woolf
is too innately creative, too inherently Bergsonian to be called Bergsons imitator. It is
conceivable that she would have found the way without him (49). Grubers comments
on the thematic bridge between Woolf s aesthetics and Bergsons philosophy come as
no surprise, especially as Bergson experienced immense popularity during the time she
wrote Virginia Woolf: A Study. Currently and in part because of the publication of Gilles
Deleuzes Bergsonism, the English edition of which was published in 1988, a reinvigorated
Bergson is once again popular. As with Grubers perceptive comments, current schol-
ars have not failed to identify the integral connection between Modernismespecially
Woolf s workand Bergsonism. Mary Ann Gillies cites The Waves as a Bergsonian work
(126) in Henri Bergson and British Modernism (1996); Merry Pawlowski utilizes Bergso-
nian time in her more recent analysis of feminine space in The Years (2008). And, Angela
Hague, in Fiction, Intuition & Creativity (2003), defines intuition through Bergson, Wil-
liam James, and Jung (among others) as she traces intuition in Woolf s creative process,
concluding that [i]n The Waves Woolf achieves the triumph of intuitive form that she
sought throughout her career (275). Extending these and similar arguments that propose
a productive coupling of Woolf s work with Bergsons, this paper affirms that, like Berg-
sons philosophy, Woolf s fiction calls for a new metaphysics, a redefinition of the thing
through duration, intuition, and assemblage.
To exemplify Woolfian metaphysics in The Waves, I take the seven-sided flower as a
point of departure. In Woolf s work, even flowers have political or, here, philosophical im-
portance. When Bernard, Susan, Neville, Jinny, Louis, and Rhoda assemble for Percivals
farewell dinner, a red carnation on the table transforms. Bernard thinks:
We have come together (from the North, from the South, from Susans farm,
from Louiss house of business) to make this one thing, not enduringfor what
endures?but seen by many eyes simultaneously. There is a red carnation in that
vase. A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many
petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leavesa whole flower
to which every eye brings its own contribution. (127)
This flower, instead of exhibiting fixed or essential qualities, fluctuates precisely because of
the collection assembled around it. Notably, when the six meet for dinner after Percivals
death, they will gather around another flower, but one with only six sides. As Bernard
says in the above passage, they are makingcreatingthe seven-sided carnation in the
moment. However, the flower they create does not last beyond that moment (or, at least,
endures only in memory). And, even in the moment, the making is a process. Thus,
this passage, like much of Woolf s writing, necessitates a particular temporality: real
time (or, moments of being) in distinction to clock time. As we will see in a further
contextualization with Bergsons philosophy, we must consider the duration of the flower
because the method of intuition already presupposes duration (Bergsonism 13).
The Waves, like Woolf s other fiction, returns again and again to this theme of time,
the principle theme of Bergsons philosophy. Often in Woolf s fiction, different modes
of time intersect; or rather, ordered (masculine) time interrupts moments of being. For
instance, at one point in The Waves, Bernard and Nevilles moment of being is interrupted
by clock time. Bernard blames Neville, who had been thinking with the unlimited time
of the mind but then poked the fire and began to live by that other clock (273; emphasis
added). This other clock is one of habit (or, non-being as Woolf puts it in Moments
of Being). The other clock represents spatialized time that orders our lives into seconds,
minutes, hours, translating our qualitative experience into something quantitative. In Ber-
nards and Nevilles shared moment of being, their identity spreads outward, grows rings
in a stream of being. But, when the tick of a clock interrupts, this intuitive sense of self,
which is not essential but continually fluctuating in experiential connectivity, is lost.
Bergsons philosophy, like Woolfs fiction, is preoccupied with the distinction between
the time of the mind and that other clock. Throughout his workpublication dates
which range from 1889 to 1934Bergson focuses on the concept of dure (duration). Berg-
son argues that usually when we speak of time we think of the measurement of duration,
and not of duration itself. But this duration which science eliminates, and which is so dif-
ficult to conceive and express, is what one feels and lives (Creative Mind 12). As Bergson
posits, science is not the only discipline that spatializes time; philosophers are especially
implicated in his critique. Bergson states that the practice of philosophy has been to study
space, to determine its nature and function, and then to apply to time the conclusions thus
reached. The theories of space and time thus become counterparts of one another (13).
Time is spatialized in Western science, philosophy, and, more often than not, literature.
However, as Woolf recognizes in her fiction, this spatialized time does not correspond to
our lived experience. Past and present, as Bergson argues and Woolf s fiction affirms, are
not so easily separated. Furthermore, the so-called present, according to Bergson, is always
already the past1; so, the past and present, in continual comingling, become arbitrary
distinctions. As we will see, it is precisely intuition which allows us to experience this dura-
tionnot time in segments but time as a fluctuating, non-spatial continuum.
For Bergson, what is at stake in living in duration is, namely, free will and the creation
of the radically new. Woolf s philosophy necessitates duration, also, as moments of be-
ingwhich are precisely artistic, creativerequire the transcendence of the false time
The Metaphysics of Flowers in THE WAVES 73
of that other clock. In a moment of being, one experiences a connection with the uni-
verse, the mind grows rings [and] identity becomes robust (257). Woolf summarizes her
aestheticsor, what [she] might call a philosophyin the much quoted passage from
Moments of Being. She famously concludes that Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the
truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no
Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the mu-
sic; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock (72). Notably, Woolf calls
this shock intuition (72), an important word, also, for Bergson. Intuition is a word
which has been used in many, often contradictory ways. The term is full of echoes, as
Woolf would say,2 and Bergson acknowledges this in Creative Mind. However, a congru-
ency exists between Woolf s and Bergsons conceptions of intuition. For both, the method
of intuition allows us to reach the thing-in-itself.
In Creative Mind, the book most centered on the theme of intuition, Bergson argues
for a radical re-visioning of metaphysics. He proposes a new metaphysics based upon the
method of intuition, which is, according to Bergson, a question, above all, of finding true
duration (34). One cannot practice intuition without placing ones self into duration,
into the flow of real time, in order to experience the movement of thought. As Bergson
states, [T]o think intuitively is to think in duration (39). Just as what Bergson calls real
time is important in an understanding of moments of being, intuition is also inherent to
Woolf s philosophy: the experientiality of the shock.
The reason why philosophers such as Kant argue that we will never be able to reach
the thing-in-itself is that these philosophers spatialize time and thus are only able to
perceive the thing by various positions outside of time and outside of the thing.3 The
other issue Bergson raises with philosophers and metaphysicians is that matter, as it is for
Kant, is given a priori. The thing is not considered in the context of change, of becom-
ing, and the universe remains static. Bergson writes:
Kant had proved, so it was said, that our thought exerts itself upon a matter pre-
viously scattered in Space and Time, and thus prepared especially for man: the
thing in itself escapes us; to comprehend it, we would need an intuitive faculty
which we do not possess. On the contrary, from my analysis the result was that
at least a part of reality, our person, can be grasped in its natural purity. (30)
The place where we might begin the practice of intuition and therefore perceive the thing-
in-itself is the self, which can be defined through Woolf, Bergson, and (later) Deleuze as
a dynamic and unified multiplicity.
As a process philosopher, Bergson is not interested in dialectical synthesis but in non-
linear becoming, in the dynamic differentiation that occurs through inner multiplicity,
which is also unified. Deleuze writes in Bergsonism: Being, or Time, is a multiplicity. But
it is precisely not multiple; it is One, in conformity with its type of multiplicity (85).
Following Bergson, Deleuze distinguishes the multiple, a quantitative grouping, from a
virtual multiplicity, which is by nature qualitative. In Three Guineas, Woolf writes of the
possibility for unity to rub [] out divisions as if they were chalk marks only; to dis-
cuss with you the capacity of the human spirit to overflow boundaries and make unity out
of multiplicity (143). Likewise, Bergson posits in Creative Evolution: I am then [] a
unity that is multiple and a multiplicity that is one. [] Such is my inner life, and such
also is life in general (258). In keeping with these congruent arguments, if we are to reach
the thing-in-itself, we must recognize the assemblage, the multiplicity, inherent to the
self and the thing. If life, the lan vital, is, as Bergson posits, a creative evolution, then
we must consider the movements of this assemblage.
Through the method of intuition, we can move from an examination of our own
minds outward. Bergson, in a clarification which current (mis)readings of his work ig-
noretake, for instance, Jonah Lehrers cursory comments in Proust Was a Neuroscien-
tist (2007)states that intuition is not simply psychological, nor is it a self-involved,
bourgeois navel-gazing, as Lehrer suggests. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson
writes: Strictly speaking, there might exist no other duration than our own, as there
might be no other color in the world than orange, for example (Creative Mind 221).
This absurd suggestion is precisely how those who label intuition as bourgeois medita-
tion (Lehrer 78) and, thus, as strictly psychological, would describe Bergsons method.
However, the intuition of our duration, far from leaving us suspended in the void as
pure analysis would do, puts us in contact with a whole continuity of durations which
we should try to follow either downwardly or upwardly: in both cases we dilate ourselves
indefinitely by a more and more rigorous effort, in both cases transcend ourselves (221).
In this way, intuition is not only a scientific method (as Deleuze argues in Bergsonism)
but also possesses ecological import because it enables us to connect with durations other
than our own, both human and non-human, and so allows us not only to transcend our-
selves but to move beyond the human, all too human. These durations, by definition,
also implicate creative evolution, the thing and the self in the context of change; we
experience a continual and originary wholeness dynamically through the connectivity of
durational unity. Or, as Elizabeth Grosz defines it, intuition allows us to discern the in-
terconnections rather than the separations between things, to develop another perspective
or interest in the division and production of the real (Time Travels 136).
Kants thing does not exist because his conception of the thing is static and, as
we have seen, change must be included in the equationwhich produces not a quantita-
tive, summary understanding of the thing but a qualitative, multiplicative experience of it.
The seven-sided flower in The Waves, as intuitively experienced by Percival and the six
voices of the novel, necessitates dure and, thus, change. Like a moment of being, this
one thing (the seven-sided flower), Bernard affirms, does not endure. We are left with
impressions, glimpses, momentary intuitionslike the fin, which rises to the surface then
sinks again. As Woolf recognizes with the seven-sided flower passage and elsewhere in
her fiction, objects continually fluctuate. In this passage from The Waves, we recognize
again that multiplicity is not opposed to unity (and vise versa), that, through intuition,
Bernard, Susan, Neville, Jinny, Louis, Rhoda, and Percival have experienced the intercon-
nections of their selves and, in so doing, have composed (or, created) a whole flower
(127). They have not added together seven points of view, which Bergson characterizes as
immobile (220), but they have collectively intuited all the possible, mobile connections
between their selves and the world (here, the red carnation).4
Later in the same dinner scene, Neville comments on this false speech, which
affirms I am this; I am that! (138). To say, simply, a red carnation in that vase is a
reduction; likewise, to make affirmative statements about the self is to falsify by fixing
the movement of the lan vital.5 Nancy Bazin, in Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous
Vision, argues that Woolf s vision of the complex ambiguous, contradictory nature of
man was similar to the Cubists concept of the total reality of an object or set of objects.
Like the Cubist painter, she wanted to increase the number of possible perspectives and
thus, in that sense, make her characters more lifelike (143).6 While intuition for Woolf
and Bergson cannot be reduced to a quantitative sum of perspectives (as earlier clarified),
Rhodas aesthetics are notably cubist. When she looks between [] shoulders, she envi-
sions something like a Cubist painting: When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a
triangle; now it is uprighta column; now a fountain, falling (139). With this vision,
Rhoda comments on the many changing shapes; instead of seeing the other characters,
she sees objects in flux. Rhoda later thinks: Like and like and likebut what is the
thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? Now that lightning has gashed the tree
and the flowering branch has fallen and Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let
me see the thing. There is a square; there is an oblong (163). However, though Rhoda
sees the world geometrically, she intuits the continual refiguration of these shapes. Rhodas
cubist vision allows her to intuit the thing in flux. Like the Cubist painters, Woolf rec-
ognizes that the image of the multiplicity (a red carnation, for instance) opens one up
to the actual multiplicity. Thus, the reader, like Rhoda, can intuit the thing, but this
experience cannot depend on language as such and must happen off the page, as language
always fixes dure. One must read affectively: for rhythm, not for plot. In this way, the
reader no longer makes sense based on static definitions, but senses the text.7
Bergson recognizes art (including literature) can often teach us something about in-
tuition. He posits: Art would suffice then to show us that an extension of the faculties of
perceiving is possible (160). Part of the practice of intuition is an exercising and expansion
of perception and memories, and artists model this practice. Artists look at a thing []
for itself, and not for themselves. They do not perceive simply with a view to action; they
perceive in order to perceive,for nothing, for the pleasure of doing so (162). Certainly,
Woolf de-institutionalizes art. Moments of being are art, and, furthermore, one becomes an
artist through moments of being. So, it is possible, following Woolf s philosophy, that even
the common person can practice an artists perception and, in turn, intuition.
Because of Woolfs connection between everyday life and art, it is not surprising that one
of her experiential moments of being as a child involves a flower, which she perceived for
the pleasure of doing so, as Bergson would say. In A Sketch of the Past, Woolf writes: I
was looking at the flower bed by the front door; That is the whole, I said. I was looking at a
plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of
the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth;
part flower (71). Here, Woolf identifies the relationship between part and whole, which can
also be understood in terms of a unified multiplicity.8 The ring, like the globe or drop in The
Waves, encloses without, paradoxically, closing off because the ring indicates a moment of
being, which we know to be flashes, shocks in a system of flux.9 In this autobiographical pas-
sage, Woolf demonstrates that she has intuited her own duration and, following Bergson and
Deleuze, has affirm[ed] and immediately [] recognize[d] the existence of other durations,
above or below her (Bergsonism 32-3), in this case, the duration of the flower.
In Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction, Stella McNichol comments on the flower
passage from Moments of Being. She states: This is a moment of transcendence, of a
mystical sense of something existing beyond the literal and tangible object one is looking
at. Embedded in this vision is a realization of the meaning and importance of wholeness;
that something is made whole often through the inclusion of something else which is not
essentially of itself (125). For Bergson, this transcendence can be obtained through the
method of intuition. But, as Bergson and Woolf would argue, to claim essentiality is to
miss the point: where is the essential self or even the essential flower in The Waves? Are
not matter and memory always already un-essentialized through assemblage? Like the
red carnation at the dinner party, things-in-themselves, as defined by Kant, become
a moot point. If we cannot think movement, cannot conceive of the thing as in flux,
we, like Kant, will never be able to intuit the thing. The only essential, according to
Bergson, is change.10 Thus, Bergsonsand, as I have argued, Woolf snew metaphysics
can be defined as experience itself; and duration will be revealed as it really is,unceasing
creation, the uninterrupted up-surge of novelty (Creative Mind 17). Through dure, the
Bergsonian and Woolfian method of intuition allows us to go beyond the human condi-
tion, which is the meaning of philosophy according to Deleuze (27) and, we might
add, the meaning of art, of novels like The Waves.
Notes
1. See Memory of the Present and False Recognition, in which Bergson systematically shows how we create
memories even in the moment we term present (Mind-Energy 157-60, 172).
2. See Eulogy to Words, 7 March 2008, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/
woolfv1.shtml>, BBC, London, 29 April 1937.
3. See Phantasms of the Living, a speech given to the Society for Psychical Research in 1913 and collected
in Mind-Energy (pages 98-100, specifically).
4. Seven points of view would equate the quantitative multiple, while the intuited connection is precisely
what Bergson and Deleuze understand through multiplicity.
5. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write: The plane of consistency contains only haecceities,
along intersecting lines. Forms and subjects are not of that world (263). Notably, they link this point
directly to Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway, who both walked through London. Walking, for Woolf as flneuse,
is an act of openness to the world. Deleuze and Guattari criticize Mrs. Dalloway for claiming I am this,
I am that, because [t]aking a walk is a haecceity, which has neither beginning nor end, origin nor
destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome (263). So,
there exists no room for subjects as such in this conception of the world.
6. Other critics, such as Jesse Matz, have argued for congruency between Impressionist aesthetics and Woolf s
fiction. In Cultures of Impression, Matz writes: When Virginia Woolf repeats Manets supreme in-
difference by providing happiest to work up her impressions in subjective solitude, she also simulates
Cezannes dedication to the mixed and broken character of fully absorbed perception. Matz continues:
Nowhere is the dynamic chiasmus of attention and distraction more evidently productive than in Woolf s
impressions, which always partake both of intense focus and subjective dissolutionboth of full presence
and absence of any fixity on objects themselves (Bad Modernisms 310).
7. Even literature can move beyond language if we seriously consider Bergsons intuitive method. Bergson upholds
affective reading as an analogy for the intuition [he] recommend[s] to the philosopher (102). This way of
reading attends to movementnot meaningto rhythm, to the temporal relations between the various sen-
tences of the paragraph and various part of each sentence, in following uninterruptedly the crescendo of thought
and feeling to the point musically indicated as the culmination point that the art of diction consists (102).
Music, for Bergson, is duration, and, inherent to literature (as well as music) is rhythm. Woolf recognizes this
musical-literary relation with The Waves, which she wrote to a rhythm and not a plot (Diary 316).
8. The whole can be understood in terms of the Deleuzian virtual, which Deleuze utilizes in Bergsonism
to reveal how Bergson does not contradict himself by positing a unity of duration while at the same time
arguing that durations are multiplicities (93-4; 112-3).
9. In other words, in this moment, the whole flower (as assemblage) has territorialized. This territorial-
ization, following Deleuze, is a momentary stabilization of the system. Manuel DeLanda has expanded
Deleuze and Guattaris concept of assemblage in his book A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory
and Social Complexity (2006). DeLandas definitions of de/territorialization are useful to my examination
of The Waves. He defines deterritorializing as any process which either destabilizes spatial boundaries
or increases internal heterogeneity (New Philosophy 13). DeLanda writes that territorialization plays a
synthetic role, since it is in part through the more or less permanent articulations produced by this process
that a whole emerges from its parts and maintains its identity once it has emerged (14). This identity
(while stabilized) is not fixed, for alternate becomings are still possible, and further de/territorializations
can occur. Once any component (or duration, function, intensity, etc.) of the assemblage changes through
de/territorializations, new capacities will emerge. The plane of consistency comprises the virtual, which is
not opposed to the real but to the actual. In any deterritorialization (enabled through a line of flight), the
assemblage reconstitutes itself through a positive feedback loop. In this way, the virtual system is potential-
ized and, then, reterritorialized as the actual (or possible).
10. For intuition the essential is change: as for the thing, as intelligence understands it, it is a cutting which has
been made out of the becoming and set up by our mind as a substitute for the whole (Creative Mind 39).
Works Cited
Bazin, Nancy. Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover, 1907. 1998.
. Creative Mind. Trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York: The Philosophical Library, Inc. 1934. 1946.
. Mind-Energy. Trans. H. Wildon Carr. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1920.
. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Paul and W. Palmer. New York: Macmillan, 1896.
. Time and Free Will. Trans. F.L. Pogson. New York: Harper & Row, 1889. 1960.Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism.
New York: Zone Books, 1988.
Gillies, Mary Ann. Henri Bergson and British Modernism. London: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Gruber, Ruth. Virginia Woolf: A Study. Leipzig: Verlag Von Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1935.
Hague, Angela. Fiction, Intuition & Creativity. DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003.
Kant, Immanuel. From Critique of Judgment. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B.
Leitch, et al. New York: Norton, 2001. 504-35.
Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
McNichol, Stella. Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction. London: Routledge, 1990.
Matz, Jesse. Cultures of Impression. Bad Modernisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 298-330.
Pawlowski, Merry M. Where Am I?: Feminine Space and Time in Virginia Woolf s The Years. Literary
Landscapes: From Modernism to Postcolonialism. Eds. Attie de Lange, Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn and
Jakob Lothe. New York: Palgrave, 2008. 75-91.
Woolf, Virginia. A Eulogy to Words. 7 March 2008. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilep-
ages/woolfv1.shtml>. BBC, London. 29 April 1937.
. Moments of Being. New York: Harcourt, 1976. 1985.
. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume III. Eds. Anne Oliver Bell and Andrew McNeillie. New York: Har-
court, 1980.
. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt, 1938.
. The Waves. New York: Harcourt, 1931.
CROWDING CLARISSAS GARDEN
by Erin Kay Penner
C
larissas plunge into London on the first page of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) offers a
rallying point for critics intent on establishing Woolf as a writer of the modern
city, the subject of last years conference. I love walking in London, Clarissa says
in the opening pages; Really its better than walking in the country (MD 6). But Clar-
issas opening plunge, of course, echoes an earlier plunge through the French windows
at Bourton into the open air when she was eighteen (3). By allowing the image of that
childhood garden to dominate the opening pages of her novel, Woolf shows readers the
real contours of the walks that take place in Mrs. Dalloway. The choice of London walks
over country ones is a red herring; for Clarissa, walking is simply inextricable from memo-
ries of country life. Although Morris Beja offered a fantastic sketch of The London of
Mrs. Dalloway in the Spring 1977 Virginia Woolf Miscellany, London is not the only, or
even the primary, terrain of the novel. Beneath the cityscape lies a prior, natural landscape
that resonates throughout Mrs. Dalloway. As the curious phrase plunged at Bourton into
the open air makes clear, Bourton, for Clarissa, is the outdoors, and it is the grounds of
her childhood home, which Clarissa remembers so vividly, that underlie the motorcars
and shops of Mrs. Dalloways London.
But here we should pause to consider Clarissas hesitation. She does, of course, even-
tually sally forth into London, but Woolf does not make that movement explicit in the
novel, as she does in the earlier Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street (1923). Whereas in the
short story we watch as Clarissa stepped out into the street (CSF 152), in the novel the
memories of Bourton replace that action. And in those memories Woolf draws us back to
a moment in which Clarissa paused on the edge of that natural space. As Deborah Guth
observes in What a Lark! What a Plunge!: Fiction as Self-Evasion in Mrs. Dalloway,
Woolf portrays Clarissas sense of plunging with such intensity that the reader, momen-
tarily lost in the syntax of the phrase, almost overlooks the fact that immediately after this
she is still standing at the window, looking and just looking (25). Whereas Guth reads
this as an example of Clarissas incapacity to commit herself fully (25), I would like to
draw attention to the way that Clarissas hesitation links the step into nature with the
step into her own drawing room in later sections of the book. For all her happiness about
London; this moment of June (MD 4), the step into nature offers as much a check as
the step into society that has Clarissa hesitating one moment on the threshold of her
drawing room, an exquisite suspense (30). There is the same confrontation of society in
the gardens as there is in the drawing room. Nature, as Woolf imagines it in Mrs. Dalloway
and in the short stories she wrote just before and after the novel, is far from wild freedom.
Instead, she uses the garden to check her readers inclinations to look to nature for escape.
It is in the vegetable garden at Bourton that Peter and Sally get together to compare
notes about the dramas played out in the drawing room (73). And it is at the secluded
fountain on the grounds that Peter asks Clarissa to meet him: they stood with the foun-
tain between them, the spout (it was broken) dribbling water incessantly. How sights fix
Crowding Clarissas Garden 79
themselves upon the mind! For example, the vivid green moss (64). For Peter and for the
other characters of the novel, the garden is a continuation of the social scene that takes
place indoors, rather than an escape from it. One wonders whether Woolf wrote such
scenes as a sly check to E. M. Forsters enthusiasm for nature as a means of magic and es-
cape. When Woolf, in that famous 1925 diary passage, says that she invented [Clarissas]
memories to offset the tinselly aspects of Clarissas character (D3: 32), those memories
came largely in the form of the Bourton garden and the conversations that occurred there.
When Clarissa thinks of plunging into the outdoors at Bourton, her focus quickly shifts
from the natural scene to Peters words. Her thoughts range between the French windows
and the terrace, hunting up the place in which he spoke, finally abandoning the grounds
for a vision of Peter himself. The interaction with nature is used largely to impress upon
the reader and the characters alike the social world that crowds any garden scene.
Two of the most striking differences between Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street and
the novel that followed are the increase in links between Clarissa Dalloway and the other
Londoners walking the street and the blossoming of the Bourton memories that play such
a major role in the novel. In the short story, the narrator makes a clear distinction between
Clarissa and the others walking down the street, whose stories are alluded to only briefly
and darkly: No doubt they were not all bound on errands of happiness. There is much
more to be said about us than that we walk the streets of Westminster.Only for Mrs
Dalloway the moment was complete (CSF 152). It is, ironically enough, Clarissas happy
childhood that seems to separate her from the others:
Only for Mrs Dalloway the moment was complete; for Mrs Dalloway June was
fresh. A happy childhoodflowers at evening, smoke risingthere is nothing
to take the place of childhood. A leaf of mint brings it back: or a cup with a blue
ring. Poor little wretches, she sighed, and pressed forward. (152)
Clarissas ability to draw on a happy childhood is precisely what cuts her off from the oth-
ers in the street in the short story.
Woolf maintains the sharp distinction between Clarissa and the other characters through
the final moments of Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street, never granting Clarissa the kind of sym-
pathy visible in Mrs. Dalloway. Whereas, in the novel, the backfiring of a car outside startles
Clarissa and enables the narrator to shift attention to other startled bystanders, her reaction in
the short story is quite different: There was a violent explosion in the street outside. The shop-
women cowered behind the counters. But Clarissa, sitting very upright, smiled at the other
lady. Miss Anstruther! she exclaimed, prompted by the shock to remember the name of the
other customer in the shop (159). The story thus ends with Clarissa still in full possession of
herself and the narrative, an exemplar of the English unflappability she so admires.
What I find interesting is that the novel probes more deeply into Clarissas memories,
revealing that not all garden experiences were happy ones for her. With the novels more
nuanced picture of Clarissas childhood we see an increase in her sympathy for others, a
change echoed by a great deal of narrative movement between her mind and those of the
poor wretches Clarissa observes. Only by reworking the garden of privilege, so that it
is not a barrier between characters, can the garden emerge as a means of deepening the
readers access to the character, and her access to others.
These plunges into the garden occur only in memory in Mrs. Dalloway, but in the
short stories that followed the novel Woolf uses Clarissas garden as a complement to the
drawing-room party, bringing the garden into focus in the present day. In sharp contrast to
Clarissas opening plunge into memory, a moment of hesitation that obscures her plunge
into London, the move outside is overdetermined in the story A Summing Up (1944):
Since it had grown hot and crowded indoors, since there could be no danger on
a night like this of damp, since the Chinese lanterns seemed hung like red and
green fruit in the depths of an enchanted forest, Mr Bertram Pritchard led Mrs
Latham into the garden. (CSF 208)
The characters are somewhere between being pushed out of the crowded room and being
lured by the fruits of the enchanted forest. Such magic-making is given a very different
cast in Mrs. Dalloway, when Mrs. Hilbery, looking for the door, stops to lecture Sally
and Peter Walsh on the beauties of Clarissas garden:
did they know, she asked, that they were surrounded by an enchanted garden? Lights and
trees and wonderful gleaming lakes and the sky. Just a few fairy lamps, Clarissa Dalloway
had said, in the back garden! But she was a magician! It was a park. (MD 191)
The absurdity of Mrs. Hilbery is set up from the beginning, when she fails to find the exit,
and it only increases as she transforms Clarissas back garden into the park of a country
estate. Mrs. Hilberys tribute is of another time, perhaps more suited to Clarissas child-
hood country home than the Dalloways walled city garden. In failing to register the shift,
Mrs. Hilbery displays her inability to adjust her eyes to the limits of the garden in the
modern, bustling world in which Woolf and her readers now live. The magic attached to
traditional English gardens is something Woolf confronts head-on; offering magic in the
voice of Mrs. Hilbery dispels it quite effectively.
Once in the garden in A Summing Up, Sasha Latham acknowledges that the beau-
ty, country born and bred as she was, thrilled her because of the contrast presumably;
there the smell of hay in the air and behind her the rooms full of people (CSF 209). So
many of the characters in the short stories clustered around Mrs. Dalloway highlight their
country childhood: Mrs. Vallance, of The Ancestors (1973), thinks wistfully of the gar-
den of her Scottish home, which now appeared to her the place where she had spent her
whole childhood (183); Mr. Serle, of Together and Apart (1944), softens visibly under
the influence of the moonlit sky and the mention of his ancestral home in Canterbury.
We might think here of the moment near the end of Mrs. Dalloway in which Clarissa,
too, thinks reproachfully, She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly ad-
mirable. She had wanted success. Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had
walked on the terrace at Bourton (185). For a party of city-dwellers, the stories and the
novel speak just as strongly to the country, which is for many of these figures the place of
childhood, of ancestors, of the dead, and of their lost potential. It is a rather Edenic im-
age, not because the garden was perfect, but because it is a reminder of their fall from it.
Unlike the other characters who think longingly of the country life, Clarissa is
thwarted in her attempts to romanticize it:
Many a time had she gone, at Bourton when they were all talking, to look at the
sky.It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this country
sky, this sky above Westminster. She parted the curtains; she looked. Oh, but
how surprising!in the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! She
was going to bed. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be
a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty. But there it wasashen pale, raced
over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. (MD 185-6)
She, like Sasha Latham, and like so many of the characters in the short stories Woolf wrote
about Clarissas party, claims the sky, the country sky, as her own, as her escape from
city and society. And yet here when she goes to claim it she is forced to see London, to
see something other than an escape from her current situation. Whereas looking at the
moon helps to bring together Miss Anning and Mr. Serle in the short story Together
and Apart, Clarissa is dismayed to find that she shares this glance outside with someone
else. Instead of seeing the moon, as she says, between peoples shoulders at dinner, she is
forced to look straight at the people. And her surprise is amplified when the sky is not as
she had thought it would be. The sky refuses to hold for her that something of her own
and instead confronts her with newness. Although critics, perhaps most meticulously
Deborah Guth, have argued that Clarissa weaves Septimus Smiths death into her own
lifes narrative, nature here refuses to offer Clarissa more material for her story. The night-
time sky is neither nostalgic nor country, and the old woman opposite prevents Clarissa
from finding in the sky an escape from the social pressures of her party.
Although the natural world plays a surprising variety of roles in the stories of Clar-
issas party, it is not until A Summing Up that Woolf confronts directly public expecta-
tions of gardens as a space of rejuvenation and reflection. Unlike the other Woolf stories,
in which the calm spaces of the country are used to criticize the human beings packed on
top of each other in little boxes in the city (CSF 182), Sasha here uses the country to, at
least at first, revel in the developments of civilization:
Where there were osier beds and coracles paddling through a swamp, there is
this; and she thought of the dry thick well built house, stored with valuables,
humming with people coming close to each other, going away from each other,
exchanging their views, stimulating each other. (209)
But when she looks over the garden wall, seeing London vast inattentive impersonal, the
gilding of civilization is lost. Unable to decide which view is the true one, that of civiliza-
tions triumph or civilizations aloofness, Sasha gleans something of an answer in the tree
in the garden: the soulfor she was conscious of a movement in her of some creature
beating its way about her and trying to escape which momentarily she called the soulis
by nature unmated, a widow bird; a bird perched aloof on that tree (210).
Sasha escapes through chains of metaphor, the soul to bird that, when startled by a
shriek in the street, becomes remote as a crow (211). She shows a refusal to engage the
dichotomies she has set up: nature or civilization, triumph or indifference. What is most
significant is not whether nature or civilization wins. We are all familiar with Woolf s
rather complex relationship with civilization as it was discussed in Bloomsbury circles, par-
ticularly by Clive Bell,1 and with her ambiguous regard for Clarissa Dalloway, for whom, she
confessed to Lytton Strachey, some distastepersisted (D3: 32). By ducking the question
Woolfs character alters the terms of the story that has unfolded. Stepping into the garden,
she seems to note the contrast between city and country out of some sort of obligation;
Sasha observes that she is awed by the beauty of the garden, but then edits that it thrilled
her because of the contrast presumably (209). That presumably sets us up for the story of
civilization she spins shortly thereafter, a clean thick house replacing the unformed swamps.
Just as she spins a story about her companion (she was thinking of him in the abstract as a
person whose existence was good, creating him as he spoke in a guise that was different from
what he said, and was certainly the true Bertram Pritchard, even though one could not prove
it (208)), so, too, she begins to spin the story of civilizations triumph.
In telling such a story Sasha shows herself susceptible to the metaphors of her time
and of literary tradition; when the gilt fades she does her best to remember what she had
read at school about the Isle of Thorney and men in coracles, oysters, and wild duck and
mists (210). But in evadingand here we might think of Rebecca Walkowitzs work on
the deliberate evasiveness of Woolf s cosmopolitan stylethe decision between the gilded
and the jaded views, she finally uses her storytelling tendencies to liberate herself from the
situation she has created. Upon reentering the house with Bertram she has freed the soul
that is now a widow bird from the constraints of her garden box.
As we watch Sasha peek over the wall, rewarded for her curiosity by a burst imagina-
tive bubble, we may well think of the Eden story; the sight of the impersonal city causes
her to lose her faith in the story of civilization. Going out into the garden does not offer
her a reprieve of companyBertram is unfailing in his attentionsor of failed interper-
sonal encounters. In a rather telling final line, Bertram decides that, of the couple with
whom theyve been conversing, he likes the husband, but not the wife, who is very clever,
no doubt (211). Sasha is not the only guest of the Dalloway party who might describe
herself as sitting somewhat outside the party: she was condemned to be herself and could
only in this silent enthusiastic way, sitting outside in a garden, applaud the society of hu-
manity from which she was excluded (209). Despite situating herself on the periphery of
society, Sasha shows herself, in her reading of civilization in the garden, to be very much
a part of that society, particularly its schoolroom perpetuation of the narratives of civiliza-
tion and progress. The garden is not a reprieve from the crush of humanity, but yet anoth-
er facet of it. In this story we see the imaginative labor required to move beyond the most
common literary tropes and philosophies of civilization that crowd the English garden.
The garden, I suggest, is just as much a social space as Clarissa Dalloways drawing-
room, one in which men and women must situate themselves within or without the
dominant English themes and images. But here we will return to Clarissas hesitation on
the opening page of Mrs. Dalloway. One thing that the garden can do is offer an image to
compete with the drawing-room party. By entering the garden Sasha can make use of the
images of nature not to escape civilizationif this were a Forster book we might expect
half the party guests to disappear into the treesbut to set up parallel images of civiliza-
tion alongside one another (the drawing room, the English garden) and find room for
her presence through the multiplicity of the images. In setting nature against civilization
Woolf acknowledges the old rivalries, but uses that tension to release her from choosing
between them.
The garden and the countryside in Mrs. Dalloway and the short stories that Woolf
wrote just before and after it are not places of consolation. Septimus rejects Holmess
attempts to shunt him off to a country home where he will be silenced; Clarissa ignores
Sallys invitation to visit her in the country. In some ways, Woolf might join Peter Walsh
in preferring men to cauliflowers (3, 4, and 193), at least inasmuch as she acknowledges
the difficulty of seeing nature as an exception to society, as a place of unbesmirched loveli-
ness and rejuvenation. Nature has been papered over by poetic longing such that those
civilized images must be confronted when one does step out into the garden. Woolf shows
us nature where the modern Briton is most likely to find it: not in the sprawling parks of
the country estates but in the London back garden, that odd square of greenery between
Clarissas party and the towers of Westminster.
Notes
1. See Brian W. Shaffer, Civilization in Bloomsbury: Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway and Bells Theory of Civiliza-
tion, Journal of Modern Literature 19.1 (Summer 1994): 73-87.
Works Cited
Beja, Morris. The London of Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf Miscellany 7 (Spring 1977): 4.
Guth, Deborah. What a Lark! What a Plunge!: Fiction as Self-Evasion in Mrs. Dalloway. Modern Language
Review 84.1 (1989): 18-25.
Shaffer, Brian W. Civilization in Bloomsbury: Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway and Bells Theory of Civilization. Journal
of Modern Literature 19.1 (Summer 1994): 73-87.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press,
2006.
Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. Orlando: Harvest, 1989.
. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. San Diego: Harcourt, 1977-1984.
. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harvest, 1953.
THE FLESH OF CITIZENSHIP: RED FLOWERS GREW
by Rachel Zlatkin
He lay very high, on the back of the world. The earth thrilled beneath him. Red flow-
ers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head. (Mrs. Dalloway 68)
T
he Regents Park represents an effort to naturalize a princely national order that in
Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway (1925) resounds in the regular ringing of Big Ben. Originally
conceived as a park closed to the common public with two rings of ornate homes
for the stately, pedestrians did not have access until 1835, and then for just two days a week.
Thus, the original conception of the park rests on the exclusion of the common public by
an encircled and celebrated state. Woolfs Flush learns that there is no equality among
dogs: there are high dogs and low dogs over a summer in The Regents Park.1 Likewise, the
characters of Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway walk their ordered daily routines with the clock tolling
their hours: First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable (4). The risk is a modern
mechanized (or habitual) movement according to a centralized state that compartmentalizes
time and space for its class-stratified citizens. Of course, in Mrs. Dalloway the hour, the past,
is revocable: it is remembered, revised, and relived for Septimus Smith and Mrs. Dalloway,
most especially. Nevertheless, the characters submit to a kind of containment, startled out
of it from time to time by the backfiring automobile or the smoking plane. Inventions, nor-
mally taken as a sign of progress and futurity, misfire the past into the present. This apparent
need to shock a citizen into an even temporary remembrance of the war and its effects fuels
Woolfs critique of a post-war England. At the heart of this critique is Septimus Smitha
man who can no longer contain the uncontainable, and whose boundaries between self and
object, body and mind, are anything but stable.
In Septimus Smiths first scene in The Regents Park, the leaves beckoned him; theyre
alive (22). He feels the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body
(22). He hears the sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling (22). He sees that their jagged
fountains were part of the pattern, that [s]ounds made harmonies with premeditation
and that the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds themselves (22). He
feels his connectedness to nature quite tangiblyin millions of fibresan experience just
as acute as Evans traumatic returns. Those fibers provide Septimus a means to signification
that the rhetoric of a post-war England does not. Timo Maran, an eco-semiotician, notes
that humans, both biological and cultural beings, stand in the unique position of translating
between the two realms (463). Septimus Smiths post war condition makes him hypersensi-
tive to such a position, fully capable of hearing the significance in the spaces between (MD
22). My argument requires that a distinction be made between Septimus Smiths intermedi-
ary position and his psychological condition, for I argue he is in a position of health.
This paper will explore the relationship between Septimus and his environment.
D.W. Winnicotts object relations theories provide the basis for my understanding of hu-
THE FLESH OF CITIZENSHIP 85
man relations, and I rely on eco-critical thoughts to extend that concept of reciprocal
exchange between human subjects to include the natural environment. In the second
portion of the paper, I turn to Merleau-Pontys more specific conception of the flesh as
it pertains to Septimus Smiths feeling of embedded-ness in The Regents Park. While
his character makes an important argument against the treatment of returning soldiers
that falls along class lines, his character also argues for a particularly personal experience
of natural phenomena, one that provides a model for all subject-subject relations. These
two arguments, for the veteran and for the natural environment, are not exclusive in Mrs.
Dalloway. Rather the two are inextricably bound in the character of Septimus Smith: a
man who leaves his small town to pursue his poetic ideals in a London that places him in
a bank, a man who returns from the first machine war with an invisible wound, a man
who finds a level of acceptance in the trees of The Regents Park that is unmatched by his
human counterparts.
When Woolf places Septimus Smith in The Regents Park for a meeting with Evans,
she creates a dialogic relation between the structured order of the park and the disrup-
tive unruliness of Septimus Smiths psyche. The national parks very design argues for a
controlled containment unheeded by Septimuss condition. Further, Woolf makes the
pointed contrast between the garden setting and an unruly experience of selfhood just as
Peter Walsh romanticizes the scene between Septimus and Rezia in the park. In so doing
she also calls into question what is meant by British post-war citizenship and challenges
her readers to read against Londons clock.
On the one hand, she has political concerns. The novels repeated mention of the honor
paid at the site of the unknown soldier, for example, underlines the inadequate help such
unknowns as Septimus receive. While the tomb does honor the dead, it also veils the after-
shocks still being felt in 1923 England not just by those returned, such as Septimus Smith,
but by the Lady Boxboroughs and Mrs. Foxcrofts who lost their sons. Such issues of con-
tainment permit Peter Walshs romanticization of the scene at Regents, as well as Clarissa
Dalloways romanticization of Septimus Smiths suicide. The tomb serves as just one form of
containment, the identity of the dead unknown permanently obfuscated. Parallel to Septi-
mus Smiths individual abandonment and the unknown soldiers monumentalized erasure is
the larger English abandonment of the Armenian people after the war, despite the renewal of
the genocide, a decision that makes ghostly reappearances throughout the novel and invades
Mrs. Dalloways party alongside Septimus Smiths suicide.
On the other hand, Woolf s ecological concerns as bound to Septimus Smith normal-
ize his psychological crises. He experiences no boundary between self and other, present
and past, because there is no boundary between his flesh and the flesh of the world. As
eco-critic Louise Westling has observed, There is no break (French rupture) from the rest
of the living community, as the very development of the modern individual from embryo
to adult makes clear, especially in the earliest stages of the fetus. And synchronically, we
breathe and move within it, transferring air and food, exchanging energies, atoms, mol-
ecules (35). Hence, the silencing of Septimus Smiths voice is a cultural repression in
which the other characters participate, for themselves as much as by the state. Peter Walsh
unwittingly plays the living Evans to Septimuss dead; Walshs knowledge of this fact is
hardly necessary, but it serves as a reminder that in our turn we are all subject to our envi-
ronment and might be better people if we participated in it more consciously. In the end,
86 VIRGINIA WOOL AND THE NATURAL WORLD
even Clarissa is glad for Septimuss death, glad he was able to commit to a leap, because
it helps her to feel her own leap into the London streets she loves and to feel the success
of her party. She feels, at her party, the unifying spirit of a life and many lives artfully
intertwined, even timed, but she is hardly aware of the misinformation and politics that
take place there. In contrast to Mrs. Dalloways experience of oneness, Septimus Smiths
experience in The Regents Park argues for a dialectical relationship between humans and
the natural environment.
Septimus Smiths heightened physical sensitivity charges his perception of the world
and energizes his interactions with it and on its behalf. Not long after he feels himself
connected by millions of fibres to the leaves, Evans appears behind the railing (25)
and Rezia dutifully interrupts. Both the park railing and Rezias words of caution signify
for Septimus a lack of communion, a separation, in fact, from Evans, that is instigated by
the people around him. In response to these intrusions he retreats under a tree, the traffic
humm[ing] (25) on one side, the zoo animals barking, howling on the other (25). The
barks and howls of the zoo animals serve as a reminder that nature is never fully caged.
Lions and tigers would maul given the chance; their sounds communicate a warlike reality
that London ignores alongside Septimuss vision of Evans. The trees, however, repeatedly
provide Septimus a haven, and Septimus responds in kind, with a desire to speak to the
Prime Minister about not cutting them down. Likewise, Septimus will respond to his
friend Evans on his next appearance.
II
What there is is a whole architecture, a whole complex of phenomena in tiers,

a whole series of levels of being, which differentiated by the coiling up of the
visible wherein it is redoubled and inscribed. Fact and essence can no longer be
distinguished. (Merleau-Ponty 114)
The cultural ecologist David Abram posits that The sensing body is not a programmed
machine, but an active and open form, continually improvising its relation to things and to
the world (49). His description of the improvisational sensing body in relation to others
counters the modernist view of body as machine or subject to habit and identifies the un-
derbelly of Mrs. Dalloways Big Ben. Woolf depicts this body when she describes the fibers
connecting Septimuss body with the leaves of trees. In so doing, she identifies the sensing
body with the body of a young poet in search of creative exchange. In other words, Septi-
mus Smiths openness to sensation and exchange is not merely symptomatic of his apparent
shell shock but an extension of his younger idealistic self who apparently identifies the artist
with the scapegoat, a figure who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow
blanket smitten only by the sun suffering forever (MD 25).
Woolf identifies the sensing body, also, with the risk of psychic instability. There is
such a thing as too much sensation and too much sensitivity. The fibres that once connect-
ed Septimus and the world eventually radiate with the symptoms of Woolf s migraines.
The first expense is the flesh, the very organ where touch and feeling are coexistent: the
flesh was melted off the world. His body was macerated until only the nerve fibres were
left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock (68). Woolf imagines Septimus Smiths body
from a snowy coverlet to a veil of nerve fibres. These fibres radiate between the rock his
body rests upon and the world crushing it. Septimus does nothing but feel the sounds of
his environment, their vibrations and waves consuming him to a felt lack of distinction.
When contemplating the flesh as a sensory organ and the consciousness it commu-
nicates, it is difficult to ignore Merleau-Pontys work. When Merleau-Ponty notes that
his hand is felt from within and is also accessible from without, itself tangible (133),
he is, also, making an argument for a dual human consciousness, a consciousness capable
of conceiving of the self both as object and subject of a relationship, and one capable of
conceiving of others as both subjects and objects of that relationship as well. However, his
sense of the flesh can appear quite unstable: I feel at the surface of my visible being that
my volubility dies away, that I become flesh, and that at the extremity of this inertia that
was me there is something else, or rather an other who is not a thing (61). His defini-
tion of the flesh as the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible
upon the touching body (146) is a conception of an active force, driven by an inertia that
continually moves outward toward touch and signification, even as it remains thought-
fully gazing from behind. This consciousness is one that must continually re-conceive
its distinction between similitude and difference, permitting the reciprocity for which
eco-criticism and object relations call. Woolf, also, plays with this distinction in Septimus
Smiths second scene with Evans.
The sounds surrounding Septimus simulate combat experience: shocks of sound
rose in smooth columns, the red flowers grew through his flesh (68). The veil of fibers
is shockingly penetrable, all too sensitive to vibration, movement, and physical sensation.
True, for Septimus, there is no distinction between feeling, seeing, hearing, and meaning.
However, his acute sensitivity to sound and vibration does not mean that the voices he
hears are only fantastical. He hears stiff leaves rustl[ing] by his head (68) and the voices
of birds (69). He is feelingly enmeshed in his world with no separation between him and
it because he coils over it so thinly. This would be the danger of the outside of Merleau-
Pontys description: Septimus Smith is this web of nerves; these nerves sense both realms
without distinction. In a striking revision of soldier as Christ-like sacrifice, Septimuss web
of nerves are the fibers feeling all the world.
The scene ends with Evanss second appearance and a Woolfian reversal, as Evans re-
veals himself from behind a protective tree. In a telling revision of the past, Septimus calls
out to Evans, For Gods sake dont come! (70) Into this dangerous scene Peter Walsh
walks, the crucially embodied signifier. Peter Walsh embodies a new past, Evanss life
rather than his death, for no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not changed (70). His
grey suit is clean. Septimus sees as sensitively as he hears. His environment provides him
his friend still living. Against his expectation of Evans dead, Septimus receives a moving,
touching, sounding person, and feels his sacrifice for his friend. Finally, he is able to save
the man whose death he could not feel, to change the experience of the original trauma,
to call out as before he could not, to play the redeemer to the one person who mattered.
The acceptance Septimus feels in The Regents Park provides a crucial setting for this
recovery. The felt separation from Rezia, who no longer wears her wedding ring, and his
doctor, who observes that his feelings are out of proportion (96), marks a space separate
from the state and the national narrative surrounding shell shock. The belief that survivors
suffering such symptoms were cowards, a national problem to be contained in homes
provided for their rest, rest, rest (96), is not so different from the marked containment
of the unknown soldier, rest in peace. The trees in The Regents Park, an example of the
contained uncontainable, guard the transitional space Septimus needs in order to revise
his own history and allow for a significant engagement with his past.
Peter Walsh is, of course, dead to the significance of this embodiment; twice the
narrator refers to him as the dead man in the grey suit (71). Walsh is enamored of this
new England, even knowing his susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing
(71): Never had he seen London look so enchantingthe softness of the distances; the
richness; the greenness; the civilisation, after India, he thought, strolling across the grass.
[] there was design, art, everywhere; a change of some sort had undoubtedly taken
place (71). Leaving the park, Walsh gives a battered old woman a coin and steps into his
taxi. For Walsh, this woman is significantly situated at the margins. She sings a song that
issued from so rude a mouth, a mere hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root
fibres and tangled grasses, still the old bubbling burbling song, soaking through the knot-
ted roots of infinite ages, and skeletons and treasure, streamed away in rivulets over the
pavement fertilising, leaving a damp stain (81). For Septimus, the voice that moves
from the deep earth is the voice he hears in the park, a primeval voice that has seen mil-
lions of Septimus Smiths and Leonard Basts swallowed up by the city they inhabit. It is
the voice that resuscitates Septimuss message, a message that he writes on slips of paper
in the park or with Rezia, bound up, hidden at homethe same primordial truths that,
in contrast, he cannot remember within the confines of Dr. Bradshaws office: Men must
not cut down trees. There is a God. Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make
it known (24). And For Gods sake dont come!
Peter Walsh, for all his ignorance of Septimuss condition, and despite his assump-
tions as to the Warren-Smith love affair, furnishes Septimus with a moment, permits him,
however briefly, to see Evans in the flesh and living, to feel the goodness he wanted to
do and to do it, to enact his protective protestation, to become the steadfast tree. None
of Walshs quizzical awe of Londons changes over 1918-1923 changes this fact. The next
time Septimus calls on Evans, Evans does not come, as if Septimus has successfully proven
to himself, consciously or unconsciously, that he is not the coward or the disproportionate
his doctors believe him to be.
The significance of Peter Walshs walk toward Septimus does not belong to him,
nor does it belong to Septimus. The fibers connecting Septimus to the leaves reach from
a hole in the earth, muddy too, matted with root fibres and tangled grasses the old
bubbling burbling song, soaking through the knotted roots of infinite ages. Peter and
Septimus both participate in a communication born of their surroundings, move as the
shape of the park guides their step. That supportive environment provides Septimus a
means toward healing that enables his last moment with Rezia, the everyday banter of a
married couple while she creates a new hat. Winnicott would surely note that this cre-
ative environment consists of their shared laughter and play. This experience of laughing
acceptance hearkens back to the environment Septimus first discovered in The Regents
Park: he saw Regents Park before him. Long streamers of sunlight fawned at his feet.
The trees waved, brandished. We welcome, the world seemed to say; we accept; we create
(69). If damaged by the war, Septimus Smith has yet managed to (re)discover the poet he
might have just as easily left in his small town before his move to London.
Why associate such a figure with The Regents Park, with the structured wild? Eco-
criticism requires a sensitivity to other voices that we have forgotten to hear, voices that
arise in what we may have formerly assumed to be silences (Merleau-Ponty 126). As
Virginia Woolf reminds us through Septimuss scenes in Regents Park, the land is not
mute, and the wilderness is not contained. This is a view Woolf continued to explore,
as evidenced in Between the Acts: the planes still fly, without the curious skywriting; the
cows, domesticated as they may be, step in and moo the ending of LaTrobes play when
the last words are blown away. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf identifies a silenced Septimus
with a silenced wilderness; his speech and his writing are associated with a lack of pro-
portion, but it is shell shock that alerts him to those voices nationalistic culture works
to regulate. His war experience sensitizes him to the natural phenomena that pervade a
political park; the incapacity of those around him to hear those voices, or their capacity
to hear them only by the count of Big Ben, has consequences for Septimus, for what it
means to be human, and for an expression of citizenship. In the words of David Abram:
Our bodies have found themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold tex-
tures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earthour eyes have evolved in the
subtle interactions with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure
to the howling of wolves and honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these
other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to
the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob
our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality,
with what is not human. (22)
If the trees in The Regents Park protect Septimus, guard him in the midst of an over-
whelming attack of feeling that permits those at the party not to feel, then Septimus is also
Virginia Woolf s argument for a sensitivity to all animate life, to the meaning even in its
silence, and for a more conscious citizenship based on such inclusion.
Notes
1. A special thanks to Elisa Sparks for reminding me of this passage.
Works Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York:
Pantheon, 1996.
Gersdorf, Catrin, and Sylvia Mayer, eds. Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on
Ecocriticism. New York: Rodopi, 2006
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Maran, Timo. Where do your borders lie? Reflection on the Semiotical Ethics of Nature. Gersdorf and Mayer
455-476.
Westling, Louise. Literature, Environment, and the Question of the Posthuman. Gersdorf and Mayer 25-47
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 1981.
THE BESIEGED GARDEN: NATURE IN VIRGINIA WOOLFS MRS.
DALLOWAY AND WILLA CATHERS ONE OF OURS
by Jane Lilienfeld
V
irginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway (1931) and Willa Cathers One of Ours critique the visual
propaganda of World War 1 through metaphoric representations of nature. Although
the writers were not personally acquainted, Virginia Woolf contextualized Cathers work
in American Fiction, while Cather judged A Room of Ones Own (1929) to be an accurate
account of the challenges faced by some women writers (Woodress 423). Additionally, the ar-
gument of Cathers essay The Novel Demeuble, is clearly indebted to Woolfs insistence in
Modern Fiction1 that novelists should only sparingly represent material reality (OBrien 155).
Further, each novelist had researched conditions at the French front, and each disapproved of the
distortions on which visual and verbal government wartime propaganda depended.2
Willa Cather has long been branded with the infamous image of the plow that broke
the plains encircled by the huge red ball of the setting sun from My Antonia (254).3 De-
nounced as scenic nationalis[m], mocked as praise of American frontier expansionism
(Cooperman, qtd. in Trout 4), Cathers work is currently undergoing reappraisal. Some
critics now champion Cather as an eco-feminist (Ryder A Cry 75-6). Most current crit-
ics argue that Woolf did not reduce the land to the body of the female (Bagley, Zeiss), al-
though Cather critics reluctantly acknowledge her reductive practices about the feminine
landscape (Stout 82-3, OBrien 409-11). However, both Cather and Woolf were fierce
preservationists of both rural and natural landscapes (Hussey Id, Ryder, A Cry 77-9).
Twice as long as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. It
earned gratitude from numerous war survivors and their families (Lewis 122-3, Harris 32-3),
along with male denunciations such as Hemingways that the novel desecrated their depictions
of the manly art of war (North 172-4, 178-9). One of Ours remains controversial. Some read
its narrative voice as praise of American war-fervor, while others champion the novels under-
mining of American militarism (Trout, Memorial 191). In fact, argues Steven Trout, Cathers
novel juxtaposes clashing discourses, narrated through several inconsistent points of view,
(Memorial 7) in order to create a many-faceted Modernist texture (Memorial 146). Criti-
cal discourse about Woolfs narrative methods is equally contentious.4 Not surprisingly, the
cacophony of interwoven voices and competing, embedded interpreters within Mrs. Dalloway
resembles the layered, often conflicted (Memorial 83) narrative voices of One of Ours.
Septimus Warren Smith is in some ways almost a British version of Claude Wheel-
er, [the protagonist of One of Ours] claimed Josephine OBrien Schaffer (143). Recent
critics acknowledge that the homosexuality of each man was likely explored in their close
conjunction with other men during battlefield conditions (Briggs 152, Cramer, Herring).
Too, both men are alienated products of rural backgrounds, and both uncritically accept
the wartime propaganda that motivates them to join the military (OOO 124-8, MD 93).
Septimus had been drawn by vague dreams of literary fame to London from Stroud
in Glouscestershire (MD 91). At the confluence of five rivers, set amidst flourishing fields
and farmlands, Stroud has prospered since Medieval times as a market town, suggesting that
The Besieged Garden 91
Septimuss family might at one time have labored both as farmers and skilled craftspeople
(Stroud). Claude had grown up on a sprawling Nebraska farm, which he had seen as a vast
monetary enterprise, producing not grain but dollar signs.5 Indeed, once war is declared,
Claudes father plans to profiteer by turning all their crops to wheat because its price is sure
to rise (OOO 123). After his failed marriage, Claude transforms his fathers lush timber
claim into what readers would now call a nature preserve, refashioning it into a well-wa-
tered-hollow for birds, small mammals and himself (OOO 136, 157, Ryder, A Cry 77-8).
As Paul Fussell points out in The Great War and Modern Memory, British troops, even
those who could not read,6 had been from their earliest years forced to hear pastoral im-
agery intoned from hundreds of Anglican pulpits, a sonorous vegetation-laden-language
from The King James Bible. Hundreds of poems by would-be and later-established poets,
and letters home from countless British soldiers are testament to the fact that the lan-
guage of what Fussell terms British ruralism, (233) abounds in such verbal war records.
These accurately depict the lush French countryside with its larks and nightingales, sud-
den streams, poppies, roses, flowering ground cover and hedgerows (Fussell 114-125, 130,
135-45, 153-4). Pastoral imagery had embedded itself in hundreds of years of British con-
sciousness, so that the soldiers verbalized their experiences through their vision of an arca-
dian Britain projected onto the similar French landscape.7 This is certainly what motivated
Septimus, who went to France to save [an] England, which consisted almost entirely of
Shakespeares plays and Miss Isabel Poole in a green dress walking in a square (MD 93).
Indeed, numerous American and British posters designed as war propaganda enunciated
imagery of a mother land for which lives must be sacrificed. Critics have demonstrated Cathers
and Woolfs visual acuity (Hankins, Humm) and sophisticated awareness of such verbal and
visual war propaganda (Poole 83, Levenbach, 92-6). British recruiting posters like A Bit of
England, Your Countrys Call, Queen Marys Army: The Girl Behind the Man Behind the
Gun, even Women of Britain say Go! all incorporate background details of country towns,
rolling hills, winding country lanes, stucco and white country cottages surrounded by kitchen
and flower gardens laden with fruit and flowers, notably hollyhocks, box hedge, tulips and rich
greenery (Propaganda Posters: UK). Similar patriotic nostalgia embedded in images of rural
and farming imagery pervaded American visual propaganda. Cather echoed this imagery within
Claudes idealized perceptions of France (Trout, Memorial 45, 49, Nelson, Harris 35-44).8
Mrs. Dalloway subtly recalls this visual propaganda in its major characters memories,
which are rooted in their deep love of the land. In Peters memory, Sally Seton rambles
through a walled-in garden awash in roses (MD 81), and in his imagination, The Soli-
tary Traveler ambles through forest lanes, into woods overgrown with ferns (MD 60).
Imagining himself on his property in Norfolk, Richard sees that a soft warm wind blew
back the petals; confused the waters; ruffled the flowering grasses. Haymakers [. . .] parted
curtains of green blades; moved trembling globes of cow parsley [. . .] (MD 122). Like her
father, Elizabeth Dalloway is happiest on their Norfolk farm and is predictably associated by
her suitors with very early Spring, as a hyacinth sheathed in glossy green (MD 133). Lady
Bruton remembers her childhood adventures amidst fields of clover [. . .] of dahlias, [. . .]
hollyhocks, the pampas grass in Devonshire (MD 121). Aunt Parry thinks back to her girl-
hood during the Raj, when she was carried by coolies to seek orchids amidst the Indian
hills (MD 194-5).9 Such memories are exactly the material played upon by propaganda.
This sweet nature of rural memory is betrayed in Mrs. Dalloway and One of Ours within
disrupted gardens. Septimus experiences the beauty of a London park transformed into the Ely-
sian fields, where the dead Evans wanders among trees in the meadow of life beyond a river [. .
.], (MD 25). Peters proposal to the young Clarissa goes awry in a ruined garden, where a broken
water-spout ticks like a time bomb (MD 68-9). The back garden where Septimus in war-time
Italy seeks refuge with Rezia and her sister is mostly cement, with flowers set in root-crushing
tubs (MD 93). The most famous of the novels besmirched gardens, that of Septimuss boss, Mr.
Brewer, was presumably destroyed by aerial bombardment (War in the Air), which ploughed a
hole in the geranium beds and smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, indicating the destruction of the
Greek nature goddess and her cycles of renewal (MD 92). The holograph of what became Mrs.
Dalloway juxtaposes these gardens with the dark soil of the French front, in which no gardener
turns with his trowel (Wussow 106). Thus flower-beds become trenches, in which Septimus had
flowered, (MD 91-93), hollows that Richard Dalloway knows are lightly-covered graves into
which thousands of nameless bodies had been shovelled together (MD 124-5).
That which Woolf metaphorically depicts, Cather enunciates. Just like Septimus, Claude goes
to war to save a pastoral ideal (OOO 157). Earlier in his life, Claudes passion for Joan of Arc (OOO
50, 128) encouraged him to project onto France the rural perfection lost to monetary America. For
Claude, the American Expeditionary Forces march northeast from Arras to the Argonne Forest
takes them, as he says to himself, deeper and deeper into Flowery France (OOO 252). Claude
experiences the front as a defamiliarized Nebraska landscape, its cultivated fields awash in poppies,
blooming clover and blue cornflowers (OOO 252-3, see also Nelson). However, even Claude can-
not deny that these fields are pitted with small cemeteries, fleeing refuges and flooded trenches
ensnarled in barbed wire, with burnt, gnarled trees suggesting the numerous dead (OOO 266-7).
Alternating with the savaged countryside, are several hidden gardens still blooming amidst
ruined villages. Within each garden looms the war. In the midst of the Joubert familys rebuilt
arbor, (OOO 262) their adopted Belgian orphan is traumatized into a silence rent only by her
terrified nightly screams (OOO 264). Further on, the remnants of a town that had changed
hands repeatedly between the French and German forces enclose a still-vibrant garden dense
with roses, flowering pear trees, yew trees and thick hedges (OOO 283-4). Yet even here death
strikes, for a few nights before Claudes arrival (OOO 282), a soldier had been drowned in
close proximity to this garden in a stagnant pool gouged by bombardment (OOO 282).
The suggested fertility of the furrows of Boars Head trenchalmost a wallow--where
Claudes depleted unit holds the line, close round Claude in what to him is his heroic death
(OOO 334-5). Claudes sacrificial charge up to the top of the trench to spare his men (334) re-
minds one critic of suicide (Trout, Memorial 34, 55, 62). Claudes mired body recalls his burrow-
ing himself into the wetlands of the hidden timber claim (OOO 157, 334). Further, Claudes
muddy death suggests a connection to the years that Septimus spent entrenched at the front.
Dramatic irony shadows each novels dual depictions of nature, perfect in propa-
ganda, savaged in battle. Woolf s and Cathers novels transform the landscape of war into
rigorous commentary on their protagonists experience.
Notes
1. In an essay that is barely laudatory of much American fiction of the day (1925), Woolf faintly praises
Cathers work by comparing it not unfavorably with that of the British: there are Americans who have all
the accomplishments of culture without a trace of its excesseswitness Miss Willa Cather (125). I would
The Besieged Garden 93
like to thank Emily Kopley for pointing out this reference to me.
2. Virginia Woolf depended on her familiarity with numerous sources, among them Roger Fry (Lilienfeld,
Editing 115-6) and Sigfried Sassoon (Showalter 192), with conditions on the French front. Willa
Cather spent four years researching the war, familiarizing herself with the letters of her cousin G. P. Cather
who had been killed in the war, veterans experience, news reports, visual depictions, and other extensive
materials (Trout, Memorial 6, Ryder, Green 198).
3. There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the
red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of
the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some
upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified
across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the
circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the shareblack against the molten red. There it was, heroic in
size, a picture writing on the sun (Cather, My Antonia 245).
4. Who is telling the story? Is it an omniscient author or an implied author or disembodied voices? Is Woolf s
narrative discourse polyphonic? Critics heatedly debate these and similar questions (Lilienfeld, Reading 186-
9).
5. Claude mourns the once-lush orchards, now cut down because it was less trouble to buy fruit in town
than to preserve the gnarled old trees (OOO 78).
6. Cather makes this point in the figure of Mahaily, the familys live-in maid, who is illiterate and believes deeply
in the most extreme of war-time anti-German propaganda (OOO 160). That Mahaily takes all photographs
and pictorial propaganda as literal truth, seems less a commentary on her as on the distorting nature of pro-
paganda. Mark Wollaegners recent book analyzes propaganda as intertwined within many diverse discourses
during the Great War, while I limit my discussion here to American and British visual propaganda.
7. This paradise becomes what Fussell terms a sordid pastoral (166), increasingly deformed by the muni-
tions of modern industrial warfare (Fussell 115).
8. Robert Nelson explores Willa Cathers complex passion for France, something of which she may have em-
beddedas a way to interrogate her younger self, perhapsin Claudes innocent transfer of her patriotism
from America to France. Edith Lewis records Cathers and her return to France after World War 1 to make
sure that One of Ours depicted the country accurately, without sentimentality (119-121).
9. Rezia, once imagined by her husband as a flowering tree, (MD 161) under sedation moments after Sep-
timuss death, sees herself racing through rural cornfields (MD 163).
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VIRGINIA WOOLF: NATURAL OLYMPIAN:
SWIMMING AND DIVING AS METAPHORS FOR WRITING
by Rebecca McNeer
T
he most memorable photographs, for which Virginia Woolf so hated posing, show
the writer at restcerebral, contemplative, wistful, andindoors. This person
would not have been at home in the natural world, they seem to say; moreover,
writing is a quiet pursuit, in which, perhaps, great thoughts are recollected in tranquility.
In fact, in her personal writing, where Woolf frequently uses images of active, physical
pursuits to describe the arduous act of writing, the opposite is true.
Sometimes, Woolf likens writing to steeple chasing: Ive taken my fences, as I say, &
got some good gallops for my trouble (D2: 258) or to mining for gold. Referring to what
became The Waves, Woolf notes: I may have found my mine this time, I think. I may get
all my gold out. . . . And my vein of gold lies so deep, in such bent channels (D2: 292). Of
the same novel she later writes, Ive got to work with my pick at my seam, excavating, or
even drilling, when she feels she has at last, bored down into my oil well, & cant scribble
fast enough to bring it all to the surface (D3: 12). The frequency with which Woolf shows
that what she is attempting requires her to go below the surface is remarkable. Woolf should
be pictured in helmets, hard hats, or goggles and wetsuits, the latter especially, for within
her diaries, no images describing her writing recur more often or are more significant to her
creative process than those associated with water, particularly swimming and diving.
Throughout her writing career, Virginia Woolf used her diaries as a bridge to her pub-
lished works. She reread them often: It composes, she said. Why? I think [it] shows one
a stretch, when ones grubbing in an inch (D5: 227). She writes that she hoped the diaries
would resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a
mass of odds & ends without looking them through. I should come back, after
a year or two, & find that the collection had sorted itself & refined itself & co-
alesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough
to reflect the light of our life, & yet steady, tranquil [,] composed with the aloof-
ness of a work of art. (D1: 266)
She says she would be curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, & found
the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time (D1: 266). The significance of
water imageryof the brains wetness, of swimming and divingmay well be a pattern
of something flung into this most personal writing that Woolf never saw . . . at the time.
Yet the heart, the foundation of these watery references, the underwater spring of
creativity that hydrated Woolf was the time spent at Talland House, near the town of St.
Ives, in Cornwall, where the Stephen family spent summers from 1882 to 1894. Lyndall
Gordon believes that Woolf s imagination was shaped first by a natural scene (16), that
Cornwall gave Virginia, as the Lakes Wordsworth, a sense of emotional reality in nature
that no experience in later life could surpass (12).
On March 22, 1921, Woolf asks of herself in her diary, Why am I so incredibly &
incurably romantic about Cornwall? Ones past, I suppose . . . . The sound of the sea at night
. . . old waves that have been breaking precisely so these last thousand years (D2: 103). In
Moments of Being (1976), Woolf enumerates memories of St. Ives down to the click of the
garden gate, the ants swarming on the step, what she calls an incongruous miscellaneous
catalogue of her memories, and likens them to little corks that mark a sunken net (116).
In Reading Virginia Woolf, Julia Briggs calls attention to Woolf s assignment of cre-
ative prominence to St. Ives in Moments of Being, describing what Woolf famously terms
the most important of all my memories (MOB 64):
If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and
fillsthen my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half
asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St. Ives. It is of hearing the waves
breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and
then breaking, one, two, one, two behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the
blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is
of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost
impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.
(MOB 64-5)
The rhythm of the waves Woolf describes above became associated in her mind with the
rhythm of lifeI sometimes think humanity is a vast wave, undulating: the same, I mean
. . . (D3: 22) and with the rhythm of writing, which she defines in a letter to Ethel
Smyth: All writing is nothing but putting words on the backs of rhythm. If they fall off
the rhythm ones done (L4: 303). That this rhythm was for Woolf synonymous with the
sea is made clear in the following reference Woolf makes to her progress in writing The
Waves (1931): I begin to see what I had in mind; & want to begin cutting out masses
of irrelevance, & clearing, sharpening & making the good phrases shine. One wave after
another (D3: 303). At some point in her diaries, Woolf refers to all of her major works
in such sea/water-oriented terms. What Woolf terms the poetry of existence itself is, she
confesses, Often . . . connected with the sea & St Ives (D2: 246).
In the creative process, the water that refills the bowl of her most important memory is
linked to the condition of her brain. Rarely is water seen in a negative and, sadly, prophetic
light, though a few references to drowning are in evidence. With To the Lighthouse (1927)
nearing publication, she does write that she feels something like a painful wave swelling
about the hearttossing me up (D3: 110). To the Lighthouse is referred to as that cursed
bookthat stone that plunges me deeper & deeper in the water (D3: 226). Correcting
proofs, always a tedious, grinding task for Woolf, she writes: And so I pitched into my
great lake of melancholy. Lord how deep it is! What a born melancholic I am! The only way
I keep afloat is by working (D3: 235). At Rodmell in 1933, complaining after a visit by
Elinor Castle Nef, Woolf grouses: I come in here to write: cant [sic] even finish a sentence;
& am pulled under . . . (D4: 171). Still, through activity, through undisturbed writing,
she is capable of recovery: My melancholy has been broken, like a lake by oars (D3: 236).
These negative references are remarkably few. More often, when Woolf writes of wa-
ter, she refers to her brain, its wetness or its dryness. When her writing is going well, she
Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian 97
refers to her brain as a well, a cistern, a hidden spring, bubbling, boiling, freshly flowing.
Working on what would become The Years (1937), Woolf notes that she is free to begin
the last chapter; & by a merciful Providence, the well is full, ideas are rising, & if I can
keep at it widely freely powerfully I shall have 2 months of complete immersion. Odd
how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order (D4: 232). A day of
solitude promises to replenish the cistern: So when I wake early now I luxuriate most
in a whole day alone; a day of easy natural poses, a little printing, slipping tranquilly off
into the deep water of my own thoughts navigating the underworld; & then replenishing
my cistern at night with Swift (D3: 33). By her references, then, reading and travel, but,
chiefly, solitude for thinking could refill or restore what Woolf sometimes complained of
as my dry cistern of a head (D5: 218).
While writing The Waves, Woolf writes in her diary with anticipation and certainty,
My brain will be filling (D4: 56). Working on what became Mrs. Dalloway (1925), in
a rough patch, Woolf remarks: indeed I made up my mind one night to abandon the
book& then one touches the hidden spring (D2: 272). Sometimes, her brain is too
full, her work in the diary too intensive: Really Im writing too much here. The twelve
months at this rate will overflow (D2: 295). On the other hand, she can chastise herself
for not having written at all: What a disgraceful lapse! Nothing added to my disquisition,
& life allowed to waste like a tap left running (D1: 239). The worst of it is, she writes,
my brain fills too fastoverflows (D4: 42).
In 1935, working on The Years, Woolf s brain is divided: Half my brain dries com-
pletely; but Ive only to turn over, & theres the other half, I think, ready, quite happily to
write a little article. Oh if only anyone knew anything about the brain (D4: 338). Clearly,
Woolf spent time considering and commenting on the condition of her own.
At its best, its most creative, Woolf describes her brain as wet and teeming with ideas,
but certain people, conversations, and experiences cause her to feel as if her brain is Like a
wrung dish cloth (D2: 271), with all the water gone. After visits with Rose Macauley and
Elizabeth Bowen, Woolf writes, I have a dull heavy mop inside my brain . . . & am prey
to every flea ant gnat (D4: 347). Six days in London leave Woolf feeling that her brain is
rather dried up (D5: 93). The aftermath of a visit to Ottoline Morrell causes Woolf to
describe her mind as damp blotting paper (D3:238).
Assessing her novel The Waves, Woolf writes that she tried to speak the truth, bom-
bastic as the remark sounds, wrung it drop by drop from my brain (D4: 43-4). Deprived
of sleep through entertaining, Woolf writes, one late night floors me; she describes her
brain the next day as all sand (D4: 257). Then, too, her brain could be dried out by writ-
ing non-fiction, made sandy, as she writes, with writing criticism (D2: 246).
This dry condition was one Woolf felt keenly, noting that when my brains dry up I
feel nervous (D4: 61), because the water, that bowl of her memory, needed refilling. At
those times, Woolf talked of healing her brain. Fretted by a visit from Leonard Woolf s
nieces, she writes, I am going to wrap my brain in green dock leaves for a few days: 5, if
I can hold out; till the children . . . have gone. If I canfor I think a scene is forming
(D4: 338). Working on the essay Fact and Fiction, Woolf writes in her diary, I get so
knotted & jaded; never mind. I shall lie flat a little in brain, for a few days; until I feel the
well full (D4: 226). She notes the metaphoric wetness or dryness of her brain as if taking
her temperature: Very slowly the well, so dry last week, seems to be re-filling (D2: 70).
Revising The Years, Woolf notes, Its [sic] true my brain is so tired of this job it aches
after an hour or less. So I must dandle it, & gently immerse it (D5: 31). But I neednt
hurry, she writes on another occasion of a similar plan for recovery; the main thing is to
let ideas blow, easily; & come softly pouring (D4: 356). As she waits for her brain to heal
in this fashion in 1937, she betrays anxiety: Will another novel ever swim up? (D5: 105)
from the well, the cistern, the spring of her brain, and put her, as she terms it, back into
the flow (D5:189) of her creative power?
Woolf herself seeks immersion in the fluid, seamless part of life. Though they fretted her,
guests could also allow her to go adventuring on the streams of other peoples [sic] lives
speculating, adrift (D3: 187). When she is not, in fact, a part of this stream, or writing of
it, she corrects herself: A scandal, a scandal, to let so much time slip, & I leaning on the
Bridge, watching it go (D3: 199). Yet in a letter to Elizabeth Robins, Woolf acknowledges
the solitary life of the writer. Writing, she says, is an unsocial occupation (L6: 74).
Woolf underscores the solitude required to write by confessing: I cannot write if anyone
is in the room (D5: 338).
In the quiet, solitary silence of swimming and diving, in the fluidity and treasure-
seeking for words she describes as pearls, Woolf found the most perfect references for her
writing. Both endeavors are solitary; one may not hear the voices from the shore, and they
form a link between what Julia Briggs calls Woolf s active silence of thought (2) and the
interiority of her novels. Even the strokes associated with swimming relate to the rhythms
Woolf identified as central to her writing and what Briggs calls the rhythms of time (5).
Evidently, in the literal sense, Woolf was an excellent swimmer. In 1909, on a return
trip to Cornwall, Woolf writes to Violet Dickinson, Yesterday, I hired a . . . bathing dress,
and swam far out, until the seagulls played over my head, mistaking me for a drifting sea
anemone (L1: 412). This drifting is the state she wishes to recreate metaphorically in
order to pursue her writing: Please God, she writes, these . . . people dont [sic] come .
. . I want to swim about in the dark green depths (D3: 255). She writes of the current
of thought into which she hopes to slip, to submerge everything as she lets ideas form
before she puts them on paper (D3: 253), of not wishing to break the current & finish
The Waves (D3: 301); on another occasion, she says that she will take a plunge into some
current of thought (D5: 261). She will, she writes, leave the dry work of Roger Frys bi-
ography and slide down into the water (D5: 154-155); she spends a July day at Rodmell
in Reading & walking & swimming into lucid depths (D4: 170).
Interrupted by Karin Stephen, Woolf subsequently complains, There I was swim-
ming in the highest ether known to me, as she was working on The Waves, but Stephen
succeeded in blowing everything to smithereens (D2: 314). As late as 1940, Woolf em-
ploys what, from its high incidence, must be seen as her favorite metaphor for writing: I
shall swim into quiet water (D5: 314).
A more extreme variety of solitude, of the quiet necessary for her writing, is to be found
in diving. Writing To the Lighthouse is, as she records, a plunge into deep waters (D3: 112).
So deeply is she immersed in writing the novel, she describes a case of artistic bends: I live
entirely in it, & come to the surface rather obscurely & am often unable to think what to
say when we walk round the Square, which is bad I know. Perhaps it may be a good sign for
the book though (D3: 59). Visiting Vita Sackville-West at Knole in 1927, Woolf notes that
she feels a sense of links fished up into the light which are usually submerged (D3: 125).
Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian 99
Elsewhere Woolf writes of the myriad impressions which I net every day (D3: 6) and of
letting myself down into my mind (D3: 219) as if she were a diver looking for treasure.
Indeed, this was often her aim. Writing of her life with Leonard, Woolf credits its
immense success to the fact that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common
things that nothing can touch it (D3: 30). The literary treasurewords, or what Woolf
once called premonitions of a book (D3: 253)is often likened to pearls, to the string
of connected waves of memory: Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will
attach themselves. For example, going to my dressmaker in Judd Street, or rather thinking
of a dress I could get her to make, & imagining it madethat is the string, which as if
dipped loosely into a wave of treasure brings up pearls sticking to it (D3: 11).
Sometimes, as Woolf notes in 1915 with a touch of false bravado, diving is strenuous
and not without danger: My writing now delights me solely because I love writing &
dont [sic], honestly, care a hang what anyone says. What seas of horror one dives through
in order to pick up these pearlshowever they are worth it (D1: 120). In another, beau-
tiful reference to pearls, Woolf writes to Ethel Smyth of her intention to
gently surge across the lawn (I move as if I carried a basket of eggs on my head).
. .take my writing board on my knee; and let myself down, like a diver, very
cautiously into the last sentence I wrote yesterday. Then perhaps after 20 min-
utes, or it may be more, I shall see a light in the depths of the sea, and stealthily
approachfor ones sentences are only an approximation, a net one flings over
some pearl which may vanish; and if one brings it up it wont [sic] be anything
like it was when I saw it, under the sea. Now these are the great excitements of
life. (L4: 233).
For Woolf, the sea was, as she once described it, the pulse of a heart (D1: 4).
References to water are most numerous during the 1920s, at the height of her great-
est creative period. In Volume Four of her diaries, covering the years 1931-1935, Woolf
details trips to Italy, Ireland, Holland, Germany, and France, a much more free and so-
ciable life made easier by the money Woolf had earned, a time punctuated by the death of
friends. Conversely, from this point there is less about the brain, less about water, as she
recognizes a certain general slackening of letters & fame, owing to my writing nothing
(D4: 287), thus underscoring the link of water, the wet and fertile brain, and of swim-
ming and diving, those active pursuits, to her creative power. Yet these references remain
to the end, perhaps because, as Woolf writes, ones life is not confined to ones body and
what one says and does; one is living all the time in relation to certain background rods
or conceptions (MOB 73). The pattern, these background rods or conceptions, may
be seen firmly established from the beginning in a 1908 letter to Clive Bell: The sea is a
miraclemore congenial to me than any human being (L1: 326).
The seaand the metaphors for writing Woolf ties to it so decisively--provides the
steady stream, the flowing connection, the link to life both backwards and forward in
which Woolf dwelt, determined, as she wrote, To make much shorter work of the day
than one used. To feel each like a wave slapping up against one (D3: 303). And so she
did, as her personal writing confirms, to the end.
Works Cited
Briggs, Julia. Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writers Life. New York: Norton, 1984.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie. 5 vols. New
York: Harcourt. 1977-1984.
. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vols.1 and 4. New York: Harcourt.
1975-1980.
. Moments of Being. Ed. Joanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt, 1976.
THIS, I FANCY, MUST BE THE SEA:
THALASSIC AESTHETICS IN VIRGINIA WOOLFS WRITING
by Patrizia A. Muscogiuri
Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea.
(D3: 209)
S
eascapes, sailing, diving and the sea itself are aspects of nature and of human be-
ings relationship with it which frequently inspired Virginia Woolf s writing. In-
deed, Woolf s engagement with the sea pervades most of her novels and surfaces
recurrently in her short stories, diaries and essays, letting emergewhen one looks care-
fully at ita persistent endeavor in bringing about a groundbreaking thalassic aesthet-
ics permeated by fresh politics. By employing the adjective thalassic (from the Greek
noun , i.e. sea) in connection with Woolf s marine aesthetics and sea-related
metaphors, my purpose is to emphasize Woolf s informed handling of the sea as a radi-
cal metaphor, in particular (though not exclusively) with reference to women as bearers
of alternative politics.1 In other words, I argue that in Woolf s writing, images of the sea
configure a dimension that is simultaneously aesthetic and philosophical, and should be
reconsidered as pivotal metaphors at the heart of her politics.
In the context of Woolfian studies, David Bradshaw has indicated Woolf s childhood
experiences in St. Ives as the source of the profuse sea imagery in her writing (101-104)
and has interpreted her metaphorical treatment of the element as essentially associated
with the silenced and marginalised position of women, with isolation and annihila-
tion and, occasionally, with security and peace (101)a partly correct but limited
reading of Woolf s more complex, ever evolving handling of thalassic metaphors. On the
other hand, Gillian Beer has connected Woolf s fascination with the sea to evolutionary
theory and the historicization of the notion of the sea as origin of life that resulted from it,
a notion which had been promulgated for millennia by most myth systems (17). In this
line of argument, Beer postulates that Woolf s fondness for the element may be related
to her search for a way out of sexual differencea problematic statement in relation to
both Woolf and the import of her thalassic aestheticsor, equally, for a continuity with
lost origins (Beer 17). The fact that the sea is constantly renewing itself yet resists
transformation (17) is indicated by Beer as another element of that fascination, whereas
the presence of sea metaphors in Woolf s texts is explained as mere receptiveness, la
Clarissa Dalloway, to images found solely in the writings of Victorian and/or later scien-
tists (105-8).2 Set against this view, my argument is that, above and beyond the influence
of her childhood memories, Woolf s life-long engagement with the sea finds its basis in
the Western philosophical and literary tradition of thalassic metaphorswhich Woolf
exploits for her purposes and keenly rewritesand has to do more with politics (includ-
ing social and gender politics), aesthetics and language than science. If contemporaneous
science did provide suggestions for Woolf (which is plausible notwithstanding her view of
science as the least like to my own ideas [L4: 409]), these do not explain, however, the
distinctive, eclectic political implications emerging from, and simultaneously channelling,

her continuous reworking of these deeply polysemic tropes.3
Indeed, throughout her writing, Woolf displays a shrewd understanding of the poli-
tics that inform Western inscriptions of the sea. From classical antiquity to early modern-
ism and beyond, the sea has been repeatedly treated metaphorically, both in writing and
iconography, so as to configure and perpetuate a variety of dominant discourses, which
range, for instance, from political conservatism and religious or moral conformism to
misogyny, exacerbated nationalism, imperialism and racial discrimination (Muscogiuri,
Sign of the Breaker 5-27). The association of the sea with evil and even the demoniac is
a classical locus of antiquity. Indeed, the sea was often thought of as chaos undermining
the fixity, order and stability built up by rationalist thought, which, as a consequence,
were usually identified with the land (Muscogiuri, Cinematographic seas 204-5). Un-
derstandably, however, the significance of thalassic metaphors fluctuates depending upon
the episteme and the historical moment, so that discontinuities in what can be read un-
equivocally as long-established phallogocentric constructions of the sea do occasionally
emerge before the end of the eighteenth century, although it is only afterwards that alter-
native treatments of the sea become less uncommon. In particular, radical renderings of
thalassic metaphors are not infrequent in twentieth-century writings by women, which
draw on the classical metaphorical association of the sea with the irrational, the senses and
the body as well as the unknown, often reformulated by women as a forgotten, alternative
dimension of being. Intriguingly, therefore, Woolf s idiosyncratic reconfiguration of the
sea as a political strategy aligns her work with that of other modernist women, in particu-
lar the poet H.D., whose writing has often been misinterpreted precisely as a result of the
general neglect of her thalassic aesthetics.
Woolf s handling of the sea involves complex aesthetic, philosophical and political
questions, which are elaborated so as to incorporate issues of identity, language and the
body, a wealth of arguments which I cannot address fully here (though I will briefly
touch on some of them). I have therefore chosen to concentrate on just some aspects of
Woolf s less obvious treatment of the sea as an aesthetic and, specifically, metafictional
metaphorwith reference to conscious allusions, in thalassic terms, to her own notion of
writing as opposed to conventional views of narrative and language. As I will show, Woolf
embraced fluidity and saturation in explicit opposition to the aesthetics of realism and,
more subtly, masculinist modernism; she undertook to explore (sea) depths unknown to
both the realist and the rationalist observer, whose outlook stops at the surface of the sea
of life; and she also strived not only to get the waves to be heard all through (D3: 236)
but also to inscribe in her texts what she called the voice of the sea (D3: 209). But what
is, for Virginia Woolf, the voice of the sea? The answer to this question is connected to
Woolf s notion of saturation and fluidity, as well as to her conception of the sea depths.
When she began to visualize The Waves (1931)her most experimental piece of writ-
ing, which was going to be, fluidly, prose yet poetry; a novel and a play (D3: 128)
Woolf submitted her still embryonic ideas on it to her sister and closest friends. Sig-
nificantly, on 7 November 1928, she noted in her diary that, whereas Nessa and Roger
and Duncan and Ethel Sands admire[d] (D3: 203) this project as the expression of her
uncompromising side, one reviewer days [sic] that I have come to a crisis in the matter
of style: it is now so fluent and fluid that it runs through the mind like water. That disease
This, I fancy, must be the sea 103
began in The Lighthouse (D3: 203). Whoever it was, that reviewer had read Woolf s latest
writings from the masculinist perspective of that mainstream modernism founded on the
tenets of hardness and drynessas advocated, for instance, by T.E. Hulme. Consider-
ing Woolf s remarkably recurrent usage of sea metaphors throughout her writing, it is
significant that, of all her works, only the ones densely permeated at a structural level by
the sea are identified as crisis and, even more subtly, as disease, in line with that medi-
calization of a womans writing which is typical of the then still-dominant understanding
of women as intrinsically prone to disorder and hysteria and hence inferior to men both
physically and mentally (Gilbert and Gubar 53 ff). In other words, from the reviewers
angle, the dry hardness (Hulme 127) of a linear, teleological (masculinist) writing would
indicate soundness, whereas anything that by virtue of its difference deviates from that
established norm would express a disorder. Indeed, I suggest that Woolf s keen reworking
of sea metaphors (and, in particular, the thalassic structure of The Waves) brings about,
rather, a dis-order: that is to say, the conscious unmakingor, at least, a severe under-
miningof the (phallocratic) order of the logos. Taking this into account, then, it is not
surprising that Woolf pondered only en passant the criticism of a diseased style that
runs through the mind like water: Shall I now check and consolidate, more in the Dal-
loway and Jacobs Room style? (D3: 203). The idea of following in the more solid style
of these two works, in which sea metaphors abound nonetheless, is immediately set aside.
Assuredly, Woolf decides to pursue her creative agenda uncompromisingly.4 Three weeks
later (28 November 1928), another entry in her diary records what may be read as her
indirect response to the critique of a sick, unsound fluiditythat is to say, her intention
to saturate (D3: 209), as she puts it, her writing in The Waves, namely:
to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; what-
ever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the
voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that dont
[sic] belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: get-
ting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional. (D3: 209)
For Woolf, the conventions of realism dry up life, producing only deadness and
waste. Set against this perspective, Woolfs notion of a saturated writing points to a poetic
prose that aims at inscribing what is left out by both traditional fiction and poetry; 5 to
saturate the text means to infuse life into it by re-creating that essential element of existence
that, for Woolf, is the voice of the sea.6 Conceived as integral to the moment, the voice of
the sea is perceived by Woolf as something incompatible with rationalist realism and almost
utterly erased by the patriarchal, logocentric order, where it is usually obscured and con-
cealed under the other sounds (TTL 30). This is a voice that relates (to) the most elusive
aspects of life and, most crucially, reclaims what is kept out of the phallogocentric discourse,
in several senses, from those nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights
(TW 279) mentioned in The Wavesor, in other words, anything that eludes the logos and
yet infuses the sphere of the irrational in each personto the genuine poetry found in the
sea of Ordinary People (an earlier, provisional title of The Years [1937]), in particular those
left in the margins of both canonical writing and society, above all women, queer people,
but also outcasts like Septimus Smith, for instance. The idea, suggested in The Waves, is that
the writer must (while they talk) let down ones net deeper and deeper and gently draw
in and bring to the surface what he said and she said and make poetry (W 217). Woolf s
materialist understanding of creative language as emerging from a sea of human beings
engaged in common conversation radically subverts traditionalist hierarchic notions of
poetry and, more generally, literature as a higher form of language which is rather received
than produced by the majority of people, along with the political and social implications
of this view. In this sense, this voice originating in the depths of the sea of life has a dual
connotation, as it is both innermost (i.e. relating to the inner sea of the individual mind,
the latter being a classical metaphor which recurs frequently in Woolf ) and social. In To
the Lighthouse (1927), for instance, Mrs. Ramsay (but finally also Lily) is the one who
hears the voice of the sea distinctly, murmuring to her, at times soothing and at times ad-
monishing her (TTL 30), whereas in The Waves it is a plurality of voices that is netted and
brought to the surface (these are of course the inner voices of a multiple self, but they also
work well as a metaphor for an eclectic group of people, so much so that, still today, they
continue to be mistaken for formal characters by many critics, something which Woolf
found odd [D4: 47]); and then conversation, proper interpersonal communication (as
opposed to the monologues of The Waves), is figured in To the Lighthouse as marine life, as
a lively sea creature moving in its underwater environment.7
Interestingly, in fact, Woolf seems to set a clear-cut antithesis between the surface
and the depths of the sea, which I will now briefly explore with a view to completing my
argument on the voice of the sea. In To the Lighthouse, for instance, the contrast between
surface and depths is illustrated in the different approach to the sea that Mr. Ramsay
and Lily have. Mr. Ramsay represents the Lucretian spectator, who imperturbably looks
at the seaand, implicitly, other peoples liveswith the detachment (and sterility, in
his specific case) provided by his rationalism: had he been able to contemplate [the sea]
fixedly might have led to something (TTL 73), the text makes clear. As for Lily, more
perceptively than Mr. Ramsay, in looking out to sea she is in fact looking for a message
or a vision (207), in an endeavor to be receptive to the voice of the sea and/or any insight
that it may bring about. Initially, she can find no message or vision there as, similarly to
Woolf s figuration of the woman writer as a fisherwoman on the verge of a deep lake
(DM 152) in Professions for Women, Lily is also described as remaining cautiously on
the verge (TTL 159), safely moored to the shore (158). In the course of time, however,
she listens to the voice of the sea (219-220), intuits its message, and gradually aban-
dons all restraints: by metaphorically immersing herself in marine waters up to the lips
(295)thus enacting Woolf s imperative, in The Mark on the Wall, to sink deeper and
deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts (CSF 79)she gains a vital
insight and, eventually, has her vision. Crucially, in fact, Lilys immersion in the depths
of the sea (of her own self and life) reveals an ocean of social interaction as the true sub-
stance of the individual, what may be termed, in contrast to Kate Chopins abysses of
solitude (18, 120), abysses of sociability, deep waters that transcend time (just like the
literal sea) and space, as well as any traditional notion of identity: for these waters were
unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays; the childrens; and
all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washer-woman with her basket; a rook, a
red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling which held
the whole together (TTL 177). The voice of the sea reconnects to this dimension, while
metaphoric sea diving reconciliates conscious and unconscious, past and present, self and
other, human and animal, and plant and object, as the sea emerges as the metaphoric locus
of that common feeling which held the whole together or, in other wordsas Woolf
herself phrased it in her diary, yet again in explicit connection with the seathe poetry
of existence (D2: 246).
Hence, the opposition between surface and depths of the sea has a specific import
in Woolf, as she explicitly associates the characteristic bias towards categorization and
discrimination that informs both rationalism and realism (those hard separate facts in
the quote above) not only with the terra firma but also, as we have seen, with the surface
of the water and the limited scope of a logocentric, land-based perspective (like Mr. Ram-
says) that stops there. This critique is beautifully rendered by Woolf through her meta-
phoric treatment of the sea in that neat metafictional story that is An Unwritten Novel
(1920). In its critical rejection of rationalist realism and the related traditionalist notion
of fiction, An Unwritten Novel traces the ultimate defeat of the omniscient narrators
attempt at external observation of surface reality and rationalistic deduction, which are
thwarted by the emergence of the unexpected and, more specifically, the non-manifest
and elusive aspects of existence that usually remain unwritten and unsaid. Revealingly, the
story, which was regarded by Woolf as her great discovery (L4: 231), finds a climacteric
denouement in the narrators final visualization of this elusive, non-manifest actuality as
a metaphoric sea:
Mysterious figures! Mother and son. Who are you? Why do you walk down the
street? Where tonight will you sleep, and then, tomorrow? Oh, how it whirls
and surges floats me afresh! I start after them. [] Wherever I go, mysterious
figures, I see you, turning the corner, mothers and sons []. This, I fancy, must
be the sea. Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the water murmurs and moves. []
its you, unknown figures, you I adore; [] you I draw to me adorable world!
(CSF 115, emphasis added)
Hence, this too is the unknown sea into which Woolf wishes to dive in her writ-
ing, an ever-moving ocean of people, a flesh-and-blood, interpersonal version of the tra-
ditional metaphor of the sea of life. Indeed, this is not an abstract symbolic sea nor a
reconfiguration of the impersonal and yet formidable oceanic crowds found in Cicero,
Virgil, or, later on, Baudelaire, Poe and others, portents of revolution, but an adorable
world made of mysterious figures, as real life is, to whom Woolf wishes to give voice. In
this way, from being considered a periphery, as it frequently happens with many writers,
in Woolf the sea becomes the substance of life itself and emerges as a source of not only
(genuine) poetry (the poetry of existence) but also fresh politics, and the voice of the
sea as voice of the other both in the sense of the other inside and in the sense of those
innumerable unknown others bodying forth the Woolfian sea of life.
This is especially interesting when compared, for instance, with Joseph Conrads un-
derstanding of the sea as a still void (148), characterised by a disappointing indolent
silence (244)which makes it ultimately monotonous and barren (184). On the
contrary, in Woolf, the sea emerges as exuberant, active life, as it moves and whirls and
surges; its murmuring signals that it may be conceived as the source of an alternative
language, a fresh creativity or, more generally, a vital fertility, as suggested by the presence
of a mother and son at the heart of this Woolfian image of the sea. Indeed, this specific
figuration of a communal sea of life as composed of mothers and sons stays with Woolf
for a long time, so much so that, as it is known, it develops into the image of an explicitly
maternal sea in the first draft of The Waves. However, it is most significant that the image
of a maternal sea disappears in the final version of The Waves, where a subtle differentiation
is introduced with regard to motherhood, which, when read in connection with patriar-
chy and womens unawareness, is identified rather with the seasonal life of the cropping
land (through the voice of Susan). The result is that, rather than a specifically maternal
sea (which in a way would have been a restrictive image), in The Waves Woolf configures
the sea as a purely feminine element. That is the import of the first interlude of The Waves,
where the image of a woman immersed in the sea, couched beneath the horizon and
raising her lamp (5) from the depths of the sea is revolutionary both in terms of philo-
sophical and aesthetical implications: indeed, to Lucretiuss celebration of the shores of
light of phallogocentrism opposing the dark seas of Mother Nature (Muscogiuri, Sign
of the Breaker 110-111), Woolf substitutes a fresh, feminine light emerging from the sea,
like a new beginning for the world, a flesh-and-blood Aurora (or the Dawn), if not indeed
Thalassa or Tiamat: the woman writer, whose voice recites/resites the voice of the sea.
Notes
1. The adjective also gestures towards Thalassa, the primeval sea goddess (one of the pre-Olympian deities,
like Gaia, of Greek mythology), and, by following in its philological tracks, towards the earlier Babylonian
sea goddess and creator of the universe Tiamat (or Tiawath/Thawath/Thalath, the latter form being nearly
identical to , Attic variant of ). Hence, through these associations signalling the signifi-
cance of the feminine principle in ancient myths of creation, it is suggestive of the sea as metaphoric locus
of an alternative, specifically female, creativity. It is my contention that the cultural and political weight of
this understanding is crucial for Woolf and that it shapes her view of the sea as a site of resistance to, and
subversion of, a number of dominant discourses.
2. Of Clarissa we are told that her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of
these nautical metaphors (MD 86); but for as much as Woolf herself was an avid reader of both scientists,
she cannot be conflated with Clarissa. My position diverges from Beers substantially in the recognition of
both a specific agenda in Woolf s handling of the sea and a much wider context of usage of these tropes,
whose crucial political implications infuse Woolf s understanding of the sea and, hence, her informed
reinvention of thalassic metaphors.
3. It is worth mentioning that both Huxleys and Tyndalls nautical metaphors have no scientific referent, on
the contrary, they are in turn to be read in the context of the philosophical and literary tradition of thalassic
metaphors.
4. It may not be a mere coincidence that in the final pages of Orlando, published only a few weeks before
that diary entry, we read: All this, the trees, deer, and turf, she observed with the greatest satisfaction as if
her mind had become a fluid that flowed round things and enclosed them completely (283).
5. This is epitomized by the oxymoron of a selected everything: Why admit any thing to literature that is
not poetry by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novel[ist]sthat they select nothing?
The poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out. I want to put practically everything
in; yet to saturate. That is what I want to do in The Moths [The Waves]. It must include nonsense, fact,
sordidity: but made transparent (D3: 209-210; emphasis added).
6. The phrase brings to mind Kate Chopins famous inscription of it in The Awakening, where the sea, its
voice and touch (18, 120), are associated with sensuality and self-discovery, considered as prerequisites
for womens emancipation in terms of both gender and creativity. The association of water with self-
knowledge and the passions or the body (DM 152) can also be found in Woolf, for instance, in the
description of the imagination diving in a deep lake (DM 152) in Professions for Women, in explicit
relation to writing. However, as far as the voice of the sea is concerned, Woolf s conception of it intro-
duces different issues from those alluded to by Chopin, as shown in the remainder of this essay.
7. [W]hatever they said had also this quality, as if what they said was like the movement of a trout when,
at the same time, one can see the ripple and the gravel, something to the right, something to the left; and
the whole is held together (TTL 165). Set against a logocentric notion of language as fixed and words as
absolute concepts, Woolf understands conversation as fluid and alive, exceeding its surface meaning, at the
same time both fish and water.
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sis. University of Salford, 2006.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. 5 vols. London:
Hogarth Press, 197784.
. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. London: Hogarth Press,
1975-1980.
. The Mark on the Wall. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: The
Hogarth Press, 1985. 77-83.
. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. London: The Hogarth Press, 1968.
. Orlando. A Biography. London: The Hogarth Press, 1928.
. Professions for Women. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: The Hogarth Press, 1942. 149-
154.
. To the Lighthouse. 1927. London: The Hogarth Press, 1932.
. An Unwritten Novel. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1985. 106-115.
. The Waves. 1931. London: The Hogarth Press, 1933.
WILD SWIMMING
by Gill Lowe
V
irginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke use water throughout their work as a metaphor
for powerful emotional states. In A Sketch of the Past, (1985) Virginia uses an
arresting simile, I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but
cannot describe the stream (MOB 92). She recognises her passivity. She is alive, aware,
alert to experience but not actively swimming; held, static, in the current of what seems
to be her mothers invisible influence.1 Water is frequently troped as female. In Waterlog:
A Swimmers Journey Through Britain, Roger Deakin, high priest of wild swimming, de-
scribes waters welcome embrace like all our mothers soothing and kissing us cool (196).
This paper will suggest that for Rupert Brooke, unable to cast off a puritanical, maternal
inheritance, swimming became a necessary cleansing that was sometimes calming but,
more often, a desired cold, sharp shock.
Both Rupert and Virginia were reliant on powerful mothers but had ambivalent feel-
ings about their influence. Both were ambitious, both physically fragile, both frequently
ill and treated by the same nerve specialist, Dr. Maurice Craig. Both were sexually ill-
at-ease. The Edwardian period was perplexing and difficult for them.2 Virginia, uncom-
fortable with a stifling nineteenth century heritage, actively embraced modernism as a
clean start. Influenced by Swinburne, Baudelaire and Wilde, Rupert chose an aesthetic,
decadent world-weary image on going up to Cambridge in 1906. This faade transformed
during his short life; he assumed several elaborate acts, depending on who was watching.
Virginia seems to have appraised his habit, noting in her essay, The Intellectual
Imagination (1919) that he made friend after friend, and passed from one extreme to
another of dress and diet (E3 134). He next tried an abstemious, Fabian, back-to-na-
ture role. Finally, traditional, reactionary values reclaimed him. In 1913 in a letter to his
first female love, Noel Olivier, he writes, Im the most conservative person in the world
(Song of Love 243). The truth was more extreme. By then, he had become stridently mi-
sogynistic, anti-Suffragist, homophobic, anti-pacifist and anti-Semitic.
Virginia Stephen stayed with Rupert at the Old Vicarage between the 14th-19th Au-
gust, 1911. According to her 1918 essay, Rupert Brooke, he was consciously and defi-
antly pagan. He was living at Grantchester; his feet were permanently bare; he distained
tobacco and butchers meat; and he lived all day, and perhaps slept all night, in the open
air. His nature was, she writes, self-conscious in the highest degree (E2 279). William
Pryor, in Virginia Woolf and the Raverats, quotes a 1925 letter to Virginia from Gwen
Raverat where she observes, retrospectively, All that about bathing and food and bodies
was a pose (176). Repeatedly, in his letters, Rupert asserts his chosen act, I am becoming
a wild rough elementalist. Walt Whitman is nothing to me he wrote to his cousin, Erica
Cotterill, in August 1908 (RB Letters 139). Again to Erica, from Devon in March 1909,
I am leading a healthy life. I rise early, eat no meat, wear very little, do not part my
hair, take frequent cold baths, work ten hours a day, and rush madly about the mountains
in flannels & rainstorms for hours. I am surprisingly cheerful about it- it is all part of my
Wild Swimming 109
scheme of returning to nature (RB Letters 159). Virginia recognized the necessity for
him of this scheme, writing that, Like most sensitive people, he had his methods of self-
protection; his pretence now to be this and now to be that (E2 279).
Always attuned to the inauthentic, she wrote, You might judge him extreme, and
from the pinnacle of superior age assure him that the return to Nature was as sophisticated
as any other pose (E2 279). The Intellectual Imagination (TLS 11th December,1919) was
Woolfs review of Walter de la Mares lecture, Rupert Brook and the Intellectual Imagination
which had been delivered in memoriam on March 27th 1919 at Rugby School. In this essay
Woolf re-states that Rupert Brooke was never for a second unconscious (E3 135).
Wild swimming refers to the liberation of entering what might be seen as an out-
lawed element; a secret skinny-dipping. No watchers are implied, or, if they are there,
they are voyeurs. Wild swimming suggests abandon: euphoric, endorphin-inducing plung-
ing and larking. For Jay Griffiths, in Wild: an Elemental Journey, wildness is rebellious,
breaks the rules, subversive and quintessentially revelrous (343). During Virginias stay
with Rupert, they swam naked together, causing her more adventurous sister, Vanessa, to
versify to Saxon Sydney-Turner, I heard from Virginia. She bathed with her Brook [sic]/
And now theyre at Firle. For what next must we look?(VB Letters 106).
Hermione Lee refers to a letter of the 25th August, 1911, to Clive Bell from Adrian
Stephen who was looking forward to seeing the Goat that day, to hear how her Rupert
romance is going on. She told me that he said he did not want to marry for several years at
any rate but did want to copulate occasionally and promiscuously. I am afraid that her bathe
has not been taken quite seriously enough for her taste but perhaps she will now have gone a
step further (295). Her siblings presumptuous expectations would be dashed.
Christopher Hassall, uses a significant line from W. B. Yeats as the epigraph to his bi-
ography of Brooke, There is always a living face behind the mask. Hassall draws attention
to Ruperts dual nature which he calls both puritanical and romantic at once (277). In a
letter to Gwen Darwin (later Raverat), Rupert writes, We go for both; we join up Puritan
and Hedonist: we have (once more) only connected (262). Ruperts close friend, Frances
Cornford, recognized that, Deep-ingrained in him, and handed down to him I should
imagine through generations of English ancestors, was the puritanical spirit. I remember
how clearly it showed nobody could miss it, whoever saw the scorn and sternness in his
face when he spoke of things that he hated, things corrupt and unclean (277-278). Hassall
suggests that Mrs Brookes strength lay in her Puritanism but he implies that this might have
been a problem for Rupert, It was there hardly less in her son, where, in that divided nature,
it could create a conflict under stress and so might become a source of weakness (144).
Jonathan Rutherford writes that, while he lived at Grantchester, Rupert manufac-
tured his own romantic identity as a naf, child poet (49-50). This was the perfect part
to adopt to help control disturbing natural impulses and to evade adult responsibilities. I
suggest that Rupert found the pastoral aesthetic appealing and useful as a means of man-
aging the division in his nature. Faced with perplexing personal dilemmas, rustication
became a reassuring escape. Styling himself as a neo-pagan was a calculated decision and,
inevitably, he found it difficult to be casual about this role.
Ruperts poetry is imbued with an elegiac longing for certainty and safety. The coun-
tryside is portrayed as place of stability and continuity; a defence against change. Nature
is conventionally represented as feminine: lovely, regenerative and comforting. Rutherford
adds a nationalist layer to this idea, The depiction of England as a mother to her sons
became a powerful motif in imperialist ideology (52). Like other spiritually-doubtful
Edwardians, Rupert sought to escape his urban existence by creating his own Arcadia, two
miles outside Cambridge. In May 1908, in a letter to Jacques Raverat, Rupert portrays
Cambridge as speciously arrayed in a pretence of heat and light green buds but it is
actually corrupt. He goes on to choose a ghoulish Websterian simile; the city is a swollen
corpse, and we buzz on it like flies (RB Letters 127).
For the Greeks, Arcadia was an innocent, pre-adolescent, asexual place. Rupert was
obsessed by Peter Pan (RB Letters 25th March 1905, 19; 31st December 1905, 33; 10th
January 1906, 38) and Keith Hale, in Friends and Apostles, writes that he saw it at least
ten times (25). Perhaps this was because J. M. Barries play restructures the ideal world
according to the parthenogenetic model of women as mothers but never as wives or lov-
ers (Cecil Degrotte Eby, cited by Hale in footnote, 25). Pastoral is stylised and highly
aesthetic. It is an artefact. As it commonly associates the City with degeneracy, pastoral
can be seen as a highly moral concept. Rupert rejected Christ, in favour of the ambiguous,
pagan Pan. Rutherford suggests that, Brooke is afraid, because Pan symbolises both what
he most wants and what he most fears. Pan is a metaphor for his turn to nature in search
of sexual potency and identity. But he is also the figure of unrepressed sexuality (62).
Virginia is often credited with the invention of the term neo-pagan but she borrowed it
from the Pre-Raphaelites and the social reformer, Edward Carpenter. His follower, J. H. Bad-
ley, founded the co-educational, progressive Bedales School, advocating nudism, mixed bath-
ing and camping to keep an innocent mind and healthy body. Several neo-pagans attended
Bedales. The group was anti-intellectual, standing for freedom and spontaneity.3 Despite all
this apparent liberty, the body was seen as androgynous and relationships were mostly platonic.
David Garnett describes the physically daring Olivier girls climbing fearlessly, mak-
ing dens, skinning and eviscerating rabbits but, sometimes, as unthinkingly cruel as sav-
ages (99). He writes about a camping trip in the summer of 1909 at Penshurst.4 They
were river swimming by the light of bicycle lamps. [W]e took running dives into the
unseen river. It was exciting- the moment of doubt before one struck the water, and then
swimming rapidly out of the next divers way. The smell of new-mown hay, of the river
and weeds, the curious polished smoothness, that fresh river-water leaves on the skin
all heart-aches were purged and healed and an immense happiness and gratitude to my
friends filled me. Soon we were sitting round the blazing fire, Noels eyes shining in wel-
come for the new arrivals and the soft river-water trickling from her hair down her bare
shoulders (169-170). Rupert, one of these new arrivals, gradually fell in love with Noel
but chose to cast her in his mind and in writing as a mythic Grecian goddess or elusive
dryad. He became irrationally protective once their relationship was over; anxious that she
would be kidnapped; revolted that another might possess and sully her.
Virginia may have misunderstood the essentially chaste qualities of most of the neo-
pagans. On 18th April, 1911, planning a holiday in France with My Neo Pagan [Ka]
Cox (L1 460), she writes a bold letter to Clive Bell, I mean to throw myself into youth,
sunshine, nature, primitive art. Cakes with sugar on the top, love, lust, paganism, general
bawdiness, for a fortnight at least; and not write a line (L1 462). Writing to Jacques
Raverat in 1925, she retrospectively mocked her yearning to be liked by the group, You
made me smoke one of Sir Georges cigars& I so much wanted you to admire me, &
Wild Swimming 111
thought I was a desolate old stick compared with the younger generation (VW and the
Raverats 139). Rupert swam with Gwen Raverat, Rose Macaulay,5 Ka Cox, and Phyllis
Gardner amongst others. He appears evangelical in his wish to involve his friends in a
shared therapeutic cleansing.
There exists a notebook, a pencil manuscript, catalogued as RCB/M/6 in the Papers
of Rupert Chawner Brooke in the Kings College archive, Cambridge. Inside is a draft of
a talk called From without, written for the Carbonari Society and dated Michaelmas
1909. In it Rupert praises the revivifying and calming qualities of nature and aligns him-
self with the rural community. He addresses his academic audience as, you little people,
you noisy, quick-witted, little, dark, shifty eyed, bitter-tongued, little men of the city.
You think that peace is ignoble, dull and dulling, a thing of sloth. You laugh at us of the
country, because we will stan[d] for hours together over a gate, watching our sheep. You
confuse nimbleness of mind with depth of emotion (RCB/M/6).
After a few more lines he writes, We of the country abide, perdurable, slow of brain,
with hearts that change from glory to glory, like a pool in evening. In the next paragraph,
he continues, Eh, I am an alien here, & homesick & shy, reading my rough words with
an archaic Arcadian burr, with all your clever bright eyes glittering round me, & your
whirring brains. A few lines later he writes about day-time swimming, Two or three
days ago I wandered out for my customary dip in the river. It was in the afternoon, about
the time you were all sitting in your great-coats over the fire roasting chestnuts for your
tea. I ran across a field, through a wood, & stripped in a little clearing (RCB/M/6). After
a break in the text, he describes a swim on a night with a great many stars but no moon.
I stood naked at the edge of the black water in a perfect silence. I plunged. The water
stunned me as it came upwards with its cold, life-giving embrace. Was it the splendid
shock that made me think the river was quivering [?] (RCB/M/6).
What is remarkable about this description is that Rupert is not swimming privately,
but has an imaginary audience. He hears the water roaring in his ears as a tumult of
applause from all the world around. To him, the trees are personified as incredulous.
They sway like a crowd at a football-match & the stars waving downwards like a million
white finger ends (RCB/M/6). This swimming is far from wild but, rather, a morally
enlivening, stirring public event. Far from being a subversive activity this sort of swim-
ming is a shock to the system. It is a cold, therapeutic purge, reminding the swimmer of
his corporality. A few lines further on he seems to feel that nature is chastising him; the
wind begins to blow and dark clouds form. He runs off homeward through the wood,
moodily feeling that somehow, somewhere, I had been a fool (RCB/M/6).
Rupert was acutely aware of his physical charisma. He often comments on the effect
he had on his audience. According to Timothy Rogers, Rupert once asked Gwen Raverat,
Will you please disarrange my hair; Ive got to read poetry to some old ladies (2). He
writes in January 1912, to Ka Cox, Ive always enjoyed that healthy serene, Apollo-
golden-haired, business (RB Letters 341). Hassall writes that he traded on his boyish
appearance to charm the elderly and eminent (277). Having met Henry James, Rupert
told Frances Cornford, Of course I did the fresh, boyish stunt, and it was a great success
(277). His friend Edward Marsh, cites Ruperts statement in a letter written in his last year
at school, I am an actor and spectator as well, and I delight in contriving effective exits
(30). Paul Delany, and other biographers, mention a celebrated, but (because of its physi-
ological implausibility) perhaps apocryphal, anecdote. This was Ruperts trick of diving into
the river to resurface with an instant erection (132). Apparently, he was not merely aware of
his audience but, also, prepared to give a standing ovation to his own performance.6
Rupert Brooke, 1913 NPG P101(b) by Sherrill Schell, glass

positive, (305 mm x 254 mm)
Nigel Jones writes that Ruperts friends impertinently referred to Sherrill Schells iconic
shirtless portrait as Your favourite actress, although Rupert himself thought it rather
silly (316). In Beginning Again Leonard Woolf recalls meeting Rupert for the first time, and
thinking, that is exactly what Adonis must have looked like in the eyes of Aphrodite. Ac-
cording to Leonard, Schells well-known portrait, neither flatters nor libels him. It is almost
incredible but he really did look like that. The photograph, of course, does not show his
colouringthe red-gold of his hair and the brilliant complexion. He considered Rupert to
be a professional charmer with a very pronounced streak of hardness, even cruelty (19).
Ruperts severe mental breakdown in early 1912 followed the troubled affair with Ka
Cox which had probably led to a miscarriage. He had idealised Ka as a dependable moth-
er-surrogate but, once he had slept with her, became obsessed with the idea that she was
no longer pure, describing his feeling for her as, like having black-beetles in the house
(RB Letters 337). The man, whose thesis was on Webster, became imbued with a Jacobean
sensibility. His letters to Noel Olivier are increasingly fastidious, full of images of poison
and dirt (Song of Love 65, 83, 118, 127, 230). Physical love and ageing are consistently
seen as filthy and disgusting. Blaming Lytton Strachey for his break with Ka, he began
to associate Bloomsbury with all that was to him rotten, treacherous & wicked (176),
specifically female emancipation, Jewishness, homosexuality and pacifism. He longs to bathe
Wild Swimming 113
to get clean, sane and healthy. He writes to Geoffrey Keynes, from Cologne, on 24th June
1912, My soul is on its last legs. Have you any cure for syphilis of the soul? still I stink;
& still I peal [sic]. It may be there is a herb growing at the bottom of the river just above the
pool at Grantchester, & that if I dive & find it & bring it upit will heal me (389).
At the British Library I have been transcribing an unpublished memoir and letters
between Rupert and the woodcut artist Phyllis Gardner. The manuscripts begin in 1911
and shed light on this unstable time in Ruperts life. The most remarkable section, from
November 1912, concerns wild swimming. Phyllis describes Ruperts wild irresistible
drowning force (BL 74742, 46). One evening, he offers her sixpence to jump in to the
swirling and bubbling waters of the mill weir near Byrons Pool. She refuses.
Next Sunday, by moonlight, they begin to wade in the shallows of the Granta. She
writes, The wood was primeval and full of strange things that crawled unseen: and in the
little stream through it were snags that looked like alligators (BL 74742, 36-37). They
take off their clothes and wade into the water. She gets his boots wet and asks him, Will
you kill me? He answers, Perhaps. They see water rats, swim in the cold, black water
and then get out. He tries to catch her, knocking her over. He offers to dry her with his
hair: it was wild and tousled and standing on end like a mop, and I could see his keen eyes
burning under the shadow of his brows (BL 74742, 46). She lets down her long soft red
hair and rubs it over his back. I understood how an animal that loves you feels when it
rubs you with its head, and I went on rubbing in a kind of ecstasy. He asks her if she is
afraid, then seizes her throat, pressing her Adams apple with both thumbs and asks, Sup-
posing I were to kill you? He says she couldnt resistmuch. She chokes, tries to stop
him from strangling her and asks how long would it take? Oh, two or three minutes,
he says. He spreads her out flat. And he looked at me, and felt me, and then said in an
off hand kind of way, youve rather a beautiful body (BL 74742, 40). It starts to rain
heavily; they return to the Old Vicarage, Grantchester.
By 1913 Rupert wanted to break with Phyllis. Condescendingly calling her Child,
he tells her that she is a puritan (BL 74741, No. 55); made for love and marriage (BL
74741, No. 65); not strong enough to stand unconventional emotional life (BL 74741,
No. 50). He, however, is a restless wanderer. Phyllis writes that he had been drawn into
a vortex of would-be original people, who to satisfy their own base natures had made in-
constancy a principle, and went as much as possible on the negative morality that he who
breaks a rule is greater than he who makes it (BL 74742, 69).
It was only later, in 1913, having escaped to an authentically wild paradise, that
Rupert found contentment without sexual guilt with a Tahitian woman, Taata Mata. He
writes in Letters from America that in the South Seas the intellect soon lapses into quies-
cence. The body becomes more active, the senses and perceptions more lordly and acute.
It is a life of swimming and climbing and resting after exertion. The skin seems to grow
more sensitive to light and air, and the feel of water and the earth and leaves. Hour after
hour one may float in the warm lagoons, conscious, in the whole body, of every shred and
current of the multitudinous water (87).
The outbreak of war released him from this atavistic idyll. Influenced by a political
group, including Wellesleys, Asquiths and Winston Churchill, Rupert assumed a stirring
new patriotic role which was exemplified by the poetry he wrote at the start of the Great
War. In the famous 1914 sonnet Peace, God has,
caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move.
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
This revivifying image of swimmers vigorously and readily jumping into cleanness,
as an escape from ordinary mundane existence, also suggests that it is an ethical imperative
to enlist in the service of the nation. This paper has explored the ways in which, for Rupert
Brooke, wild swimming became an essential cleansing, both literal and metaphorical; a
splendidly shocking alert against stagnation, a cold, life-giving embrace (RCB/M/6).
Notes
1. In Reminiscences, Virginias mother is seen as a swimmer who is struggling to master the element of
water. Virginia writes about Julias weakening efforts, she sank, like an exhausted swimmer, deeper and
deeper in the water, and could only at moments descry some restful shore on the horizon to be gained in
old age when all this toil was over (MOB 11).
2. Virginia lost her father in 1904 and her brother, Thoby, in 1906; Dick Brooke died in 1907 and Ruperts
father in January 1910.
3. The neo-pagan contingent was fluid but at various outdoor camps included: Godwin Baynes, Justin
Brooke, Rupert Brooke, Ka Cox, Gwen Darwin (later Raverat), Frances Darwin (later Cornford), David
Bunny Garnett, Harold Hobson, Bill Hubback, Geoffrey Keynes, Bryn, Daphne, Margery and Noel
Olivier, Hugh Popham, Sybil, Ethel and David Pye, Maitland Radford, Jacques Raverat, Gerald Shove,
Eva Spielman and Dudley Ward.
4. The Penshurst group included Rupert Brooke, the Olivier girls, Godwin Baynes, Maitland Radford, Har-
old Hobson, Dorothy Osmaston, Walter Layton and Dudley Ward.
5. Rupert was tutored by George Macaulay, Roses father, and seen as family friend. She was a keen swimmer
and swam with him at Grantchester. At this time, Rose wrote The Secret River, John Murray, (1909); her
protagonist, Michael, is said to be based on Rupert Brooke. Jane Emery writes, in Rose Macaulay: a Writers
Life, Rupert enjoyed mixed bathing for yet another sensation: the exciting tension between innocent
childlike pleasure and suppressed adolescent titillation. For, simultaneously puritanical and sensual, he was
persistently torn between love for a very young, beautiful, elusive dryad type and for an emotionally and
sometimes sexually generous partner of either genderwhom he subsequently devalued (109).
6. In her 1917 essay, The New Crusade, Virginia writes about the peculiar irony of his canonisation and
implies that, later in Ruperts life an adoring audience became undesirable, that the romantic public took
possession of his fame leaving an unmerited and undesired burden of adulation (EII 203).
Works Cited
British Library manuscripts 74741, 74742. Phyllis Gardner/Rupert Brooke Papers. Letters and memoir of Phyl-
lis Gardner relating to Rupert Brooke, poet (b. 1887, d. 1915); 1911-1918.
Papers of Rupert Chawner Brooke in the Kings College archive, Cambridge. RCB/M/6, From without, writ-
ten for the Carbonari Society, dated Michaelmas 1909.
Brooke, Rupert. Letters from America, Travels in the USA and Canada. London: Modern Voices, Hesperus Press, 2007.
Deakin, Roger. Waterlog: A Swimmers Journey Through Britain. London: Vintage, 2000.
Delany, Paul. The Neo-Pagans, Rupert Brook and the Ordeal of Youth. New York: The Free Press, 1987.
Wild Swimming 115
Emery, Jane. Rose Macaulay: A Writers Life. London: John Murray, 1991.
Garnett, David. The Golden Echo. London: Chatto and Windus, 1953.
Griffiths, Jay. Wild: An Elemental Journey. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006.
Hale, Keith. Ed. Friends and Apostles, The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.
Harris, Pippa. Song of Love, The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier. London: Bloomsbury, 1991.
Hassall, Christopher. Rupert Brooke, a Biography. London: Faber and Faber, 1964.
Jones, Nigel. Rupert Brooke, Life, Death and Myth. London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999.
Keynes, Geoffrey. Ed. The Letters of Rupert Brooke. London: Faber and Faber, 1968.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996.
Marler, Regina. Ed. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. London: Bloomsbury, 1993.
Marsh, Edward. Ed. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, with a memoir by Edward Marsh, London: Papermac,
Macmillan, 1987.
Pryor, William. Ed. Virginia Woolf and the Raverats, a Different Sort of Friendship. Bath: Clear Books, 2003.
Rogers, Timothy. Rupert Brooke, a Reappraisal and Selection. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.
Rutherford, Jonathan. Forever England, Reflections on Race, Empire, Masculinity and Empire. London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1997.
Woolf, Leonard. Beginning Again, an Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918. London: The Hogarth Press, 1964.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1 1888-1912. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann.
London: Chatto and Windus, 1975.
_____, The New Crusade and Rupert Brooke. Essays 2 1912-1918. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The
Hogarth Press, 1987.
_____, The Intellectual Imagination. Essays 3 1919-1924. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1989.
_____, Reminiscences and A Sketch of the Past. Moments of Being. Ed. Hermione Lee. London: Pimlico, 2002.
THE WOOLF, THE HORSE AND THE FOX:
RECURRENT MOTIFS IN JACOBS ROOM AND ORLANDO
by Vara Neverow
R
eferences to the horse1 and the fox in Jacobs Room (1922) and Orlando (1928) have
been noted in passing but have neither been analyzed in depth nor in relation to
one another. In my examination of these two motifs, I have become particularly
intrigued by what the conventions of the horses domestication and the foxs ferality might
signify and have also noticed that there are strong sexual overtones underlying some refer-
ences to these two species. Let me begin, however, by tentatively aligning the horse and
fox with another related and oft-discussed animal motifthe dog. With regard to dog
references in Woolf s work, various scholarsincluding June Dunn, David Eberly, Emily
Jensen, and Ruth Vanitahave explored canine sexual significance, especially with regard
to possible allusions to coded lesbian and male homosexual relationships. More recently,
Jane Goldman, in Ce chien est moi: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog, an essay
that will soon evolve into a book-length work, has tackled dog references even more rigor-
ously and from multiple perspectives. In her argument, Goldman articulates the troika
slave-woman-dog, a concept rooted in the legacy of counter-enlightenment discourse
that links slaves and dogs, as well as an equally entrenched patriarchal discourse that links
women and dogs (Goldman 59). Such compounding of hierarchical exploitation is simi-
larly evident when Orlando, at the time still a man but now obsessed with the glory of
a man who had written a book and had it printed, ticks off a list of former pleasures: a
dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards (61). The glib inventory, which echoes the time-
worn phrase wine, women and song, indicates Orlandos prior preferred indulgences, a
hierarchy that privileges the dog over the other items. Further, the generic woman in ques-
tion would certainly be a prostitute and seems to have been less interesting to Orlando
than an animal and just barely more important than the joys of gambling at cards.
Like dogs and women, horses and foxes are intrinsically categorized as Other, and ref-
erences to them are embedded within discourses that justify abuse and persecution. Margin-
alized humans (e.g., women, homosexuals, non-Caucasians, etc.) who fall into these catego-
ries are demoted to the status of animals (a hierarchy determined by humans, not established
by nature) and can then be identified as inherently inferior, sub-human and thereby targeted
for legitimized exploitation. In both works, Woolf alludes to the exploitation of horses and
foxes by referencing the ways that humans use and abuse these animals.
Domesticated horses in the two works manifest in a variety of ways including both
hunting and warfare. War horses, bred and trained for battle, are specifically mentioned in
Orlando, while the use of horses (as well as dogs) in the Great War is subtly mentioned in
Jacobs Room. One such instance in Orlando occurs when, deeply depressed by Sashas be-
trayal of him, Orlando takes to wandering in the family burial crypt. In a scene calculated
by the faux biographer to echo Hamlet addressing the skull of Yorick, Orlando morbidly
contemplates the bones of an ancestral hand and wonders as to the sexual identity of its
original owner: Had it urged the war horse,2 or plied the needle? (53). Having become a
The Woolf, the Horse, and the Fox 117
woman, Orlando rejoices that she is not prancing down Whitehall on a war-horse (119)
and later, while she is wandering through Londons Victorian-era streets, she c[omes] to
great open squares with black shiny, tightly buttoned statues of fat men in the middle,
and war horses prancing, and columns rising and fountains falling and pigeons flutter-
ing (203), suggesting that the setting actually is Whitehall, which is intrinsically both
a massive display of military history and a site of concentrated power to wage war. Lady
Orlando seems here to have come upon the Horse Guards and may be passing a statue of
Charles I on horseback as she walks in the direction of Trafalgar Square where the figure
of Admiral Nelson stands erect atop a pillar.
In Jacobs Room there are specific coded allusions to the impending First World War
as related to horses. One particularly poignant instance in the novel is the passing men-
tion of The Twentieth Hussars (89), the cavalry unit in which Cecil Woolf and Philip
Woolf, Virginia Woolf s brothers-in-law, both served in the Great War. Cecil was killed in
the Battle of Cambrai, and his brother Philip was wounded by the same shell (see Hussey
387; see also Levenback 19). Clara Durrant, hosting a gathering, introduces two of her
guests to each other, and it is in their idle party chit-chat that the army unit is mentioned:
You shall sit by my mother, said Clara. Everybody seems to come in here. ...
Mr. Calthorp, let me introduce you to Miss Edwards.
Are you going away for Christmas? said Mr. Calthorp.
If my brother gets his leave, said Miss Edwards.
What regiment is he in? said Mr. Calthorp.
The Twentieth Hussars, said Miss Edwards. (89)
Ironically, the word war itself actually never occurs in Jacobs Room, but it is cleverly im-
bedded in various ways, including the three middle letters of Miss Edwardss proper name.
The historical impact of the Great War specifically on horses is documented in the per-
manent exhibition of the International Museum of the Horse at the Kentucky Horse Park
in Lexington. There, a plaque entitled The Horse in World War I[:] 1914-1918,3 states:
It is estimated that some six million horses served [in the war] and substantial
numbers of these were killed. By 1914, the British had only 20,000 horses and
the United States was called upon to supply the allied forces with remounts. In
the four years of the war, the United States exported nearly a million horses to
Europe. This seriously depleted the number of horses in America. When the
American Expeditionary Force entered the war, it took with it an additional
182,000 horses. Of these, 60,000 were killed and only a scant 200 were returned
to the United States. In spite of the innovations of World War I, one reality re-
mained the same; the horse was the innocent victim.
In one year, British veterinary hospitals treated 120,000 horses for wounds or
diseases. Like human combatants, horses required ambulances and field veteri-
nary hospitals to care for the sick and injured. The motorized horse van was
first used as an equine ambulance on the Western Front. (http://www.imh.org/
legacy-of-the-horse/the-horse-in-world-war-i-1914-1918/)
A British website that addresses the history of World War I notes that such was the use of hors-
es on the Western Front, that over 8 million died on all sides fighting in the war. Two and a half
million horses were treated in veterinary hospitals with about two million being sufficiently
cured that they could return to duty (http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/horses_in_world_
war_one.htm). Indeed, the tragedy of this vast slaughter of horses seems almost unimaginable.
The fox has been subjected to slaughter in a different way. The fox is targeted victim of the
fox-hunt,4 a venerated bloodsport. The fox itself has a complicated relationship with both the
domesticated hunting horse and the accompanying hounds. Foxes, as wild animals, however,
cannot generally be exploited in the same ways as horses (or, of course, dogs). Thus, one can
view the fox in both Jacobs Room and Orlando as a motif of freedom, an autonomous creature,
defiantly unshackled, and not at all constrained by the slave-woman-dog troika of abuse
noted above. I hope to establish that Woolfs references to the fox confirm this claim.
Aligning and analyzing various patterns of horse and fox motifs in both Jacobs Room
and Orlando, it becomes evident that horses are generally (though not always) depicted as
domestic animals, while foxes are consistently shown to be truly wild at heartand danger-
ous even when in captivity. Fascinated and bewitched by his treacherous Russian love inter-
est, Sasha, Orlando describes his object of desire in ways exquisitely ambiguous with regard
to identity and sexuality alike: a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in
the snow all in the space of three seconds (28). Again referencing the fox, Sasha is compared
to Orlandos dangerous pet of yorea white Russian fox, . . . a creature soft as snow with
teeth of steel, which bit [Orlando] savagely (33). I should note that it is unclear in either
Jacobs Room or Orlando as to whether any given fox reference is linked to male or female
biology5a factor that makes Sashas own sexual indeterminacy even more pronounced and
suggests that the fox is not merely a creature but a marker of ambiguous difference.
Like the ambiguous fox in both Jacobs Room and Orlando, horses are not merely rep-
resented as living animals. They are imbued with the imaginary. Mrs. Jarvis in Jacobs Room,
melancholy and suffering from extreme ennui, entertains fantasies of phantom horsemen
galloping over the moors where she wanders (25). Similarly, the narrator observes that
Jacob, while alone in Greece, indulges in delirious flights of imagination, evidencing the
wild horse in us (149; see also discussion below). And as a young boy, Orlando, day-
dreaming, imagines that the root of his favorite oak tree on which he reclines was the
back of a great horse that he was riding (15)an image which fairly obviously alludes to
sexual arousal and, implicitly, to psychoanalytic interpretations of sexual fantasy.
The horse has other strong sexual resonances in both Jacobs Room and Orlando. Jane
de Gay, in Virginia Woolfs Novels and the Literary Past, briefly discusses the horse motifs
in Jacobs Room in relation to classical traditions. As she notes, in Phaedrus, a work Jacob is
explicitly reading, Socrates likens the soul to a charioteer driving two horses, one virtuous
the other wanton (de Gay 82). De Gay, quoting a passage from the novel, also observes that
Jacob ha[s] been seen riding a horse which becomes part of him: as if your own body ran
into the horses body and it was your own forelegs grown with his that sprang (de Gay 82).
And reinforcing my own argument, de Gay, when she interprets this passage as evidence that
Jacob wrestles with the temptations of the flesh in his relationships with women, strongly
suggests that there is an undercurrent of sexuality in the horse motif (de Gay 82).
Jacobs imaginary fusion with his horse in a fox-hunt also links him to the ancient
Centaurs of Greek myth, notorious for their lustful, unruly ways, including profligate
indulgence in drunkenness and rape, characteristics that manifest themselves in milder

forms in Jacobs own behavior. When, as noted above, the narrator describes Jacob on his
jaunt through Greece, observing that Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild
horse in us (149), she also implicitly invokes the passions aroused during Jacobs earlier
fox-hunting experience when he fuses with his steed:
To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have
positivelya rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were
over, and as for men and women, let them go hangthere is no getting over the
fact that this desire seizes us pretty often. (149)
Jacob can be considered something of a metaphorical stallion himself considering that, by the
end of the novel, he has apparently fathered at least two children, one with Florinda and the
other with Sandra Wentworth Williams. And, perhaps not surprisingly, he ultimately lets all
his lovers go hangperhaps taking after his father, who had also run a little wild (13).
De Gay links the horse motif, as have many other scholars, to Clara Durrants panic
attack which occurs when she is in Hyde Park near the statue of Achilles honoring the Duke
of Wellingtons defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. As de Gay states, Clara sees a riderless horse
running past which, according to the Phaedrus, implies uncontrolled desire and spiritual
chaosan image encapsulating the onset of war and presaging Jacobs death, and, as de Gay
subsequently observes, the poignant becomes risible when another character, Julia Eliot, no-
tices that the runaway horse is being pursued by a little man . . . pounding behind with his
breeches dirty (de Gay 82). Yet, the horses mad dash does not lead to its freedomrather,
the elegant animal remains saddled despite having unseated the rider and soon will experi-
ence the humiliated riders mortifying weight again. Further, the rider may well punish the
horse for its daring dash toward autonomy. The disobedient horse is enslaved and ultimately
devoid of options. Given the devastating massacre of horses in World War I and Britains
voracious demand for new animals, one speculates that this horse, too, may die at the front.
The horse in Jacobs Room is also associated subtly elsewhere with transgressive and secretive
sexuality. Laura Doyle points to the conventions of evasive sexual categorization in the novel, not-
ing that Jacobs and Clara Durrants gossipy acquaintances assiduously avoid outright reference
to Richard Bonamys homosexuality, instead calling him a dark horse (Doyle 549; see JR 163).
Linking the horse to the fox most directly are the specific references to fox-hunting in
Jacobs family. In the novel, Jacobs father, Seabrook Flanders, prior to his marriage: had bro-
ken horses, ridden to hounds, farmed a few fields, and run a little wild (13), as noted above
regarding sexual adventures. On the maternal side, Lady Rocksbier, Betty Flanderss relative,
had been a great rider to hounds (104) and Jacob himself rode to hounds after a fashion,
for he hadnt a penny (163), all in pursuit of the wily fox. And Jacobs fleeting transaction
with the prostitute Laurette includes a brief conversation regarding how, once upon a time,
this woman (now a sex worker) had the status and wherewithal to have ridden to the hounds
but, by implication, can certainly no longer be invited to dinner by the horsy set (see 105 for a
description of them). This passing reference is reminiscent of both Jane Goldmans dog-slave-
woman troika and Orlandos reference to a dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards.
The specific word fox occurs four times in Jacobs Room (aside, that is, from two
references to Charles James Fox, the eighteenth century Whig statesman [89; 151]). There
are three references to the creature itself (22, 140) and one hyphenated mention of fox-
hunting gentlemen (140). There are also two references to wild foxgloves (52, 56), which
grow on the moors and dangle their downward-facing bell-shaped flowers, attracting bees
(56). These plants not only share the suggestive name of the fox itself but perhaps may lim-
inally also remind the reader of the implicitly sexualized significance of gloves, an argument
delineated in Kathryn Simpsons The Paradox of the Gift: Gift-Giving as a Disruptive Force
in Mrs. Dalloway. The first mention of actual foxes6 occurs early in Jacobs Room:
An old cottage woman living alone, high up, had told him of a purple butterfly
which came every summer to her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the
early morning, she told him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always
see two badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like two boys fighting,
she said. (22)
I have argued elsewhere that the wrestling badgers are homosexually coded (see Neverow,
Transgressive), the episode being echoed later in the novel when Richard Bonamy and Jacob
get into a kerfuffle while another elderly woman, Mrs. Papworth, the charwoman, eavesdrops
from the scullery, wondering, in regard to Women, what Sanders and her gentleman did
in that line (106). The passage is aligned with the playful puppy dog motif in Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) of Septimus and Evans wrestling (see Jensen 173). It seems that the reference to the fox
cubs falls into the same category. In both Jacobs Room and Mrs. Dalloway, the recurrent motif
of intimate, playful behavior representing emotional and sexual bonding alludes to traumatic
experiences in the Great War (whether symbolically between foxes or badgers or in terms of
plot development between young men). In Jacobs Room, these encounters foreshadow the hor-
rors to come while in Mrs. Dalloway, the references allude to those who have already made the
so-called ultimate sacrifice (or have witnessed these deaths in Septimuss case).
The fox cubs play on the moors, in the habitat where the foxgloves grow. In a research
paper entitled Sexual Deviants on the Moor: Transgressive Love in Emily Bronts Wuther-
ing Heights and Virginia Woolfs Jacobs Room, Michelle Gould, a graduate student at South-
ern Connecticut State University, has argued convincingly that the moors themselves are
the site of sexual liberation, the only place where Mrs. Jarvis and Mrs. Flanders can at last
be freed from heterosexual constraints, allowing them to discover and express their desires.
To pursue their nocturnal adventure, Mrs. Jarvis and Mrs. Flanders must pass through an
actual gate into the wild. Encouraged by her friend, Betty agrees to go for a late evening walk, and
the narrator notes suggestively that it was years since [Betty] had opened the orchard gate and
gone out on Dods Hill after dinner (138; see Neverow, Return). Earlier in the novel, when the
narrator describes Betty Flanderss thought process and her concomitant behavior as she rejects
Mr. Floyds marriage offer, the gate is also mentioned: How could I think of marriage! [Betty]
said to herself bitterly, as she fastened the gate with a piece of wire (18). But now, years later,
Mrs. Flanders and her friend are crossing a restrictive boundary and, one may argue, are entering
a zone that is not controlled or restricted by patriarchy (see, for example, Showalter).
In their transgressive nighttime wanderings, the two women, as they stealthily enjoy
forbidden erotic pleasure, are aligned with the fox (or foxes?)7 (see also Neverow, Re-
turn), for the fox itself appears only on the moors, in its natural habitat, a space beyond
social constraintsand beyond gates. In the passage describing the two women together on
the moors at midnight, the narrator twice directly references the activities of the fox, thereby
bracketing a specific mention of churchgoing fox-hunting gentlemen (133), while describ-
ing the natural world in the present tense. It is unclear whether just one or two foxes share
the moonlight with the two women. In the first reference, a fox steals out from behind the
gorse bushes, and in the second, A fox pads stealthily (133), but it could be the same fox.
There may also be a subtle frisson of foxy irony regarding Bettys house-cat Topaz, so
named for his orange-red fur and directly associated with Mr. Floyd, her rejected suitor:
Poor Topaz, [Betty] said (for Mr. Floyds kitten was now a very old cat, a little mangy
behind the ears, and one of these days would have to be killed) . . . and she smiled, thinking
how she had had him gelded, and how she did not like red hair in men. Smiling, she went
into the kitchen (18). Betty smugly anticipates euthanizing Topaz and implicitly associates
castrating the cat with rejecting Mr. Floyds marriage offer. Intriguingly, the color of Topazs
marmalade fur is also very similar to that of a red foxs pelt. Thus, while Topaz, a neutered
feline, is a household pet subjugated to Bettys will, Betty and Mrs. Jarvis are able to go a bit
wild and achieve, however briefly, the autonomy of the fox at liberty on the moors.
In regard to fox references, there may be a suggestive hint in Woolf s verb choice.
The narrator notes that the fox pads about the moors. To pad, of course, means to
walk with or as if with padded feet (like the pads on a foxs paws) but is also associated
with a colloquial phrase from the late eighteenth centurymaking a fox-pawwhich
Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English suggests is probably
a deliberate perversion of faux pas (fox [or foxs] paw; see also Farmer and Henley,
foxed). The word pad, as John S. Farmer and William Ernest Henley note, has mul-
tiple meanings, one being slang for a robbery committed on footwhile another variant
is a reference to a bed, or pad. In this instance, the reference to the foxs padded paw may
also be a deliberate and layered pun since the fox paw means, and with regard to women
specifically, carelessly allowing oneself to be seduced (423), and the pad suggests trans-
gressions appropriate to wandering on foot on the moors in the moonlight.
The narrators bracketed reference to fox-hunting gentlemen (133) is the only explicit
mention of the fox as a target. There are, however, other instances in Jacobs Room associat-
ing horses with the bloodsport without actually identifying the elusive object of desire, the
desperate fox that flees the riders, the horses and the pack of hounds. In Mrs. Dalloway, Sep-
timus Smiths escalating madness transforms him from a domesticated dog playing with his
canine companion to an isolated and victimized wild fox literally being hounded to death.
Septimus envisions himself as a creature relentlessly pursued: Human nature, in short, was
on himthe repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils. Holmes was on him (90). Dr.
Holmes, one of Septimuss medical consultants, literally pursues Septimus to his death as
hounds do in the chase (146). This motif of the hunted animal vividly depicts the persecu-
tions and suffering of those who are viewed as sexually transgressive.
As in Jacobs Room, the fox in Orlando is associated primarily with the moor. In an
inventory of Orlandos family wealth, the narrator ticks off: the heath[,]the forest, the
pheasant and the deer, the fox, the badger and the butterfly [15]). In Jacobs Room, the
same triad of fox, badger and butterfly are mentioned in the sexually charged description
of wrestling animals noted above. And, while there are no references to deer in this section
of Jacobs Room, the narrators description of Mrs. Jarvis resonates strongly with the pheas-
ant mentioned in Orlando: Short, dark, with kindling eyes, a pheasants feather in her hat,
Mrs. Jarvis was just the sort of woman to lose her faith upon the moors (25). Elsewhere
in Orlando the fox is again linked to the pheasant when, now a woman, Orlando, back in
England, hear[ing] a fox bark in the woods, and the clutter of a pheasant trailing through
the branches (130), is inspired to begin to work again on her poem, The Oak Tree.
The horse motif in Orlando has specifically been linked to sexual ambivalence. Sherron K.
Knopp in her 1988 article, If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?: Sapphism and the Subversive-
ness of Virginia Woolfs Orlando, notes that, after Orlandos transformation into a woman:
Orlando flees to the moor, breaks an ankle, and resolves to die as natures bride,
until she is discovered by a man on horseback: Madam, the man cried, leaping
to the ground, youre hurt! Im dead, Sir! she replied. A few minutes later,
they became engaged. The morning after as they sat at breakfast, he told her his
name. It was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire. (31 [Orlando 183])
When Shelmerdine on horseback rescues Orlando after she has broken her ankle, Orlando
immediately jilts her fantasy of a union with nature for a conventional marriage that will
allow her sexual freedom without negative social consequences, an arrangement obviously
similar to that of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. The horse here is depicted as
domesticated and reliable, associated with social expectations and accepted sexual stan-
dards rather than with acts of defiance or transgression.
In contrast, when Mrs. Jarvis and Betty Flanders meander together stealthy and un-
bridled, it is only outside the garden gate on the moor where the foxes wander freely that
they each discover something satisfyingMrs. Jarvis, no longer discontented, suddenly
finds it difficult to think of herself to-night, and Betty Flanders, leaning down to pick
up a pebble, seemingly discovers something that makes Mrs. Jarvis think that Sometimes
people do find things (139). What do the two women really find? Its up to the reader
to determine. Evidently, Mrs. Jarvis and Betty Flanders are able, at least briefly, to enjoy
intimacy and repose outside the limits of society in a zone where only rarely does noise
disrupt the peace of the moors or the hunt disturb the fox:
Still, as Mrs. Jarvis said, stepping out on to the moors, How quiet it is! Quiet at mid-
day, except when the hunt scatters across it; quiet in the afternoon, save for the drifting
sheep; at night the moor is perfectly quiet.
A garnet brooch has dropped into its grass. A fox pads stealthily. A leaf turns
on its edge. Mrs. Jarvis, who is fifty years of age, reposes in the camp in the hazy
moonlight. (140)
To conclude, the horse, for the most part, seems to represent conventionality and domes-
ticity, although there are moments of rebellion, intense desire or fantasy associated with
the equine. In contrast, the foxs stealth and wiliness points toward possibilities that can
hardly be articulated.
Notes
1. Regarding specific references to horses in Woolf s work, see also Clarke and Marcus.
2. The term war horse is not hyphenated here (53) in the edition used; it is, however, hyphenated in the
phrase subsequently quoted (119).
3. The subtitle of this plaque is Theirs Was not to Reason Why, a wry echo of Alfred Lord Tennysons word-
ing in his jingoistic Crimean War poem The Charge of the Light Brigade. The phrase suggests that, while
soldiers can at least desert (however dishonorably), the horses have no options for resistance whatsoever.
4. Fox-hunting, still practiced in the United States, was purportedly banned in 2002 in Scotland and 2004 in
England and Wales. One might think that foxes would actually be protected by such legislation; however,
since they continue to be regarded as pests, the provision only prohibits the hounds from chasing the foxes
to death and does not ban shooting the fox once the hounds have flushed the prey out. In the nineteenth
century, as many as 100,000 foxes were killed per year in hunts (Impact on the Countryside.). Prior to the
2004 ban, 21,000 to 25,000 foxes were killed in registered hunts, approximately five percent of the fox
population (Foxhunting). According to another source, more foxes are now killed in the Scotland hunts
than were previously because they have a lower chance of survival and are shot to death in larger numbers
(Ironic Consequence Of Scottish Fox Hunt Ban).
5. Using Mark Husseys invaluable CD-ROM to search Woolf s work for fox references, I found only one
mention of a vixen, a specifically female fox. The reference occurs at the very end of the published version
of Between the Acts in the rather violent union of Giles and Isa (148) and, in the same passage, as Mark
Hussey pointed out at the 2010 Woolf conference, Giles is specifically referenced as the male animal of the
speciesthe dog fox (148). As one website points out with regard to differentiation, there is very little
sexual dimorphism in Red foxes (i.e.[,] the males and females look very similar) (Red Fox).
6. It is highly probable that, aside from the white Russian fox in Orlando, the ordinary foxes Woolf mentions
are the red variety (see Red Fox).
7. Deborah Garrard has suggested that there may be parallels between Woolf s fox motifs and David Gar-
netts curious illustrated Lady into Fox (1922). That the fox motif may be associated with lesbian desire is
reinforced by D. H. Lawrences The Fox, which was published on 11 April 1923 and thus could not have
influenced Woolf s work since Jacobs Room was published on 22 October 1922.
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THE DOGS THAT THEREFORE WOOLF FOLLOWS:
SOME CANINE SOURCES FOR A ROOM OF ONES OWN
IN NATURE AND ART
by Jane Goldman
T
he saturnine dog in Drers engraving Melencolia I is an antecedent to the dog-
woman narrator in A Room of Ones Own (1929), I have argued (Goldman 2007).
Situating a dog at the scene of scholarship and creativity, both works test the
boundaries between human and animal. I argue that Woolf s signifying dog follows Dr-
ers dog and also follows other accounts of Drers dog. Following here means both fol-
lowing chronologicallycoming afterbut also following the example ofthe figure or
pattern ofthat is following sufficiently enough to recognize Drers dog as an allegorical
antecedent but also departing from it, refiguring, or resignifying it. (Goldman 2010).
Furthermore, Woolf s dog-woman narrator, suspended between human and animal, an-
ticipates Jacques Derrida, naked before the pitiless gaze of his domestic cat, and asking:
Who am I, therefore? Who is it that I am (following)?punning on the French je
suisI am and I follow (Derrida). Is the human something that is the animal or some-
thing that follows or even supercedes the animal?
Derrida identifies an abyssal rupture [which] doesnt describe two edges (emphasis
added) between Human and Animal. He claims: beyond the edge of the so-called hu-
man, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than The Animal or
Animal Life there is already [] a multiplicity of organizations of relations between liv-
ing and dead [] among realms that are more and more difficult to dissociate by means
of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death (Derrida 30). For Derrida,
anyone who claims the distinct edge between Human and Animal,
claiming thus to designate every living thing that is held not to be human (man
as rational animal [] who says I and takes himself to be the subject of a
statement that he proffers on the subject of the said animal, etc.) [] he utters
an asinanity [btise]. He avows without avowing it, he declares just as a disease
is declared by means of a symptom, he offers up for diagnosis the statement I
am uttering an asinanity. And this I am uttering an asinanity should confirm
not only the animality that he is disavowing but his complicit, continued, and
organized involvement in a veritable war of the species. (Derrida 31)
Woolf s dog-woman, on the contrary, does not efface the limit between Man and Ani-
mal, nor does she ignore the abyssal rupture identified by Derrida, but she contributes to
multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing
the line precisely by making it increase and multiply (Derrida 29). Woolf s dog-woman
may resemble Derridas animal figureswithout doubt something other than figures
or characters in a fablemore, as he says of his essay White Mythology, the meta-
morphoses of the figural [] follow[ing] the movement of tropes and of rhetoric, the
explanation of concept by means of metaphor, by prowling around animal language, and

welcomed or poised, as he says of A Silkworm of Ones Own, on the threshold of
sexual difference (Derrida 36).
I would like to explore some readings of the dog and other creatures in Drers en-
gravingincluding some readings that were available to Woolf. Drers engraving has
vexed to nightmare generations of critics, writers and artists. As a recent journal editor,
inviting new looks on Drer, put it: the Melencolia I simply will not go away (Lears
129). According to the great iconographer Erwin Panofsky, it was
the first representation of the Artists Melancholy, and for centuries it has in-
spired writers and artists to meditate on its jumble of meanings-embodied in the
clutter of ordinary and esoteric objects; the cadaverous dog, drowsing putto, and
banner-bearing bat; the mysterious play of light and darkness; and, above all, the
bulky, brooding angel whose sex remains unclear. (Lears 1)
Walter Benjamin helps us to understand the metanarrative status of the print (Benjamin
152; Goldman, Desmond 181-182). But Panofskys foundational modern reading of
Drer, whose exposition of Melencolia I remains the most paraphrased in scholarship (see
Doorly), helps us to do what every viewer of the print is obliged to do: put the images into
words and to recognize the provenance of these images. He describes the dog as a half-
starved shivering hound (Panofsky 156), and both the dog and the bat as not merely
emblems but, even more, living creatures, one squeaking with evident ill-will, the other
shrivelled up with general misery (Panofsky 162). I would like to dispute these assertions
about the living creaturesnot least that the bat Panofsky sees is a bat at all.
If Woolf s A Room of Ones Own is indeed an intertext with Drers Melencolia, I
suggest that it is further inflected by reference to readingsor verbal accountsof that
engraving by two Victorians, the critic John Ruskin and the poet James Thomson (B.V.),
whose works were in Woolf s library and also cited in her writings. Ruskin understands
the main design of Melencolia I to represent human labor: The labour indicated is in the
daily work of men. Not the inspired or gifted labour of the few (it is labour connected
with the sciences, not with the arts), shown in its four chief functions: thoughtful, faith-
ful, calculating and executing (Ruskin 244). But if human labor is the subject, no human
is actually represented in the engraving. Ruskin understands the winged androgynous
looking spirit to be a feminine figure or representation of human labor, but not itself
a human subject (as does Panofsky). How could she be human? She has eagles wings,
and is crowned with fair leafage of spring (Ruskin 245). The androgyny of the figure has
sometimes been noted by critics, but usually in acknowledging that the inhuman and
winged feminine form is the allegory of the (always and already) masculine artistic subjec-
tivity. A recent observer even ignores her eagles wings in making this assumption: What
ails this flummoxed technician, this hermaphroditic lump surrounded by the detritus of
a defunct cult? Trevor Winkfield asks. Trapped as he is in female attire and crowned
by a hedge, he looks the personification of Worry, not Melancholia. In fact the bat-held
banner bearing that title could well be just another red herring, one among the many that
plague this particular rebus (Lears 5). I will return to the the bat-held banner later, but
it is worth noting Winkfields articulation of the comedic aspect of Drers melancholic
The Dog that Therefore Woolf Follows 127
whose wings are indeed so negligible as to render her more like an overweight man in drag
than like Ruskins eagle-winged vehicular spiritbut perhaps thats Drers point about
melancholia as the failure of creative transcendence.
Meanwhile, in A Room of Ones Own, Woolf describes an eagle-winged chimaerical
feminine figure laboring in the margins between history and poetry: a worm winged like
an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet (AROO 66). This
monster represents the combined failure of either discipline to represent real, historically
situated women and also has something in its gene pool of Horaces famous chimaera in the
opening lines of the Ars Poetica. Elsewhere in A Room of Ones Own the evasive narrator, in
the temporary persona of the fictional Mary Beton, discusses the fictional Mary Carmichaels
first novel, Lifes Adventure, in which she reads the scandalous sentences that give evidence
that women, like men, have other interests besides the perennial interests of
domesticity. Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together. . . . I read
on and discovered that these two young women were engaged in mincing liver,
which is, it seems, a cure for pernicious anaemia; although one of them was mar-
ried and hadI think I am right in statingtwo small children. Now all that,
of course, has had to be left out, and thus the splendid portrait of the fictitious
woman is much too simple and much too monotonous. (AROO 125)
Are the laboring Chloe and Olivia, mincing liver in their laboratory rather than chop-
ping suet in the kitchen, a feminist or even Sapphic satire on Drers (or Ruskins Drers)
winged Melancholia and her putto sidekick? The scene begs many questions, not least
regarding the provenance of the liver. Is it from a human or an animal? Are they students
of anatomy? Woolf s narrator speaks of material half-elided at this point in Lifes Adven-
ture. And what precisely of her own first drafts Woolf herself decided had to be left out
from this point in A Room of Ones Own is now available to her readers in the published
manuscript version edited by S.P. Rosenbaum. In the corresponding MS pages following
the Chloe liked Olivia refrain are numerous inscriptions and allusions to Quennells offen-
sive sentence and numerous repetitions of its deeply offensive term, limitations (Woolf,
Women and Fiction: passim; Goldman 2009: 442-451). The subjectivity of Woolf s narra-
tor I have argued is suspended (I is only a convenient term for somebody who has no
real being. [] (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you
please--it is not a matter of any importance)) (AROO 7); and her status on the margins
between animal and human is everywhere inscribed in distinctly canid figurations. But
given the gender politics of the iconographic legacy that Drer has left us for inscribing
the subjectivity of the scholar-artist in studio, perhaps it is not so surprising that Woolf s
attempt to represent the woman scholar-artist in studio borders on the canine.
Alice A. Kuzniar, ignoring the inhuman wings and the gender politics of artistic
subjectivity, nevertheless discusses Drers Melencolia as a human and presses the resem-
blances between this woman and her hound (17, 18). Finding animal muteness para-
doxically to render the human Melencolia mute, Kuzniar goes on to ask: could it be that
among all the imponderables on which she broods is that of the radical alterity of animal
being, despite its embodiment in the mundane hound at her feet or despite its physi-
cal immediacy as it presses up against her body? (Kuzniar 18). Despite mirroring one
another, Melencolia and her hound remain in Kuzniars reading stranded on either side
of the human-animal divide. Reaching this conclusion Kuzniar is herself mute on the
inhuman attribute of Melencolias wings. But the proximity of a dog to an angel may be
Drers very topos; and we might compare Andrea del Verrochios painting Tobias and
the Angel (c. 1470-80) in which the human protagonist, Tobias, is accompanied by the
Archangel Raphael and by his pet dog.1 If the third walking beside the dog and the angel is
human here, then the third sitting beside the dog and the angel in Melencolia I is another
unearthly winged being, the putto. Given the unearthly and divine qualities associated
with wingedness, can it really be that mortality is indeed what the winged Melencolia
shares most with the animal (Kuzniar 19)? In order to reach this view, then, canine crit-
ics must employ their fingers to elide those wings (however ineffectual or residual they
may seem). Kuzniar is obliged to turn to Franz Kafkas fiction to consider what it would
mean to coalesce human and animal into the same being (Kuzniar 20), yet Drers
etching may yield quite different readings of the human-animal divide if we consider the
precise morphology of his figures.
If the winged figure of melancholy and the companion putto are obviously con-
structed figurative emblems, Drers dog and bat, Panofsky reminds us, are of a different
order: not merely emblems but, even more, living creatures (Panofsky 156). But what if
the dog is the only image to be both emblem and living creature? Is that winged crepus-
cular creature sporting the title of its own engraving in any sense a realistic depiction of
a recognizable species of bat? Clearly, with Ferdinand de Saussure and Rene Magritte we
can all recognize Ceci nest pas une roussette, but the focus of critical debate is the mor-
phology of Drers emblems. Whereas the dogs breed has been confirmed by many critics
to be wolf-hound, the bat fails to match the description of any bat found in Nature (or
indeed on the Internet!). Winkfield is right to ask: And do bats really have tails? And why
are those wings so robust? (qtd in Lears 5). The answer to his first question is No they
do notor at least not tails like that one! (The long-tailed bat appears to be misnamed
and the mouse-tailed bat has a long skinny tail . . . like a mouses). The answer to the
second is perhaps, Presumably because they have to hold up the sign saying Melencolia
I! Is the I here, as some scholars suspect, not a numeral but a letter, and the word for
the first-person?
If the bat is not a bat, then what is it? According to Thomsons The City of Dreadful
Night, it is a chimaera. Thomson seems to be the first to notice that the morphology of
Drers bat emblem is not that of a bat but a batlike chimaerical creature, a snaky imp,
dog-headed (Thomson XXI ll. 40, 39). And if this is so, then the keen wolf-hound sleep-
ing undistraught (XXI l.21) is now the solitary example of Panofskys living creature em-
blem. Thomsons poem also seems correct in identifying the imp as cynocephalousdog-
headed. Acknowledging this complicates our reading of the dog itself. Is the dog-headed,
snake-tailed and winged creature somehow representative of the slumbering dog in another
stateits Benjaminian necromantic slumber? Unlike The grave and solid infant perched
beside, / With open winglets that might bear a dove (Thomson XXI ll.23-24), or the house-
wifely figure of melancholia with her impotent and folded eagle wings (XXI ll.27, 26),
the snaky imp, dog-headed ascends effortlessly on its melancholia emblazoned wings.
Yet where are these figures I am attempting to describe? Somewhere in the margins
between Drers image and Thomsons poem. The published poem, furthermore, elides
another verbal rendering of Drers image by Thomson which we might bring into play.
Thomsons biographer, Henry Stephens Salt, records this earlier draft, as it was written in
a letter to William Rossetti (January 30, 1874) enquiring about the status of the dog in
Drers print. Salt reproduces it as an instance of how Thomson could jest grimly on the
humorous side of very serious subjects:
Wishing to bring this great figure into a poem, and rapidly enumerating the ac-
cessories which help to identify it, I find myself bothered by the animal prone
at her feet. Ruskin in one place terms this a wolf, and in another a sleeping
wolf-hound. [] For myself, I have been used to consider it probably a sheep,
and as dead, not sleeping; in fact, a creature awaiting dissection, and suggesting
anatomy as among the pursuits of the labouring and studious Titaness.
Can you, who are an art-adept, resolve the question, and tranquilise my agi-
tated mind?
My animal stanza runs thus:-
Words cannot picture her; []

The instruments of carpentry and science
Scattered about her feet in strange alliance
With the poor creature for dissection brought.
Must I, as Ruskin dictates, change this last into,
With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught(a villainous make

shift)? (Salt 78)
Aborted from the published version, this verbal depiction of the dogor sheepas dead
and awaiting dissection reduces the animal to the reified object of human instrumental
science, and gives a blackly humorous explanation for its flying dog-headed chimaerical
counterpart. In death it is transfigured and ascends from the pit toward heaven. Given
the powerful atheism communicated by Thomsons City of Dreadful Night, a radically
unstable, fragmentary pre-modernist text, in which one of its many dislocated speakers
asserts, There is no God; no Fiend with names divine (Thomson XIV l.40), we might
understand the transfigured and ascendant dog as an instance of adynaton, the classical
rhetorical device employed to suggest impossibility, which often makes use of animal
figures. For example, Matthew 19:24: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of
a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God; or the expression Pigs
might fly! Is Thomsons rendition of Drers engraving therefore suggesting that the dog
has a much better chance than anyone elsein the picture or looking at itof getting to
heaven or reaching creative enlightenment? Dogs might fly?
We know that Woolf was avidly reading Thomsons works in January 1905 when she
was also composing her lecture for the Working women of Morely College London.2 The
experience prefigures her lectures to women students at Cambridge University twenty-three
years later, on Women & Fiction, out of which she drafted A Room of Ones Own. At the
close of her manifesto she pointedly repeats the canine adynaton employed by Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch to describe the impossibility of writing poetry in poverty as evidenced by the

poets of the previous hundred years, including both Ruskin and James Thomson:
Browning was well to do [] and if he had not been well to do, he would no
more have attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book than Ruskin would
have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously
in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted.
There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a
mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappoint-
ment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It ishowever dishonouring
to us as a nationcertain that, by some fault of our commonwealth, the poor
poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years a dogs chance.
(AROO 161-162)
Woolf actually quotes Quiller-Couchs dogs chance adynaton again in the next para-
graph, and then adapts it for feminism by demonstrating the historical record of womens
poverty, concluding Women, then, have not had a dogs chance of writing poetry. That is
why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of ones own (AROO 163).
Drers dog is a realistic enough rendition of Nature to be identified as a Wolfhound;
but is it denatured by Woolf s verbal engagement with Thomsons poetic reinflection of
it (and his speculation on its status as Nature Mort)? This complex of verbal and visual
sources suggests Woolf s chimaeric signifying dog and dog-woman to be self-conscious
artistic constructs, modernist-feminist satiric allegories, not realist attempts to represent
Natures real creatures. But, A Room of Ones Own is also informed by another work known
to Woolf, which documents a living canine woman. The giant cucumber (AROO 92),
Woolf s lampoon of Margaret Cavendish (Duchess of Newcastle), overshadows intriguing
subterranean allusions to Cavendish, including her graphic account, in Sociable Letters
(1664), of a Woman [] like a Shagg-dog [] a Doglike Creature:
To tell you what Pastimes this City hath, they be several Sights and Shews, which are
to be seen for Mony, for even Pastime is Bought; for at several times of the Year come
hither Dancers on the Ropes, Tumblers, Juglers, Private Stage-Players, Mountebanks,
Monsters, and several Beasts, as Dromedaries, Camels, Lions, Acting Baboons, and
Apes, and many the like, which would be as Tedious to me to Relate as to See, for
I would not take the pains to See them, unless some Few; amongst the rest there
was a Woman brought to me, who was like a Shagg-dog, not in Shape, but Hair, as
Grown all over her Body, which Sight stayd in my Memory, not for the Pleasantness,
but Strangeness, as she troubled my Mind a Long time, but at last my Mind kickd
her Figure out, bidding it to be gone, as a Dog-like Creature; and though I am of so
Dull and Lazy a Nature, as seldom to take the Pains to See Unusual Objects, yet here
coming an Italian Mountebank, who had with him several persons to Dance, and
Act upon the open Stage, []. (Letter 195; Cavendish 205-206)
If Woolf s signifying dog counts Drers saturnine Wolfhound in her paternal forebears,
her mother-line includes the Duchesss shaggy dog-woman! Cavendishs letter records her
impressions of a Flemish fairground curiosity, one of a number of unusual objects who

are reified performers and actors (human and animal) whose Sights and Shews may be
bought: a hairy woman the troubling memory of whose strange alterity is transformed
by Cavendish into a figure: as she troubled my Mind a Long time, but at last my Mind
kickd her Figure out, bidding it to be gone, as a Dog-like Creature (206). Notice how
Cavendishs mind transforms the recognizably human and living woman into the Dog-
Like Creature, and in emphasizing these mental workings she forces a Cartesian rupture
between mind and body, self and other, attempting to draw the line, the distinct edge
between Human and Animal, and therefore she:
utters an asinanity [btise]. [She] avows without avowing it, [she] declares just
as a disease is declared by means of a symptom, [she] offers up for diagnosis
the statement I am uttering an asinanity. And this I am uttering an asinanity
should confirm not only the animality that [she] is disavowing but [her] com-
plicit, continued, and organized involvement in a veritable war of the species.
(Derrida 31)
Yet in the context of Cavendishs long syntactically proliferating sentences the crea-
tures pile up, human and animal, in such a pell-mell that the asinanity of the speaking
I is all too apparent. Cavendishs self-conscious account of her figure-making is surely
an open acknowledgement too of her asinanityor caninicity. Ejected from Cavendishs
mind but forever inhabiting her text, her Dog-Like Creature may well be stalking Shake-
speares sister too, along with Drers doubled flying and melancholic dog, and Thomsons
dead dog, through the shifting terrain of A Room of Ones Own, multiplying its figures at
the veryedgelesssite of the common life, which is the real life, and not [] the little
separate lives we live as individuals (AROO 171). Woof! Woof!
Notes
1. I thank Karina Williamson and John Llewelyn for drawing my attention to this story and image. According
to the catalogue of the National Gallery, London, which acquired it in 1867 (NG781, Room 57), Tobias, a
figure from the Old Testament Apocrypha, was the son of Tobit. Tobit was blinded by some sparrows drop-
pings which fell into his eyes. He sent his son on a journey to receive some money which was owed to him.
Accompanying Tobias were his guardian, the archangel Raphael, whom he thought was a mortal, and his
dog. Tobias bathed in the river Tigris, where a giant fish leapt from the water. Raphael told him to catch it
and when they returned home Tobias used the gall of the fish as a cure for his fathers blindness. The dog is
considered the work of the young Leonardo da Vinci who was apprenticed to Verrocchio.
2. It was on the subject of Prose [] which does not commit me to anything. It amuses me rather to write,
as I can say what I like, without fear of criticism, and the subject interests mebut Heaven knows if it will
interest them (PA 223).
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 2003.
Cavendish, Margaret. Sociable Letters. Ed. James Fitzmaurice. New York and London: Garland, 1997.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Doorly, Patrick. Durers Melencolia I: Platos abandoned search for the beautiful. Art Bulletin 86 (2004): 255-276.
Goldman, Jane. Ce chien est moi: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog. Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007): 49-86.
. Desmond MacCarthy, Life and Letters (1928-35), and Bloomsbury Modernism. The Oxford Critical and
Cultural history of Modernist Magazines, Vol. 1: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955. Ed. Peter Brooker and
Andrew Thacker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 428-51.
. When dogs will become men: Melancholia, Canine Allegories and Theriocephalous Figures in Woolf s
Urban Contact Zones. Woolf and the City: Selected Papers of the Nineteenth Conference on Virginia Woolf.
Ed. Elizabeth F. Evans and Sarah E. Cornish. Clemson, South Carolina: Clemson University Digital Press,
2010. 180-88.
Kuzniar, Alice A. Melancholias Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Lears, Jackson, et al. Drers Melencolia I: New Looks. Raritan 25.3 (2006): 129-153.
Panofsky, Erwin. Albrecht Drer, Vol. 1. 3rd Ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948.
Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. Vol. 5. London: Smith, Elder, 1860.
Salt, Henry Stephens. The Life of James Thomson (B.V.). Revised Edition. London: Watts & Co., 1914.
Thomson, James. The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems. London: Reeves and Turner, 1880.
Woolf, Virginia. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. London: Hogarth, 1990.
. A Room of Ones Own, London: Hogarth, 1929.
. Women and Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of Ones Own. Ed. S.P. Rosenbaum. Oxford: Black-
well, 1992.
THE BIRD IS THE WORD: VIRGINIA WOOLF AND W. H. HUDSON,
VISIONARY ORNITHOLOGIST 1
Diane F. Gillespie
M
y title The Bird is the Word dates me. It refers to a song from the 1960s that
morphed into a surf-rock song, taken up more recently by the Family Guy and
Big Bird on Sesame Street. What does it have to do with Virginia Woolf? It
came to mind when I was free-associating about nature and words. Next I recalled Woolf s
famous comment in A Sketch of the Past (1939). It ends, we are the words; we are the
music; we are the thing itself (M0B: 72). If the bird is the word 2 and, more seriously,
we are the words, then, the bird and we are one with each other and also with an authen-
tic mode of expression.
Relevant scholarship examines Woolf s many bird images with their classical and me-
dieval precedents and suggestions of continuity, community, or social commentary (e.g.
Blyth, Ames, Leslie, Walker). As others note too, Woolf supported bird protection acts,
but disliked the dogmatism and sentimentality of some proponents.3 Her graphic essay
The Plumage Bill (1920) is a feminist response to those who blamed womens feathered
hats exclusively for the torture and extinction of whole species of birds (Abbot).4 More
philosophical studies of Woolf and nature focus on language (e.g. Waller, Walker, Sultz-
bach, Westling). Among all these insightful readings, however, are only brief references
to British naturalist and ornithologist W. H. Hudson (18411922) (e.g. Blyth, Abbot,
Walker). I want to use two of his books especially to create cultural contexts for Woolf s
writing. When she reviewed Hudsons memoir Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My
Early Life in 1918, she linked his interest in birds with his flights of words. In her later
fiction, she re-envisioned Hudsons attempt in his bird-filled 1904 novel Green Mansions
to express oneness with nature.
PART I: I WISH I HAD SEEN HIM.V. WOOLF (L2: 549)
In spite of differences in sex and socialization, age and reputation, Hudson and Woolf
were surprisingly kindred spirits. Both had distinctive childhood experiences of non-ur-
ban places that reverberate throughout their writing. Hudsons early life in Argentina
remained as vivid to him as summers in Cornwall were to Virginia Woolf. Both lost their
mothers at a young age and married spouses who helped satisfy a need for nurturing
and support.5 Both were educated and enthusiastic common readers. Without university
degrees or positions, however, both defined themselves as outsidersHudson among aca-
demic scientists in an adopted country and Woolf among academic, mostly male, biogra-
phers and critics.6 Neither was conventionally religious, although both achieved a form of
spirituality through sensory immersion in the living, natural world.
Both Hudson and Woolf were also observant walkers.7 Hudsons path almost crossed
Virginia Stephens in Cornwall in 1905. She had returned for a nostalgic summer vacation.
In November of the same year, Hudson arrived. His study of the Cornish people, plants,
and especially birds resulted, in 1908, in his book, The Lands End. Again in Cornwall ten
years later, Hudson, elderly and in poor health, wrote the memoir Woolf reviewed.
Both also inherited nineteenth-century traditions of human domination that includ-
ed collecting and classifying dead specimens (c.f. Alt, Virginia, 65). A good example is
an 1885 painting by John Everett Millais. I would call it Dead Birds, but its real titles
are The Ruling Passion, and later, The Ornithologist (Tomalin 129) [Figure 1]. As a boy in
Argentina, Hudson hunted
birds for the family table, and
then made a meager living get-
ting exotic bird skins for scien-
tific collectors. Naturalistic in-
terests also ran in the Stephen
family and Virginia, with her
siblings, hunted, chloroformed,
and collected moths and butter-
flies (PA 145).8 Yet both Hud-
son and Woolf, who went on to
observe a wide variety of living
creatures in their natural envi-
ronments, became advocates for
those too often deemed inferior Fig 1: John Everett Millais. The Ruling Passion, or The Ornithologist
and powerless. When Hudson (1885).
met scientific bird collectors in England, like hummingbird Gould shown invalided in
the painting, their pride in their dusty collections of dead feathers disgusted him (Tomalin
10910, 1412). Although he ably described people, Hudson determined to defend the
lives of beleaguered creatures of the natural world, especially birds. Woolf privileged wom-
ens neglected lives and thwarted aspirations (Alt,Virginia 65). Contemporary readers
therefore consider both Hudson and Woolf precur-
sors of current environmental movements, ecological
in the case of Hudson (Tomalin 25), ecofeminist in
the case of Woolf (e.g. Waller 1534, Walker 144).
Neither Virginia nor Leonard Woolf ever met
Hudson. Leonard, who knew people who admired
and described him, pictured Hudson as a gentle,
melancholy, charming, bird-like man (Essays 76).
The Woolfs books included a painting by Bryan
Hook of Hudson feeding gulls (Birds in London) and
a formal photograph of him used as a frontispiece in
Far Away and Long Ago [Figure 2]. Although Virginia
was to have been introduced to the man in person by
Dorothy Brett who adored Hudson, this encounter
never occurred. In 1922, the year he died, Virginia
Fig. 2: W. H. Hudson. Opie Ltd. Redruth. voiced her regrets: I wish I had seen him, she wrote
Frontispiece for Far Away and Long Ago (L2: 549).
(1918).
The Bird is the Word 135
Clearly, however, the Woolfs read Hudson. Eight of his volumes remain today among
their books: the 1918 memoir Virginia reviewed; 153 Letters from W. H. Hudson (1923) ed-
ited by Edward Garnett and reviewed by Leonard; Hudsons book on the Woolfs beloved
south downs, Nature in Downland (1900);9 a 1923 edition of his essays, Idle Days in Patagonia
(1893); 1924 editions of both Birds in London (1898) and Adventures Among Birds (1913); plus
1926 and 1927 editions of Hudsons best-known novel, Green Mansions (1904).
PART II: THAT MYSTERIOUS SPIRIT [] IN ALL NATURE, BUT IN BIRDS

PARTICULARLYV. WOOLF (E2: 301)
Virginia Woolf wrote about Hudsons memoir Far Away and Long Ago when she
didnt feel like taking on projects at command of a telegram from the Times Literary
Supplement (D1: 197). For a wonder, she recorded in her diary, the book, Hudson, was
worth reading (D1: 197).10 In her review, Woolf reveals her fascination with his creative
process. Hudson describes the marvelous experience, of feeling simultaneously ill with
a howling Cornwall storm outside, and thousands of miles away in Argentina, happy
again with that ancient long-lost and now recovered happiness! (Far 4). His vivid experi-
ence made Woolf recall her own sense that between or behind the dense and involved
confusion of grown-up life, were chinks of pure daylight. Her own lantern-like il-
lumination may last only seconds, but Hudson, she says, writes as if he held his lantern
steadily upon this simple, unmistakable truth (E2: 298). Although Hudsons memoir has
both literary and artistic merit, Woolf decides that it should be read as the whole and
complete person whom we meet rarely enough in life or in literature (E2: 298).11
In her review Woolf wants to keep quoting from Hudsons engaging descriptions of
living people (E2: 299300).12 She notes, however, that his own temptation was to write
about birds and little else (E2: 301). He resists but, she adds, like all writers of strong
individuality, a colour gets into his pages apart from the actual words, and even when
they are not mentioned we seem to see the bird flying, settling, feeding, soaring through
every page of the book (E2: 301). Hudson doesnt just record facts for specialists, Woolf
says; he perceives a relationship between birds and the mysterious spirit he finds in all
nature, but in birds particularly (E2: 301).13
In his memoir, Hudson describes his envy of a bird he calls the great creasted scream-
er. It rises high in the sky, then floats in vast circles for hours, pouring out those jubilant
cries . . . which sounded to us . . . like clarion notes (Far 191). Hudson admits his own
longing to fly, yet not by being deprived of his will or soul by a balloon or airship. He
is content with a rare kind of dream called levitation, when one rises and floats above
the earth without effort (Far 191). Woolf doesnt mention this dream in her review but,
much later in The Moment: Summers Night (c. 1938), she too imagines that we . .
. take wing, with the owl, over the earth and survey the quietude of what sleeps. The
experience is creative and unifying, unclassifiable and humbling: Could we not fly too,
she asks, with broad wings and with softness; and be all one wing; all embracing . . . , and
these . . . pryings over hedge into hidden compartments of different colours be all swept
into one colour by the brush of the wing; and so visit . . . peaks; and there lie exposed .
. . to the cold light of the moon rising, . . . eminent over us? (CE 2: 2945).14 For Vir-
ginia Woolf, Hudsons memoir reveals a consciousness not only subject to what she calls,
elsewhere in the same year (1918), moments of vision,15 but also an enviable ability to
sustain and capture them in colorful and rhythmic flights of words.16
Woolf s recreations of childhood experiences in Cornwall are less spiritually bird-
filled than Hudsons of Argentina. Yet, in To the Lighthouse (1927), she weaves an early
memory of rooks cawing as part of the waves breaking in Cornwall (MOB 66) into her
re-imagining of her mother. Perhaps Hudsons fifth chapter, Expulsion of the Rooks, in
the Woolfs 1924 edition of Birds in London may have been an additional impetus. Mrs.
Ramsay humanizes an old pair of rooks she calls Joseph and Mary. She is amused by
them, but also admires their beauty in flight as they cut the air into exquisite scimitar
shapes in ways that defy description (TTL 80). Protective of this intense life, Mrs. Ram-
say chides her son Jasper, who thinks birds do not feel, for wanting to kill them, for she
did not understand the fun of shooting birds (TTL 81).
Hudsons book on Cornwall, The Lands End (1908) (see n. ix below), includes a
lengthy and graphic denunciation of this wide-spread fun of shooting sea and land
birds as well as maiming them with snares and stones. The biblical names of Mrs. Ram-
says rooks, although mock-heroic, allude to a long religious history of spiritually potent,
winged creatures, one Hudson invokes to denounce the hypocrisy of followers of Method-
ist preacher John Wesley. Cornish clergy who, like Wesley, should love all creatures, still
wont denounce the killing and torture of birds for fear of alienating parishioners who give
dolls to little girls but bird traps (or gins) to little boys (Lands 1967).
Mrs. Ramsays Joseph and Mary also reflect her own complex relationship with Mr.
Ramsay, their gendered roles as well as their mutual dependencies and irritations. In Birds
in London, Hudson describes the rooks complex domesticity in a way that makes their
appearance appropriate in Woolf s mature and often amused portrait of family tensions.
The rook, Hudson says, in a domestic state has a capacity for strong attachments, but
also for versatility and playfulness, and that tricky spirit . . . which so curiously resembles,
or simulates, the sense of humour in ourselves (53).17
PART III: A TENDER SPIRITUAL MUSICA LANGUAGE WITHOUT WORDS

W. H. HUDSON (GREEN MANSIONS)
Virginia Woolf never wrote about a Hudson novel, but her comments suggest fa-
miliarity and appreciation.18 In 1919, the year following her review, she recorded in her
diary one criterion for a good writer: Hardy, Conrad, and Hudson all have interesting
mind[s] (D1: 238). Publicly, in Modern Novels (1919), Woolf expresses her uncon-
ditional gratitude for Hardy, Conrad, and, to a lesser degree for the Mr Hudson of
The Purple Land, Green Mansions, and Far Away and Long Ago (E3: 31).19 Although she
thought parts of his books very bad, she continued to think others very good (L2:
549). Passages of his memoir, for instance, she said in 1923, will undoubtedly go to
posterity entire (E3: 356). 20
When Leonard Woolf reviewed Hudsons letters in 1923, Virginia learned about an
earlier scratch from him (D2: 282).22 Hudson had found the ending of The Voyage Out
(1915) brutal, and criticized Woolf s settingsomewhere in S[outh]. America. For all
the relationship her characters had to their environment, he wrote, the scene might just
as well have been in some hotel on the south coast of England (153 Letters 1301; rpt.
Majumdar 612). Hudsons scratch drew little blood. Woolf continued to group him
with great Edwardian figures like Conrad and James (E4: 341). We might even read fic-
tional experiments like Time Passes in To the Lighthouse and the interludes in The Waves
(1931) partly as responses to Hudsons challenge to embed characters more effectively in
their natural environments.
Several scholars discuss what they call Woolf s conversation[s] (Walker 1445;
Sultzbach 71, 75), or her dialogue[s] with nature (Waller 137). Hudsons 1904 novel,
Green Mansions, mentioned by Woolf in 1919, was an earlier attempt at such intimacy.
Using a first-person narrator who is frustrated by his inadequate language skills, Hudson
anticipates, but cannot fulfill, Woolfs need to transform conventional uses of language
and forms of narration.23 Illustrators of Hudsons novel have been equally bound by tra-
ditional visual languages and forms. Since the first illustrated English edition (1926) re-
mains in the Woolf s library, I want to juxtapose one of Keith Hendersons dramatic,
black-and-white interpretations of specific passages with a less representational, more sug-
gestive frontispiece done in color in 1944 by E. McKnight Kauffer. The Woolfs knew and
worked with Kauffer but, although his Green Mansions illustrations suggest some of her
own experiments with verbal renditions of nature, Virginia would not have seen them.24
The differences between these visual languages help to underscore some of the verbal diffi-
culties Hudson himself faced in describing his bird-girl Rima and her intimacy with nature.
Hudsons narrator, Abel, is a political refugee in the jungles of Guayana. He settles
among natives who do not hunt in a certain area for fear of a being they call the daughter
of the Didi (Green 1927
53). To Abel, however, this
part of the forest is a wild
paradise (Green 1927 32).
There he contemplates na-
tures organic architecture
(its green mansions) and
loses himself in a harmony
of sights and sounds. Abel
begins to hear a low strain
of exquisite bird-melody,
wonderfully pure and ex-
pressive, unlike any musi-
cal sound I had ever heard
before (Green 1927 37).
He repeatedly tries to de- Fig. 3: Keith Henderson. Scarcely Daring to Breathe. Illustration for W.
scribe this voices ranges H. Hudsons Green Mansions (1926). Courtesy of Manuscripts,
and moods, and concludes Archives and Special Collections, Washington State University.
that it is the natural language of an intelligent unhuman being (Green 1927 45; my em-
phasis). The source, however, is humana small, bird-like, girl form he comes to know
as Rima (Green 1927 65). Hendersons dramatic, black-and-white illustration, Scarcely
Daring to Breathe, dwarfs Abel and unites Rima (lower right-hand corner) with the
thick, surrounding foliage and the small bird flying to her hand [Figure 3 Green 1926
712]. According to the text, Rima eats wild berries and gums and wears garments wo-
ven of spider webs (Green 1927 105), clothing Henderson does not try to suggest. She also
flits with birds among tree-tops, as in I Caught Sight of Her as She Ran Along, where
Henderson depicts her white legs, barely visible to Abel atop a high branch (Green 1926
12122).25 Under Rimas protection as well are representatives of the darker side of nature,
like the snake she, with a torrent of . . . sounds in that unknown tongue, prevents Abel
from stoning (Green 1927 77).26
Abel has less trouble describing Rimas bird-like language than he has with her ethe-
real appearance. Limited by words we all use to paint commoner, coarser things, he can-
not capture all the exquisite details, all the
delicate lights, and shades, and swift changes
of colour and expression that comprise Rima
(Green 1927 79). McKnight Kauffers more
impressionistic visual language suggests some
of the mercurial, luminous quality of her per-
son along with her oneness with all natural
creatures [Figure 4]. When Abel begs his lis-
tener to subordinate the picture as I have to
paint it in words to the feeling its original
inspired in me (Green 1927 80), Hudson
thus privilegesover external appearances
and factsAbels trembling with delight
(Green 1927 80). Yet the narrative form con-
tinues to limit him to only what Abel can
summarize for his auditor.
Also, although Rima is increasingly
Abels intermediary with nature, we have no
access to her perceptions. Through Abel, we
know she wants him to have a more authen-
tic, even spiritual level of conversation both
with her and with the natural world. She
Fig. 4: McKnight Kauffer. Frontispiece for tries to teach him her bird-like language, but,
W. H. Hudsons Green Mansions (1944). although admiring, he cannot learn it. Her
Permission of the Estate of E. McKnight Kauffer. sweet, wasted symbols . . . would always be
inarticulate sounds, he says, affecting me like a tender spiritual musica language with-
out words, suggesting more than words to the soul (Green 1927 11213).
The unsentimental naturalist in Hudson does balance Rimas spiritual union with
nature against the more down-to-earth qualities of her everyday life with her disreputable
old guardian, but Abel is even more thoroughly earth-bound (Frederick 53, Garnett viii).
When hostile natives, avid to kill the birds and animals Rima protects, burn her alive in
a tree, Abel first is overcome by grief.27 Then, sinking into moral insanity (Garnett viii),
he incites a rival tribe to wreak bloody vengeance on Rimas killers. Fleeing, like a guilt-
ridden Cain, Abel carries her spirit and her ashes with him on a despairing and arduous
journey back to civilization. As part of his effort to salvage and live a life of nature and of
the spirit (Green 1927 4), Abel relates the story that is this novel.
Although in Green Mansions Hudson reflects patriarchal identifications of women with

nature and birds, he also validates what his society subordinates. He creates a parable of the
mutually destructive failure of human beings to live in harmony with the natural world,
and of the need to transcend everyday language conventions to describe or commune with
it. Green Mansions thus anticipates and provides a cultural background for Woolf s eco-
feminism and for what L. Elizabeth Waller calls her ecology of language (138). More
successfully than Hudson, Woolf pushes herself against the boundaries of language and un-
derstanding and against traditional oppositions and hierarchies like human and natural. As
she playfully suggests in Craftsmanship, useful words should give way to suggestive ones,
freely living, combining, propagating, and changing in our minds (DM 2046).
Conversations with nature in fiction are more likely to occur when a living language
endows a living natural environment with seemingly independent expressionlike what
Abel first calls the natural language of an intelligent unhuman being (Green 1927 45).
The long, italicized, poetic passages that comprise the nine interludes of The Waves, for
instance, do include a variety of bird images. More generally, and like the best of Hudsons
writing, Woolf s descriptive passages, whether she recreates what is repulsive or what is
beautiful in nature, resound with rhythmic bird wordsflying, settling, feeding, soar-
ing (E2: 301), colorful, and harmonious. Woolf s characters need no bird-like Rima to
mediate with all that is ruthless or exalting in nature. Nor do we, as readers, feel domi-
nated by a single, identifiable, human perspective like Abels. As readers we participate in
the life cycles of Woolf s six characters as they unfold, one with inspiring and relentless
natural cycles. We are the birds; we are the words; we are the thing itself.
Notes
1. I wish to thank Simon Rendall and the Estate of E. McKnight Kauffer for permission to reproduce the
frontispiece of the 1944 edition of Hudsons Green Mansions as well as Manuscripts, Archives and Special
Collections at Washington State University (hereafter MASC/WSU) for the Henderson image. I have
made a sincere effort to locate copyright holders and apologize for any information I may have missed.
2. I limit bird here to the winged and feathered creature, and ignore traditional applications to maidens or
girls as well as contemporary American slang usages, like bird as a rude sound of disapproval.
3. Woolf had some sympathy for Eleanor Ormerods definition of sparrows as garden pests (Alt, Pests;
Scott).
4. A quotation from Hudson appears in Woolf s essay, but she objects, not to his words, but to the use Way-
farer [H. W. Massingham] makes of them. See Abbot and, for background on Murderous Millinery, see
Haynes.
5. Hudson married, in part, for something of the security of the mother and child relationship (Tomalin
115), and Virginias need for care also partially defined her marriage to Leonard (Lee 314).
6. Although, in addition to her self-education, Woolf took formal courses at the Kings College Ladies De-
partment, London, she and her sister were not matriculated students, regularly following a course of study
leading to a . . . University degree (Jones and Snaith 6). Hudson was educated by tutors and his own
reading (Tomalin 568).
7. When Hudson relocated from Argentina in 1874 at age 33, he traveled and walked all over England,
always recording and often publishing his observations (Tomalin 103). Woolf, as her diaries indicate,
walked, in London and the country, both for her health and for pleasure.
8. Leslie Stephen owned field guides that Virginia inherited; he observed, classified, and also drew flora and
fauna, including birds, in the margins of other books, some still in the Woolfs library (MASC/WSU).
Among his children, Thoby especially developed a passion for bird-identification and, like his father, drew
them in his books (Lee 115).
9. Leonard, in his 1923 review of the edition of Hudsons letters to Edward Garnett, says he recently had
re-read The Lands End (no longer in the Woolf s library in MASC/WSU). Leonard contrasts the charm
of this and other early books to the bitterness of the later letters (Essays 79).
10. Woolf must have been moved, for example, by Hudsons memories of pet dogs, fragile health, and a beloved
mother lost too early in life. A child is as dependent on its mother, he writes, as any fledgling in the nest on
its parent (Far 39). Woolf notes in her review how Hudsons mother worried about him until she realized
that he was not staring at vacancy, but observing an insect perhaps, but oftener a bird (E2: 301).
11. McNeillie suggests that we compare A Sketch of the Past (E2: 302 n. 3). As Woolf said about Hudson,
she can write about her own first impressions (MOB 66) only by recreating the person to whom things
happened (MOB 65). Also like Hudson she says, At times I can go back to St Ives . . . and can reach a
state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there (MOB 67).
12. In A Sketch of the Past we also get glimpses of characters Woolf remembers from childhood, seen
exactly as she saw them then (MOB 735).
13. Hudson called his view animism by which he means, in part, the sense and apprehension of an intelligence
like our own but more powerful in all visible things (Far 2245).
14. Woolf also never went up in an airplane, but was more curious about mechanical flight than Hudson. See
Flying Over London (CE 4: 16777). In her fiction, not just birds, but also airplanes take on a variety
of meanings (Beer).
15. Moments of Vision is the title of Woolf s review of Logan Pearsall Smiths Trivia (1918): He enclose[s]
certain moments which break off from the mass, in which without bidding things come together in a
combination of inexplicable significance and are, to the thinker at least, . . . almost menacing with
meaning (E2: 25051).
16. Both Hudson and the Woolfs enjoyed memoirs. Hudson identified with Serge Aksakoffs history of his
childhood (Far 226) and with early chapters of Leigh Hunts memoir (Far 315). Both Aksakovs A Russian
Schoolboy (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1924) and Hunts Autobiography (London: Milford; Oxford
UniversityPress, 1928) are still among the Woolfs books ( MASC/WSU), the former signed by Leonard.
17. The young Hudson was strongly influenced by Gilbert White. Virginia Woolf pasted her AVS bookplate in
a 1901 edition of his The Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (MASC/WSU) which she reviewed in
1939 (CE3: 12216). White also stresses the domesticity of rooks (322).
18. Beginning in 1885, Hudson wrote five pieces of longer fiction (The Purple Land, A Crystal Age, Fan, Green
Mansions, Ralph Herne) and a number of short stories in a collection called El Ombu, and, published
together, Dead Mans Plack and An Old Thorn.
19. See also Modern Fiction (E4: 158). In The Modern Essay (1922, 1925), Woolf groups Hudson with
those who have strayed into essay writing accidentally (E4: 222) and who have some fierce attachment
to an idea (E4: 224). Leonard follows her in grouping Hudson with Conrad as artists in words who had
gone to or come from the wild and exotic parts of the world and found in them and in Nature the only
congenial subjects (Essays 73).
20. Hudson himself was not given to praising his own work, some of which he wrote because he badly
needed money (Miller 878).
21. When in 1927 Woolf recommends Hudson, along with Richard Jeffries, to Julian Bell as one model for an
aspiring writer, she says he is very careful to select only observations that contribute to the whole (L3: 432).
22. Garnett says his own effusive praise of The Voyage Out had prodded Hudson into rapier thrusts at my ribs
(Introduction 8; c.f. Majumdar 61).
23. In such writing, narrative may lose traditional oppositions, centralities, and hierarchies; backgrounds may
become foregrounds and plots may become organic progression[s] (Waller 1401, 1534).
24. Henderson (18831982), a Scottish artist/designer, trained at the Slade. His work included designs for
books, posters, and the RAF. For the conference presentation, I used four of his images and three by
McKnight Kauffer (18901954), an American artist/designer who settled in London in 1914, became a
friend of Roger Frys, and designed the 1928 wolf s-head logo a well as several distinctive dust jackets for
the Hogarth Press. He is often remembered for his London Underground and Transport posters (Willis
376, 383).
25. Even more literal, later attempts include a 1959 Mel Ferrer film. Critics panned its star, Audrey Hepburn,
as too old (29 at the time) and too tall to play Rima.
26. Abel is crazed but not killed by the snakes bite. D. H. Lawrences poem Snake was influenced by Hudson
(Tomalin 189) who describes his own changing attitude towards snakes (Far 20523).
27. Ironically, Rimas death is as brutal as Hudson thought Rachel Vinraces. There is no evidence that Woolf read
Green Mansions (1904) before publishing The Voyage Out (1915). Still, just as Abel cannot learn Rimas bird-like
language and thus cannot communicate with her on the level at which she speaks (Miller 154), so Terrence
Hewett cannot enter into the musical language of Rachels expressive piano playing. Both men lose young
women who seem too immersed in an aesthetic level of being to survive the realities of an adult, patriarchal world.
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Majumdar, Robin and Allen McLaurin, eds W. H. Hudson, a sharp criticism. Virginia Woolf: The Critical
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EVOLUTION, HISTORY, AND FLUSH; OR, THE ORIGIN OF SPANIELS
by Jeanne Dubino
F
lush is the story of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings spaniel, recounting his fourteen-year
life from his ancestry to his death. Flush is a dog memoir, about a dogs life, with
a dogs point of view and, in some editions, with dog photos (Smith 352; see also
Humm). So often is Flush read as a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browningmore specifi-
cally, of the years leading up to her life with Robert Browning, their escape to Italy, and the
first part of their lives together therethat it is easy to forget, as the narrator proclaims in the
first sentence, that Flush is the subject of this memoir (3).1 And, today, Flushor more
specifically, the origins of his family, the spanielwill be the subject of my paper.
Quentin Bell wrote that Flush was not so much a book by a dog lover as a book by
someone who would love to be a dog (175). I am not going to look at the way Woolf
imagines herself as a dog as such. Critics would agree that Flush is an anthropomorphized
character, but the extent to which the novel/biography is about canine consciousness
(Ittner) itselfor the dogginess of the dog (Goldman, Ce Chien 100)is under de-
bate by critics such as Jutta Ittner and Dan Wylie. Rather than explore the extent to which
Woolf enters into Giorgio Agambens Open, or the cerebral space inhabited by nonhu-
man animals and accessible to humans,2 I want to explore the way she constructs, broadly,
canine context. As Anna Snaith notes, Woolf s interest in writing Flush had all to do with
context (615). Other critics have examined an array of these contexts and significations;
to cite just a few, Susan Squier looks at the woman writers journey from imprisonment to
freedom; Pamela Caughie, the interplay of highbrow art and mass culture; Snaith herself,
eugenics, race, and fascism; David Eberly, the emotionally fraught world of Woolf s own
human, domestic relationships; Jacqui Griffiths, childhood and the oedipal triangle; and
Wendy Faris, animals as vehicles for Bloomsburys expressions of the suppressed emotion-
al life. All of these valuable studies consider human contexts, whether Elizabeth Barrett
Brownings or Woolf s own. My presentation, focusing on the very beginning of Flush,
will concentrate on canine context. More specifically, it will examine Woolf s use of Dar-
winian discourse in constructing a history of the origin of the spaniel.
Flush is a history of a dogs lifebut in Woolf s writing nothing is simply one thing
(TTL 277). It is important to consider, briefly, Woolf s historiography. All her life, Woolf
was interested in the lives of the silenced, the subordinated, the excluded, the underdog.3
Even Flush, she wrote, deserved a biography (L5: 167). For Woolf, history was not sin-
gle-stranded; it was ever thick description (Geertz), dense, hybrid, and interrelational.
Woolf s inclusion of the social, economic, literary, and more, make her histories dynamic
and rich. Because canine history is so closely intertwined with human historythe evolu-
tion of their companionship can be traced back to more than 50,000 years ago (Thurston
1)Woolf s canine biography is inclusive of the human milieu as well. Intertwined in
what Melba Cuddy-Keane calls Woolf s multiple versionings of history (60) are mul-
tiple articulations (Cuddy-Keane 62)literally, multiple voices telling multiple stories.
In Flush, we have a dogs perspective often informed and controlled by his emotions
and senses,4 above all, smell; Alison Booth calls this focalization narrative olfaction
(Scent 3). The voice of Flushs object of affection, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, emerges,
from time to time, through her quoted letters. Behind Flushs view is that of an anony-
mous, omniscient third-person narrator whose consciousness freely moves in and out of
the spaniels, at times empathically merging, at other times creating a distance (Ittner).
Woolf s multiple reasons for writing Flushas a way to make money, as a parody of
Lytton Stracheys Eminent Victorians, as a way of critiquing nineteenth-century political
and social culture (Snaith 613-14), as a distraction from writing The Waves, as a continua-
tion, as David Eberly suggests, of Orlando, as a means, as Gillian Beer proposes, to expose
the fictionality of our imagined Victorian England (103), as a way to exercise her pow-
ers of representation[,] reality[,] accuracy (D4: 40), and as, perhaps, an offering to her
own spaniel Pinka, on whom Flush is modeledall further the multi-tonal resonance of
her project. Interwoven in its dense texture of serious and humorous layers are the vari-
ous threads that constitute a canine history, the origin of the spaniel, and I will now turn
to those. Starting with Darwinism and the story of creation, I next move to the stories
of another evolution, the possible etymologies of the word spaniel. Tied in with these
etymologies are the histories of empires and dynasties. After I trace these histories I end
with a discussion of the spaniels roots in Great Britain. By the nineteenth century, Woolf
suggests through her narrative of the life of Flush, evolution, at least in terms of British
class structure, seems to have stopped altogether.
DARWINISM AND THE STORY OF CREATION
Historical accounts have traditionally served to provide legitimacy and to secure

the pedigrees of existing rules (Lowenthal 235), and so the narrator of Flush, not to be
outdone, pushes beyond the greatest antiquity to the very beginning of time, to the
ferment of creation, in her quest to secure the origins of the spaniel: It is universally
admitted that the family from which the subject of this memoir claims descent is one
of the greatest antiquity (3). To read Flushs parodic first line, though, in the context
of more contemporary books on breeds, such as Joyce C. Judahs An Ancient History
of Dogs: Spaniels through the Ages: The Historical Roots of All Dogs, is to see how Woolf
knew her breed books; Judah, writing three quarters of a century later, also starts at a
point in the very distant past, 55 million years ago (3). While Darwinian language and
concepts appear through Woolf s novel/biography, they are most prominent in its first
twelve pages. Woolf playfully speeds5 over Darwins concept of slow time, of his slow
and gradual modification (Darwin 317), to describe the evolution of the worldAges
passed; vegetation appearedto the first appearance of animals, or here, rabbits. A
key component of evolution is the idea that all life is a result of a random process, a
concept that the narrator, in the spirit of Voltaire, dismisses: where there is vegeta-
tion the law of Nature has decreed that there shall be rabbits; where there are rabbits,
Providence has ordained there shall be dogs. There is nothing in this that calls for ques-
tion, or comment (3). This metaphysico-theologico-cosmoloonigolog[ical] (Voltaire
520) passage, of course, echoes Candides parody of Gottfried Leibnizs argument from
design, or the notion that everything exists for a specific reason; compare Panglosss
instruction to his pupil Candide: It is clear . . . that things cannot be otherwise than
Evolution, History, and FLUSH 145
they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the
best end. Observe: noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles . . .
(Voltaire 521). On the other hand, the balance among the varying elements in Woolf s
passagevegetation, prey (rabbits), and predator (dogs)is a law of Nature, and so the
spirit of evolution, it would seem, trumps the implied creationism (that things cannot
be otherwise than they are). From the emergence of vegetation, rabbits, and dogs from
this ferment of creation we move quickly to further individuation into multiple family
trees: the royal Plantagenets, Tudors, and Stuarts; the middle-class Howards, Caven-
dishes, and Russells; and the working-class Smiths, Joneses, and Tomkins (5). Alongside
this human individuation into classes and families, minor branches of the Spaniel
family break off from their parent stem, and at least seven famous . . . familiesthe
Clumber, the Sussex, the Norfolk, the Black Field, the Cocker, the Irish Water and the
English Watercome into existence (5). The profusion of families, both human and
spaniel,6 recalls Darwins famous Tree of Life diagram (Darwin 160-61), and fore-
shadows the domestic, and class-defined, world that will emerge in the following pages.
ETYMOLOGIES
In its parody of a breed book, itself a genre of The Origin of Species, the narrator
posits the origin of the name spaniel. Following her snapshot history of the creation of
the world, she offers a hopping etymology, bouncing from one theory to the next. Does
the word spaniel come from span, the Carthaginian word for rabbit? Upon arriving in
Spain, Carthaginian soldiers shouted with one accord Span! Span!for rabbits darted
from every scrub, from every bush. The land was alive with rabbits. . . . and the dogs,
which were almost instantly perceived in full pursuit of the rabbits, were called Spaniels
or rabbit dogs (3-4). But no, our narrator notes, there is another school of thought:
Hispania derives from the Basque word espaa, signifying an edge or boundary. If that
is so, we can imagine her sighing, rabbits, bushes, dogs, soldiersthe whole of that
romantic and pleasant picture, must be dismissed from the mind; and we must simply
suppose that the Spaniel is called a spaniel because Spain is called Espaa (4). Indeed, it
would be easy, like the narrator, to dismiss these theories out of hand, except that Woolf
did do her homework; as she told David Garnett, in response to his favorable review,
Im not so inaccurate as you think. No. I am rather proud of my facts (L5: 231).
Fanciful as these speculations appear to be, they are two of several legitimate hypotheses
still extant. The ancient Greek geographer Strabo reports that the Carthaginians, or
Punic/Phoenicians, found Spain abounding with rabbits (Strabo 125-29),7 and, accord-
ing to one etymology with which Woolf may have been familiar, their word for rabbit
was tsepan.8 Espaia is the Basque word for edge, and among its other meanings are
extremity and shoulder; Espaia may mean the Land of the Shoulder because it
formed the western boundary of ancient Europe.9 Bypassing the most recent derivation
of the word spaniel, the Old French word espaigneul, which meant Spanish (Spaniel),
Woolf prefers to make her history come alive by alighting on the more remote, and the
more suppositious, conjectures.
IMPERIAL AND DYNASTIC HISTORIES
As far as the spaniels pre-historic and etymological origins, Woolf takes us, as far
as scholarship allowed, to point zero, but she bypasses one of the other possible origins,
namely, the Far East (Lytton 14). Judith Neville Lyttons compendium on spaniels, the
359-page Toy Dogs and Their Ancestors, published in 1911 by Duckworth, Woolf s half-
brother, had been in print for two decades by the time Woolf wrote Flush. Surely she
would have known about it, or, at the very least, would have been familiar with this
putative ancestry of the spaniel. Instead, her account tells us that the spaniel sprung from
the same soil as its vegetation and rabbits. Woolf s reason may be, as Jane Goldman has
suggested, that she is acknowledging Vitas Spanish ancestry (Cambridge 76). Or, Woolf s
account of this etymology, based on the Carthaginian presence in Spain (Hammond 577),
may be an occasion for her to include the allusion to the Carthaginian Empire, one of the
longest-lived and largest states in the ancient Mediterranean. At its peak, under the rule
of Dido,10 Carthage came to be called the shining city, ruling 300 other cities around
the western Mediterranean and leading the Phoenician (or Punic) world, including Spain.
Founded in 814 BCE, Carthage lasted till 146 BCE, when it was utterly and memorably
destroyed by the Romans in the Third Punic War (Langer et al. 103-04, 116-17). Flush
also includes references to three fallen dynasties, the Royal Houses of Bourbon, Haps-
burg and Hohenzollern, . . . now in exile, deposed from authority, judged unworthy of
respect (8). The House of Bourbon, overruling, primarily, France and Spain from the
mid sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, lasted nearly 250 years; Hapsburg, most
famously the Austrian and Spanish Empires, from the mid thirteenth to the early twenti-
eth centuries, or nearly 700 years; and Hohenzollern, over Prussia, Germany, and Roma-
nia, from the eleventh to the early nineteenth centuries, or nearly 800 years (Langer et al.
395, 459, 490, 465; Hearnshaw 7-8). Along with this vanished empire and these nearly
extinct Royal Houses, Woolf refers to two regional areas whose political highpoints are a
part of the past and who are now under the power of their neighboring nations. The no-
tion that Spain may be based on a Basque word is a point of pride among Basque nationals
(Spain); the Basque area, crossing the French and Spanish borders, marked its period of
greatest autonomy at the end of the eighteenth century (Payne, Chapter Three). Woolf
also cites the great Welsh king Howel Dda (or Hywel Dda), who codified Welsh law in
930 in his famous Book of Laws (Davies 87-89, 94); the rule of Welsh princes ended in
1282 with the Edwardian conquest (Davies 161).
To the rise and fall of empires, dynasties, and political entities, Woolf connects the
evolution of the spaniel, whose own family prevails through the centuries. In comparison
to the royalty of the Houses of Bourbon, Hapsburg and Hohenzollen, the breed of the
Spaniel triumphs. Moreover, when the Plantagenets and the Tudors and the Stuarts were
following other peoples ploughs through other peoples mud, the spaniel was taking his
ease in palaces (5). Howel Ddas Book of Laws stands out, now, because it is the first de-
tailed classification of dogs in the worldand, in Flush, because of Howel Ddas assertion
that [t]he Spaniel of the King is a pound in value, thus making it plain that the spaniel
was already a dog of value and reputation (5).11 Woolf is certainly parodying classism and
its reverence for nobility with/and all its trappings, its coronets and quarterings [noble
descent going back to five generations] (8).
Woolf s emphasis on the demise of these powers, however, serves also to illustrate
several Darwinian concepts, including the survival of the fittest, with fit being defined
as, primarily, the remarkable ability to adapt. In my paper last year I described in some
detail how successfully Flush adapts to each of his environments (Dubino). Even before
we see how Flushs story unfolds we are reminded, in these early pages, that the story of
the dogand in Flush, of the spanielis a story of brilliant evolutionary success almost
without parallel in the animal world (Budiansky 5). While empires such as the Carthag-
inian are ultimately doomed to extinction, whose only remains are putative linguistic fos-
sils embedded in language (or in shards uncovered by archeologists), its living beingsin
Flush, its people and its dogssurvive, and often, as Woolf shows us, through migration,
another key component of The Origin of Species. The spaniel, after all, may have been
brought to Wales by the Spanish clan of Ebhor or Ivor (4-5) long before before Howel
Dda wrote his Book of Laws. Once again, Woolf is not being fanciful here; small groups
of westward-migrating Celts did move to the British Isles in the last centuries of prehis-
tory (Davies 22-23), and they brought their language and their cultureincluding their
animals, and possibly the spanielwith them.
THE SPANIEL IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Whatever its origins, by the age of Elizabeth the spaniel became the quintessentially
English dog. In Flush, without any fanfare or debate, and slid into the middle of a para-
graph (5), the spaniels Spanish identity has been erased and it has become anglicized,
its family history integrated into the course of English history (5) with its tripartite divi-
sions of royalty, gentry, and yeomen. By the sixteenth century the narrator, quoting Sir
Philip Sidneys Arcadia, refers to the aristocracy of dogs with greyhounds, Spaniels and
Hounds corresponding to the Lords . . . Gentlemen, and . . . Yeomen of dogs (6).
By the seventeenth century the spanielat least one of its familieswould have been
moved from gentry to royalty simply by being given the name of the King Charles Spaniel
(Wyett). If dogs could assume a new class identity simply by being given the name of
the highest ranking Briton (Wyett), the reverse, as we see in the reference to the Arcadia,
was even truer, especially for the middle class, who could rise up the social hierarchy by
keeping company with dogs associated with the gentry and nobility. As cultural canine
theorists such as Mary Elizabeth Thurston, Harriet Ritvo, and James Serpell have noted,
dogs serve, especially in England, long renowned as a nation of dog-lovers, as a symbol of
a nations values, attitudes, and character. While, in an endnote, Flushs narrator calls into
question the dogs relation to the spirit of the age, whether it is possible to call one dog
Elizabethan, another Augustan, another Victorian (176), the novel itself shows a close
correlation between the life and times of the dog. As it defines English national character,
the spirit of the ages in Flush does not change from one century to the next. The two eras
featured most prominently in Flush, the Elizabethan and the Victorian, are both marked
by classism. Sidneys canine divisions persist into Flushs world; his only recourse to a
class-defined society is flight to an idealized country like nineteenth-century Italy where
it appears that there [are] no ranks at all, where it seems as if all dogs are mongrels, . . .
dogs merelygrey dogs, yellow dogs, brindled dogs, spotted dogs . . . [and not] a single
spaniel, collie, retriever or mastiff among them (112).
NINETEENTH-CENTURY LONDON: NO EVOLUTION
When Flush returns to London for a short visit he encounters the result of what can
happen to a society that does not evolve. The class structure is still in place. Every charac-
ter Flush sees upon his arrival is defined by his or her class position, from a lady bounti-
fully appareled in flowing robes of purple plush to a page at the service of a majestic
deerhound to a flunkey in livery dropp[ing] a letter in a box (137-38). The presence of
a policeman, with his bulls-eye [lantern] swinging menacingly from side to side, hints
at the coercion needed to maintain this oppressive, class-bound order. The city is under
a funereal pall (137) and is, moreover, paying a physical price for allowing the poverty
that results from this class divide: it has just recovered from an epidemic of cholera (138).
It is hardly a wonder that Mrs. Carlyles dog Nero may have tried to commit suicide by
leaping from a top-story window (175-76). Flush himself feels under a great deal of strain,
and is happy only once he finds himself on the deck of the Channel steamer crossing to
France (142). In nineteenth-century England Flush and his comrade Nero have only two
options: death or escape. Unlike poor Nero who has to stick it out in London, with the
archetypal Victorians the Carlyles, till the end of his life, when he is finally run over by a
butchers cart (176), Flush migrates to survive. If evolution leads to extinction, it also leads
to new life forms, and failure to evolve at all leads to certain stagnation and, in the realm
of human and canine affairs, misery.
Flush may have been a joke, as Woolf repeatedly told her friends in letters, but it was
also a serious undertaking to which she applied herself with her usual care, assiduousness,
and inventiveness. In her history of the spaniel she offers a serious and whimsical account
of its origins in relation to the dawn of time; to her medium, language; to the rise and
fall of several empires and dynasties; and to its anglicization. Intertwined in her multiple
stories is a strenuous critique of classism, overlaid with a parody of breeding and the genre
of the breed book, and informed by a deep appreciation and knowledge of Darwinism.
As the study of non-human animals becomes a more prominent part of the humanities, I
believe that future work on this underestimated book will reveal Woolf s complex under-
standing of the relationships between the human and canine species, and her facility in
making these relationships come alive through literature.
Notes
1. All references are from Flush unless otherwise noted.
2. Or, to cite a translation of Agambens own words, the space in which human openness in a world and
animal openness toward its disinhibitor seem for a moment to meet (62).
3. See Cuddy-Keane 61; Snaith 618-20, 631-32; Caughie 162; and Booth, Greatness 178.
4. See Beer 102.
5. I visualise this book now as a curiously uneven time sequencea series of great balloons, linked by
straight narrow passages of narrative (D4: 142).
6. The word family is repeated eight times in the first twelve pages of Flush, and 129 times throughout The
Origin of Species.
7. See also David and DeMello 37.
8. See Spain.
9. See Spain; and Taylor, who speculates that Espaa may derive from the Basque espaa, which means a
lip, border, or edge of anything (263).
10. The indirect reference to Dido, renowned for her loyalty to Aeneas (The Aeneid), may introduce one of the
themes of Flush, or dogged devotion. I am indebted to Jane Goldman for highlighting one possible mean-
ing for this allusion.
11. See McHugh 65.
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LAPPIN AND LAPINOVA: A WOOLF IN HARES CLOTHING?
by Kathryn Simpson
A
nimals are central to Woolfs life and writingfrom the marmosets and the many
dogs that she and Leonard kept as pets, to the plethora of animal names she uses as
terms of endearment (dolphin for Vanessa and mongoose for Leonard, for example)
as well as the animal names she uses not quite so kindly (most notoriously, civet cat to
refer to her friend and rival, Katherine Mansfield).1 In Woolf s fiction literal animals take
on a fantastical and metaphorical life, signifying far more than the simple animality of their
real-life selves, and imaginary creatures similarly test boundaries of different kinds. Woolf s
fictional menagerie has been variously considered as a means of challenging social norms and
as revealing repressed desires and creating a space for unruly behavior.2 Her fictional animals
also operate as vehicles for raising contentious and complex political issues.3
Here I will explore Lappin and Lapinova, a story published in 1939 but first writ-
ten 20 years ago or more (D5: 188) at Asheham (and so before 1919). This was one
of the few stories Woolf published explicitly to make money4 but, as we know, Woolf s
writing is never simply one thing. The story recounts the first few years of Rosalinds
marriage to Ernest Thorburn, a relationship vitally sustained through their fantasy of
themselves as Queen Lapinova (a hare) and King Lappin (a rabbit). With its fairy tale
qualities and tantalising ambiguities, the story offers many possibilities for interpretation
and Ill examine three aspects in detail. These are the colors white and gold, the rabbit/
hare fantasy world and the sand caster gift. Keeping in mind the two historical moments
of probable composition and publication, Ill consider how these offer scope for interpret-
ing this story in relation to Woolf s experience as a writer, her perception of her work in
relation to the literary market and her political perspective, especially in relation to war.
Comparing an undated typescript (held in the Berg Collection) with the version of the
story published in Harpers Bazaar in 1939, there are only very slight variations. One that seems
significant for the war-time context of its original composition and the near war-time context of
its publication is Rosalinds introduction of the adjective white to describe her fantasy hare self.
In the typescript Rosalind simply echoes Ernests description of the hare hed chased:
A white hare, he added.

A white hare! Rosalind exclaimed
In the published version, however, Rosalind responds with her own intervention into
Ernests description:
A woman hare, he added.

A white hare! Rosalind exclaimed.
In both versions, Rosalind goes on to elaborate her description: Rather a small hare;
silver grey; with big bright eyes? (CSF 263). The silver grey color possibly over-rides the
white that she initially insisted on, but it simultaneously draws attention to this initial color.
As Jane Goldman has persuasively argued, Woolfs deployment of color may [] offer
the basis of a coded articulation of historical intervention (1998, 8) and the various signifi-
cances of white at the earlier point of composition may come into play. It signifies purity
in the womens suffrage color scheme of purple, green and white (as Goldman discusses) as
well as cowardice or shame in the White Feather Campaign, which was used to pressure able-
bodied men to enlist in the period before the 1916 Military Service Act legalized conscription
into the armed forces. There was a conscience clause as part of this Act but, as each case was
tried on an individual basis, there was considerable anxiety about whether the eligible men in
Woolfs intimate circle would be conscripted. Both political deployments of this color would
have been readily apparent to Woolf in the late 1910s and both, in different ways, equate
white with militancy and so imply womens dangerous collusion with the forces driving war.
White, of course, is also central to Victorian ideals of femininity and Rosalinds seemingly
Ruskin-inspired binary schema of the separate spheres that she and Ernest will occupy, with
an outline of their different characters, is suggestive of that powerful Victorian conception of
the perfect wifethe angel in the house. As Ruskin explains, a true wifely subjection can be
achieved where the wifes qualities complement the manly attributes of her husband:
The mans power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator,
the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for
adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary.
But the womans power is for rule, not for battle, her intellect is not for invention or
creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision. [] Her great function is
Praise. [] This is the true nature of homeit is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only
from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division. (Ruskin 117-8)
Although in her real life Rosalind does seem to be a compliant wife, her fantasy life
significantly modifies Ruskins terms:
And before they went to bed that night it was all settled. He was King Lappin; she
was Queen Lapinova. They were the very opposite of each other; he was bold and
determined; she wary and undependable. He ruled over the busy world of rabbits;
her world was a more desolate, mysterious place, which she ranged mostly by moon-
light. All the same, their territories touched; they were King and Queen. (CSF 263).
This fantasy sexual economy that Rosalind commits herself to is patriarchalas her name,
Lapinova, with its Slavic patronymic suffix, ova, indicatesand this suggests her com-
plicity in a patriarchal social structure. However, in the fantasy Rosalind creates she is
actively creative and adventurous. Further, her version of their marriage makes the couple
feel in league together against the rest of the world (CSF 263; emphasis added) and, as
Georgia Johnston has pointed out, Rosalinds fantasy and her active sexuality puts them at
odds with the sexual dynamic conventionally associated with patriarchal marriage.
That Rosalinds identity would ultimately be dangerously subsumed into that of Er-
nest and his family is indicated through the use of the colors white and gold, where white
is dissolved or dispersed by gold. Rosalind marks her separation from Ernests prolifically
breeding family by wearing her white wedding dress to the Thorburns golden-wedding
Lappin and Lapinova 153
anniversary party (where Everything was gold). Her intense discomfort and feeling of
isolation is signalled by her gaze which seemed insoluble as an icicle (CSF 264). How-
ever, the heat of the party and feeling oppressed by the numbers of (significantly named)
Thorburns leads to her sensation of disintegration: She was being melted; dispersed;
dissolved into nothingness (CSF 265). Even the raw white fog of Lapinovas natural
realm is turned into a golden mesh in the lamp light and as an orphan she feels like a
mere drop among all those Thor(thaw)burns (CSF 264). This thawing and potential
burning seem to be powerful threats, eroding Rosalinds sense of autonomy and evoking
the punishment of rebellious womenhares being associated with witches in folklore.
Her anniversary gift of an eighteenth-century relic, a sand caster, also signals her differ-
ence from the Thorburns (CSF 264). As Marcel Mauss explains, the giving of gifts is part of
complex social practices, governed by norms and obligations, and Rosalinds giving of this gift
indicates her acquiescence in these social norms. It is a sign of her good breeding that she
knows how to behave in polite society in adhering to the rituals of gift-giving. In many ways, as
she says, the sand caster is a senseless presentoutmoded and not utilitarianbut it is these
qualities that actually mark it as a true gift and separate it from the monetary economy. The
difference of Rosalinds gift becomes apparent in comparison to the other lavish gifts that strew
every available surface: these are all gold-marked, authentic and so readily translatable into, in
fact synonymous with, cash (CSF 264). Her gift is fundamentally at odds with the acquisitive-
ness of the Thorburns, whose large family is also conceptualized in economic terms: in addition
to Ernest, the fruitful Thorburn union had produced nine other sons and daughters into the
bargain, many themselves married and also fruitful (CSF 264; emphasis added).
But as Rosalind participates in this obligatory gift-giving, she has a moment of stark and
shocking clarity as she recalls the note her mother-in-law gave her expressing the wish that Er-
nest would make her happy. She feels panic as she reflects on the fact that shes not happy with
Ernest and that he, like all his family and ancestors in the family portraits that surround her, has
a nose that doesnt twitch at all. But she also realizes that her mother-in-laws note, in the stubby
black handwriting, is not just a reminder of the legally binding marital contract that Rosalind
has signed, but a contract of another kind, fixing her in her place in this family as Ernests wife. It
assumes her acceptance of the Thorburn idea of happinessbased on acquisition, increase and
profit in terms of gold and the breeding of childrenand her role in its continuation.
Her only recourse from the increasingly horrifying realization is to escape into fantasy:
hearing the magic word rabbits results in a mysterious catastrophe for the Thorburns
in Rosalinds imaginary revision of the party: The golden table became a moor with the
gorse in full bloom; the din of voices turned to one peal of larks laughter ringing down from
the sky (CSF 265). Rosalinds surreal perception of the Thorburn family reveals her feelings
of fear and distaste about them, their greed and acquisitiveness determining their transfor-
mation of Mr Thorburn into a poacher, Mrs Thorburn into the squire and Ernests sister,
Celia, into a ferret. As they raise a toast and return[ing] thanks for the abundance of their
family and gifts, Rosalind as Lapinova foresees the fall in the Thorburn fortunes, and views
the scene through an altered visionnot of affluence and success, but of the decayed family
mansion and their investment in the values of a world that had ceased to exist (CSF 265).
However, in the interplay of real and fantasy worlds at this point, Mr Thorburns role
as poacher sheds a different light on Rosalinds anniversary gift. Although the sand caster
does not have the same illicit connotation as Mr Thorburns collection of eighteenth-cen-
tury dressing-table objects (kept secret from his wife), Rosalinds identification of him as a
poacher raises concerns that she too has collaborated in his stealing off with goods that
will be taken out of circulation, kept privately and consumed greedily: she feels she has
played into the poachers hands. Like the pheasants and partridges her fantasy poacher
drops stealthily into his cooking pot, Rosalind realizes that she too may be appropriated,
her freedom curtailed and her creative gifts stolen and consumed (CSF 265).5
At this crucial point in the story Ernests on-going co-creation of their fantasy ensures
Rosalinds sense of safety as Lapinova. But this animal imagery is double-edged and all refer-
ences to rabbits and hares are violent and destructivethey are animals to be shot, sold, eaten
and used. Rabbits are commodities, comestibles and in both their fantasy and real worlds Er-
nest is a metaphorical hunter.6 Rosalinds re-writing of Ernest as King Lappin seeks to over-
ride (or over-write) the Victorian associations of his name and his family heritage: He did
not look like Ernest either. The name suggested the Albert Memorial, mahogany sideboards,
steel engravings of the Prince Consort with his familyher mother-in-laws dining room in
Porchester Terrace in short (CSF 261). However, his breeding and cultural belonging win
through in the end. Ernests refusal to continue the co-creation of their fantasy life causes
Rosalinds world to shrink to the prosaic and everyday (the simply domestic) and, without his
co-operation, she loses her fantasy self. Simultaneously, Ernest becomes Rosalinds hunter
his key in the door sounds like a gun shot and he seems to relish Rosalinds distress at losing
Lapinova, cruelly concluding she was Caught in a trap [] killed (CSF 268). The life-
sustaining force of Rosalinds imaginary life is cut off by Ernests refusal to collude: as a result
she experiences a metaphorical death, becoming stiff and cold with eyes, like those of the
stuffed hare she sees in the Natural History Museum, glazed, like glass eyes (CSF 267). This
is a testimony, perhaps, to Woolfs own awareness of the (literally) vital necessity of imagina-
tion to sustain existence, but also of the necessity of collaboration and co-creation.
The sand caster gift and the emphasis on imagination and narrative all suggest an inter-
pretation of this story in the light of Woolfs writing and publication. The sand casters out-
moded function in fixing words may also allude to the Hogarth Presss outmoded publica-
tion practices of fixing words in print.7 Theres much more that could be said about this, but
its the later context of the storys production and publication that I want to focus on here.
In the 1930s context when the proliferation of propaganda became increasingly powerful
in forming and promoting fixed perceptions and beliefs, Rosalinds gift of a device that fixes
words takes on a different significance. The rise of fascism in Europe led to dramatic changes in
the social, political and economic context in which Woolf worked. Holding fast to her pacifist
principles, Woolf felt an increasing sense of isolation from friends and family, and also feared
a loss of audience which she attributed in part to the increasing intrusion of market forces and
political agendas into literary writing (as her essays, Why Art Today Follows Politics (1936)
and Reviewing (1939) attest). As Three Guineas demonstrates, for Woolf the forces of fascism,
capitalism and patriarchy form a powerful and deadly nexus driving Europe towards war. Her
sense of being the hare, a long way ahead of the hounds my critics, following the publication
of The Waves (D4: 45), is echoed as she anticipates the response to Three Guineas, describing
herself as an outsider at which [t]he pack may howl, but it shall never catch me (D5: 41).
In the diary entry in which she mentions rehashing Lappin and Lapinova, she also tellingly
reflects on her sense of her public reputation at [that] moment in terms of being secondrate,
& likely [] to be discarded altogether, decapitated by negative criticism. This latter feeling
Lappin and Lapinova 155
is not unlike Rosamunds sense of imminent death, feeling hands tightening at the back of her
neck (D5:188; CSF 268).
In some ways, this story could be read as a companion piece to Three Guineasa com-
plicating counterpart to the strident polemic of Woolf s extended essay. Whereas in Three
Guineas the guineas operate as monetary gifts (free gifts given freely), and the extensive
letters operate to sustain dialogue and a multiplicity of voices in an effort to counter the
movement towards war, the sand caster gift perhaps sheds a more problematic light on
Woolf s position as a pacifist and woman writer. Like Rosalinds gift, Woolf perceives
her own artistic gift to be complexat once at odds with the acquisitiveness dictating the
operation of the commercial literary marketplace and also with the proliferation of the
mechanical reproduction of words so closely associated with propaganda. However, Ro-
salinds dilemma is similar to that of Woolf: Rosalind is the pacifist white hare caught in
a trapan unwilling member of the very English Thorburn family and at odds with, but
ultimately in danger of being subsumed by, their acquisitive and belligerent values.8 These
values are encapsulated in ostentation of the golden-wedding anniversary party, with its
discussion of the different ways of obliterating the enemy (the rabbits). That this golden
celebration of the Thorburn family is associated with capitalisms insatiable acquisitiveness
that must be resisted if the destruction of war is to be avoided is made apparent through
the operation of color: the white icicle is dissolved by the Thorburn gold, destroyed by
their greed for money and power. That this gold is also associated with war is suggested by
the great Chrysthanthemums that curled their red and gold petals into large tight balls
and which obscure Rosalind at the dinner table. As Elisa Sparks has pointed out, Woolf s
diary for December 1920 records her experience of seeing women in the Strand crying out
Remember the glorious dead as they handed out Chrysanthemums (D2: 79).
Whilst Woolf s essays of the period privilege womens creativity as a force to counter
war and to promote peace,9 I wonder whether this story in some ways suggests something
otherwise. Woolf increasingly felt herself to be a lone pacificist voice, but she may also
have a sense that, like Rosalind, she was not a white hare but silver grey, with her invest-
ment in the imaginary, the creative and the fictional leading only to unwitting complicity
with capitalism and war. Rosalinds gift may suggest Woolf s fears that her creativity and
writing had been superseded, like the sand caster, by more powerful, mechanically repro-
duced voices and words.10 The story may suggest Woolf s fears that her creativity, her writ-
ing and her stance outside the war machine may not free her from complicity, nor prevent
her from being killedwhether metaphorically as a writer whose work is no longer read
and responded to, or literally if Hitlers invasion of Britain were to succeed.
Notes
1. Indeed, Hermione Lee describes the messy, uncontrolled and sexual menagerie of names which by a literary
parthenogenesis would breed yet more beasts (111).
2. As Richard Espley argues (92).
3. As Jane Goldman reveals in her discussion of Woolfs signifying dog (2007, 100).
4. Woolfs submission of this story to Harpers Bazaar was, according to her diary, simply to do with economic neces-
sity (D5, 189).
5. Rosalinds revulsion towards Mr Thorburns appropriation of the sand caster may hint at Woolfs own concerns
about their catering to a niche market in which their hand-printed books would also have value largely as col-
lectibles (as Lawrence Rainey has suggested of such modernist productions, 43).
6. Perhaps the fox terrier that crosses the newly-weds path as they leave the church at the beginning of the story is
an omen of what is to come.

7. As she and Leonard began to set up the Hogarth Press in 1916, producing their first hand-printed book, Two
Stories, in 1917 Woolf was well aware that their production methods were outmoded but also that the Press itself
was not a business in the usual sense, motivated as it was, not by the drive to make profit, but to publish work that
was experimental and difficult to publish elsewhere, to support new and unknown writers, and to create a public
space for political views and a greater freedom of speech. From the outset the Press was perceived not as part of
a capitalist system but as operating in a different economic sphere, privileging the process of production and the
creative and intellectual work itself rather than seeing value only as the maximising of profits in the production of
commodities. Rather than seeing her writing as a commodity for ready consumption by her reader as consumer,
Woolf imagined an ideal reader as accomplice and co-conspirator in the creative process.
8. Although Rosalind fears replicating her in-laws lives, it is significant that it is on the anniversary of her in-laws
anniversary party that Rosalinds fears about Ernests loss of commitment to their fantasy life are realized. As Lapi-
novas vision of the Thorburn mansion in ruins indicates, the worship of gold and greed leads only to destruction
and decay. But this greed also enslaves men as well as women: making women such as Mrs Thorburn into bullies
and Celia into a spy.
9. As is clear in Three Guineas and Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid Woolf is keen to privilege womens creativity
because, as she states in Room, it is in the gift of women to renew and revitalize literary and cultural traditions and,
her writing of the mid-late 1930s suggests, to bring about and sustain peace.
10. She was perhaps aware, as Sonita Sarker argues, of her participation in a negotiated nostalgia (39)
Works Cited
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ternational Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed Anna Burrells, et a. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2007.
Goldman, Jane. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual.
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Goldman, Jane. Ce chien est moi: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog. In Woolfian Boundaries: Selected Papers
from the Sixteenth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed Anna Burrels, et a. Clemson: Clemson
University Digital Press, 2007. 100-107.
Johnston, Georgia. Natural Iteration. Paper presented at Virginia Woolf and the Natural World (20th Annual Confer-
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London: W.W.Norton, 1990.
Rainey, Lawrence. The Cultural Economy of Modernism. In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed Michael
Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 33-69.
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don and Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press.
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of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Caughie. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000. 37-66.
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Bowlby. London: Penguin, 1993. 168-72.
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_____. Why Art Today Follows Politics. The Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected Essays Volume 2. Ed. Rachel
Bowlby. London: Penguin, 1993. 133-136.
A CERTAIN HOLD ON HADDOCK AND SAUSAGE:
DINING WELL IN VIRGINIA WOOLFS LIFE AND WORK
by Alice Lowe
F
ood is an essential part of the human experience of the natural world, and for Vir-
ginia Woolf, as for most of us, it has many meanings. Much has been written and
discussed about Woolf s eating disorders, her fear and loathing of food and refusal
to eat properly (or at all) when she was ill. But just as she displayed a lively and outgoing
character when she was well compared to the depression and anxiety that accompanied
her sporadic illness, so too, she had a vivid appreciation for food, in both her personal
enjoyment and appreciation of it and her use of it in her novels and essays, letters and
diaries. From gathering mushrooms and baking bread to the boeuf en daube dinner in To
the Lighthouse, this paper will explore Woolf s positive experience with food and eating.
Both emotionally-rooted childhood traumas and biologically-based mental illness are
asserted as major factors in Virginia Woolfs life, either or both contributing to her eating
problems. Louise DeSalvo attributed Woolfs eating disorders to the former, citing maternal
neglect and paternal bullying as well as molestation by her step-brother Gerald Duckworth,
conjecturing that as it occurred on a ledge where dishes of food were placed, The very sight of
a plate of food must have made her sick, recalling her feelings of disgust and shame (104-5).
Her nephew and first biographer, Clive Bell, claimed mental illness, using the terms
madness and insanity for what is now thought to be bipolar disorder. Hermione Lee
took a balanced approach, calling Woolf a sane woman who had an illness (171), with
genetic, biological and environmental factors all contributing. She expressed concern
about diagnostic labels: To choose a language for Virginia Woolf s illness is . . . to rewrite
and represent, perhaps to misrepresent it (172). Allie Glenny called her work on Woolf s
eating distress the vindication of Virginia Woolf as a woman not only of genius but also
of eminent sanity . . . [in spite of ] pathologizing labels intended to silence her or at the
least to devalue her viewpoint (vi).
Lee and others have questioned the effects of her illness versus her treatment by an
authoritarian medical profession. Stephen Trombley wrote of Woolf as a victim of male
medicine, whose doctors heightened her aversion by plying her with food. He studied
the doctors backgrounds and biases, diagnoses and treatments and noted that Dr. Savage,
for example, blamed insanity in young women on education (126). Virginias purportedly
mad belief that she was the victim of a conspiracy made sense under the circumstances
of her treatment, and he attributes her refusal to eat and violent reactions to her caretakers
as a response to her threatened freedom.
Leonard Woolf believed and trusted the doctors, even though he was aware that they
didnt really know what was wrong or how to treat it. He adhered to their prescriptions of
plenty of food and milk, rest and inactivity. Overfeeding was thought to be a kind of seda-
tion and thus essential to the rest cure. While he observed early on that Virginia had a
great love of ordinary things, of eating (56), he perhaps didnt see that his and the doc-
tors insistence on her overeating might be part of the problem rather than the solution.
He believed, as many still do, that his diligent monitoring of her health and well-being
enabled her to work, even perhaps kept her alive.
My argument is not with the diagnoses or the theories behind them as much as with
an implied constancy of these conditions, the suggestion that they permeated her life and
work to a greater extent than I believe they did. I assert that Virginia Woolf liked food.
Leonard acknowledged this, as did Clive Bell, who pointed out that when she was well,
there was fun . . . there was much eating, drinking and jollity (94). And so I offer the
following as food for thought.
In 1907 she wrote to Nelly Cecil, Why is there nothing written about foodonly so
much thought? I think a new school might arise, with new adjectives and new epithets, and
a strange beautiful sensation, all new to print (L1: 278). She makes a similar observation in
A Room of Ones Own: It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that
luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for some-
thing very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. She goes on
to describe, in sensuous and sumptuous phrasing, the lunch at the mens college (11).
She appreciated and recognized the importance of food not just for sustenance, but
for its vital social connotations. Her keen observations of human behavior and nuance in-
clude many scenes at the dinner table. She wrote about food deliberately and thoughtfully,
attentive to what she wanted to convey. E. M. Forster observed that It is always helpful,
when reading her, to look out for the passages which describe eating. They are invariably
good . . . [and] a sharp reminder that here is a woman who is alert sensuously (236). Of
the scene in To the Lighthouse, he says that Such a dinner cannot be built on a statement
beneath a dish-cover which the novelist is too indifferent or incompetent to remove. Real
food is necessary, and this, in fiction as in her home, she knew how to provide. She put it
in because she tasted it (236-7).
This is in stark contrast to claims that displays of fondness for food in her fiction were
compensation for her rejection of food in real life (Trombley). Analyzing food images in
Woolfs novels, Harriett Blodgett posits that too much attention is given to Woolf s life at
the expense of her artistry. Yet because it is no longer usual to scrutinize Woolf in formalist
terms, particularized recognition of her food imagery dwells on its autobiographical ties,
sometimes misleadingly so (45). She refutes arguments that the novels reflect the attitudes
of an anorectic woman, that, as one example, Mrs. Ramseys not being seen eating is indica-
tive of both Woolfs and Mrs. Ramseys anorexia. First, Mr. Ramsey isnt seen eating either,
and secondly, Mrs. Ramseys cosseting of the men is typical of Victorian women. Similarly,
her refusal to take one of the pears from the table arrangement, also cited as evidence, merely
shows her aesthetic appreciation of it and her awareness of her role as host.
Most of her novels contain significant food or eating scenes with vivid descriptions, in-
cluding Nevilles delicious mouthfuls of roast duck, fitley piled with vegetables, the butter
oozing through Bernards crumpet, and Susan plunging her hands into the bread dough in
The Waves. In Orlando, How good to eat is used in lieu of the word beautiful. Jacobs Room
is a cornucopia of food references, the most of any of her novels; they run the gamut of the
human experience, from plenty and privilege to hunger and hardship. The gentility of Clarissa
Dalloways party is contrasted with the satire of Doris Kilmans gluttony for both food and
Elizabeth Dalloway. Boeuf en daube, the pivotal dinner in To the Lighthouse, is a stewa blend
of ingredients, and Woolf uses communal meals and parties to bring people together.
A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage 159
Food imagery and dining scenes flesh out characters, settings and moods, showing
both contrasts and commonalities, pleasure and pain. Consummate artist that she was,
of course she also used her own experiences, as any good writer will do, to convey an
authenticity to her characters experiences. She was able to recall the negative reactions to
food that Septimus displays, and like William Bankes in To the Lighthouse and Kitty in
The Years, she was critical of English food. She wasnt a glutton, but shed observed them.
Much has been made of her disdain for gluttony and bad table manners, her primary
targets being her close friend Ethel Smyth and Leonards colleague, Kingsley Martin. She
shrewdly remarks that You can tell people they are murderers; you can not tell them that
they eat like hogs. That is wisdom (L5: 226). She had dined at the tables of renowned
hosts, and she shared the sensual enjoyment of good meals as so many of her characters
did. Yet she was careful to add these passages and descriptions only when they served her
purpose, whether metaphorically or to paint a vivid scene.
Food images in her work have been used as supporting evidence of opposing view-
points, so one might say that the proof of the pudding lies in her life. Food is prominent in
her diaries and letters, with fascinating trajectories over the years. Letters to friends include
an appreciation of food as pleasurable and associated with well-being. She describes meals as
one for whom they keenly matter: not just had lunch, but lunched off cold chicken and
tongue; not just we dined, but we dined off cold pheasant. From Spain, she writes to
Lytton Strachey of the beauties of nature and the antiquities of man, upon which I would
discourse if you would listen, but to tell the truth it is the food one thinks of more than
anything abroad (L2: 5). To Roger Fry, she describes the colors and sights and a delicious
lunch off rice and bacon and olive oil and onions and figs and sugar mixed (L3: 29).
In spite of regular household help, she always had an interest in preparing as well as
eating food. At Little Talland House in Firle, before she had a cook, she reports to Clive Bell:
Meals take 10 minutes to prepare, if one is sagacious enough to begin ones potatoes after
breakfast. Owing to this foresight, I had a potatoe so cooked that its skin rose in crackling
bubbles, on the surface, and it was soft to the heart (L1: 453). She took cooking classes in
1914 and describes to Janet Case the ladies of great culture and refinement . . . come to
improve their knowledge of dinner party soup. I distinguish myself by cooking my wedding
ring into a suet pudding! Its really great fun (L2: 55). At Asheham in the summer of 1917,
diary entries express her joy in the daily activity of foraging for mushrooms and picking ripe
blackberries to augment their table and compensate for wartime shortages.
During the first World War, Virginia and Vanessa became increasingly self-reliant. They
learned from their own cooks, experimented making meals, and exchanged recipes (Light
137). Sweets took on heightened importance during the war, especially chocolate, for which
she beats the town in London (Dl: 126). Mary Hutchinson is frequently and warmly men-
tioned for producing chocolates, cakes & sweets in abundance (D1: 197). It was a great treat
in Brighton in 1918 when they found plenty of chocolate; she says, Cant one see the curtain
lifting very slightly, and some promise of a world of food & so on beyond? (D1: 189).
When she and Leonard settled in at Monks House in 1919, food becomes part of the
reassuring routine of daily life, enhanced by their garden. She talks of picking strawberries
and cutting asparagus, harvesting apples, potatoes and walnuts in season. Baking is a satis-
fying activity. Her cooks were aware of her bread-making skill, and Woolf herself showed
Louie Mayer how to make it as good as her own. Her cooks culinary skills were important.
She sent both Mabel and Nellie to cooking classes, where both became proficient at French
cooking (Light 236). She wrote about food increasingly and with undisguised appreciation.
Nelly is preparing a nice roast chicken & ices for dinner, which I shall enjoy (D3: 90); I
have just eaten a pear warm from the sun with the juice running out of it (D3: 251).
Dining with friends was more about the people and the conversations than the food,
but menus find their way into numerous letters and diary entries. During World War I:
We sat at a low table covered with a bandanna, & eat out of dishes each holding a differ-
ent bean or lettuce: delicious food for a change. We drank wine, & finished with soft white
cheese, eaten with sugar (D1: 17); and shortly after the war at the Savoy Grill Room: It
is long since eating a meal was such a serious business to me. Fish & meat & melon & ices
have come to their own again (D1: 290). Food with Vita Sackville-West is charged with
playfulness and eroticism: [We] dined off sandwiches & strawberries in the highest glee
(D3: 306); [We] ate cold salmon & raspberries & cream & little variegated chocolates
given by Lady Sackville (D4: 87). While visiting Nan Hudson and Ethel Sands she writes
to Vita: Oh the heavenly food! I said to myself I shall grow so fat Vita wont like me. Still
I ate and ate (L3: 407). Of that same visit, she tells T.S. Eliot that For the cooking alone
I would sell my soul twice over (L3: 413). Mary Hutchinson entertains in great style, and
Virginia describes a dinner that included an enormous earthenware dish . . . garnished
with every vegetable, in Januarypeas, greens, mushrooms, potatoes; and in the middle
the tenderest cutlets, all brewed in a sweet stinging aphrodisiac sauce (L3: 164).
Two important things happened in 1929-1930a new stove came, and Nelly left (after
some false alarms, coming and going). Of the former she says: But what interests me is of
course my oil stove. I go over the dishes I shall cookthe rich stews, the sauces. The adven-
turous strange dishes with dashes of wine in them (D3: 257). And without a live-in cook: I
make bread. I cook mushrooms. I wander in & out of the kitchen (D3: 311). I am more
& more attracted by looseness, freedom, & eating ones dinner off a table anywhere, having
cooked it previously (D3: 316). She tells Vita: I have only one passion in lifecooking. I can
cook anything. I am free for ever of cooks. I cooked veal cutlets today. I assure you it is better
than writing these more than idiotic books (L4: 93). She values solitary evenings; & cook-
ing dinner (D4: 184); Words words & now roast beef & apple tart. An evening alone (D5:
183). Our way of life herecooking messes, cutting fresh asparagus from the earth seems
to me almost divine (L4: 335); I light my oven, and put in my chicken brew; and a divine
blood red soup, made of beetroot, onions, carrots and I think a dash of some spirit (L4: 407).
Recovering from a bout of flu, she writes Im beginning to plan a walk; and to plan what my
next sentence will be, and to think with rapture of roast mutton (L4: 268).
She loved French food. Traveling with Vita, she describes the food in four of five
letters to Leonard, including the vastest most delicious meal I have ever eaten. It is the
usual small French inn, with farmers lunching; we began with pate of duck, went on to
trout, gnocchi, stuffed chicken and spinach made with cream and then sour cream and a
delicious cake and then pears (L3: 534). On another trip, there was a first rate dinner . .
. thought out and presided over by a graceful young chef . . . he concocted a sauce out of
cream, French beans, mustard, salt & wine . . . another red brown casserole was brought,
& the sauce poured over. I had mushrooms in cream. And I observed the way a good
waiter serves a dish with infinite care & respect, as if handling something precious (D4:
317). At a hotel in France: Dinner of character; fried eggs, ham and rice. Choc[olate]
A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage 161
cream with biscuits floating. Aubergines with chopped bacon and gravy; also stuffed with
cheese dressing (D5: 89).
She couldnt get enough goose liver pate abroad or at home and expressed her pleasure
in imaginative detail. Of a gift from Vita, she writes: Ive eaten the whole pie practically
myself! What immortal geese must have gone to make it! It was fresh as a dockleaf, pink as
mushrooms, pure as first love (L6: 194). Gifts of food were frequent and acknowledged
with mouth-watering words of thanks. Vitas mushrooms must have grown in a water
meadow and been breathed on by cows (L5: 204). Did I tell you my notion of heaven?
All mushrooms (L5: 328). During World War II, Octavia Wilberforce sent them hard-
to-get dairy products: Your cow must be a miracle. It has produced the best cream and
the best milk that [we] have ever eaten (L6: 454).
Shortages and rationing were part of the wartime challenges and horrors taking their
toll. But her accounts of cooking and eating at Monks House demonstrate a heightened
appreciation of the relative simplicity of their life, where the world rises out of dark squalor
into this divine natural peace (D5: 243). Cooking helps to combat depression (D5: 215),
and she tells Ethel Smyth that The delight of being without a maid in the house is such
that I dont mind an hours cookingindeed it is a sedative (L6: 434). So happy cooking
dinner, reading, playing bowls (D5: 231). Making butter with Louie is a moment of great
household triumph (D5: 340), and becomes a source of pride. She writes Ethel: Did I tell
you I can now make lovely, rich, savoury vegetable soup? Tonight we shall have macaroni au
gratinwith cream (L6: 467). She closes an update to Mary Hutchinson: What else? Oh
I read a great many books, and cook vegetable soup for dinner (L6: 472).
Her last entry in 1940 reads, How one enjoys food now. I make up imaginary meals
(D5: 347). In January 1941 after viewing the devastation in London, shes ravished &
demolished. So to Buszards where, for almost the first time, I decided to eat gluttonously.
Turkey & pancakes. How rich, how solid (D5: 353). And then in March, just two weeks
before her death: And now with some pleasure I find that its seven; and must cook din-
ner, Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage
and haddock by writing them down (D5: 358).
With her keen powers of observation, Woolf used the language of food vividly and
playfully to describe the world around her. Friends and family, acquaintances and strangers,
are likened to one of the hams in Flints shop (D5: 23), a perfectly stuffed cold fowl (D5:
120), mute as a trout [with] the swift composure of a fish (D1: 197). Compare Morgan
Forster, a pale cold chicken (D4: 169), to Desmond McCarthy, the most cooked & satu-
rated of us all . . . basted richly over a slow fire (D3: 234). She herself is light as a trout with
sheer irresponsible relief (L4: 357), like a biscuit in the middle of rats (L5: 211).
Reading and writing assume colorful images: books that go stale like a cheese thats
been cut in & left. The first slice is always the best (D5: 257) or are likened to a sickly
slab of plum cake iced with pink fly blown sugar (D4: 186); ideas are like omelettes and
words like hard boiled eggs (L6: 286). Meritorious prose, she says, is such gruel &
water . . . not a food for the mature (L5: 88). She compares writing Between the Acts to
The Year, noting more milk skimmed off. A richer pat (D5: 340). She writes to Hugh
Walpole that his book is even better than peach-fed Virginian ham (D5: 141-42).
Virginia Woolf s priorities, her loves, were writing and reading, her friends and fam-
ily, and her daily life, which included her walks, nature and food. She writes about what
she eats as a way of expressing contentment. Food was comfort, a quiet pleasure, like a
warm fire or a brisk walk. She mentions when food is bad as well as when its good, but
not that its noxious or that she has no taste for it, but rather as one who expects and hopes
for better. And she recognizes the potential for the picturesque and the humorous as well
as the layered meanings in her use of food imagery to describe people, to demonstrate
character and to set a stage. I dont think this would be possible without an underlying
appreciation and enjoyment.
Her work reflects this, perhaps most notably in A Room of Ones Own, when she compares
the meals at the mens and womens colleges. Of the former, Mary Gordon remarks that Her
joy in sensual satisfaction is magnificently expressed . . . it is one of the immortal meals in lit-
erature (ix). Woolf reflects on the two meals and observes that The human frame being what
it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as
they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good
talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well (18).
Works Cited
Bell, Clive. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
Blodgett, Harriet. Food for Thought in Virginia Woolf s Novels. Womens Studies Annual. Vol.3:1997. 45-60.
DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1989.
Forster, E.M. in Recollections of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Joan Russell Noble. 1972. Middlesex, England: Penguin
Books, 1975. 226-242.
Glenny, Allie. Ravenous Identity: Eating and Eating distress in the Life and Work of Virginia Woolf. New York: St.
Martins Press, 1999.
Gordon, Mary. Foreword. A Room of Ones Own. Virginia Woolf. 1929. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1989.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. 1996. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.
Light, Alison. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants. New York: Bloomsbury Press. 2008.
Moran, Patricia. Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Charlottesville: Uni-
versity Press of Virginia, 1996.
Trombley, Stephen. All that Summer She was Mad. New York: Continuum, 1982.
Woolf, Leonard. Growing. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanov-
ich, 1977-84.
___. Jacobs Room. 1922. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1978.
___. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1975-1980.
___. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. New York: Harvest Book, 2005.
___. Orlando. 1928. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1973.
___. A Room of Ones Own. 1929. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1989.
___. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Orlando: Harvest Book, 2005.
___. The Waves. 1931. New York: Harvest Book, 2006.
MOMENTS OF AGING: REVISING MOTHER NATURE IN VIRGINIA
WOOLFS MRS. DALLOWAY
by Katherine Sedon
I WAS IN A QUEER MOOD, THINKING MYSELF VERY OLD: BUT NOW I AM A WOMAN AGAINAS
I ALWAYS AM WHEN I WRITE. (D3: 231)
S
cholars have documented and discussed well Virginia Woolf s use of mirrors and
glass as devices that key readers into what she calls moments of being. Critics from
Harold Bloom to Hermione Lee have explicated her life and writing, thoroughly
commenting on issues of identity, perception, and time, among others. In similar mea-
sure, feminist critics from Kathleen Woodward to Anne M. Wyatt-Brown have initiated a
new conversation on Woolf that includes issues of aging in the context of Woolf s life and
work. Just as feminist scholars continue to cultivate insights on aging, so too should critics
discuss the devices used by Woolf to explore, analyze, and comment on the phenomenon
of aging. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf revises the Mother Nature archetype to better
fit her perceptions and experiences of aging. In doing so, she employs nature imagery
as vantages into particular moments of being that portend the social retrogressions and
psychological devaluations of aging womeninstances we might call moments of aging.
Diverse cultures throughout prehistory and recorded history have incorporated a
feminine understanding of nature and earth into their mythologies, spiritual practices,
and arts. Although there are a few exceptions, dominating discourses construct the Moth-
er Nature archetype as a young woman. For example, Tellus or Terra Mater in Roman
mythology, whose name literally translates to Mother Earth, is painted in a floor mosaic
inside a Roman villa in Sentinum. A youthful Tellus reclines with her offspring, the four
seasons, while Aion (the god of time) stands centered inside of a golden ribbon streaming
the signs of the zodiac. Though thats only one example, the archetype of nature as femi-
nine pervades and crosses cultural, geographic, and chronological boundaries.
Carl Jung defines an archetype as psychic contents that have not yet been submitted
to conscious elaboration (4). The conscious elaboration of an archetype develops into
that archetypes historical formula. As Mother Nature has been associated with the earth,
harvests, growth, and fertility, those psychic contents have transformed into a highly de-
fined concept rigidly connected to the idea of youth. Virginia Woolf turns this concept
on its head by revising the archetype, effectively creating a well-wrought urn to hold the
experiences of aging women. She explores the phenomenon of aging by comparing and
contrasting her female characters to the features of nature: sky, animal and plant life,
wind, and water. Her study yields a new Mother Nature, an aging one, who is barely
recognizable to the historical formula of Mother Nature as a young woman. More spe-
cifically, Woolf s revised Mother Nature appears in the Battered Woman, Clarissas aunt
Helena Parry, and Clarissa Dalloway herself.
As Peter Walsh strolls through the park and considers his own age of fifty-three, the
Battered Woman interrupts him with singing:
A frail, quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, begin-

ning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human mean-
ing into--ee um fah so foo swee too eem oo--the voice of no age or sex, the
voice of an ancient spring sprouting from the earth; which issued . . . from a tall
quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever
barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches . . . and rocks
and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze. (MD 81)
The Battered Womans ageless, sexless, weak, and shrill voice coupled with her apparent
homelessness imply that she lacks some subjectivity as a result of her loss of social status.
Although she is physically visible to Peter Walsh, she is socially invisible and barren of
leaves. Without the protection of her leaves, she is at the mercy of the eternal breeze, that
unrelenting force of time and subsequent aging. Effectively, her voice is revoked of all
human meaning.
In Aging and its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions, Kathleen Woodward describes
the devaluation of subjectivity in aging women. The sexual allure of a woman, still taken
to be one of a womans most important economic possessions, is understood to diminish
much more rapidly with age than does that of a man (16). Aging women lose valuebe
it social, political, or economicuntil one might assume it is altogether depleted. Rather
than provide her readers with a youthful and feminine form of nature that is fertile with
the potential for life, Woolf creates the Battered Woman in the images of a barren tree and
rusty pumpnearly lifeless and certainly less valuable objects.
Additionally, Woolf describes the Battered Woman with images of flowers and birds
but with an ulterior version of Mother Nature: Once she had walked in May. . . . But
the passage of ages had blurred the clarity of that ancient May day; the bright petalled
flowers were hoar and silver frosted . . . with the bird-like freshness of the very aged she
still twittered give me your hand and let press it gently (MD 82). The Battered Womans
memory fades as she ages, and her flower petals become icy with the passing of time, in-
dicating senility and a loss of sexual allure. Furthermore, she has the bird-like freshness
of the very ageda juxtaposition of the freshness and vitality of youth with the staleness
of the very aged.
The Battered Womans implied senility is further evidenced in how Peter Walsh re-
acts to her request that he hold her hand. He gives her a shilling before entering the taxi,
avoiding any touch. The Battered Womans dependency on strangers is a microcosmic
example of the power of the patriarchys purse and the powerlessness of an aging woman,
who is simultaneously trapped within and discarded by the system. Leena Schroder and
Merry Pawlowski cite Woolf s intention to expose the pecuniary consequences of aging as
a woman. Schroder identifies the Battered Woman as a radical and disruptive spirit who
threatens Britains image of imperialism yet also confirms the power of the Empire (239).
Pawlowski adds that the very presence of [the Battered Woman] is also the confirma-
tion of British power, a fact that was not lost on Woolf (vii). We see this when her shrill
intonation and solicitation for spare change stand out amongst the rhythmic hustle and
bustle of shopping Londoners.
Aside from the Battered Woman, Woolf provides us with one of her oldest female
characters: Aunt Helena Parry, age eighty years, one of the few female characters to age
Moments of Aging 165
past fifty. Woolf consistently describes Helena in relation to flowersparticularly or-

chidsand provides her readers with glimpses into Helenas memories. [I]t was orchids
she saw, and mountain passes and herself carried on the backs of coolies in the sixties over
solitary peaks; or descending to uproot orchids (startling blossoms, never held before)
which she painted in water-color; an indomitable Englishwoman (MD 178). Helena
recalls her lifes journey as uprooting orchids. The process of aging and journeying through
life parallels the violent action of pulling flowers from the ground: a premature end of life.
Rather than presenting Helena as a flower growing her roots deeper and deeper into the
soil, Woolf writes her as an uprooted orchid.
Many age theorists and scholars of age studies have already noted that females experi-
ence a loss of life and subjectivity because age is, in large part, socially constructed despite
its bodily implications. To quote Woodward, Meanings are attached to the figures of age
and aging based on a societys evaluation of aging (x). A womans subjectivity is ham-
pered by the process of aging not because of physical change or deterioration but because
of the social norms affixed to age like the false attribution of senility. Margaret Gullette
exposes this false attribution of senility to old age, saying of early twentieth-century Brit-
ish culture, The losses attributable to aging had become systemictied not merely to the
sexual system but to cerebration as well (23). In other words, during Woolf s lifetime,
sexual activity was believed to be inherently tied to creative energy (read: imagination and
intellect).
Peter Walsh falsely attributes senility to Helena, who he initially believes to be dead
until he sees her very much alive at the party. Peter thinks, He has heard of [Aunt Hel-
ena], from Clarissa, losing the sight of one eye. It seemed so fittingone of natures
masterpiecesthat old Miss Parry should turn to glass. She would die like some bird in a
frost gripping her perch (162). The loss of sight pivots on the cultural metaphor of sight
as thought. If seeing is thinking, Peter believes that Helena, in her old age, lacks intellec-
tual abilities, despite her research and publications on orchids and how Charles Darwin
admired her. Helena is a bird, frozen to death on its perch, without any marker of youth.
The Battered Woman and Aunt Helena exemplify Woolf s revised Mother Nature.
However, the reader attains a stronger sense of Woolf s feelings on aging through Clarissas
moments of being. By using the images of her revised Mother Nature, Woolf gives her
audience the opportunity to live inside a moment of aging. Clarissa feels young, yet at
the same time unspeakably aged (8). There is an ambiguity surrounding Clarissas experi-
ences of simultaneous youth and old age, emblematizing the anxiety one might have near
the cusp of midlife and beyond. Throughout the course of her day, in preparing for her
party, Woolf lets us inside Clarissas thoughts as she grapples with her fear of aging.
As Clarissa prepares for her party, Woolf constructs a moment of being that plunges
into the anxieties of aging:
[Clarissa] had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had
the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into her
fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July,
August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop,
Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the mo-
ment, transfixed it, therethe moment of this June morning on which was the
pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the
bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the
glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night to give
a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself. (37)
Clarissas anxieties over aging culminate in a spasm that fixes her identity within the mo-
ment of aging. The placement of glass within the scenealong with particular language
such as variations of fixity, fluctuation, and plungingkeys readers into Clarissas mo-
ment of being as she considers her age. Yet, she envisions her awareness of aging as icy
claws that fix in her. The ice and claws reveal a particular kind of moment of beinga
moment that hinges upon Woolf s revised Mother Nature, a moment of aging. No longer
a historically-formulated archetype of youth and fertility, Woolf references Mother Nature
in images of ice to develop Clarissas experiences of aging.
One of the most prominent experiences for aging women is invisibility, and the Bat-
tered Woman, Aunt Helena, and Clarissa all experience it. Clarissa reflects on her own
invisible identity as she walks down Bond Street after purchasing flowers:
But often now this body she wore . . . , this body, with all its capacities, seemed
nothingnothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, un-
seen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now,
but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up
Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being
Mrs. Richard Dalloway. (11)
Already married and no longer bearing children, Clarissas identity as an aging woman
rests on being Mrs. Richard Dalloway. Clarissa is no longer visible to othersand even,
to an extent, to herself. As the body ages and hides a former youth, the phenomenon of
aging also hides the aging womans subjectivity as herself, instead transforming her into
the identity seemed most suitable by society-at-large.
Because of the nature of aging as a biological phenomenon and social construction,
an aging womans identity is bound up with her age. Woolf often explores the concept of
identity within her moments of being, but her moments of aging provide readers and crit-
ics with specific vantages into the identities of aging women. For example, Clarissa pauses
at a window and plunges into a moment of aging:
A single figure . . . against the stare of this matter-of-fact June morning; soft with
the glow of rose petals for some, she knew, and felt it, as she paused by the open
staircase windows which let in blinds flapping, dogs barking, let in, she thought,
feeling herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless, the grinding, the blowing,
flowering of the day, out of doors, out of the window, out of her body and brain
which now failed. (30)
Clarissa reacts to aging by feeling shrivelled and breastlessbankrupt of her bodily cur-
rency. She laments the inescapability of aging. Age had brushed her; even as a mermaid
might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves
Moments of Aging 167
(174). Aging touches and visibly alters the body in a way that one cannot control just as
one cannot control the waves of an ocean. Often used by Woolf, waves represent fluctua-
tion, always changing position, growing and breaking, those forces that carry us out into
the sea of old age. The danger of a mermaid and the image of a setting sun depict the
consequences of aging: eventual death.
Both aging and death intermingle in Clarissas life, which Woolf illustrates through
repeated allusions to William Shakespeares Cymbeline: Fear no more the heat o the sun
/ Nor the furious winters rages (4.2). The first allusion appears when Clarissa muses on
Lady Brutons luncheon invitation to Richard, the second when she reacts to news of
Septimus Smiths suicide, and the third when she watches the old woman in the window
at the end of the evening. Fear no more, said Clarissa. Fear no more the heat o the sun;
for the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her made the moment in
which she had stood shiver, as a plant on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar
and shivers: so she rocked: so she shivered (30). This shock is a disruption that Woolf
connects to images of a plant on a river-bed. Helplessly rooted to the river-bed, the plant
has no option but to rock and shiver. From this imagery, Woolf immediately transitions
into Clarissas fear of aging as she sees it in Lady Brutons face, a woman of at least fifty.
Woolf writes, The dwindling of life; how year by year [Lady Brutons] share was sliced
(30). From this stream of consciousness, Clarissas shock becomes ambiguousblurred
between her jealousy over the invitation and her feelings of helplessnessbut clearly
bound up within her fear of aging.
Just after hearing news of the suicide of Septimus Smith, Clarissa reflects as she looks
through a window. She thinks, It will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty.
But there it wasashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her.
The wind must have risen (186). In the setting sun, in the end of life and living, Clarissa
finds a lack of color in her life history, a history that happened too quickly and broadly.
In order to have the audience fully understand this in Clarissa, Woolf uses the sky and the
Battered Woman as variants of her revised Mother Nature, such that the audience is able
to recognize a modified theme of Mrs. Dalloway: death is natural, death is inevitable, the
wind will rise.
At the end of the evening, Big Ben strikes its count as Clarissa watches the old woman
in the window across the way. And she thinks,
The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the clock
striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all this going on.
There! the old lady had put out her light! the whole house was dark now with
this going on, she repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat
of the sun. (186)
Fear no more the heat of the sun as the light will go out in death into darkness. Clarissa
tells herself not to fear aging because death will end it. Just as the light goes out in the old
womans window, Clarissas setting sun will fade into night.
Clearly, Clarissa does not pity Smith. Instead, she almost envies him for ending his
own life. Aside from stating the obvious in regard to pity, Woolf provides a deeper intro-
spection: while Smith very literally threw his life away, Clarissa and everyone else went
on living; they would grow old (184). Clarissa perceives death as an embrace. Death
was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of
reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded,
one was alone. There was an embrace in death (184). Death embraces aloneness.
Woolf elaborates on her allusions to Shakespeare in a moment of aging. During this
instance, Clarissa sees the waves collect and fall in the sea of old age. Woolf blurs the
boundary between the aging woman and an aging nature:
So on a summers day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and
the whole world seems to be saying that is all more and more ponderously,
until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That
is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its
burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins,
collects, lets fall. (40)
No longer fearing, the heart wades out into the sea of old age that grieves ones losses over
and over again. That is all. One only escapes aging in death, in wading farther into the
water.
Woolf s A Room of Ones Own criticizes how little the world knows about the lives of
older women, but she provides many accounts of their experiences in Mrs. Dalloway. In
taking up the topic of aging, Woolf revises the Mother Nature archetype and historical
formula to include her experiences and perceptions of aging and death. She references
feminine nature in particular moments of being to explore aging, creating moments of
aging. For Woolf, aging was a grave concern. Her diary entry from October 2, 1932 reads,
I dont believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering ones aspect to the sun. Hence, my
optimism (D4: 125). Despite the sardonic humor of her diary, there is perhaps some
truth in Woolf s statement. One could understand her suicide as a rejection of aging.
Works Cited
Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Creativity, Aging, Gender: a Study of Their Intersections, 1910-1935. Aging
and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity. Ed. Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen. Charlottes-
ville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. 19-48.
Jung, Carl. Four Archetypes. Cornwall: TJ International Ltd, 2001.
Pawlowski, Merry M. Introduction. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Kent: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2003.
i-xii.
Schroder, Leena. Mrs. Dalloway and the Female Vagrant. Essays in Criticism 45 (1995): 324-46.
Woodward, Kathleen. Aging and its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1991.
. Introduction. Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1999. ix-xxix.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 3. Ed. Anne O. Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1979.
. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4. Ed. Anne O. Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1982.
. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, 1981.
HOMELESS IN NATURE: SOLITARY TRAMPINGS AND SHARED ERRANTRY
IN CORNWALL, 1905
by Barbara Lonnquist
W
oolfs understanding of her position within the whole of natural existence was
often expressed within the context of being a walker upon the earth, of being, as
she describes in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), part of the swing, tramp, and trudge of
human existence (4). Her travels between the city and the country as well as her voyages out-
side of her native England reinforced within her a view of human experience as a simultane-
ous inclusion inand alienation fromthe strangeness of the natural universe. One locus
in particular, Cornwall, served as a privileged site of Woolf s psychic and aesthetic mining of
the natural world. Cornwall was for Woolf the place of an imagined stability associated with
childhood and the acute discovery of a radical abandonment. As Woolf herself identified
in A Sketch of the Past (written in 1940, only months before her own death), her earli-
est memories reached backthrough her motherto Talland House in St. Ives, Cornwall
(MOB 64-65), which Leslie Stephen had leased in 1881, and where the Stephens spent their
summer holidays from 1882, the year Virginia was born, until 1894, the summer before the
death of her mother, Julia Stephen, in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen.
Cornwall was not simply a framing device for Woolfs art; rather its place in Woolfs
writing anticipates Lawrence Buells description of an environmental text as one in which
the non-human environment becomes a presence that begins to suggest that human history
is implicated in natural history (qtd. in McKusick 200). To put it another way, the visit to
Cornwall in 1905 was for Woolf the genesis of a realization that would come to full expres-
sion twenty years later in To the Lighthouse (1927), namely that seemingly stable constructions
such as family, home and solid land are somewhat flimsy illusions of stability. Walks along the
towering Cornish cliffs, with their history of often unregarded devastation, inspired in Virginia
what might be called a geological view of human historynot unlike that of an Arnold or
Hardy, except that in Woolfs case the long view was inflected not so much with Victorian
doubt as with a chastened perception of a self decentered in the vast reaches of natural history.
In August of 1905, a year after the death of Leslie Stephen and eleven years since the fam-
ily had last summered in St. Ives, Virginia and her siblings, her sister Vanessa and her brothers
Thoby and Adrian, returned to Carbis Bay in Cornwall for a holiday that was in many respects
as much a pilgrimage as it was a vacation. In the wake of their fathers death in 1904, the four
Stephen children had moved from the family home in Hyde Park Gate in Kensington to a rented
house at 46 Gordon Square in the less fashionable (and not yet Bohemian) Bloomsbury district
of London. Virginia, who was barely twenty-three at this time of liberation from the restrictions
of a Victorian familial and social life in Hyde Park, no doubt experienced both the exhilaration of
a new-found freedom and at the same time a radical disorientation, a sense of being unmoored as
she embarked on this new life and her own fledgling apprenticeship as a writer.
The stay in Carbis Bay near St. Ives from August to October of 1905 would offer
her a similarly exhilarating and destabilizing experience as the now-orphaned siblings
confronted the phantoms of their past (some comforting, such as the Cornish folks who
retained vivid and fond memories of the Stephen family, especially of Julia Stephen) and
at the same time the discovery of their own ghostliness not only in the unprotected state of
relative homelessness but also in relation to the immense span of human and non-human
history embedded in the Cornish landscape, where the desolation and spectacle of natural
devastation contrasted sharply with the relative security of the world circumscribed by the
electric lighting that was newly theirs in Gordon Square.
If the 1905 journey to Cornwall was, as Julia Briggs has characterized it, a form of Word-
sworthian revisiting (162), Woolfs encounter with nature was less than romantic; her tramp-
ings (Woolf uses tramped and tramping throughout the 1905 journal account of the visit)
brought her into contact with natures radical otherness. Her descriptions suggest not only
solitude but an existential loneliness that permeated even their communal walks and initiated
for Virginia a haunting sense of abandonment, of being orphaned in the midst of a landscape
that was not only stunningly beautiful and personally significant but at the same time an aloof,
even indifferent, nature. And although in moments such as a regatta in St. Ives, when listen-
ing to the voices from the beach on a sunny afternoon, she registers the impression of finding
herself held safe in a Nurses [sic] hand again (PA 291), the feeling cannot hold.
The text that perhaps most informs my reading in this paper of Woolf s 1905 Corn-
wall encounter with the strangeness and destabilizing sense of natures transience (echoed
most poignantly in the Time Passes section of To the Lighthouse [1927]) is Marilynne
Robinsons American novel Housekeeping (1980), a narrative in which parental abandon-
mentliteral orphanhoodserves as a trope for our natural, human condition and leads
the protagonist Ruth under the care of her aunt Sylvie (herself a transient) to an acute
perception of the fluidity underneath the seeming solidity of human constructions, which
she calls mere apparitions. Accepting the existential homelessness signaled in nature,
Ruth (unlike her sister Lucy) ultimately embraces with Sylvie a shared itinerancyor in
Edouard Glissants formulation, the shared errantry that makes its home in exile (Glis-
sant 14-16). Loneliness, young Ruth declares, after her initiation into natures deep,
is an absolute discovery (157). The interplay in Robinsons novel between the dark and
watery world outside where Sylvie and Ruth wander and the solid world of lighted houses
(real and conceptual) sought by Lucy recalls Woolf s counterpointing of solid and fluid in
both To the Lighthouse and (although Robinson may not have known these) the Cornwall
journal and Woolf s subsequent essay A Walk by Night, published later in 1905, based
on the Stephen childrens dramatic tramp home in the dark at the end of their stay.1
From the start the journal explores the contrast between the familiar world of substantial-
ity and a foreign and disorienting sense of ghostliness. After the excitement of setting off on
the Great Western train, hoping to find in Cornwall our past preserved as though through
all this time it had been guarded and treasured for us to come back to one day . . . to recover
something tangible of their [summers] substance (PA 281, emphasis added), the foursome
disembarks at dusk and heads straight to Talland House, where they stealthily grope in the dark
to catch a glimpse through a chink in the escalonia hedge of an irretrievable past:
There was the house, with its two lighted windows; there on the terrace were the
stone urns, against the bank of tall flowers; all, so far as we could see was as though
we had but left it in the morning. But yet, as we knew well, we could go no further;
if we advanced the spell was broken. The lights were not our lights; the voices were
Homeless in Nature 171
the voices of strangers. [ ] We hung there like ghosts in the shade of the hedge, & at
the sound of footsteps we turned away. (PA 282, emphasis added)
One sees here images now familiar to us from To the Lighthouse: the lighted windows,
the stone urn and the aromatic escalonia hedge that functions as a kind of Proustian
madeleine. The recognition upon arrival at the place of pilgrimage that memory cannot
be resubstantiated any more than the grown children can reenter the sheltering space of
the nursery is suggested by Woolf s ironic reversal of the present and the vanished in ren-
dering the living, embodied Stephen survivors as apparitions suspended in timehung
there like ghosts (282). This inaugural image of ghostliness presages the deconstruction
of the solid world (Lee 221) that prevails throughout the Cornwall diary, figured most
prominently in the juxtapositionsor puzzling margins, to borrow Marilynne Robin-
sons phrase from Housekeeping (4)which Woolf observes between the fluidity of the sea
and the utter solidity of the land, a contrast sharpened by the ruggedness of the Cornish
coast with its towering cliffs that speak to Woolf of enormous geological forces and vast
reaches of time (Westling 856). As Virginia continues to tramp this trackless country
throughout the summer in sun and rain (which she once refers to as the shock of an
uncivilised storm (PA 286, emphasis added), she notes the sudden unexpected secret[s]
of pilgrimage that surprise the solitary walker & linger in the memorylittle visions
which she realizes no one else will see for months, or even years (PA 294). The interplay
of solid and fluid throughout the Cornish diary echoes descriptions from a previous sum-
mer of the downs near Salisbury as long curved waves of the sea as though the land
here, all molten once, & rolling in vast billows had solidified while the waves were still
swollen & on the point of breaking (PA 192; qtd. in Westling 858).
Only at Lands End, a goal where the imagination expects to be infallibly im-
pressed, was she disappointed to find the sight made hideous by encroaching tourism:
the cliffs, & the romantic line of the coast are the property nowadays of a hundred eyes;
every ten minutes or so a lumbering brake or a dusty motor car deposits its load of sight
seers (PA 294). The land all around, however, is still lonely & very beautiful (PA 294).
In the darkened evenings of the approaching autumn, the distinction between land and
sea would gradually dissolve into an ambiguous space just as human outlines them-
selves would blur and disappear into the vaporous landscape (E1: 82).
If as Jonathan Bate has suggested in The Song of the Earth, art is the place of exile
where we grieve for our lost home on earth (73), Cornwall in 1905 became the site of
Woolf s embrace of a simultaneous sense of homelessness and belonging on earth that
would inform her writing over a lifetime, and, more immediately, one rather remarkable
tramp recorded in her Cornwall diary would be transformed before the years end into an
essay, A Walk by Night, published in The Guardian in December 1905. With summer
on the wane and the holiday nearing its conclusion, Woolf describes in the Cornwall dia-
ry a walk home begun at dusk but extended into night by their taking a long look at Gur-
nards Head promontory beyond which flashed the fitful glare of the St Just Lighthouse
(PA 297). During the seven mile return in the darkness of misty Cornish night, although
they try to keep to the road, it turns into a white mist, making its hard surface a surprise
to their feet. As Adrian stalks ahead of them, he was blurred and without outline so that
they had to call out after him to make sure we had not lost him (PA 297). The sudden
appearance of a farmer with a lantern returns them for a moment to the cheerful land of
substance before returning into the darkness and the fields that swam in dusky vapours
(PA 298). As they climb a hill they witness a village whose lighted windows were scarcely
able to irradiate a yard of the blackness that pressed on them (PA 298).
The version published in The Guardian (and reprinted in Volume One of The Essays
of Virginia Woolf) is faithful to the incident, but she transforms some of the imagery to
emphasize the wateriness of the dark and their immersion in its depths. For example, the
vast trackless country in the diary will become the trackless ocean of the night in the
published version (E1: 81). The view as the party begins its return is described as still
solid in the twilight as the great cliffs front the night and the Atlantic waves, but soon
the surface of the road beneath them swam like mist, and our feet struck somewhat tenta-
tively as though they questioned the ground, and a figure who appears momentarily will
soon be engulfed as though the dark waters of the night had closed over it and the voice
sounded like one reaching across great depths as if by the waters of the night (E1: 80).
In this version, their own individuality is also dissolved: their voices sound strange to each
other, and the figures walking beside one seem to merge in the night (E1: 81). As, by
degrees, resistance to the darkness subsides, the body moving forward seems something
separate from the mind (E1: 81). The farmer with the lantern confers a momentary feel-
ing of solidity, but his voice bidding us goodnight becomes a firm hand pulling their
submerged bodies to the shores of the world, but in two strides the immense flood of
darkness and silence was over us again (E1: 81). The lights of the cottages hung floating
without anchorage in the valley below were like the lights of ships passing at sea (E1:
81). At the vision of a village below, the narrator comments, How puny were the rays of
the lamp against the immeasurable waves of darkness surging around them! A ship at sea
is a lonely thing, but far lonelier it seemed was this little village anchored to the desolate
earth and exposed every night alone to the unfathomed waters of darkness (E1: 82). In
this version, the adapting consciousness gradually finds peace and beauty as it grows ac-
customed to the strange element; the eye finds relief without grating on any harsh out-
line of reality (E1: 82)a possible revision of Matthew Arnolds melancholic resistance
to dissolution in Dover Beach. The earth, Woolf continues, with its infinity of detail
is dissolved into ambiguous space (E1: 82). Here the people of the night are not like their
apparitions in the day. Both versions end with the image of the Stephen children as birds
returned to a narrowed space after the immensity of the dark.
One can see here how Woolf anticipates the imagery of To the Lighthouse with its
counterpointing of land and water in relation to the appearance of solidity registered by
the house (symbolizing marriage, domesticity, culture) in its stand against the chaos and
flux of nature. Take for example the dining table scene when the candles are lighted and
the individuals are composed . . . into a party round a table, for the night was now shut
off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled
it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside,
a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily (97, emphasis added). This
momentary stay against the chaos (produced by the immense efforts of the sheltering
goddess Mrs. Ramsay) does not last as we learn in the Time Passes section of the novel,
which reveals how the winds and vapors have invaded the house, along with the thistles
growing in the larder and swallows nesting in the drawing room. Even Mrs. McNabb, the
Homeless in Nature 173
servant who comes to prepare the house for the Ramsays return, resembles a tropical fish
oaring its way through sun-lanced waters (133).
In the final entry in the 1905 Cornwall diary, written on the eve of their departure,
Woolf thinks, with an admission of melancholy at the thought of her return to civiliza-
tion, The lights of London will be around me at this time of evening tomorrow, as the
lighthouse gleams now (PA 299). Later in London, where she will write the Guardian
essay, she notes, A dozen lights can do much to solidify the world (E1: 81). Woolf would
return to this diary twenty years later, in August of 1925, to mine it for her new novel,
whose mature aesthetic vision eschewed the false separations between nature and culture,
human and non-human. Like Lilys painting in the novel, which was interruptedand
enriched, one feelsby the passage of time, the dynamic and poignant vision of Woolf s
novel is indebted to the discovery of the young apprenticeand solitary tramperwhose
encounters with nature in Cornwall plunged her more deeply into the dialogue between
the human and natural worlds that surrounded her.
Notes:
1. I am indebted to George B. Handleys understanding of Housekeeping as an ecological text and also to

Thomas Gardners discussion Enlarging Loneliness: Marilynne Robinsons Reading of Emily Dickinson.
I would add that Sylvie is also a Wordsworthian emblem reminiscent of the river Wye in Lines written a
few miles above Tintern Abbey: O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the wood. . . (l. 57).
Works Cited:
Bates, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. New York: Harcourt, 2005.
Gardner, Thomas. Enlarging Loneliness: Marilynne Robinsons Reading of Emily Dickinson. The Emily Dick-
inson Journal 10 (2001): 9-33.
Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Handley, George B. The Metaphysics of Ecology in Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping. Modern Fiction Stud-
ies 55.3 (2009): 496-521.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Knopf, 1997.
McKusick, James C. Ecology. Romanticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Nicholas Roe. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005. 199-218.
Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Noonday Press, 1998.
Westling, Louise. Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World. New Literary History 30 (1999): 855-75.
Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York and
London: Harcourt, 1976.
. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. New York: Harcourt, 1990.
. To the Lighthouse. 1927. New York: Harcourt, 1981.
. A Walk by Night. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume One. Ed. Andrew McNeille. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1986. 80-2.
Wordsworth, William. Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye dur-
ing a Tour, July 13, 1798. Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology. Eds. Michael ONeill and Charles
Mahoney. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 105-110.
WALK[ING] OVER THE BRIDGE IN A WILLOW PATTERN PLATE:
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE EXOTIC LANDSCAPES
By Xiaoqin Cao
I
n a review of Strange Stories from the Lodge of Leisures, a classic Chinese short
story collection by Pu Songlin of the Qing Dynasty, Virginia Woolf concludes her
discussion by saying that [s]o queer and topsy-turvy is the atmosphere of these little
stories that one feels, when one has read a number of them, much as if one had been try-
ing to walk over the bridge in a willow pattern plate (E2 8). Indeed, by reading Chinese
literature, Woolf was able to imagine the exotic land no matter how strange it proved to
be. The very imagery Woolf employed in such an analogy is the classic Chinese landscape,
the willow pattern. As a most popular domestic artifact in the English society, the willow
pattern plate, with its vivid visual reflections of Chinese landscapes and the exquisite por-
celain, has become an important cultural symbol of the East in westerners imaginations.
By likening her reading experience to walking over the bridge in a willow pattern plate,
Woolf was in fact materializing her perception of otherness when encountered with new
literature and cultures.
Woolf s reading of Chinese literature and mention of Chinese artifact were no ac-
cident. Woolf developed an early interest in foreign literature and culture while read-
ing in her fathers grand library. Her later travels in many European cities expanded her
knowledge and understanding of foreign cultures. For those countries where she never
had a chance to traverse herself, she learned about them either by talking to family and
friends who had returned from abroad or through extensive readings. These experiences
and knowledge are inevitably reflected in her works. Though most of her novels are set in
Britain, we can find foreign affiliations in the major characters in one way or another. Ex-
otic landscapes thus become a necessary but subtle element in Woolf s novels. Landscape
writing on South America, Italy, India, Russia and even China can be found in many of
Woolf s writings, in which she chooses different imageries from the natural world and
sometimes uses them as cultural symbols. This paper aims to explore Woolf s writing
on exotic landscapes in her novels, esp. in The Voyage Out (1915), Orlando (1928), Mrs.
Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927). I argue that by writing about exotic land-
scapes, Woolf was also negotiating between self and other and criticizing imperialism
and colonialism.
The study of landscape in literature is not a recent invention. As early as 1977, Chris-
topher L. Salter and William J. Lloyd made a survey of landscape writing in literature.
Based on the human imprints on the landscapes, Salter and Lloyd generalize them into
landscape of agriculture, landscape of livelihood, landscape signature of commercial ac-
tivity, transportation, and so on. Martin Mitchell tried to examine the socioeconomic
imprint upon the land. Roger Ebbatson and Ann Donahue made an even more focused
study on nation, landscape and literature from 1840-1920. They noted that landscape
representation acted as a site for the articulation of class relations, a means of forming
national identity or a conduit for the exercise of colonial power (2). They further stated
Walk[ing] over the bridge in a willow pattern plate 175
that landscape representation in both art and literature [] acts as a carrier of cultural
authority through the operation of a complex set of visual or verbal conventions (3).
With this conviction, Ebbatson and Donahue explored the ideological aspects of land-
scape representation (3) and tried to reveal the gender, race and class implications that
haunt the political unconscious (3) of their chosen texts. My study of exotic landscape
representation in literature concerns such ideological aspects of landscape representation
with a focus on issues of orientalism, colonialism and imperialism.
Landscape writing is a necessary part in any form of creative writing because it is
within certain landscapes that characters interact with each other. The landscape is always
there; it gains meaning only when it is seen. Its meaning would depend on the subject
who sees it. Like the interpretation of literary texts, the interpretation of exotic landscapes
varies from person to person according to their social background and personal experi-
ence. The word exotic immediately implies a center of perception, a point of departure
for the viewing, that is, the dichotomy of self and other, in which self refers to the
speakers native country, other refers to any country outside of his or her own national
boundary. It is thus assumed that most people within a country share, to a certain degree,
their interpretation of the other, the exotic.
For the interpretation of exotic landscapes, let us go back for a moment to the wil-
low pattern plate mentioned earlier. Though the willow pattern plate has become a cul-
tural symbol of the East, the artifact itself is problematic. The willow pattern plate was
originally introduced into England from China by trade. Later, with the popularity of tea
fashion in the English society and subsequently an increased demand for more willow
pattern plates (the time required for replacing a broken willow pattern plate could be
about three years), the English people began to produce their own willow pattern plates.
It was also during this process that the willow pattern plate assumed its current form. A
typical willow pattern plate design includes a weeping willow, pagodas, a crooked fence,
tree bearing fruit, three or four figures on a bridge, a boat and a pair of love birds forever
kissing (Kearns). It is generally believed, however, that the bridge in it was not on the
original Chinese plate, and was only added later to the design by the British porcelain
makers. Moreover, the fascinating willow legend attached to it was actually invented by
British manufacturers only around two hundred years ago as a clever promotional tool for
the marketing of Chinoise tableware (Kearns). Thus what seems to be a typical Chinese
artifact, when imported into England, changed enormously through the ongoing recon-
struction of the original object by the English people. This example restates what Edward
Said terms as Westerners orientalization of the Orient.
The story of the willow pattern plate, however, only illustrates how the image of the
East was constructed through the unconscious communal efforts of Westerners. These
images, again through various textual representations, were later fixed into stereotypes and
became the media through which most Westerners imagine the East. Such orientalization,
though powerful, may still raise doubts by keen social observers and writers, as Virginia
Woolf self-reflexively wrote about when describing the exotic landscapes.
The description of the exotic landscape can be found in many of Woolf s novels.
Given the wide-encompassing reference of the word exotic and for convenience of dis-
cussion, I have divided Woolf s exotic landscape writing into two major categories, the
Occidental other and the Orientalized other, with the former referring to European and
American other, the latter referring to the third world countries, with the exception of
Russia. For the inclusion of Russia in the Orientalized other, I will have a fuller explana-
tion later. For the limited time and space here, I will only discuss Woolf s representation
of the exotic landscapes in the Orientalized other countries. I argue that these exotic land-
scape representations inform Woolf s treatment of the other in three levels: 1) reproduc-
ing western views of the Orientalized other; 2) balancing between Self and Other,
introducing another point of view; 3) aestheticizing and incorporating the Other as
enriching and enlightening.
I use the term Orientalized other for my paper because I want to convey that all the
countries under my discussion were Orientalized in some way, at least in Woolf s works.
Despite geographical differences, all the countries under my treatment are either perceived
like the Orient by Westerners, or assumed to have oriental characteristics because of colo-
nialization. Russia is another country perceived to be the Orient. In Woolf s writings, she
constantly placed Russia together with the East. In The Voyage Out, Helen remarks that,
the future of the race is in the hands of Susan and Arthur; nothats dreadful. Of farm
labourers; nonot of the English at all, but of Russians and Chinese (VO 205). In Jacobs
Room (1922), Woolf writes, [s]uch is the fabric through which the light must shine, if
shine it canthe light of all these languages, Chinese and Russian, Persian and Arabic
(JR 40). The same narration appeared so much so that Nick Kupensky argues, the Rus-
sians are positioned as the objects of an imperial gaze in which they are Orientalized to
the extent that they inhabit the same foreign space as the Arabs, Chinese, and Persians
(4). So in Orlando, we find Woolf reproducing Western views of Orientalized Russia. For
Orlando, Sasha was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and
sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them (O 29). Here Or-
lando relates Sasha to the exotic landscape in Russia and then tries to sum her up despite
her Muscovitish Temperament. He was attracted, fascinated by the otherness of Sasha.
For Orlando, Russia was a barbaric country where there were frozen rivers and wild
horses and men [] who gashed each others throats open. [] a landscape of pine and
snow, habits of lust and slaughter (31). What Orlando sees in Sasha is exactly what Said
generalizes as Westerners view on the Orient: exotic, mysterious, recondite and implicit.
In The Voyage Out, the exotic landscape of South America was given much detailed
description on the travellers arrival: the little boat was now approaching a white crescent
of sand. Behind this was a deep green valley, with distinct hills on either side. On the slope
of the right-hand hill white houses with brown roofs were settled, like nesting seabirds,
and at intervals cypresses striped the hill with black bars. Mountains whose sides were
flushed with red, but whose crowns were bald, rose as a pinnacle, half-concealing another
pinnacle behind it. The hour being still early, the whole view was exquisitely light and airy;
the blues and greens of sky and tree were intense but not sultry (VO 86). The objectiv-
ity of the landscape, when viewed by Mr. Pepper, immediately gained meaning with his
knowledge of the brutal colonial history. He imagined how three hundred years ago the
Elizabethan barques reached this virgin land and fought with the Spanish galleons who fi-
nally fell in heaps (87). All these pointed to the expansion of the British Empire through
violence. Here Woolf wrote about how the image of the native was spread from mouth to
mouth by the travelers; they declared that the natives were strangely beautiful, very big
in stature, dark, passionate, and quick to seize the knife (88). One of the main locales of
the story, Willoughby Vinraces villa, was built on the slope of the mountain, (88) which
was enabled exactly by the colonial powers freedom and autonomy in the colonized land.
His villa thus became a symbol of colonial powers imprint on the exotic landscape.
In both of the above instances, the landscapes in the orientalized countries were
viewed, imagined, judged and even inhabited by the imperial subjects. In the same novel
Orlando, however, a different way of landscape representation occurred, and together with
it, a seemingly reversed power structure. When Orlando left Constantinople in the com-
pany of a gipsy when he became a woman, a large part of landscape description followed
regarding the high ground outside Broussa (O 88).
There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She climbed the
mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of the streams. [] Then, look-
ing down, the red hyacinth, the purple iris wrought her to cry out in ecstasy at
the goodness, the beauty of nature; raising her eyes again, she beheld the eagle
roaring, and imagined its raptures and made them her own. Returning home,
she saluted each star, each peak, and each watch-fire as if they signalled to her
alone; and at last, when she flung herself upon her mat in the gipsies tent, she
could not help bursting out again, How good to eat! How good to eat! (89-90)
But it is exactly on the ejaculation of How good to eat! that Orlando and the gypsies
differ. Unlike Orlando, who was intoxicated by the beauty of nature, the gypsies regard
the love of nature as a disease, something abnormal. To show the cruelty of nature, the old
gypsy man showed her the fingers of his left hand, withered by the frost and his right
foot, crushed where a rock had fallen (90). This incident makes Orlando think about
whether nature is beautiful or cruel (91). In this section, Orlando is placed within a
group of gypsies and has to confront their otherness on a daily basis. On the other hand,
nevertheless, the gypsies are also confronted with Orlandos strange Englishness. Unlike
the previous section when Orlando sees the Russian princess otherness, in this section
Orlandos otherness is being viewed by the gypsies. Orlandos pride as an Englishman is
ridiculed and even sympathized upon. For the gypsies, England was a barbarous land
where people live in houses because they are too feeble and diseased to stand the open air
(89). When Orlando discloses with pride about the 365 bedrooms of her English home
and her ancestors greatness, the gypsies comforted her by saying that [t]hey would none
of them think the worse of her for that (92). While in the previous part the people in the
Orientalized other countries are silenced, their voice and points of view are introduced in
this part and form a contrast to the English values. Though Urmila Seshagiri rightly argues
that the novel [Orlando]s playful satires and chronological games do not destabilize the
myth of an originary, unified, and all-powerful white England, (142) Woolf s introduc-
tion of gypsys points of view does point to her conscious consideration of non-English
values. After all, her 1906 journal of Constantinople already showed such consciousness:
you also realised that life was not lived after the European pattern, that it was not even a
debased copy of Paris or Berlin or London (PA 348). I argue that by intentionally plac-
ing these two value systems together, especially by transferring Orlandos Englishness into
otherness in the gypsies eyes, Woolf was subverting the self-assumed positional superior-
ity of the imperial powers.
It is based on this consideration of the other points of view that Woolf made her
aesthetization of the other. As an English woman growing up in the Victorian age, Woolf
herself experienced the otherness her gender brought to her in various aspects of social
life, as she vigorously pointed out in many of her essays. This experience more or less
influenced her idea of the other. She criticizes any kind of cultural hegemony and the
dominance of a single perspective. Thus we can always find the presence of the other
perspectives in her writings. Sometimes she aestheticizes the other perspective as rejuve-
nating and enriching. A good example is her frequent use of Chinese eyes in her novels.
The landscape is generally understood as the combination of natural scenery and human
inventions like architecture, means of transportation, etc. Within this panorama, human
figures, though a necessary part, always lose their individuality and are zoomed out from
as with a digital camera to form a collective part of a single symbol. What the viewer sees
from them, at best, is their costume and appearance. What they wear and look like, to
the viewer, are nothing but symbols of their culture. It is in this sense that I will discuss
Woolf s frequent use of Chinese eyes as part of her exotic landscape writing. In Mrs.
Dalloway, Elizabeth Dalloway was described as dark; had Chinese eyes in a pale face; an
Oriental mystery (MD 137). In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe had little Chinese eyes
(TTL 21). Elizabeth, as the younger generation of the Dalloways in the novel, symbolizes
life, hope and future in the novel. Lily Briscoes creative energy is believed to be connected
to her Chinese eyes. What both characters indicate is a fresh point of view, something un-
conventional, which when integrated into the English self, may bring cultural and artistic
regeneration. Patricia Laurence remarks that, Lilys Chinese eyes suggest not the Empires
foraging glance toward the distant lands of China and India for trade and gain, but the
new aesthetic voyaging in the East during the modernist period. [] Lilys embodiment
of Chinese eyesWoolf s brilliant cultural, political, and aesthetic strokesuggests then
not only the incorporation of the Chinese aesthetic into the English artist, but also Eu-
ropean modernisms and now, our own questioning of our cultural and aesthetic place
or universality (10). Urmila Seshagiri also notes that [t]hrough Lilys little Chinese
eyes, the longstanding imperilist binaries (colonizer/colonized, white/not-white, civi-
lized/primitive) symbolized by tea, china, and the other material evidence of British rule
will lose their authority in the postwar world (154). So in both Elizabeth Dalloway and
Lily Briscoe, Woolf uses Chinese eyes to suggest a new mode of perception which may
subvert the Eurocentric discourse.
Edward Said said, I do not believe that authors are mechanically determined by
ideology, class, or economic history, but authors are, I also believe, very much in the his-
tory of their societies, shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience in
different measure (xxiv). The three levels of exotic landscape writing in Woolf s novels,
I argue, well illustrate such interaction between writers and the history of their societies.
In the first level, Woolf s reproduction of the Western views of the Orientalized other
shows how her writing was influenced by the western society of her time. In the other
two levels of exotic landscape writing, we see Woolf consciously consider and assume the
other points of view. By so doing, Woolf seems to prophesy a process of change in the
perception of Self and Other, the Occidental and the Oriental. Woolf was able to criticize
the empire from within, firstly because of her personal experience as a gendered other;
she felt herself both an insider (being a British citizen) and an outsider (being a woman).
Moreover, her marrying Leonard Woolf may have significantly strengthened her antipathy
to colonialism and imperialism, since Leonard Woolf was an ex-colonial administrator
who returned to England after seven years of civil service in Ceylon and became a vocal
socialist and opponent of the empire (Seshagiri 149). The Bloomsbury Group also con-
tributed to her positive consideration of other literatures and cultures, being themselves
the forerunners in promoting exotic art and culture in the metropolitan London. So just
like her suggestions for writers to have androgynous vision instead of sexist vision, Woolf
also seems to consent on cultural hybridity rather than cultural hegemony in her discus-
sion of the other. Thus, by writing about exotic landscapes, Woolf virtually built a bridge
to walk over in the willow pattern plate.
Works Cited
Ebbatson, Roger, and Ann Donahue. An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840-1920.
Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005.
Kearns, Diana. The Willow Pattern. World Collectors Net (WCN) Magazine Issue 32. <http://www.worldcol-
lectorsnet.com/magazine/issue32/iss32p5.html>. Accessed 14 May 2010.
Kupensky, Nicholas. Translating The obliquity of the Muscovitish temperament: Virginia Woolf from a Rus-
sian Point of View. Paper presented to The Seventeenth Annual International Conference on Virginia
Woolf, Oxford, Ohio, June 7-10, 2007.
Laurence, Patricia. Lily Briscoes Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 2003
Mitchell, Martin. Landscapes and Literature: A Look at the Early Twentieth Century Rural South. Journal of
Geography 97-4&5 (1998): 204-12.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1993.
Salter, Christopher L., and William J. Lloyd. Landscape in Literature. Resource Paper for College Geography, No.
76-3. Washington, D. C.: The Association of American Geographers, 1977.
Seshagiri, Urmila. Race and the Modernist Imagination. New York: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2: 1912-1918. Ed. Andrew AcNellie. London: Hogarth, 1987.
___. Jacobs Room. London:Triad Grafton Book, 1976.
___. Mrs. Dalloway. London: CRW Publishing Limited, 2003.
___. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909. Ed. Michael A. Leaska. London: Hogarth, 1990.
___. Orlando. London: Triad Grafton Book, 1977.
___. To the Lighthouse. London: Triad Panther Book, 1977.
___. The Voyage Out. London: Triad Grafton Book, 1978.
MINING WITH THE HEAD: VIRGINIA WOOLF, HENRY DAVID THOREAU,
AND EXPLORING THE SELF THROUGH NATURE
by Diana Royer
W
oolfs 1917 essay Thoreau conveys admiration for Thoreaus philosophy and way
of life at Walden Pond. Rather than join Transcendentalists in some cooperative
community, Thoreau chose to live in solitude with nature (134), with which
he had an affinity (138). His drive to simplify his life in the woods became a method of
intensification, a way of setting free the delicate and complicated machinery of the soul (135),
which led him to discover that most unsimple thing, ones self. Analyzing Thoreaus technique
in select passages of Walden and making connections to Woolfs technique in fictional passages
on nature demonstrates how each author uses nature philosophically to explore the self.
Part of the exploration and discovery for both Thoreau and Woolf is the capacity
to see ordinary things in a truly new manner, a capacity Woolf much admired in Henry
James. In a slightly negative 1908 review of Vernon Lees The Sentimental Traveler, Woolf
states that if you will open your mind to receive all impressions and force your imagina-
tion to track down the most fugitive of suggestions, something charming and valuable, be-
cause original, will be recorded. This is perhaps the course that any sensitive mind adopts
naturally, though it does not always go on to trace it out upon paper (The Sentimental
158). But what art is needed to give such perishable matter an enduring form! she ex-
claims (The Sentimental 158); Lee does not have this art, but Woolf credits James with
it. In a similar way, When we read Walden, she writes in her essay Thoreau, we have a
sense of beholding life through a very powerful magnifying glass. To walk, to eat, to cut up
logs [. . .] all these occupations when scraped clean and felt afresh prove wonderfully large
and bright. The common things are so strange, the visual sensations so astonishing that,
after experiencing them alone in nature, one could not imagine living life with the herd
and following social habits (135). Woolf admired that Thoreau enacted his philosophy of
life with little care for what society thought. Similarly, Kitty Lasswade in The Years (1937)
and Susan in The Waves (1931) have fresh encounters with nature that form or reinforce
their sense of self as distinct from a social being, as we shall see shortly.
Woolf observes, Thoreau himself was an extremely complex human being, and he
certainly did not achieve simplicity by living for two years in a hut and cooking his own
dinner. His achievement was rather to lay bare what was within himto let life take its
own way unfettered by artificial constraints (Thoreau 135). As Thoreau put it in the
chapter of Walden titled Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, I went to the woods
because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I
could not learn what it had to teach (1766). Fully experiencing dawn and the morning
are his primary means for doing this, and thus springboards for his philosophy. Every
morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say in-
nocence, with Nature herself, he declares (1765), and ruminates on how in the morning
for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and
night (1765). This awakening should be accompanied by the undulations of celestial
Mining with the Head 181
music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air (1765). In such a setting,
To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a
perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors
of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform
is the effort to throw off sleep. [. . .] The millions are awake enough for physical
labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exer-
tion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is
to be alive. [. . .] We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by
mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn. (1765)
Here Thoreau is calling for heightened awareness and thinking throughout ones life, contin-
ually viewing things freshly and actively. He rejects clocks, factory labor and mechanical aids
and embraces the movement of the sun, intellectual exertion and reawakening to Nature.
A passage that expresses Thoreaus Transcendentalist philosophy quite effectively is
the one that closes Where I Lived, and What I Lived For:
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see
the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but
eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly
with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have
always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is
a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be
any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel
all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an
organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with
it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest
vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I
judge; and here I will begin to mine. (1770)
In this passage Thoreau demonstrates how intuition allows you to penetrate naturein
this case, the flowing streamto escape time and place, to transcend the real and sense
the ideal (those pebbly stars). Burrowing with his intellect, mining with his head, Thoreau
explores nature to gain knowledge of himself and humanity.
To return to Woolf s essay on Thoreau, she finds all of his books to be packed with
subtle, conflicting, and very fruitful discoveries and uses the quite apt metaphor of an In-
dian marking his path through a forest by turning down twigs (Thoreau 136). Thoreau
too leaves signs for those who come after, should they care to see which way he went,
but following is not easy for the reader: We can never lull our attention asleep in reading
Thoreau by the certainty that we have now grasped his theme and can trust our guide to be
consistent. We must always be ready to try something fresh; we must always be prepared
for the shock of facing one of those thoughts in the original which we have known all our
lives in reproductions (Thoreau 136). Of course, this describes how one must be an at-
tentive reader of Woolf s work as well, be prepared for her original expression of thoughts.
Sometimes, what Woolfs characters discover when becoming introspective over nature
is that it can make one feel insignificant and connected with humanity in a necessarily
unsatisfactory way. In To The Lighthouse (1927), when Nancy wishes to retreat to her attic
after lunch to escape the horror of family life (112), Minta draws her into joining others
on a beach excursion. On the beach, she and Andrew separate from Minta and Paul, and
then from each other. Nancy crouches down over a tidal pool, looking closely at minnows
and imaginatively transforming this microcosm of sea life into the macrocosm of the entire
ocean, over which she has God-like powers to withhold sunlight or let it shine. But once
her eyes wander to the seas horizon, she becomes hypnotized, and the two senses of that
vastness [of the ocean] and this tininess [of the tidal pool] [. . .] flowering within it made
her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings
which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for
ever, to nothingness. So listening to the waves, crouching over the pool, she brooded (TTL
115). Shortly after when Minta is crying over having lost her grandmothers brooch, Nancy
feels she wasnt crying only for that. She was crying for something else. We might all sit
down and cry, she felt. But she did not know what for (TTL 117). In The Singing of the
Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolfs Fiction, Mark Hussey uses the tidal pool scene
to make certain correlations between Woolfs view of the human situation and Pascals: all
human beings [are] reduced to nothingness when set against infinity (102). To understand
the human situation, says Pascal, is to despair (102). The difference between the two is
that for Pascal, to escape from this despair we must pass to knowledge of God (102). This
doesnt happen in Woolf, and so Nancy broods, feels we might all sit down and cry.
A happier outcome occurs when Kitty Lasswade of The Years revels in leaving London
after her party and arriving the next morning at her country estate, which is surrounded by
the green of nature. As she views it, she hears a bee buzz, the river murmur, pigeons crooning;
she closely observes a butterfly on a leaf. She thinks of the other party guests sleeping back in
London, is pleased to be here alone, and goes out for a walk on the grounds. She moves from
the tailored lawn and flowerbeds, pauses on the rivers bridge to watch and listen to it. Leav-
ing the more cultivated portion of the grounds and entering the woods, she observes spring
flowers, moss, the thinning trees as she climbs higher. All passes, all changes, she thought [. .
.]. Nothing of this belonged to her; her son would inherit; his wife would walk here after her
(TY 277). Yet this is not a disturbing thought to Kitty; rather, she feels joined with nature in
the most elemental and universal way. As she arrives at the top of the hill and looks at the coun-
tryside spreading out around her, Her body seemed to shrink; her eyes to widen (TY 277).
Uncultivated, uninhabited, existing by itself, for itself, without towns or houses it looked from
this height. [. . .] A deep murmur sang in her earsthe land itself, singing to itself, a chorus,
alone. She lay there listening, She was happy, completely. Time had ceased (TY 278). This
scene connects nicely to the aforementioned closing passage of Where I Lived, And What I
Lived For in Thoreaus and Kittys having stepped outside time and the material, social world
to be absorbed in and by nature, learning from it, gaining happiness from it.
Susan in The Waves is also very connected with nature. In her soliloquy when she is
almost twenty years old, she goes outside in early morning and observes,
At this hour, this still early hour, I think I am the field, I am the barn, I am the
trees; mine are the flocks of birds, and this young hare who leaps, at the last mo-
ment when I step almost on him. Mine is the heron that stretches its vast wings
Mining with the Head 183
lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes one foot before another munching;
and the wild, swooping swallow; and the faint red in the sky, and the green when
the red fades; the silence and the bell; the call of the man fetching cart-horses
from the fieldsall are mine. (TW 65-66)
She feels that she cant be divided, or kept apart from this environment (TW 66); she re-
flects on how she hated being sent to school in Switzerland, hated the fir trees and moun-
tains of that landscape and embraces her fathers farm rather literally: Let me now fling
myself on this flat ground under a pale sky where the clouds pace slowly (TW 66). Rather
like Thoreau, Susan reflects on her solitude: I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or
mix with other people (TW 66); instead, she embodies nature: I think sometimes [. . .]
I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons,
I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn (TW 66). She
sees herself as a natural inhabitant of this land: I return, like a cat or fox returning, whose
fur is grey with rime, whose pads are hardened by the coarse earth (TW 67).
In midlife, Susan, appropriately married to a farmer, reflects, In this hot afternoon
[. . .] here in this garden, here in this field where I walk with my son, I have reached the
summit of my desires (TW 128). Yet she sometimes feels sick of natural happiness, and
fruit growing (TE 129). But for the most part, she concludes, I walk content with my
sons. I cut the dead petals from hollyhocks. Rather squat, grey before my time, but with
clear eyes, pear-shaped eyes, I pace my fields (TW 130). Woolf had written in her essay
Thoreau, At times he seems to reach beyond our human powers in what he perceives
upon the horizon of humanity (138). I find that The Waves, with its six distinct voices
representing different human experiences and its beautiful interlude passages about the
sun on the sea, shows Woolf s heightened perception of humanity.
The final lines of Walden are, Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There
is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star (Thoreau 1889). Woolf observes,
However much Thoreau had been able to do, he would still have seen possibilities be-
yond; he would always have remained in one sense, unsatisfied. That is one of the reasons
why he is able to be the companion of a younger generation (Thoreau 138). I believe a
similar sense of unsatisfaction drove Woolf to continue her explorations as well, using her
head to mine nature and have her characters explore their selves through it. Like Thoreau,
this makes her an equally suitable companion for a younger generation of readers.
Works Cited
Hussey, Mark. The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf s Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1. 4th ed. Ed. Nina Baym, et
al. New York: Norton, 1994. 1719-1889.
Woolf, Virginia. The Sentimental Traveler. The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San
Diego: Harcourt Brace Yovanovich, 1986. 157-59.
. Thoreau. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Yova-
novich, 1987. 132-40.
. The Waves. London: Grafton Books, 1987.
. The Years. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965.
. To The Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955.
VIRGINIA WOOLF AS MOUNTAINEER
By Catherine W. Hollis
THE REAL PROBLEM IS TO CLIMB TO THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN. WHY, IF THAT IS NOT
[IT], HAVE WE THE DESIRE? WHO GAVE IT US? (Virginia Woolf, The Symbol)
I
n order to explain what I mean by calling Virginia Woolf a mountaineer, Id like to
start by reading from an essay called A Tent of Her Own, originally published in
1982 in the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin:
Virginia Woolf s recommendations for a womans intellectual and creative sur-

vival in the modern world (a room and money of ones own) are too modest for
me; there must also be an internal frame backpack with ski-slot/wand pockets,
loops for ice hammer and axe, as well as leather accessory patches for crampons
and carabiners. [] I have been to Outward Bound and I have visionsso
you must believe me when I say I have seen Virginia Woolf snowshoeing in
Maine, face climbing El Capitan. Yes, Bloomsbury Ginny on cross-country skis,
telemarking the Haute Route [], Virginia, rampant with backpack and tent,
leav[ing] the protection of Leonards killing kindness and launch[ing] her career
with the clear-headed anger of Three Guineas rather than ending it in desper-
ate fear, a woman alone, a suicide. (A Tent 6)
In other words, the authormy motherhas a rescue fantasy about Virginia Woolf and
proposes that had Woolf taken up mountaineering, as her fatherLeslie Stephenhad
done, she would have lived a longer, happier, and healthier life. This is the psychobio-
graphical germ of my own work on Leslie Stephen as Mountaineer, fresh off the presses
from Cecil Woolf this month. While I wont be talking very much about Leslie Stephens
mountaineering today, if you are interested in the scope and variety of his Alpine climbs,
Id direct you to the appendix of my monograph, which contains a Climbing Resum
listing all the mountains, including first ascents, that Stephen climbed in the 25 trips
he made to the Alps over a lifetime (LS 5760). This project of mine has grown to en-
compass both biographical scholarship and empirical practice, as though by climbing in
Leslie Stephens footsteps in the Alps, I am also thinking back through my mothers flight
into the wildernessand her desire to take Virginia Woolf with her. Today, Id like to try
and convince you that my mothers vision of Virginia Woolf as a mountaineer is not as
unlikely a scenario as it might first appear. I will do this primarily through a reading of
Woolf s late short story The Symbol (1941) which, through its attention to the problem
of accurately describing a mountain, represents a return to Stephens Alpine legacy.1
On the face of it, the Bloomsbury Group was spectacularly uninterested in the ath-
letic fraternity of British Alpinism. While Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant worshipped
the Apollonian beauty of George Mallory, their younger Cambridge friend who would
attempt to climb Mt. Everest three times before perishing on the mountain in 1924,
Virginia Woolf as Mountaineer 185
Strachey found the culture of mountaineering simply absurd and regretted the effect of
Alpinism on Mallorys looks (Lunn 67, Holroyd 213). Oxford historian and mountain-
eer Arnold Lunn describes being invited to lunch with Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell
and eagerly questioning them about their fathers Alpine achievements only to be met
with ironic bemusement: my uncritical reverence for Leslie Stephen meant, he says, that
lunch was not a great success (Lunn 67). Nonetheless, theres an echo of George Mal-
lory in Mrs. Dalloway, when Peter Walsh muses that the future of civilization rests in the
hands of the idealistic scholar-athletes who get books sent out to them all the way from
London to a peak in the Himalayas (50), and perhaps also in Percival, that golden young
man in The Waves whose death in India ripples back through the friends who survive him.
On some level, Woolf was already picking up on the culture of mountaineering that she
became more attuned to in the final decade of her life.2
Herbert Marder observes that two familiar metaphors for death pervade Woolf s writ-
ing, drowning and falling, and notes Woolf s increasing interest in mountains throughout
the 1930s; he argues that altitude represents death in Woolf because it symbolizes a sever-
ance of human connection, as in Woolf s essay Flying Over London (Marder 139). We
can see this association in a diary entry from 1937 when Woolf considers writing a dream
story about the top of a mountain. Now why? About lying in the snow; about rings of
colour; silence& the solitude (D5: 95). Woolf appears to have begun to brood on the
idea of death on a mountain during a Sussex heat wave in 1930, when her own sun-stroke
coincided with the news that an acquaintance, Victor OConnor, an Eton schoolmaster
and tutor to the Nicolson children, had died with his fiance Mary Irving in a climbing
accident in the Alps. In her diary, Woolf dwells on the distance between herself in the
heat-stricken countryside and the frozen lovers on the mountain: there are the two bod-
ies for ever. I suppose some ice drips, or shifts: the light is blue, green; or wholly black;
nothing stirs around them. Frozen, near together, in their tweeds and hobnail boots there
they lie (D3: 314). Woolf s I suppose indicates the imaginative effort necessary to
envision a glacier, something she has never seen for herself, and which here takes on the
post-impressionist coloration of her early short stories. But this is hardly a solitary death:
these lovers lie near together, married to the mountain and each other in their hobnail
boots. Indeed, I would argue that Woolf s imaginative flight to the mountain glacier is
predicated on relationship, not severance, and that her increasing attraction in the 1930s
to what she calls my mountain topthat persistent vision represents movement towards
a new understanding of her father.
Two years after OConnor and Irvings climbing accident, in 1932, the centenary of
Leslie Stephens birth, Woolf wrote an essay about her father for The Times that was later
published in The Captains Death Bed. The essay opens by gesturing towards the biographi-
cal gulf between Stephens mountaineering achievements and his family: By the time his
children were growing up the great days of my fathers life were over. His feats on the river
and on the mountains had been won before they were born leaving only the relics of an
alpenstock and a silver cup behind (69). Its only now, Woolf tells us, that she recognizes
that link between poetry and athleticism in her fathers character: the act of walking or
climbing seemed to inspire him to recite whichever it was that came uppermost or suited
his mood (70). Its a crucial insight, and one that shed previously captured through
Mr. Ramsays pacing and recitation of Tennyson. By 1933, when Vanessa and Quentin
Bell flew in an airplane from London to Geneva, Woolf s interest in the Alps was further
piqued, and she writes to Quentin in his Swiss sanatorium:
She says our ancestral mountains [the Alps] rather appeal to hershe begins to
feel what father feltnoble, solitary, severe. I must come and see them. Do tell
me what you think of them. I daresay they change in the dawn and sunset: and
one gets to think them more beautiful than any other earth scape. (L5: 244)
That mountains change their appearance at dawn and at sunset, and further that moun-
tains appear differently to the climber at the summit and the watcher in the valley is the
cornerstone of Leslie Stephens mountain philosophy, as contained in his essay Sunset on
Mont Blanc, which we can assume Woolf readout of curiosity, if nothing elseafter
noting in her 1932 essay on Stephen that Sunset was in his opinion the best thing he
ever wrote (70). Woolf s comment to Quentin mirrors Leslie Stephens Alpine empiricism;
which is to say that time and again in The Playground of Europe (1871, 1894) he encourages
his readers to come and see the Alps for themselves, his invitation to readers being to put
down the book and take to the hills. This emphasis on seeing for oneself in Stephen is at
least in part an expression of the insufficiency of language to capture the changing appear-
ance of the the dawn and sunset on the mountain, or, as he says at the end Sunset on
Mont Blanc: the easiest way of obtaining the impression is to follow in my steps (268).
When Virginia Woolf turned to the composition of her story, The Symbol, in the
winter of 1941, her fathers footsteps led her towards her own vision of those ancestral
mountains. As one of the last pieces of fiction she worked on (the typescript is dated 1
March 1941), The Symbol is clearly freighted with mortality, yet it is also an attempt,
however inconclusive (an early title was Inconclusions), to confront directly her fathers
Alpine heritage. The woman in the story is a British tourist in a Swiss village, writing a
letter to her sister in Birmingham from the balcony of her hotel, who while observing a
mountain through her binoculars, struggles to finish the sentence fragment, the mountain
is a symbol (282). Ultimately, she witnesses a rope teams plunge into a crevasse high
on the mountain, but her sentence remains unfinished. A network of fact undergirds this
story: the Alpine village in question is modeled on Zermatt, and the mountain itself on the
Matterhorn (a mountain Leslie Stephen never actually climbed); further, the proprietor of
the narrators hotel is Herr Melchior, a direct reference, as Lyndall Gordon first noted, to
Leslie Stephens lifelong friend and mountain guide, Melchior Anderegg (Dick 305). The
narrators comment on the history of the mountain (in the forties of the last century two
men, in the sixties four men had perished; the first party when the rope broke; the second
when night fell and froze them to death [2823]) evokes the most infamous mountain-
eering accident in Victorian times, when on 14 July 1865, a British team led by Edward
Whymper successfully climbed the Matterhorn for the first time, only to face tragic loss on
the descent when a rope broke and four climbers perished.3 Woolf s narrator (or doppel-
ganger?), a woman puzzling about the significance of a mountain, reveals a familiarity with
the Victorian culture of mountaineering that Leslie Stephen was a part of.
Evoking the Victorian fascination with mountains as spectacle, The Symbol focuses
its lens on the question of perspective: how ones impression of the mountain changes de-
pending on whether one looks at it through glasses or the naked eye, from the valley below
or from the peak above.4 Throughout the story, impressions of the mountains appearance
proliferate: somehow the talk [] is always about the mountain. Either, how clear it is
today, it might be across the street; or, how far away it looks; it might be a cloud (284). In
fact, The Symbol opens with an apparently close-up view of the mountain summit:
There was a little dent on the top of the mountain like a crater on the moon. It
was filled with snow, iridescent like a pigeons breast, or dead white. There was a
scurry of dry particles now and again, covering nothing. [] the snow was iri-
descent one moment; and blood red; and pure white, according to the day. (282)
This view of the summit is possible for the main character through the visual technology
of binoculars: she could see the topmost height through her glasses. She focused the lens,
as if to see what the symbol was (282). Although the technology helps bridge the visual
distance between the observer below and the mountain above, it does not help her com-
plete her thought. The sentence fragment in the womans letter, the mountain is a sym-
bol, suggests the spatial and conceptual distance between the observer and observed,
the woman and the mountain. Leslie Stephen wrote about a similar dynamic in The Re-
grets of a Mountaineer: he speaks of the frustration of being confined to the valley floor
in terms of desire, perception, and distance: I wander at the foot of the gigantic Alps,
and look up longingly to the summits, which are so apparently near, and yet know that
they are divided from me by an impassible gulf (PE 305). In Woolf s story, the repetition
of ellipsis represents the impassible gulf between the woman and the mountain as well as
her desire to bridge it, which she attempts to do through her glasses and through figura-
tive language (the summit is like a crater on the moon, the snow iridescent like a pigeons
breast). But it will take more than focusing her lens to help bring the letter writer into
relationship with the mountain.
Leslie Stephen had his suspicions about the use of figurative language in the descrip-
tion of mountains, when writers attempt to convert [mountains] into allegories about
mans highest destinations and aspirations (PE 308); he was more challenged by the
epistemological problem of mountains, by the attempt to see the mountain in itself as
it really is. He took pains to point out the endemic of misperceptions and inaccuracies
that Alpine tourists, like Woolf s character, were subject to in the observations they made
of the mountain from its base: Nothing is more common than for tourists to mistake
some huge pinnacle of rock, as big as a church tower, for a traveler (PE 316). Partly the
problem is that, as Stephen tells it, a bare statement of figuresMont Blanc is 15, 782
feet highgives little for a mind to seize upon: the bare tens and thousands must be
clothed with some concrete images (PE 315). The solution, for Stephen, relies on train-
ing the eye, the disproportion ceases to an eye that has learnt really to measure distance
(PE 316). And the eye is only trained to measure the mountain through the activity
of climbing it: no one can decipher the natural writing on the face of a snow-slope or a
precipice who has not wandered amongst their recesses (PE 319).
Observing the mountain through her glasses, immobile on her balcony deck, Woolf s
narrator grows increasingly frustrated by the mountains propensity to change shape, I
could shriek sometimes [] always to see that mountain (283). Her attempt to say what
the mountain is a symbol of is thwarted by its ability to constantly change its appearance.
How can she get a fix on something at once so overwhelmingly solid in fact and annoy-
ingly fluid in appearance? The mountain needs to be measured against a human context,
as when the woman nods to a group of mountaineers in the street, making ready to
start (282). One of the climbers is a tangential connection (his Aunt was mistress of her
daughters school [282]) evoking Woolf s acquaintance with the tutor Victor OConnor.
As the climbers make their way up the mountain, the woman narrates their progress to
her sister: as I write these words, I can see the young men quite plainly on the slope of the
mountain. They are roped together. One I think I told you was at the same school with
Margaret. The letter-writers assumption that she can see the young men quite plainly
on the slopes of the mountain is an example of one of those perceptual inaccuracies that
so distressed Leslie Stephen, who describes a similar scenario with these words: I lately
watched through a telescope the small black dots, which were really men, creeping up the
high flanks of Mont Blanc (PE 305). But the appearance of the climbers as small black
dots in Stephens essay actually mimics the penultimate ellipsis in Woolf s story: They
are now crossing a crevasse The pen fell from her hand, and the drop of ink straggled in
a zig zag line down the page. The young men had disappeared (284). Representing the
disaster visually (Briggs 187), the ellipses mimicks the crevasse, a gulf that the climbers
fail to cross. Woolf the writer is cannier than her narrator concerning her usage of the ap-
pearance of the black dots on the page and on the mountain.
To observe a death through glasses, the immeasurably far brought unspeakably
close, is to be confronted by the horror of ones own immobility and impotence in the
face of mortality. Julia Briggs brief reading of this story emphasizes its thematic con-
nections between writing, desire, and death: Briggs observes how the inexpressible vi-
sion of the climbers death in a crevasse is represented materially both by an ellipsis in
Woolf s text and a blot of ink in the womans letter home (187). Briggs also notices that
the letter writer associates the mountain with a parental death, and with an almost un-
speakable desire for freedom from that parent (a mother with cancer in the story): the
mountain just now reminded me how when I was alone, I would fix my eyes upon her
death, as a symbol. [] I thought, when I reach that point I have never told anyone;
for it seemed so heartless; I shall be at the top (283). The characters mixed and guilty
feeling is evident in the dashes and semi-colons stuttering the expression of this forbid-
den wish, while the unspeakable desire for freedom is figured as attaining a mountain
summit. In Briggs argument, this is primarily a story about the unspeakability of death
(as paralleled through the womans struggle to say exactly what the mountain is a sym-
bol of ), with the manifest image of the climbers fall masking the latent content about a
parental death. To extend this line of thought, Id suggest that the characters association
of the mountain-top with parental death, and the guilty desire for freedom on the part
of a writer-daughter, points to the more fraught emotional content of Woolf s return
to her fathers Alpine legacy.5 We can read the mother in the story as a transposition for
Leslie Stephen, who also died from cancer and of whom Woolf famously said his life
would have entirely ended mine (D3: 208). If this sounds morbid, we should recall
that Woolf herself was in a deepening depression when she wrote this story; and as
Octavia Wilberforce, the psychiatrist who spoke with Woolf in her last months, noted
in a letter dated March 28, 1941, after shed received news of Woolf s suicide, She was
desperate and scaredand, my belief is, haunted by her father (Marder 360). I think
its fair to say that The Symbol is both emotionally and intellectually haunted by the
presence of Leslie Stephen.
But The Symbol also marks a return to Leslie Stephens intellectual and athletic
legacy, and in this, it suggests a more productive inheritance. If The Symbol pres-
ents the mountain as an unsolvable problem, a crevasse that cannot be crossed, it also
contains the germ of a solution to that perceptual knot. Although much of the text
structures the conceptual problem as the struggle to say what the mountain is a symbol
of, one of its cancelled lines presents the challenge differently: the real problem is to
climb to the top of the mountain. Why, if that is not it, have we the desire? Who gave
it us? (306). Climbing the mountain, actually physically ascending it, is a solution
to the problem of saying what the mountain is drawn straight from the pages of The
Playground of Europe. The problem in this story is that while the mountain is constantly
changing its appearance, the letter writer is static, unmoving, leading to her frustration:
I could shriek sometimes [] always to see that mountain. By contrast, the moun-
taineer is a mobile observer, not a passive one, and gathers impressions of the mountain
from its base, its flanks, and its summit: the climbers range of perception allows for a
more accurate measurement of the mountain than the tourist down below can hope to
obtain. Woolf actually develops this solution herself in another late short story, The
Searchlight. In that story, a character uses a telescope to bridge the distance between
his current position and what he desires: when he sees, through his glass, a woman kiss-
ing a man, he drops the binoculars and rushes to her house, eventually marrying her.
Here, physical activity trumps visual passivity. I would propose then that the solution
to the problem of The Symbol involves the journey of climbing the mountain, step
by step, converting the mountain into units of bodily effort understandable to the hu-
man mind. Achieving the summit after such
a climb would feel very different than merely
observing the summit through the artifice
of binoculars, which in The Symbol can
only be associated with the ultimate stasis of
death, I think if I could get there, I should
be happy to die (306).
I would therefore wager that since we
only have The Symbol in draft form, it is
not only inconclusive, but also incomplete.
And so I want to leave you with my own ver-
sion of a rescue fantasy in the form of a hap-
pier ending to this story. What happens next
is this: after seeing the rope teams plunge
into the crevasse, the letter writer rushes
into the street to join the search party, rent-
ing boots and crampons, and hiring a guide
knowledgeable in mountain craft to keep her
safe in her climb. As she climbs, she begins
to learn what the mountain is in relation to The Matterhorn seen from Zermatt, August 2007
(photo by author)
her own body, to those units of muscular
exertion that Leslie Stephen recommended as the pathway towards knowledge of the
mountain (PE 317). When she reaches the summit, she discovers what Stephen knew:
that, as he says, to lie on the summit of a new and first-rate pass is a pleasure, which,
in the nature of things, can be but rarely enjoyed (PE 186). Not death at all, but life
itself. We can only speculate that had Virginia Woolf taken up mountain climbing,
she would have found in the activity what her father did: mental and physical vitality,
friendship, and pleasure.
Notes
1. Here I follow Ann Banfield in positing that the theory of knowledge Woolf develops in her own writing,
particularly her interest in the relationship between matter and mind, at least partially emerges from her
exposure to the British empirical philosophy espoused by her father and developed by Bertrand Russell and
G.E. Moore (1, 38).
2. One of Virginia Stephens suitors, Hilton Youngwho unsuccessfully proposed to her in 1909was the
brother of mountaineer Geoffrey Winthrop Young, a climbing mentor to Mallory and friend to John
Maynard Keynes (Hall 139).
3. The narrators description of the graves in the churchyard (282) of fallen climbers suggests the English
Church in Zermatt, where the body of Rev. Charles Hudson lies interred under the altar (Hudson was
one of the men who died in the 1865 Matterhorn accident, and had been a frequent climbing partner of
Stephens).
4. Ann C. Colleys forthcoming book examines the intersection of technology and theatricality in the Victo-
rian attraction to mountains as spectacle.
5. In the holograph cancellations, the speaker specifically regrets a wasted youth caretaking the ill parent
and contextualizes it against her present desire to master the height and confront her own mortality.
The peak represents something, the narrator says, that remained almost unspeakable even to herself
(305).
Works Cited
Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge
Briggs, Julia. Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Colley, Ann C. Victorians in the Mountains. London: Ashgate, 2010.
Hall, Sarah M. Before Leonard: The Early Suitors of Virginia Woolf. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2006.
Hollis, Catherine W. Leslie Stephen as Mountaineer. London: Cecil Woolf Publishers, 2010.
Hollis, Val Ward. A Tent of Ones Own. Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin (Summer 1982): 6 7.
Holroyd, Michael. Lytton Strachey: The New Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
Lunn, Arnold. A Century of Mountaineering 1857 1957. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1957.
Marder, Herbert. The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf s Last Years. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
2000.
Stephen, Leslie. The Playground of Europe, 2nd ed. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894.
Woolf, Virginia. Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. 5 Vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1979 1984.
. Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 Vols. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1975 1980.
. Leslie Stephen. The Captains Death Bed. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1950.
. Mrs. Dalloway (1925). New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1953.
. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
IT WAS AN UNCERTAIN SPRING: READING THE WEATHER IN
THE YEARS
by Verita Sriratana
INTRODUCTION: THE WEATHER AND VIRGINIA WOOLF
T
he abounding weather descriptions which distinguish The Years from Virginia Woolfs
other works were, according to Grace Radin, added spontaneously as a final touch:
the passages describing the weather and setting the scene that begin each chapter and
that separate scenes within chapters were not added to the novel until the final months before
publication (xxii). The reason why the weather was inserted at the books final stage, I propose,
might be that Woolf resorted to the weather as an alternative solution to what she perceived
as the novels main problem: extremely abrupt and incoherent transition between scenes. She
articulated what she thought was problematic in her work on Monday 16 March 1936: I
think the change of scene is whats so exhausting: the catching people plumb in the middle:
then jerking off. Every beginning seems lifeless & them I have to retype (D5: 17).
Descriptions of seasonal cycle can produce paradoxical effects. On the one hand,
it portrays an ever-changing world and helps us imagine time in terms of space: streets,
pathways, and backyard gardens covered with snow in winter and filled with dry leaves
in autumn. On the other hand, however, the idea of a constant cycle situates the ever-
changing world in a fixed temporal pattern. Winter is believed, as a fact, to be followed by
spring and summer by autumn. This paradoxical union, of course, does not run smoothly
and might be the reason Woolf perceived the book as a complete failure (D5: 17), the
kind of failure which, she complained in a letter to Elizabeth Bowen on Sunday 23 Febru-
ary 1936, might better be dropped into the waste paper basket (L6: 16). Woolf s sense
of failure might be an inevitable result of the weathers uncertainty or, in other words,
its Janus-faced ambivalence. The weathers insertion in The Years is paradoxical from the
start, and so is the impact it produces.
AGAINST ONES FORECAST1: THE ELUSIVE WEATHER
The first director of the Meteorological Office was the then Admiral Robert Fitzroy
(1805-1865), who in his early career had been the captain of HMS Beagle as well as the
second governor of New Zealand. After his retirement in 1851, he was appointed as head
of the Meteorological Statist to the Board of Trade, established in 1854. Fitzroy was fully
aware of the impact of mass media and the significant ways in which mass observation
could contribute to the accuracy of weather prediction. Telegraphs and publications were
then used to spread information accumulated from the offices forecasting. He famously
coined the term forecast (88) in his 1863 The Weather Book, which was written as a
manual for amateur weather observers. It is in this book that Fitzroys intention to de-
mocratize the weather can be seen: The means actually requisite to enable any person of
fair abilities and average education to become practically weather-wise; are much more
readily attainable than has been often supposed (B). Despite the many attempts to chart
and contain the weather in an exact pattern, it is true that we can never be certain about
the climactic condition in the next instant or in the future. Fitzroy himself was also aware
of the weathers elusive nature. Meteorology, he wrote, never can be an exact science, like
Astronomy, because its elements are incessantly changing, in nature as well as quantity ; but
it does not therefore require a merely superficial degree of attention (vii-viii). It is this very
ambivalence in the weather that The Years demonstrates.
The weathers transformative power and impact on place can be seen in the novels
Oxford section of 1880. It has been raining when young Kitty Malone, cousin of the Par-
giters, makes her way to Miss Craddocks home among the cheap red villas (61) for her
history lessons. Afterwards, she goes to tea with Mr. Robson, a blue-collar academic from
Yorkshire, and his family. She has been looking at a landscape painting of the Yorkshire
moor and feels that the artwork itself brings out Mr. Robsons regional identity: In look-
ing at the picture he had increased his accent (68). The following excerpt depicts the trail
she takes back home to the Lodge where her father, an Oxford Don, sits working on the
history of the college. The rain has stopped earlier:
As she stood still for a second at a crossing she too seemed to be tossed aloft
out of her usual surroundings. She forgot where she was She could almost
see the moors brighten and darken as the clouds pass over them. But then in
two strides the unfamiliar street became the street she had always knownand
next moment she was out in the famous crooked street with all the domes and
steeples. (71)
In the same way that the oil painting has ignited both Mr. Robson and Kittys imagina-
tion of Yorkshire, the weather has physically contributed to the metamorphosis of Oxfords
scenery. The sight of a glistening pavement and flowers on it leads Kitty to conjure up her
abstract version of Yorkshire and its moor in the middle of stern concrete domes and spires,
her usual surroundings. Although her vision of Yorkshire appears only in a short while, it
has a haunting effect. Woolfs rainbow is suddenly juxtaposed with the granite as Kitty
turns the corner and finds herself in a familiar street. The changing weather as well as the
switch from vision to reality gives her the status of an outsider possessing a mind which has
just travelled to a place other than this mundane university town:
The usual undergraduate in cap and gown with books under his arm looked silly.
And the portentous old men with their exaggerated features, looked like gar-
goyles, carved, mediaeval, unreal. They were all like people dressed up and acting
parts, she thought. Now she stood at her own door and waited for Hiscock, the
butler, to take his feet off the fender and waddle upstairs. Why cant you talk like
a human being? She thought, as he took her umbrella and mumbled his usual
remark about the weather. (72)
The weather as technology of place2 encourages her to defamiliarize herself from her com-
fort zone and question social norms and traditions, such as Oxfords gown-wearing ritual
and rigid hierarchy system. According to Homi K. Bhabha, the moment when one, like
It was an Uncertain Spring 193
Kitty, becomes the other within oneself or feels unhomely3 in a place that is supposed to
be ones own home is called the moment of discursive transparency (155). He explains
that the moment when one is able to see into the discursive transparency is the mo-
ment when, under the false appearance of the present, the semantic seems to prevail over
the syntactic, the signified over the signifier (155). The countryside of Yorkshire is, for
Kitty, an other place where the Robsons would, she imagines, speak and live differently
from what they are compelled to do at present. By positioning herself as the unhomely
outsider within the body or parameter of an insider, the daughter of an Oxford profes-
sor, Kitty comes to challenge the signifier or the faade and fixity of places and power
discourses. She realizes that had Hiscock, the butler, been placed or stationed somewhere
else, his ways of speaking and behaving would have been different. It is social class systems
that divide them. It is social norms that make his weather remarks sound most unnatural
to her ears. The ambivalent weather, therefore, unbolts a new possibility of seeing and
understanding society as a physical and as a discursive construct.
I CAN WADE GRIEF4: THE REVOLUTIONARY WEATHER
The weather is portrayed in the novel as having the power to unite people in an imag-
ined community. At the same time, its ambivalence can also shatter the illusion of that
very sense of community. For the subaltern or the socially marginalized people, in par-
ticular, the weather is there to emphasize their seclusion from mainstream society. In other
words, it highlights a social paradigm which builds itself upon class, status, gender, and
racial segregation. An example can be seen when Crosby, after moving out from Abercorn
Terrace, comes to pick up Martins laundry. After dismissing her by lying that he has had
a previous engagement, Martin watches her walk away from his window: She stood for
a moment, like a frightened little animal, peering round her before she ventured to brave
the dangers of the street. At last, off she trotted. He saw the snow falling on her black bon-
net as she disappeared. He turned away (212). On the surface, it can be said that Crosby
has finally been liberated from class and domestic constraints. It seems that she is now
able to live a life of her own. However, the weather description in the extract reveals the
opposite. Crosby, depicted as a little animal, feels ever more frightened and alienated.
Her black bonnet juxtaposes with the whiteness which surrounds her. This extreme color
contrast emphasizes that she is forever the unwanted other whose presence agitates even
the most intimate people in her life like Martin.
In the 1918 section, five years after her eviction from Abercorn Terrace and her
meeting with Martin, Crosby reappears as a frail old woman: She looked so small and
hunched that it seemed doubtful if she could make her way across the wide open space,
shrouded in white mist (287). Her new liberated life proves to be repeating the same
old story of servitude. Louisa Burt, the landlady, has ordered her to clean the bath of a
count, who is one of her fellow lodgers. Here, the opaque veil of mist (287) has allowed
Crosby an opportunity to express her frustrations:
It was not actually raining, but the great open space was full of mist; and there
was nobody near, so that she could talk aloud.
Dirty brute, she muttered again. She had got into the habit of talking
aloud. There was nobody in sight; the end of the path was lost in mist. It was
very silent... Her face twitched as she walked, as if her muscles had got into the
habit of protesting, involuntarily, against the spires and obstacles that tormented
her ()
The dirty brute, she muttered again. She had had some words that morn-
ing with Mrs Burt about the Counts bath. He spat in it, and Mrs Burt had told
her to clean it.
Count indeedhes no more Count than you are, she continued. She was
talking to Mrs Burt now. Im quite willing to oblige you, she went on. (287-88)
The weather condition of this particular November day provides an alternative space for
Crosby, the oppressed and marginalized, to talk aloud and make comments which chal-
lenge the dominant discourses of power: classism and patriarchy. In broad daylight, with
crowd swarming around, Crosby would not have the chance nor the courage to condemn
Mrs. Burt and the Count. She would not have dreamed to undermine their authority:
Count indeedhes no more Count than you are. To analyze this chosen passage in
terms of Bourdieus formula of habitus and field: [(habitus) (capital)] + field = practice
(Distinction 101), the haze creates an alternative field which exposes the challengeabil-
ity of a particular class and gender habitus. To illustrate, a social field can be visualized
in terms of an arena where social games are played or practised according to a habitus
or a set of rules. Class habitus, a product of social hierarchy which privileges those on
the upper ladder, propels Crosby to accept Mrs. Burts command to clean the Counts
dirty bathtub. When combined with gender habitus, a product of a convention which
privileges men over women, class habitus also propels her to serve Martin even when she
is supposed to be liberated from the confines of servitude. Ones habitus is shaped by
doxa which, according to Bourdieu in The Logic of Practice, means the fundamental
presuppositions of the field (68) or what one is made to think as natural. A classist
doxa is reflected, for example, in the idea that the rich and the elite are better human be-
ings than the poor and the working class. A sexist or patriarchal doxa, on the other hand,
is reflected in the idea that men are better human beings than women. Crosbys initia-
tion into the field of servitude, her adoption of habitus and of classist and sexist doxa,
are aided by her rites of passage and examinations. She has the illusion of being given
the privilege to be chosen as a part of the Pargiter family when, in truth, it is not so.
Martin finds no difficulty in discarding her like he disposes of his old childhood trinkets.
Crosbys actions and attitudes towards Martin reflect the notion that it is natural for
her to serve and obey. Here, however, everything natural is dismantled in the misty
November air. In Crosbys alternative field, created and made possible by the weather
condition, questions which have long been suppressed are finally articulated: What gives
Mrs. Burt authority over her? Why does the man dare call himself a Count when he is
not? The weather, to conclude, opens up Crosbys possibility to imagine and articulate her
heterodoxa. Despite the fact that Crosby is still orthodoxic in that she upholds the
doxa: Even out here, in the mist, where she was free to say what she liked, she adopted a
conciliatory tone, because she knew that they wanted to be rid of her (288), her attempt
to attack and simultaneously defend the doxa of classism and patriarchy shatters its truth
claims. The weather, therefore, empowers her to think beyond her usual familiar habitus.
It was an Uncertain Spring 195
Notes
1. Anyhow, nothing is more fascinating than a live person; always changing, resisting & yielding against
ones forecast; (D1: 85).
2. My idea of technology of place was inspired by Michel Foucaults concept of technologies of the self and
Irvin C. Schicks concept of the technology of place in his book The Erotic Margin, in which he states that
technology of place is the discursive instruments and strategies by means of which space is constituted
as place (9). I propose that we come to understand place through an amalgamation of (including clashes
and negotiations between) concrete place which we perceive through our sensory reception and abstract
place which we imagine from shards of personal and collective memories, narratives, and representations.
This paradoxical union parallels Woolf s visionary concept of the granite and rainbow in her essay The
New Biography, first published in the New York Herald Tribune on 30 October 1927:
And if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of

rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless
whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have
for the most part failed to solve it. (149)
For more explanation on the concepts of technology and technology of place, see my essay Unleash-
ing the Underdog: Technology of Place in Virginia Woolf s Flush.
3. As Sigmund Freud points out in his essay The Uncanny, concepts of the unhomely and the uncanny
are interconnected through their shared German semantic word unheilmlich. Equivalent terms in English
are uncanny and eerie (124). The Uncanny is a term used when something seems familiar and strange
at the same time: the uncanny [the unhomely] is what was once familiar [homely, homey]. The nega-
tive prefix un- is the indicator of repression (151). The paradox and ambivalence in the notion of the
Uncanny, therefore, mirrors Bhabhas concept of colonial ambivalence.
4. I can wade grief,/ Whole pools of it, --/ I m used to that (Emily Dickinson. The Test. Poems [Series 2]).
Works Cited
Bell, Anne Olivier. Ed. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 1, 1915-19. Intro. Quentin Bell. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1979.
. Ed. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 5, 1936-41. Assist. Andrew McNeillie. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London; New York: Routledge, 2006.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans.
Richard Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984.
. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity, 2009.
Dickinson, Emily. The Test. Poems [Series 2]. Full Text. Web. Accessed 16/03/2010. 17.51 <http://www.full-
books.com/Poems--Series-2-1.html>
Fitzroy, Robert. The Weather Book: A Manual of Practical Meteorology. 2nd Ed. London: Longman, 1863.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. (121-162). The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. Intro. Hugh Haughton.
New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Nicolson, Nigel. Ed. Leave the Letters till Were Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf Vol. VI (1936-1941). Assist.
Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press, 1980.
Radin, Grace. Virginia Woolf s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981.
Schick, Irvin C. The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse. London; New York: Verso, 1999.
Sriratana, Verita. Unleashing the Underdog: Technology of Place in Virginia Woolf s Flush. Forum: Univer-
sity of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts. Issue 8 Technologies (Spring 2009). Web.
<http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/archive/08/sriratana.pdf>
Woolf, Virginia. The New Biography. Granite and Rainbow: Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1958: 149-161.
. The Years. Ed. Hermione Lee. Notes. Sue Asbee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
TRANSFORMING NATURE: ORLANDO AS ELEGY
by Elise Swinford
D
espite the clearly satirical tone of Orlando: A Biography, there is also, just as pres-
ent, a melancholia that permeates Orlandos search for Life, a lover! (244).
As Suzanne Raitt has observed, Woolf intended Orlando (1928) in part as a
light-hearted comedy (30), yet, in Woolf s characteristic style, the instances of lightness
are contrasted with deeply melancholic moments. Considering the dark side of Woolf s
light-hearted comedy, I propose viewing the novel as an unconventional elegy.
Orlandos mutable sex and ambiguous gender performance add to the parodic nature
of the form of the novel but also suggest the parodic nature of gender itself. Woolf resists
the notion of fixed representability by creating a character who, by no effort of his own
and with no apparent cause, transforms and metamorphoses. It is through the trope of
metamorphosis that the satirical biography of Orlando also becomes a study in mourning,
unlimited by gender, time, nature, or representability.
Woolf s examination of the connections between writing, gender, and nature leads us
to reexamine traditional notions of grieving as well as traditional notions of gender, thus
illuminating the indelible relationship between grief and gender. I see this relationship
functioning on two levels: first, one might immediately think of the gendered roles as-
signed to mourners, especially prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well
as the necessarily gendered experiencing of loss just after the First World War. Secondly,
I consider melancholia and gender on a more fundamental level through Judith Butlers
theory of melancholic gender, in which both melancholia and primary gender formation
are matters of identifying with internalized love objects: gender identification necessitates
the sex of the original prohibited object of desire to be internalized as a prohibition (Butler
63). While Butler cites the Freudian models of mourning and melancholia, I believe that
Orlandos subversion of traditional notions of gender also allows us to push back against
the traditional Freudian model in which grieving successfully is to grieve with finality
and reconciliation. I suggest an alternative framework of resistant mourning, to borrow
Patricia Raes term, in order to allow us to view Orlando as a work of mourning without
requiring reconciliation, which Woolf herself resists in the very form of the book and her
intentionally unresolved ending.1
In his study of the elegy, Peter Sacks identifies the conventions of the genre as:
pastoral contextualization, the myth of the vegetation deity (particularly the sexual
myths, and their relation to the sexuality of the mourner),the reiterated ques-
tions, the outbreak of vengeful anger or cursing, the procession of mourners, the
movement from grief to consolation, and the traditional images of resurrtion. (2)
Though one could find many of these elements in Orlando, it is Sacks identification of
the vegetation deity in the elegy that is particularly illuminating to the gendered meta-
morphosis of Orlando.
TRANSFORMING NATURE 197
Early in the novel, we are given an image of Orlando as a young boy attempting to
compose a poem: He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature,
and in order to match the shade of green precisely he lookedat the thing itself, which
happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could
write no more (16-17). Though he writes furiously in his notebook of Vice and Mis-
ery, he is unable to proceed once nature enters his imagination. This passage is doubly
significant for the reading of Orlando as an elegy. Woolf s purposeful use of the laurel bush
in the context of an attempt at poetry is an allusion to the myth of Apollo and Daphne in
which Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree to escape Apollos impassioned pursuits.
Realizing the metamorphosis, Apollo mourns the loss of Daphne in her female, human
form by making the laurel an emblem, representing, among other virtues, poethood. Or-
landos own metamorphosis in physical form is closely tied to discourses of nature and,
just as Daphne does in her altered form, Orlando remains, in essence, the same. Further,
that Orlando could write no more when he sees the laurel bush indicates that Orlando
is halted in his poetic venture because he has not yet properly ascended to the role of Poet.
In order to join the ranks of the great poets throughout history, the Poet must first figura-
tively replace his predecessor by mourning him through the writing of an elegy.
Sacks views the elegy as well as the story of Daphne and Apollo within the framework
of the Freudian model of mourning. The elegy is a work, he says, both in the sense of a
text, and in Freuds concept of the work of mourning (Sacks 1). Within this model, the
laurel tree as a signification of Daphne becomes a substitute for Apollos lost love object.
Sacks explains that [o]nly when Apollo turns to the projected founding of a sign, the
laurel wreath, does he appear to accept his loss (4). Apollos turning from Daphne to a
sign of her indicates, then, that Apollo is working through the loss as a part of a success-
ful mourning process. By any account, Orlando would be an unconventional elegy. There
is no named lost love object. For that matter, the identity of the elegist him or herself is
debatable. However, if Orlando is a part of the canon of works of mourning written by
many modernist writers during the interwar period, Sacks conventions of elegy serve to
shed light on what is being mourned and how Orlandos (and Orlandos) resistance to
resolution and representation become indicative of a modernist melancholia.
At the moment of Daphnes metamorphosis, Apollo exclaims, Let the laurel / Guard
and watch over the oak, and as my head / Is always youthful, let the laurel always /
Be green and shining! (Ovid 1.1.544-66). Throughout Orlandos centuries of life, it is
The Oak Treeboth the poem and its physical representation on Orlandos estate
that represents Orlandos struggle with figuration, both through words and through his
own changing physical manifestation. In light of Apollos elegiac declaration of the laurel
watching over the oak, we see in Orlando a reversal of this conventionthe laurel, the
sign of traditional poethood, is subordinated to the oak tree, both the document Orlando
carries in his bosom and the tree that provides him refuge.
It is the oak tree in both of its manifestations that provides the 30-year old Orlando
safe haven after his betrayal by Nick Greene, the representative patriarchal literary ge-
nius. After reading Greenes biting satire of him, Orlando performs a sort of purification
through fire, during which he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works,
only retaining The Oak Tree (O 96). This process strips Orlando of what he calls a vast
mountain of illusion (97). The idea of illusion returns throughout the text: literature
is illusive (and elusive) to Orlando at this point in his life (Orlando calls all literature a
farce), just as gender will come to be an illusion for Orlando later; Orlando is after all,
precisely as he had been after he changes sexes (138).
Orlandos failed foray into literaturehis attempt at representability through lan-
guagecauses him to be thrown into a melancholia from which he does not recover until
his sexual transformation. After the dramatic burning of the volumes of poetry, Orlando
flings himself under his favorite oak tree and wishes never to speak to anyone again. In his
desire to never speak again, Orlando turns from The Oak Tree as language (the poem)
to the literal oak tree. Just as Apollo mourns by turning from Daphne to the signification
of Daphne in the laurel wreath, so too does Orlando begin a process of mourning by turn-
ing from the lost objectliteratureto its signification in the oak tree.
In this initial turn toward melancholia, Orlando knows what has been losthis po-
etic aspirationsbut, to borrow Freuds words, not what he has lost in the dissolution
of his ability to write. After Nick Greenes devastating satire coupled with the loss of
Sasha, his Russian princess lover, Orlando sinks into a melancholia that lasts for centuries.
Though these specific events can be used as markers in Orlandos work of mourning,
Woolf describes him from the beginning as having dark inclinations. Even during his pas-
sionate affair with Sasha as a young nobleman in James court, Orlando inexplicably falls
into deep bouts of depression and comments that nothing thicker than a knifes blade
separates happiness from melancholy (45). This vacillation between happiness and mel-
ancholy, between satire and elegy, returns repeatedly throughout the novel. Upon seeing a
production of Othello, Orlando thinks to himself that [r]uin and death . . . cover all. The
life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us (57). Though there is no tone of satire in
Orlandos dark thought, Woolf s jokes here serve again to blur the line between satire and
elegy: death, of course, will not cover Orlando, neither does he follow a typical path to the
grave; in fact, his life as a man ends not in the grave but in a Turkish palace.
Woolf s pairing of gender and literature as illusions suggests two things: first, just
as the illusive nature of Orlandos gender is not an obstacle but instead another vehicle
through which he gains varied life experiences, literature as illusion does not necessarily
carry with it the negative implications of a lie or deceptionliterature is deceiving to the
point that all language is a deception, a necessary but often hindering tool of self defini-
tion. The second thing that Woolf s positioning of gender and literature as illusions sug-
gests is the indelible connection between literature, gender, and loss.
Considering this connection from the Lacanian perspectivethat ones psychosexual
development is dependent on ones entrance into language, which necessarily implies a
lossit is particularly significant that at the moment of Orlandos transformation, he ar-
rives into the world as a woman in a way suggestive of a child entering subjecthood. After
a pseudo-gestational period of seven days in a dark, warm room, Orlando wakes with a
blast of trumpets, announcing The Truth! (137). Though Orlando is, in essence, the
same, she re-enters the world with a reawakened subjectivity. As we are unable to remem-
ber our own existence prior to our entrance into subjecthood, Orlandos memory went
back through all the events of her past life, yet [s]ome haziness there may have been, as if
a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a lit-
tle dimmed (138). Orlandos process of self-recognition consists of the moment in which
she looked himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of
discomposure, and went, presumably, to his bath (138). In this version of the Lacanian
mirror stage, Orlando identifies her own image as herself, and then re-enters the world.
The important difference here is that Orlandos recognition of herself in her reflec-
tion as I, as a coherent subject, is not fraught, as in the Lacanian mirror stage, but is
notably without any discomposure. Though the trumpets announce The Truth!, this an-
nouncement is not a shocking, anxiety-inducing shift away from primary narcissism but a
brief acknowledgement of a shift in embodiment. Though this shift represents an elegiac
beginning again, it is without the angst of moving away from the disordered self. If
anything, then, Orlandos self-perception is most fraught before he is reborn as a woman.
The truth, then, that Woolf seems to suggest does not lie in biological sex but in how
gender is treated discursively. Orlando is the same; her meaning has changed due only to
the cultural baggage attached to gender. The ease with which Orlando transforms also
points to a process of mourning that, unlike Daphnes transformation, is not destructive.
To begin again, Orlando does not distance himself from his original state but internalizes
it and moves forward.
Significantly, this moment and the proceeding days Orlando spends with the Turkish
gypsies are marked by silence. When Orlando speaks again, it is with an awkwardness, a
sense that words are inadequate. As she sits around the campfire with the Turkish nomads
and views a beautiful sunset over the hills, Orlando exclaims, How good to eat! (The
gypsies have no word for beautiful. This is the nearest.) All the young men and women
burst out laughing uproariously. The sky good to eat, indeed! (142). Though the gypsies
recognize this outburst as the foreign disease of a love of nature, it also points to the dif-
ficulty of representing experience through language. It is after this, Orlandos (re)entrance
into language, that she again feels compelled to compose in her manuscript, The Oak Tree.
The natural world and notions of natural sex, both constructed discursively, become
open to interpretation. Woolf s use of nature as an inspirationseen in Orlandos love
of the country and her life-long work of The Oak Treealso brings to mind the law of
nature as social restriction that sexologists had popularized in discourses of unnatural
sexuality by the time Woolf wrote the novel.
As Orlandos search leads her to the literary and social circles of eighteenth-century
London, she entertains the next incarnation of the torchbearers of Glawr: Pope, Ad-
dison, and Swift, quoting Joseph Addisons Trial of the Petticoat for a testament to his
character: I consider woman as a beautiful, romantic animal, that may be adorned with
furs and feathers, pearls and diamonds, ores and silks. All this I shall indulge them in,
but as for the petticoat I have been speaking of, I neither can, nor will allow it (qtd. in
Orlando 210). Already we are given the description of woman as an animal, her adorn-
ments given freely by nature. Given Sacks almost exclusively masculine-oriented explana-
tion of the (male) vegetation god mourner mourning the (female) metamorphosed lost
love object, it is worth considering that Orlando possesses both positions in Sacks frame-
work for this elegiac convention. Orlando is both the beautiful, romantic animal of the
metamorphosed, mourned female love object as well as the male, immortal, vegetation
god mourner. In this way, Orlando is already a perversion of natural law.
If the biographer would have quoted Addison a paragraph earlier in The Tatler, we
would have seen more directly the conflict that the forces of nature present to Orlando
during her early life as a woman. Addison comments:
I would not be understood thatI am an enemy to the proper ornaments of the

fair sex. On the contrary as the hand of nature has poured on them such a pro-
fusion of charms and graces; so I would have them bestow upon themselves
all the additional beauties that art can supply them with, provided it does not
interfere with, disguise, or pervert those of nature. (Tatler 116, 1709)
In Addisons estimation, specific female attire has the ability to pervert or disguise the
nature of women. Though Addisons scope of what is natural for women is quite limited,
Orlando still becomes a perversion of the multiple discourses of nature. She dresses in drag
to enter the London nightlife, thereby perverting the natural beauty of the fair sex as well
as the natural law of heteronormative gendering. When Orlando dresses in her neat black
silk knickerbockers of an ordinary nobleman on her way to London, the biographer com-
ments, Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely
to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the worlds view of us (187).
Whoever the unspecified they are, Orlandos clothesand, I would argue, her entire mas-
culine gender performance during these outingssignal a metamorphosis from Orlandos
previous self as a country gentleman that is not limited to outward appearance or biology.
Woolf refuses to answer the question of constructed versus essentialist self because this is not
the main issue of Orlandos metamorphosis. Orlando is not limited by gender, at least not
gender alone, but by her (in)ability to fit within the limits of representability.
The question of course persists: how can a work of high camp, of fantasy and joki-
ness (Lee 517) be placed among the highly elegiac works created during the interwar
years? Her other works written around this timeTo The Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves
(1931)take on the subject of death with no comforting satire or joking. Speaking of Or-
landos relatively utopian ending, Hermoine Lee adds that Orlando doesnt die. Orlando
is the only of her books with no deaths, turning away from the elegiac mood of the afore-
mentioned works (520). It is, though, what is left out, what is unrepresented, that points
to loss. One such moment occurs soon after the female Orlandos famous revelation of,
Youre a woman, Shel! she cried. Youre a man, Orlando! he cried.I am a woman,
she thought, A real woman, at last (253). At the moment of ultimate gender ambiguity,
Woolf cannot find or backs away from the words that would represent true gender sub-
version. The narrator instead almost dispenses with language and leaves a great blank
during Orlando and Shels passionate conversation (254). In addition to the modernist
dilemma of an inability to express something beyond articulation, we have the bittersweet
notion that Orlandos space is filled to repletion (253), yet the space representing it to
the reader is void. Despite or perhaps because of the nature of the satirical biography, the
biographer postpones resolution, both in what happens here in the blank space and in the
final words of the novel. Woolf presents a sense of looking forward without forgetting the
past. Orlandos elegiac work of mourninghere I mean work as in a text and in a con-
certed effortdoes not end in destruction or in abandoning the lost love object. Instead,
it ends in a revelatory acknowledgement of Orlando as constantly transitioning, as seen
in Shels exclamation of Youre a man! followed by Orlandos realization that she is a
real woman. The biographers comment that our modern spirit can almost dispense with
language is poignant here: Orlandos entrance into womanhood is ultimately achieved
through language (at the moment of this exclamation), not biology.
Notes
1. See Patricia Raes introduction to Modernism and Mourning.
Works Cited
Addison, Joseph. The Trial of the Petticoat. The Tatler. No. 116. The Tatler and the Guardian: Complete in One
Volume. Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo & Col., 1880. 242.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. Collected Papers, Vol. IV. Trans. Joan Riviere. New York: Basic
Books, 1959.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.
New York: Norton, 1977.
Lee, Hermoine. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1996.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955.
Rae, Patricia. Introduction: Modernist Mourning. Modernism and Mourning. Lewisburg: Bucknell University
Press, 2007.
Raitt, Suzanne. Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993.
Sacks, Peter. Interpreting the Genre: The Elegy and the Work of Mourning. The English Elegy: Studies in the
Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1985.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. 1928. Orlando: Harcourt, 1956.
NATURE, WHO HAS PLAYED SO MANY QUEER TRICKS UPON US:
DIGGING GRANITE AND CHASING RAINBOWS WITH VIRGINIA WOOLF
by Derek Ryan
P
erhaps her most famous metaphors taken from the natural world, Virginia Woolf s
figuration of granite and rainbow (The New Biography 100) appears to capture
both halves of a neatly split up question concerning the aims of biography (The
New Biography 95). Her 1927 essay The New Biography assimilates granite with the
hard facts of reality: it is truth in its hardest, most obdurate form; it is truth as truth is
to be found in the British Museum (95). In contrast, the rainbow is assimilated with the
artful or highly coloured (95) and consists in personality (96). Granite and rainbow
are, as Kathryn Miles summarizes in an earlier edition of conference proceedings, the
constituent elements of a theory of biography that seeks to reconcile the binaries of truth
and fiction (212). Miles argues that we find potential for this reconciliation in viewing
Orlando (1928) as the fictional praxis to underscore [Woolf s] theory (213), and posits
that it is through Orlandos unnamed narrator that we potentially find a biographer ca-
pable of bringing these binaries together (217). Where Miles uses The New Biography
to illustrate the success of Orlando, however, Mitchell Leaska has used Woolf s essay to ex-
plain the failure of The Pargiters (xviii). In his 1978 introduction to Woolf s abandoned
project, Leaska maps the theory of granite and rainbow onto Woolf s initial intention to
have essay segments interspersed with fiction and argues that she gradually realised that
all the factual matter which would constitute the essay portions was weighty substance
that somehow collided with the artistic design she originally planned, therefore meaning
that the truth of fact and the truth of fiction could not meet in felicitous alliance (xiv).
Confining Woolf s term to an oppositional framework, Leaska uses it to argue that The
Pargiters failed because Woolf felt the pressure of granite against rainbow (vii).
Specific readings of Orlando and The Pargiters are not my primary concern here, but as
examples of the ways in which The New Biography has been utilized by some of Woolf s
critics, they are important for two main reasons. Firstly, both Miles and Leaskas appro-
priation of Woolfs granite and rainbow figuration illustrates that it can be extended and
applied to her other writings; secondly, although using it to different ends, they both em-
ploy Woolfs figuration without ever challenging the stability of the terms granite and
rainbow themselves. That is, this natural metaphor may be more or less amalgamated
but remains, from the start, as two distinct elements working within a binary framework.
Rather than understanding it as a fixed and stable metaphor, I would like to argue that the
complexity and usefulness of this dual term has not been fully realized. This paper attempts
to extend Woolfs theory not by simply applying its dual premise but by analyzing Woolf s
use of the terms granite and rainbow, both coupled and uncoupled, elsewhere in her
writings. Digging granite and chasing rainbows will also lead me to consider the significance
of these terms in relation to the natural sciences of geology and physics.
From the second paragraph of The New Biography, Woolf is already blurring the dis-
tinctions between granite and rainbow. We learn that granite-like solidity has an almost
Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us 203
mystic power. Like radium, it seems able to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms
of light (95), and the rainbow-like intangibility of that inner life of thought and emo-
tion in fact meanders darkly and obscurely through the hidden channels of the soul (95).
The inversion of properties of dark and light appears to confuse the opposing granite and
rainbow; the bland and dark shades of granite become mystic and filled with light, and the
luminous colors of the rainbow become darkened and obscure. Furthermore, when Woolf
concludes that we cannot yet name the biographer whose art is subtle and bold enough to
present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite
and rainbow (100), a self-reflexive writing is again displayed; even in this very sentence she
undermines the expected parallel by pairing dream with granite, reality with rainbow.
It is perhaps telling that the only other occurrence of Woolf deploying granite and rainbow
in the same sentence also complicates the expected parallel, when in Orlando we are told:
Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and
diamonds, of rainbow and granite (46). In one sense, granites parallel with diamonds is no
surprisebeing hard, obdurate rocksand, to a lesser extent, the symmetry of rainbow and
clay works in the sense of clays transformative, varied form. But, delighting in the muddle
and mystery (O 46), Woolf is playing with the overlapping possibilities for these queer
couples whereby an argument could just as convincingly be made for the rainbow/diamonds
symmetry (mysticism, beauty, rarity), and the clay/granite symmetry (as naturally occur-
ring materials). Already we become vigilant to Pamela Caughies warning in Virginia Woolf
and Postmodernism that where Woolf is concerned, we cannot count on any one element
meaning the same thing from one text to another (101). Caughie, who has herself criticized
Leaskas use of the granite and rainbow term as a given distinction (96), argues that the
most important sentence in The New Biography may be that [t]hey have no fixed scheme
of the universe, no standard of courage or morality to which they insist that [w]e shall con-
form (98; Caughie 100). As Woolf writes in her essay Craftsmanship:
It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order.
But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind.
And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human be-
ings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is
true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. (89)
We cannot conceive of a marriage of words as we do a conventional marriage between

two people. Rather, there are many swift marriages (Craftsmanship 91) because words
have a profound need of change (Craftsmanship 90). Free to mate with many other
words, Woolf s granites and rainbows often appear uncoupled in her writings, and some-
times within the same text. Turning my attention to Woolf s posthumously published A
Sketch of the Past, I would like to argue that the various ways in which Woolf s polyga-
mous granites and rainbows hang together (Craftsmanship 90) with different words
in different contexts demonstrates that we find solidity and intangibility, truth and fiction,
are always already intermingled each time Woolf writes the word granite or rainbow.
In her A Sketch of the Past, Woolf remembers childhood days in the granite county
of Cornwall, recalling old men and women who danced round Knills Monumena
granite steeple in a clearing (MOB 136). She describes everywhere seeing walls [that] were
thick blocks of granite built to stand the sea storms and supposes that the town was then
much as it must have been in the sixteenth century, unknown, unvisited, a scramble of
granite houses (MOB 133). Importantly then, the endurance of granite does not solidify
the towns meaning, instead adding to the sense of the unknown, unvisited, to a somewhat
mysterious existence. It is granite that evades a stable entry into linear time: The eighteenth
century had left no mark upon St IvesIt might have been built yesterday; or in the time of
the Conqueror. The Church, like the houses, was built of granite and therefore ageless
(MOB 133). Indeed, it is a simultaneous endurance and intangibility of Cornish granite that
also appears to be captured by D. H. Lawrence, when in The Nightmare chapter of Kan-
garoo he describes Cornwalls huge granite boulders bulging out of the earth like presences
as the mystery of the powerful, prehuman earth, showing its might (225).
In a letter from 1921, Woolf had already described Cornish granite hills as half
transparent, elusive entities provoking the imagination and memories, reminding her
of childhood (L2: 462). In A Sketch of the Past she elaborates on the mystery of these
hills, scattered with blocks of granite; some said of them to be old tombs and altars; in
some, holes were driven, as if for gate posts (MOB 138). The children found great ad-
venture in them, and Woolf alludes to the legend of the Logan Rockan 80-ton rocking
stone, finely balanced at the top of a cliff (so finely balanced that in April 1824 it had
been tipped over by a disgraced Lieutenant Goldsmith before the locals demanded it be
replaced!). Woolf expresses the childhood wonderment it evoked: The Loggan [sic] rock
was on top of Tren Crom; we would set it rocking; and be told that perhaps the hollow
in the rough lichened surface was for the victims blood (MOB 138). Far from these
hills always and already signifying their obdurate actuality, it was only her fathers severe
love of truth that attempted to reduce an already mysterious granite: He disbelieved it;
he said, in his opinion, this was no genuine Loggan rock, but the natural disposition of
ordinary rocks (MOB 138). It is precisely this notion of natural disposition, of a fixed
and certain reality, that Woolf challenges by sharing her memory of this childhood event.
The massive and yet tentative existence of this granite rock is recalled and re-appropriated
in the fight against phallogocentrism, and foregrounded are the pervading doubts about
fact and fiction, about whether I mean anything real, whether I make up or tell the truth
(MOB 138). For Woolf these granite rocks are at once real and imaginary (The New
Biography 97); they do not signify one totalizing meaning. As she notes plainly in a let-
ter to Katherine Arnold-Forster in June 1923: I dont like symbolical granite (L3: 49)!
As it turns out, the stability of Woolfs granite is always already challenged by modern
advances in natural science. We dont need to dig too deep into our geological world to
discover that whilst granite may be a hard, durable, and dense material, studies since the
Enlightenment have led to a less than straightforward understanding of it. The epigraph of
Wallace Pitchers book The Nature and Origin of Granite cites acclaimed geologist Joseph
Beete Jukes speaking in 1863: Granite is not a rock which was simple in its origin but
might be produced in more ways than one (vii). There is even less excuse for us to fall into
stable understandings of granite today, as Pitcher informs us of a resurgence of interest in
the twentieth century stimulated by the thesis that granites image their source rocks in
the inaccessible deep crust, and that their diversity is the result of varying global tectonic
context (v). With its truth both diverse and context-dependent, it is somewhat appropriate
that granite should be formed from magma and contain potential metamorphic properties.
Due to its complexity, Pitcher highlights the intense difficulties in attempting to

classify granites: It could well be argued that any attempt to categorize the granite fam-
ily on a natural basis is doomed to failure given the virtually infinite number of different
types which might be generated (19). Whilst conceding that a proper order is obviously
required for description and comparison, he stresses that the resulting arrangements are
wholly static, often artificial, and lead nowhere along the path of understanding (19-20).
This sounds remarkably close to poststructuralist readings of Woolf which argue, as Pa-
mela Caughie puts it, that categorizations are not necessarily discreteRather, they are
constructed to solve certain problems (20). Like Caughie then, Pitcher emphasizes what
he calls process based, dynamic classification (20).
Just as the solidity of granite is challenged by Woolf s writings and by science, so is
the notion of an intangible rainbow as somehow detached and evasive of our material
world. This too is illuminated in A Sketch of the Past when, recalling the bright co-
lours and many distinct sounds of childhood (MOB 91), Woolf emphasizes an embod-
ied movement and change, a complicated and flowing actual (MOB 92) that creates
an equally evasive sense of self, the little creature:
One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing, get-
ting large, getting small, passing at different rates of speed past the little crea-
turedriven on as she was by the growth of her legs and arms, driven without
her being able to stop it, or to change it, driven as a plant is driven up out of the
earth, up until the stalk grows, the leaf grows, birds swell. That is what is inde-
scribable, that is what makes all images too static. (MOB 91)
Following this, Woolf then appears to assimilate rainbows straightforwardly with the
imagination; describing her first memory of her mother, she recalls how she told me
to think of all the lovely things I could imagine. Rainbows and bells (MOB 93). But
rather than the intangibility of her memory and imagination being an escape from reality,
these minute separate details are very much a part of the material life of the young Vir-
ginia Stephen (MOB 93). For example, as Woolf remembers the elusiveness of her moth-
ers personality, Julia Stephen becomes not so much a particular person as generalised;
dispersed; omnipresent the creator of that crowded merry world (MOB 94). Woolf
was living so completely in her [mothers] atmosphere that one never got far enough
away from her to see her as a personShe was the whole thing; Talland House was full
of her; Hyde Part Gate was full of herShe was keeping what I call in my shorthand the
panoply of lifethat which we all lived in commonin being (MOB 94). Crucially
however, Woolf is eager to avoid the notion of her mother as a totalising symbolical figure
by adding, It is true that I enclosed that world in another made by my own temperament;
it is true that from the beginning I had many adventures outside that world; and often
went far from it; and kept much back from it (MOB 96).
Exploring the complexity of the granite/rainbow dynamic in A Sketch of the Past
illustrates the world tinged with all the colours of the rainbow (MOB 55). It is as when
Woolf describes the total eclipse of 1927 in The Sun and the Fish, where we see this fill-
ing in of the world by the re-emerging sunlight that was sprinkled rainbow-like in a hoop
of colour, that steadily and surely became a great paint brush [that] washed in woods,
dark on the valley, and massed the hills blue above them: The world became more and
more solid (191). Another comparison could be drawn here with Lawrence, where this
relationship between rainbow and solidity is evident at the end of The Rainbow: a faint,
vast rainbow appears and is described as great architecture of light and colour that
stood on the earth (493). In The Sun and the Fish, the earth soon becomes the familiar
and populous place of farm-houses, villages, and railway lines, as the rainbow-like
sprinkles of light modeled and moulded the whole fabric of civilisation, before Woolf
tells us of the true revelation: But still the memory endured that the earth we stand on is
made of colour; colour can be blown out (191). It is both the earth as rainbow, and the
earth as ephemeral as a rainbow (TTL 20).
The unweaving of the rainbow itself as intangible and opposed to the hard facts of our
material reality has, of course, also been emphasized by centuries of scientific discovery,
most famously by Descartes and by Newton. On the one hand rainbows are multiplicities
of color and type: everyone is familiar with the reds and yellows, greens and blues, but
there are also variations such as reflected and refracted rainbows, the supernumerary rain-
bow, and the double rainbow that Virginia and Leonard Woolf themselves witnessed on
their terrace in September 1930a spectacle that Woolf notes as interrupting her letter
writing to Ethel Smyth (L4: 217). Moreover, Richard Dawkins reminds us that the mul-
tiplicitous nature of rainbows is not solely due to their colors or types: why do you see a
complete rainbow? Because there are lots of different raindrops. A band of thousands of
raindrops is giving you green light (and simultaneously giving blue light to anybody who
might be placed above you, and simultaneously giving red light to somebody else below
you.) (46). Ad infinitum, so that there is never only one rainbow that we all see; Virginia
and Leonard were not in fact seeing the same double rainbow. Arguing against Keatss
famous disappointment in Lamia that Newton had reduced rainbows to fully under-
stood common things, Dawkins emphasizes that science has multiplied the rainbows
beauty and mystery: there are as many rainbows as there are eyes looking at the storm
strictly speaking, even your two eyes are seeing two different rainbows (47). There is then
a kind of solid intangibility, a granite-like illusion. As Dawkins states: The illusion of the
rainbow itself remains rock steady (47).
Where does this leave us regarding how we as critics may think about and use
Woolf s granite and rainbow term? If Woolf s multiple granites and rainbows evade
fixed and distinct meanings, can we still treat her figuration as metaphor (with its
tendency towards totalization)? In her 2006 book Transpositions, Rosi Braidottiself
proclaimed materialist nomadic feminist philosopher (30)offers us this concept of
transpositions as an alternative to metaphor (and metonymy): Transposing is a ges-
ture neither of metaphorical assimilation nor of metonymic association. It is a style, in
the sense of a form of conceptual creativity, like a sliding door, a choreographed slip-
page (9). Transposing involves non-linear leaps, mobility and cross-referencing, no-
tions that drift nomadically among different texts (7). For Braidotti, the theory of
transpositions offers a contemplative and creative stance that respects the visible and
hidden complexities of the very phenomena it attempts to study (6). In all of this,
Braidotti emphasizes that transposing is no mere rhetorical device (146); instead it is
connecting philosophy to [science and] social realities; theoretical speculations to con-
crete plans; they are discursive and also materially embedded (7). It is by emphasizing
the multiplicitous and complex nature of materiality that we can discover the positivity
of difference as a specific theme of its own (5).
Braidotti takes music and geneticswhich she argues are both exemplars of non-
linear transfer, working as dissociative shifts or leaps (6)as the double source of in-
spiration for transpositions. Transposing Woolf s multiple granites and rainbows onto
this model, could they become the double source of inspiration (5) for the complex
inter-, intra- and extra-textual map of her writings, where these terms are freed from the
assignment of unification and from a priori associations, and where their heterogeneity
is celebrated? As transpositions that are sustained and enduring precisely because of their
fluidity, uncertainty, and adaptability, granites and rainbows must, then, be considered as
the perpetual marriage becoming many swift marriages; a polygamy of synchroniza-
tions, or to use Braidottis own words, a joyful kind of dissonance (93). Perhaps it is
transpositions that could help explain why when we are digging granite and chasing rain-
bows we are at the same time unearthing rainbows andas Woolf writes in Jacobs Room
(1922)piercing the skylike granite cliffs (JR 61).
Works Cited
Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.

Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Dawkins, Richard. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder. London: Allen Lane, 1998.
Lawrence, D. H. Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Lawrence, D. H. The Rainbow. Ed. Kate Flint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Miles, Kathryn. That perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow: Searching forThe New Biography in Vir-
ginia Woolf s Orlando. Virginia Woolf & Communities: Selected Papers from the Eight Annual Conference on
Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jeanette McVicker and Laura Davis. New York: Pace University Press, 1999. 212-218.
Myths and Legends of Cornwall. Cornwall in Focus. 20 May 2010 <http://www.cornwallinfocus.co.uk/his-
tory/legends.php>
Pitcher, Wallace S. The Nature and Origin of Granite. London: Blackie Academic & Professional, 1993.
Woolf, Virginia. Craftmanship. Selected Essays. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
85-91.
. Jacobs Room. London: Vintage, 2004.
. The Letters of Virginia Woolf . Vol. 2. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: HBJ, 1976.
. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1978.
. The New Biography. Selected Essays. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 95-100.
. Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Pimlico, 2002.
. Orlando:A Biography. London: Vintage, 2004.
. The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion of The Years. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. London: The Hogarth Press, 1978.
. The Sun and the Fish. Selected Essays. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 188-192.
. To the Lighthouse. London: Penguin, 1964.
SUNDERED WATERS:
ISOLATED CONSCIOUSNESSES AND OSTENSIBLE COMMUNION IN
WOOLFS NARRATION
by Dominic Scheck
I
n Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse (1927), Lily Briscoe voices the modernist pursuit
of unity as a desire for intimacy, for personal knowledge of Mrs. Ramsay: What de-
vice [was there] for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same,
one with the object one adored? How did one know one thing or another thing
about people, sealed as they were? (TTL 54). Lilys problem is a phenomenological one:
as a conscious self, she yearns for access to the internal consciousness of an external other.
However, the thoughts and emotions of an individually conscious subject belong exclu-
sively to her own interiority, as Mrs. Ramsay thinks to herself, she alone could search
into her [own] mind and heart (66). In order to overcome the alienation of privacy, Lily
desires to share interiority, but Woolf consistently evinces the impossibility of communi-
cating the intimate knowledge of the mind, what she describes as nothing that could be
written in any language known to men (54). Instead of actually experiencing the same
interior thoughts as an other, or attempting to encode ones experience and recreate it
in an others consciousness via language, the individual creates an illusory yet functional
communion with others through the perception of mutually exterior objects.
At stake here is our understanding of intersubjectivity, of the experience of being a
conscious subject among other selves. Justine Dymond asserts that Woolf s narrative proj-
ect explores orientation toward the other as constitutive of a fluid subjectivity, therefore
putting into question what constitutes the boundary between the subject and the other
(140-41). For Dymond, Woolf s writing not only expresses a desire for one self to know
another but also enacts a successful communion of their subjectivities. However, though
free indirect discourse allows the narration to vacillate between consciousnesses of charac-
ters, thereby weaving together the perspectives of different selves into a fabricthat is, the
novelthis fabric is visible only to the reader. The individual threads of thought remain
separate for the subjects to which they belong. Although Dymond suggests the possibility
of interconnected consciousnesses, I hope to demonstrate that consciousness for Woolf is,
as her rough contemporary William James tells us, the quality of an isolated mind:
The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in per-
sonal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular Is and yous Neither
contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content
are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belong-
ing to different personal minds. (226)
A subjects consciousness is unequivocally private and therefore divisive: selves are cut off
from one another by their inability to share a common interiority. Dymond draws on the
phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to imply otherwise, invoking his experiment
Sundered Waters 209
in which ones left hand feels ones right, allowing the body to experience itself both as
subject and object. It follows that the self can experience itself as the object of an others
gaze if he imbues the other with a subjectivity analogous to his own. For Dymond, this
reversibility of subject and object upsets the dichotomy of inside/outside and mysteri-
ously blurs the horizon between subjectivities (142). Dymonds interpretation of Merleau-
Ponty, however, fails to reflect his account of the other:
If there is an other, he is never in my eyes a For Itself, in the precise and given
sense that I am, for myself. Even if our relationship leads me to admit or even to
experience that he too thinks, that he too has a private landscape I do not
have that private landscape as I have my own. What I say of it is always derived
from what I know of myself by myself: I concede that if I inhabited that body
I should have another solitude, comparable to that which I have... But the if I
inhabited is not a hypothesis; it is a fiction or a myth. The others life, such as
he lives it, is not for me who speaks an eventual experience or a possible: it is a
prohibited experience, it is an impossible. (Merleau-Ponty 78-79)
For Merleau-Ponty, then, the I solely understands the other as a conscious subject, a For
Itself, by analogy to herself. That is, Lily experiences her position as a subject solipsisti-
cally and can inferbut not inhabitthe consciousness of others because they appear to
be similar to herfor instance, in physical structure, behavior, and capacity to produce
language. The I, then, is alone in the final analysis; the others consciousness may be, but
it is an impossible to experience it.
In the dinner scene of To the Lighthouse, we see this sealed-off nature of consciousness
when Mrs. Ramsay, William Bankes, and Lily turn their attention to the drab political
discussion the other men are having:
Lily was listening; Mrs. Ramsay was listening; they were all listening. But already
bored, Lily felt that something was lacking; Mr. Bankes felt that something was
lacking. Pulling her shawl round her, Mrs. Ramsay felt that something was lack-
ing. All of them bending themselves to listen thought, Pray heaven that the in-
side of my mind may not be exposed, for each thought, The others are feeling
this. They are outraged and indignant with the government about the fishermen.
Whereas, I feel nothing at all. (96)
Instead of saying that they all were listening, feeling, and thinking, the narration describes
them individually performing these actions. Lily feels something was lacking, as does Mr.
Bankes, as does Mrs. Ramsay, but they experience this common sentiment separately.
In addition to this feeling that something was lacking, their very thoughtsalthough
similar in quality and content, to borrow Jamess languageisolate them from each other.
Each character wishes his or her interiority, the inside of [each ones] mind, will not
be exposed. Each of them thinks the others are all outraged and indignant and feels
alone for feel[ing] nothing at all. Despite their common interior thoughts, they construe
themselves as different from the others and subsequently alone because, unable to experi-
ence others thoughts, they misread them.
Not only does one persons consciousness lack the ability to traverse Jamess barrier
into the personal mind of another, but, as Woolf s fiction suggests, language fails to export
the experience of an individuals interior thoughts and feelings. Lily considers telling her
thoughts to Carmichael, but reflecting on languages limitations, she decides against it:
she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the
thought and dismembered it said nothing. About life, about death; about Mrs.
Ramsayno, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of
the moment always missed its mark how could one express in words these
emotions of the body? (181)
Lily not only determines that language cannot communicate the particular emotions she
has in this certain situation but also universalizes the failure of language, reflecting that
one could say nothing to nobody. Regardless of the speaker, the listener, or the experi-
ence being discussed, words cannot accurately externalize a subjects interiority. Further-
more, Lily suggests that language actually violences what it attempts to convey; words
break up and dismember thought. The immediacy of an experience is suspended by
encoding it in language, thereby losing the urgency of the moment and vitiating the
meaning of the interior event. An individual, then, can neither experience an others inte-
riority nor recreate it for himself from the others attempted communication.
Laura Doyle argues that instances of language in Woolf s fiction function not only
as semantic vehicles but also as tangible objects to be perceived: Words are not simply
names for things that fix those things within a logical system, or even that sacrifice those
things to the coded system. Words are themselves things, as palpable and as open to mate-
rial struggle as things themselves (58). Doyles characterization of language here points
both to its failures and physicality. Echoing Lily, she suggests words misrepresent the
things they name by sacrific[ing] the immediate meaning of the things and reductively
fix[ing] them to a meaning within an artificial logical system. In addition to its prob-
lematic semantic power, Doyle emphasizes languages palpability. This material status of
language is important to her as she describes what she calls Woolf s intercorporeal narra-
tive strategies (Doyle 43), the use of perceived objects as points on which to shift narra-
tive consciousness. She claims that if we think of consciousness as an embodied phenom-
enon in which a conscious subject perceives through his body another body, an object,
then intercorporeal narrative is the process of switching the narrative perspective from the
consciousness of one subjective body to that of another subjective body by means of the
common perception of an objective body. As heard and seen material bodies, instances
of language can also serve as these pivotal objects (Doyle 8).
I will add as an important qualification that intercorporeal narrative entails two sep-
arate perceptions and separate consciousness rather than a blending of either. For this
reason, it is more accurate to describe this technique as transcorporeal than intercorpo-
real because the consciousness of one body never inhabits another body. Instead, the nar-
ration transfers from the embodied consciousness of one subject to another. We see this in
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) when the mysteriously primordial and nonsensical chanting of an
old woman disrupts Peter Walshs interior frustrations about Clarissa. The voice serves as a
point on which to shift the narration to Rezia Smiths consciousness: Clarissa was as cold
Sundered Waters 211
as an icicle. There she would sit on the sofa by his side, let him take her hand ee um fah
um so / foo swee too eem oo ee um fah um so/ foo swee too eem oo / Poor old woman,
said Rezia Warren Smith, waiting to cross. Oh poor old wretch! (MD 2597-98). The nar-
ration begins with Peters personal memories and thoughts as he ruminates on Clarrissa,
remembering how she would sit on the sofa. Peter then perceives the voice, and when the
song appears again, Rezia is the subject perceiving it. The narration continues from there,
reporting Rezias consciousness. The voice, absent of all human meaning, communicates
nothing to Peter or Rezia but acts instead as the object of their parallel perception. By paral-
lel, I mean that two subjects perceive the same mutually external object, but because they
have discrete consciousnesses, their perceptions are separate and therefore different. Indeed,
in this case, neither Peter nor Rezia is even cognizant of the others perception of the invin-
cible thread of sound (MD 2598) that strings their narrative perspectives together. Woolf s
narration then respects Jamess insistence on insular consciousnesses belonging to personal
selves while portraying the internal mindscapes of multiple characters. Transcorporeal nar-
ration provides transition between them. While Dymond suggests this polyvocal narration
signals a collective or merged consciousness as the consciousnesses of the characters inter-
connect within paragraphs and sentences (Dymond 142), we must remember that this
aggregate of thoughts is a novel, a fiction, rather than what James calls consciousness that
we naturally deal with, and within the novel, characters do not experience the interwoven
textile of consciousnesses available to the reader; they witness only their own.
Although limited to the isolated confines of his own personal mind, however, an indi-
vidually conscious subject can create a sense of communal interiority with others through
a sort of double awareness: first the perception of an object and then the perception of
another self perceiving the same object. In this way, subjects think of themselves as sharing
a common experience. In the dinner scene of To the Lighthouse after the moment in which
Lily, Mrs. Ramsay, and William Bankes each feel alienated from the group by their respec-
tive consciousnesses, the candles on the table are lit. The candlelight serves as an object for
the common perception of those present, and the diners, aware of each others perceptions,
experience a sense of communion spurred by a mutual exclusion of the outside world:
Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were
brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been in the
twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of
glass Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really hap-
pened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an
island; had their common cause against the fluidity out there. (99-100)
The diners experience both parts of the double individual consciousness that generates the
sense of belonging to a conscious collective whole. In parallel, they perceive the exterior
candlelight and that the others perceive the candlelight, all conscious of making a party
together. Although the individual feels as though the candlelight has composed the
disparate conscious subjects into a party, into a merged perceptual entity, the narrator
points out that this is an illusion that only seems as if [it] had really happened.
We are approaching here a solutionalbeit it a troubled oneto Lilys problem of
overcoming the hermetic sense of isolation engendered by the barrier between conscious
selves. The experience of a shared exteriority inhabited in common facilitates a feeling of

communion; it grants the characters the sense that they are not individual sundered con-
sciousnesses but a party. The narration suggests, though, that this coming-together, this
dissolution of personal boundaries, did not really happen. We see this more clearly when
we are given access to the characters thoughts instead of summaries of them, as when Lily
and William Bankes watch waves together on a beach. The narration begins with Lilys
perceptions and thoughts and then shifts to Bankess, revealing the disparity between the
contents of their interiorities:
They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity, excited by
the moving waves both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of
merriment felt come over them some sadnessbecause the thing was completed
partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily
thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an
earth entirely at rest.
Looking at the far sand hills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay: thought
of a road in Westmorland, thought of Ramsay striding along a road by himself
hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his natural air. (24)
In the first paragraph of this passage, Lily perceives the waves and the sand dunes as ob-
jects, and she perceives Bankes as another perceptive self watching them. She thinks they
are sharing this experience of a mutual exteriority, that they are feeling the same hilarity
and the same sadness, but Bankes is actually thinking about Ramsay while Lily contem-
plates the land, sea, and sky. Thus, Lily feels a communion with Bankes, a communion
that is false but functional in that it alleviates her sense of isolation.
In Woolf s novels, then, we find a rich rendering of different consciousnesses, but
each belongs exclusively to a particular personal self. Because of this, an other cannot
access the interior consciousness of that self, as she can neither experience it directly nor
recreate for herself the experience by decoding language. As Lily discovers when she puts
her head on Mrs. Ramsays knee in an attempt to discover her inner thoughts, and finds
that, [n]othing happen[s]. Nothing! Nothing! (54), the boundary between self and
other, between subject and object, between interiority and exteriority is intraversable. The
intertwining of consciousnesses remains, as Merleau-Ponty tells us, a fiction: Although
characters are isolated by their insulated consciousnesses, we see in Woolf s narration that
an individual self creates a sense of communion by thinking that others are experiencing
the same mutually exterior object that she is perceiving, that she and they are sharing a
common experience via their common perception, whether they are or not. In this way,
we may consider ourselves like waters in a single jar; though illusory, it makes us feel less
alone, less like hermits in our heads.
Works Cited
Doyle, Laura. These Emotions of the Body: Intercorporeal Narrative in To the Lighthouse. Twentieth Century
Literature 40.1 (1994): 42-71. Web. 14 Dec. 2009.
Dymond, Justine The Outside of Its Inside and the Inside of Its Outside: Phenomenology in To the Light-
house. Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds: Selected Papers from the Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf.
Sundered Waters 213
Ed. Jessica Schiff Berman and Jane Goldman. New York: Pace University Press, 2001. 140-145. Web. 14
Dec. 2009.
James, William. Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt, 1890. Classics in the History of Psychology. Web.
14 Dec. 2009 <http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin9.htm>.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Ed. Mark Hussey. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005.
. Mrs. Dalloway. Longman Anthology of British Literature. Ed. David Damrosch and Kevin J.H Dettmar. 3rd
ed. Vol. 2C. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2006. 2552-2655.
TO GIVE THE MOMENT WHOLE: THE NATURE OF TIME AND COSMIC
(COMM)UNITY IN VIRGINIA WOOLFS THE WAVES
by Emily M. Hinnov
What I want to do now is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate

waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it
includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation;
the voice of the sea. (Woolf, THE WAVES 209; D 3: 201)
That is the wholethe revelation of some ordersome real thing

behind appearancesIt is only by putting into words that I make it
whole. (Woolf, MOMENTS OF BEING 71-72)
V
irginia Woolf asks her readers to collaboratively discoverthrough personal and
coequal awarenessthe socially redemptive value of an art that allows audiences
to contemplate human choices and find instances of agency in the real world.
Moreover, her work suggests that a positive, politically-engaged aesthetic project might
begin in the present moment of belief within the context of community, even in the midst
of a terrifying monolith like fascism that will later be recalled as a horrific moment in
History. Woolf s contemporary cultural critic Walter Benjamin also valued the impor-
tance of personal perception in the construction of a more humanistic history.1 Woolf s
moments of being coincide with Benjamins flashes of insight: the true picture of the
pastThe past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can
be recognized and never seen again (Theses 255). Through common engagement in what
Benjamin calls the redemptive optics available in the newly democratized role of art,
Woolf contends that audiences might collaborate and participate with a new version of
living aesthetics. For these modernists, the seemingly small, vibrantly lived, personal mo-
ments serve as a counternarrative to authorized versions of History as told by fascist and/
or patriarchal institutions of power. Consequently, Woolf and Benjamin were proponents
of artwork composed of fragmentary materials as a response to the seeming whole of the
fascist threat. For Woolf, fascism is a totalitarian ideology stemming from patriarchal no-
tions and the success of imperialism, dependent upon militarism, and implicit in British
public and private life as well as abroad. Woolf s work thus evinces a politico-aesthetics
particularly concerned with the threat posed by fascism. Woolf focuses instead on the
cosmic pattern that transcends distinctions between the past, present, and future and
advocates a larger, more communal awareness of our connection with others and the
natural world that envelops us all. Her later works, even as early as The Waves (1931), as I
will argue, illustrate counternarratives of community2 in action against fascism in order to
imagine the future for a still-to-be-redeemed humankind.3
In The Waves, Woolf creates the narrative structure of soliloquies as possible medita-
tions on each characters deeper motivations. This device complicates her representation of
selfhood within a militarized and increasingly fascist society. The seven characters of the
To Give the Moment Whole 215
novel are not whole in themselves, but they do experience brief moments of harmony and
congruity. Ultimately, they create a composite character in that their multiplicity of perspec-
tives offers a complete organic vision, even in difference: A single-sided flower as we sat here
waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce, purpleshaded, stiff with
silver-tinted leavesa whole flower to which every eye brings its contribution(263). This
essay will follow the wavelike oscillation between fragment and wholeness as represented
in The Waves. I aim to illustrate the sense of waxing and waning inherent in the creation
of communities that welcome outsiders into the fold, from an individual consciousness
revealed as necessarily a fragment, to a coherent and unified natural world.4
The symbol of the wave itself suggests chaotic unity, fluidity of identity where the self
merges back, and a cyclical view of the universe. In the movement from collision to sepa-
ration, there is a process of psychological growth. The Waves predominantly asks how one
can form a sound identity or self in light of the pressures of modernity. Each characters
painful process of individuationWe suffered terribly as we became separate bodies
(344)necessitates fragmentation. Yet disunity from the whole is required for eventual
reunion as the wavelike movement is both a break and a merge. In this novel, personal
epiphanies are often examples of separation that reveal disconnection from the whole in
order to reform the self. Bernard frequently attempts to create coherence through Benja-
minian flashes of insight: The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment,
has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life
(341).5 For Woolf, these ecstatic and violent shocks of being are potentially moments
of mystical unity, where each person is connected to the other, and all are part of some in-
explicable pattern (Moore 222). Bernards performance of identity throughout the novel
functions like a wave, and he becomes the ultimate multipart identity at the end when
he absorbs all their characteristics into one symbolic whole. Yet even in Bernards absorp-
tion of the other characters, we are reminded of the fleeting quality of individual identity,
especially when considered against the larger, cosmic whole of natural time.6 I will return
to Bernards conclusion later in this essay.
The undulation between self and greater whole is reflected not only in the characters
lives but also in the structure of the narrative itself. In their entirety, the interludes suggest
progression in age, the binaries of sunrise/sunset, childhood/old age, rise/fall, summer/
winter, the movement through History, the rhythm of life, and most prominently human
history versus the cosmology of time and Nature in cyclical, repetitive, and sometimes vio-
lent images. In the first interlude we have the phrase, Everything becomes softly amorphous
(194), suggesting openness and fluidity. In the second interlude, the birds that had sung
erratically and spasmodically in the dawn on that treenow sang together in chorus, shrill
and sharp; now together, as if conscious of companionship, now alone as if to the pale blue sky
(225), perhaps signifying some kind of cosmic communal ethos, however dissonant it may
be. This interlude in particular evokes a Darwinian aestheticrot and fear of deathyet
it also suggests life and renewal: Down there among the roots where the flowers decayed, gusts
of dead smells were waftedThe skin of rotten fruit brokeNow and then [the birds] plunged
the tips of their beaks savagely into the sticky mixture (226). Imagery of natural decay and
the survival of the fittest simultaneously intimates the cycle of life, as these birds will be
nurtured by the spoils of the earth. Ultimately, however, the interludes remind us that we
are all of momentary importance in this cosmos of chaos over which we have no control:
The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed
themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back and forth with the energy of their fallThem,
too, darkness covered (279-280; 341). The invocation of Indian mysticism, the emphasis
on astronomy, and the randomness of life in the interludes also contrast with the death of
white Western cultureas Jane Marcus reminds us.7
The prose-poem quality of the narrative structure, then, presents a rhythmic personal
history of these English lives, exposing the rise and fall of empire and its internalized con-
structs of whiteness and patriarchal or imperial supremacy. Woolf utilizes the character of
Percival in particular to represent fascisms inheritance of imperialism. Percival is utterly
fragmented by death, and he never quite finds a sense of unified community. Percivals death
is futile, yet it ironically creates stability, order, and unity for his friends. At the same time,
his role as supreme imperialist is bitterly satirized: Behold, Percival advances; Percival rides
a flea-bitten mare, and wears a sun-helmet. By applying the standards of the West, by us-
ing the violent language that is natural to him, the bullock-cart is righted in less than five
minutes. The Oriental problem is solved. He rides on; the multitudes cluster round him, re-
garding him as if her werewhat indeed he isa God (269). Percival appears like a knight
in Arthurian legend who finds the grailhe is an imperialist god and colonizer central to
the rise of the British Raj. Each character idealizes him because as a male and a colonial ad-
ministrator he holds a position of power in modern British culture. Moreover, Percival does
not speak; as an icon of British imperial identity, he is a blank slate, allowing for the other
characters projection. His high stature in this society contributes to his role as a would-be
fascist with too much power. In the recurring images of India, Africa, unexplored territories,
and the representation of Percival as cardboard hero projection of those who do not speak,
Woolf critiques the violence of imperialism and its resolution in fascism.
Many of the characters see themselves in reference to an exotic or primitive Other. Susan
and Bernard, for instance, appear as young adventurers in an undiscovered countryLet
us take possession of our secret territory (189)while the gardeners are imagined as hostile
natives. In the English schoolchilds imagination, imperialism is a significant part of selfhood
and nationhood, revealing the psychology of empire, and by extension, fascism. If Percival is
to represent imperial dominance and its ties to fascism, then Woolfs solution to the problem
of an individuals fascistic potential is to dispense with it. The death of a proto-fascist character
such as Percival reveals the redemptive power of The Waves; his untimely and rather unheroic
fall from imperial glory on a flea-bitten mare shows the rest of the community that there is no
hierarchywe are all equal specks in the universe. Percivals waning back toward fragmenta-
tion reminds characters and readers of the place of self and its correlation with others, bringing
us back to the larger presence of a cosmic whole of which we are all a part.
In Between the Acts (1941), Woolf similarly ventures a hopeful resistance against any
view of hegemonic history as dominant or overpowering to the masses, even if only for
fleeting moments. Miss LaTrobe is trying to give people this kind of transformative art,
from fragmentary moment to moment. As Lucy murmurs, Weve only the present (82).
The optic shock created by the reflective glass shards at the end of the performance might
draw the audience into positive action. Miss LaTrobe cannot control the play or the reac-
tions of the audience, but her efforts do at times create seized moments of time, a gather-
ing in that might make the audience stop to think: Hadnt shemade them see? A vision
imparted was relief from agonyfor one moment (98). The play has opened the pos-
sibility, through its varied imaginings of history, that the audience has agency in choosing
what to remember, what to live by, what to discard or re-create. They all search for some
kind of pattern or coherence or order, some inner harmony? (119) that might explain
the whole of existence. Yet again the natural world, that uncontrollable force, establishes
unity against the fragments of war: And the trees with their many-tongued much syl-
labling, their green and yellow leaves hustle and shuffle us, and bid us, like the starlings,
and the rooks, come together, crowd together (120). As in The Waves, Natures influence
possibly reveals some cosmic wholeness that is broader than the human universe, as well as
a yearning for lost unity and human connectedness in the midst of it all. The background
conversation is the splintered, fragmented dialogue about the play about British history,
which encompasses accounts of Dictators and the present of the papers and the Jews?
The refugeesPeople like ourselves, beginning life again (121). There is definitely an
atmosphere of renewal among fragmentation afoot here.
Woolf s attention to characters inhabiting the outer edgesoutcast figures such as
the broken and suicidal Rhoda and the alienated, class-conscious Louis in The Waves
helps us to connect the role of fascism to constructions of difference and division within
potential communities. In part, Woolf intended to restore community with her writing,
because we must in no way hinder any other human being, whether man or woman,
black or white (TG 66). If we attend to those characters othered because of gender, class,
sexuality or race, then we can become even more aware of the interdependence of Woolf s
fragmented characters and the ethical impulse to connect.8 Early in the novel we see Rho-
das longing for human community when she says, I will bind flowers in one garland and
advancing with my hand outstretched present themOh! To whom? (TW 214).9 Later
in the narrative, Louis observes that The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here
is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then
expand again. Yet I am not included[as] an alien, an external (240).
The collective narrative of The Waves itself is one of Woolf s prime examples of the
literary representation of unity among humanity not based upon the hierarchical, mecha-
nistic collective of fascism that would surely obliterate those designated as other. Instead,
this anti-history is a retelling of communal awareness that resists the strictures of fascism
and attempts to include everyoneeven the alien or externalin its story. A case in point
appears at the conclusion of The Waves when the ultimate, symphonic moment suggests
the possibility of rebuilding community out of the metaphor of art. The community of
Neville, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda, Bernard and a thousand others transcends time and
death to create a symphony, with its concord and its discord and its tunes on top and its
complicated bass beneathEach played his own tune, fiddle, flute, trumpet, drum, or
whatever the instrument might be (354). The merging of those usually othered by fas-
cistic modes of being thus creates an alternate mosaic (Woolf, D3: 298) of community.
In a gesture of total intersubjectivityI am not one person; I am many people; I do not
altogether know who I amor how to distinguish my life from theirs (TW 368)Ber-
nard defies the divisiveness of fascist history that seeks to pull us apart and away from our
collective human unconscious.10 The unborn selves (377) and the abjected brute, too,
the savage, the hairy man are all contained (378) and thereby presumably restored. The
colonialists primitive man is tossed and combined with the would-be white imperialist
in this fluid yet complex composition of community. These multitudes of selves which
become one in the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again
(383) embody the dance and the wavelike interplay between personal and cosmic time.
As Chloe Taylor notes, Bernard questions whether the six characters of the book are not
all one, all him, and whether he is male or female, whether he is not, in being Jinny and
Neville, Susan and Louis, Rhoda and Bernard, both (372). Bernard, the poet who cat-
egorizes words alphabetically yet longs to howl and bark, who is male, but listens to the
sea, may also be read as Virginia Woolf, who, by extension, is all of the characters in one
(17). By novels end, the waxing of communal identity and the waning of fragmentation
ceasesthe seven characters, necessarily refracted through the shared consciousness of
Bernard, come home to a coherent and unified world.11
As demonstrated in The Waves, Woolfs organic symbol of ethical communitythe sym-
phonic seven-sided flowerallows us to imagine a postpatriarchal community of Outsiders [,]
reaffirm[ing] the vital relevance of Woolf for those who work for peace in any sphere (Hussey
12). This flower, of course, recalls Woolfs own musings on the concept of wholeness in Moments
of Being as quoted in my epigraph. Virginia Woolfs work invites collaborative meaning-making
when it comes to possible social outcomes of engaging with art in future generations. Further-
more, Woolf views aesthetics as a vehicle for social action that might bring about humanistic uni-
ty. In her search for coherence and interconnectivity, she speaks to the web-like linkage between
all of humanity, accessible through our participation in art: WeI mean all human beingsare
connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art, that we are parts of that work of art
we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself (MOB 73). Here she also describes
her profound pacifism in that for any wholeness to exist, peace is necessary (98). A deep sense
of peace can be found in Woolfs present moment, yet the depths of Woolfs deep river of
consciousness contain an interweaving of past, present, and future. She sees beauty in whole mo-
ments of being that transcend modes of living death with fullness of mind and spiritall within
the mesh of a wider web of humanityforging connections between her artistic philosophy and
the modernist writers project of self and communal formulation.
Woolfs pacifism contributes to her ideas about community because she wanted to destroy
the war mindset with her work, which is most often connected with fascist powers seeking to
conquer the fragments of society in the form of woman, nonwhite, and non-Westerner. The
Waves reveals that she had not yet lost faith in humanitys ability to form a global communal
ethos, and therefore that task resides in her readers participation. Studying Woolfs formations
of community illuminates the historic tension between self and other so that we might fully
understand her resistance to imperialism and fascism. Woolf writes of our collective emancipa-
tion from tyranny through our recognition and recreation of communality. Moreover, examin-
ing Woolfs creation of ethical awareness on the page is necessary to our understanding of what
community can be, and so may determine a future in which we do not repeat the mistakes of
the past. For Woolf, the creative mind, body, and soul might finally redeem humanity through
the potentially transformative aesthetic of cosmic community.
Notes
1. Benjamin famously argued that in the mechanical age of reproduction, art has lost its original aura. For
Benjamin, the dialectical image afforded by the lately egalitarian place of art in modern society offers a
veritable constellation of interpretations. Moreover, the reproduced photographic work of art produces
flashes of insight about what history as the story of the past might mean, which, with the benefit of com-
munal interaction, will lead to social transformation for both artist and viewer. Woolf s vision of the world
as a living work of art in which the wider audience must play an integral part speaks to Benjamins concept
of redemptive optics; both modernist philosophers provide relevant context for the communal moment as
a narrative aesthetic (found both in the novel and the photograph) which creates the opportunity, through
cooperative (re)action, to rebuild community.
2. For an extended discussion of what I term modernist choran moment and its subsequent phenomenon
of choran community, please see my book, Encountering Choran Community: Literary Modernism, Visual
Culture and Political Aesthetics in the Interwar Years (Susquehanna University Press, 2009).
3. Other Woolf scholars have argued that Woolf tackles the spectre of fascism in The Waves as well. See in
particular AnnKatrin Jonsson, Natasha Allen, Gabrielle McIntire, and Suzette Henke.
4. Madeline Moore similarly argues that in The Waves the representative range of human possibilities focuses on
an inevitable cycle wherein individuals are momentarily united with nature, experience both its exultation and
its nothingness, and, in order to preserve their autonomy, reemerge into the present of human effort (219).
5. Tamlyn Monson wonders whether any ethical encounter with the Other is possible:
An ethical encounter with the Other is indicated as Bernard begins more and more often to con-
sciously problematize language, despite its necessity. Woolf s sense of the arbitrary nature of the
relation between word and reality is tellingly exhibited as Bernard recognizes the minds veil of
words for everything (88)words that cover over reality rather than revealing it in its essence. This
recognition is an indication of the self s inability to bar the Other through the power of an exclusory
representation, and its simultaneous inability to wholly include the Other through some mystical
fusion or transcendence to a new, borderless ontology. Recognition of the violence of representation
cannot redeem the subject from approaching the Other through the necessarily violent modes of
selfhood and language. (183)
She concludes that Woolfs characterization of Bernard reveals the problem of ordering the narrative: The paral-
lelbetween Woolf herself and the character Bernard is significant for this reading, suggesting, perhaps, Woolfs
negotiation, through Bernard, of the ethics of her own task in revealing the paradox of the self in literature (189).
6. Jean Alexander argues that the greater designlarger than persons, forces of nature, or social structures
must be considered a religious or mythic one (175). Likewise, Lyndall Gordon looks at the novel as an
attempt to defamiliarize lives and see them as phenomena of nature and argues that this work asks what
shape lifespans have in common (203-204).
7. According to Jane Marcus, By making the sun set in the British Empire in her novelWoolf surrounds
the text of the decline and fall of the West (the transcendental self striving and struggling against death)
with the text of the East, random natural recurrence (Britannia 155).
8. AnnKatrin Jonsson makes an extensive argument on ethics and the modernist subject in her book of the same
title. In regards to The Waves, she writes that the novel has phenomenological tendency[ies] because of its
emphasis on an ethical subjectby representing the subject in an inescapable relation with the world and the
other, a relation depicted as a wavering between signification and indeterminacy, between same and other (98).
9. Natasha Allen argues that part of Woolf s anti-fascist critique in The Waves is Rhodas speaking silence,
testifying to the voicelessness of the Other (23).
10. Although Suzette Henke writes on The Waves as a meditation on ontological trauma, she also comments
on this passage as an epiphanic moment[when] the walls of the ego grow porous and fuse with a larger
empathic whole (142). She goes on to discuss the implications of this utopian dream of community,
pitted against the trauma of mortality (143), which she concludes is, for Woolf, a creative endeavor that
is doomed to fail in the face of death; however, True heroism liesin human resiliencein the perpetual
impulse toward heroic creation (146).
11. Jonsson would likely agree: As the last words of the novelbelong not to the subject but to the objectto
what is other than the self and outside the control of the selfthe novel makes a final comment on the eth-
ical priority of the other-than-the-self over the self (144-145). Madeline Moore concludes that Woolf s
characters do not achieve their potential community. Instead, community is experienced symbolically or
in moments of ecstatic longing (240).
Works Cited
Allen, Natasha. The Critical Silence of the Other: Critique of Fascism in Virginia Woolfs The Waves. In Virginia
Woolf: Art, Education, and Internationalism, Selected Papers from the Seventeenth Annual Conference on Virginia
Woolf. Eds. Diana Royer and Madelyn Detloff. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2008. 21-24.
Alexander, Jean. The Venture of Form in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936. In Selected Writings: Walter
Benjamin. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
___. Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, Essays and Reflections. Ed. and
Intro. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1986.
Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, and Modernity. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004.
Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writers Life. New York: Norton, 1984.
Henke, Suzette. The Waves as Ontological Trauma Narrative: The Anxiety of Death (Un)Forseen. In Virginia
Woolf and Trauma: Embodied Texts. Eds. Suzette Henke and David Eberley with the assistance of Jane
Lilienfeld. New York: Pace University Press, 2007. 123-155.
Hinnov, Emily M. Encountering Choran Community: Literary Modernism, Visual Culture, and Political Aesthetics
in the Interwar Years. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2009.
Hussey, Mark, ed. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991.
Jonsson, AnnKatrin. Relations: Ethics and the Modernist Subject in James Joyces Ulysses, Virginia Woolf s The
Waves and Djuna Barness Nightwood. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2006.
Marcus, Jane. Britannia Rules The Waves. In Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century Literary
Canons. Ed. Karen R. Lawrence. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. 136-162.
McIntire, Gabrielle. Heteroglossia, Monologism, and Fascism: Bernard Reads The Waves. Narrative 13.1
(2005): 29-45.
Monson, Tamlyn. A Trick of the Mind: Alterity, Ontology, and Representation in Virginia Woolf s The Waves.
Modern Fiction Studies. 50.1 (Spring 2004): 173-196.
Moore, Madeline. Nature and Community: A Study of Cyclical Reality in The Waves. In Virginia Woolf,
Revaluation and Continuity. Ed. and Intro. by Ralph Freedman. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1980. 219-240.
Pawlowski, Merry, ed. Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators Seduction. Houndsmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Phillips, Karen J. Virginia Woolf Against Empire. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1994.
Taylor, Chloe. Kristevan Themes in Virginia Woolf s The Waves. The Journal of Modern Literature. 29.3 (Spring
2006): 57-77.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. 1941. Annotated and with an Introduction by Melba Cuddy-Keene. New
York: Harcourt, 2006.
___. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and asst. Andrew McNeillie. New York and Lon-
don: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
___. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Ed. and Intro. JeanneSchulkind. Sussex: The
___. Three Guineas. 1938. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Jovanovich, 1965.
___. The Waves. Jacobs Room and The Waves: Two Complete Novels. 1931. London: Harvest Books, 1959.
SPENGLERS THE DECLINE OF THE WEST AND INTELLECTUAL QUACKERY:
CHECKING THE CLIMATE WITH LEONARD WOOLF AND W. B. YEATS
by Wayne K. Chapman
O
ne of the objectives of this essay, at points aided by visual matter, is to introduce
scholars to two of the resources found on the Bibliographic Studies page of the
Clemson University Digital Press website. Without demonstrating the function
of the Annotated Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard Woolf (by J. Manson and W.
Chapman) in tandem with my Short-title Catalog of the W. B. Yeats library at the National
Library of Ireland, I believe that a selection of work by German philosopher Oswald Spen-
gler will demonstrate the utility of these resources. If the intellectual ecology of the essay
ranges from the national to the vaguely cosmological, there can be no apology as it is all
one with the particular subject.
Figure 1, detail from CUDP Bibliographic Studies page.
The essay primarily examines Leonard Woolf s critique of the two volumes of Spen-
glers treatise on history, The Decline of the West, published, respectively, after each volume
appeared in English translation in 1926 and 1928. It happens that, as a set, both volumes
were purchased and read by Yeats soon after he published the first edition of his occult
philosophy, A Vision, in 1925, and this reading impacted the rewritten 1937 second edi-
tion, where aspects of Spenglers comprehensive outline were cited. Woolf critiqued Spen-
gler as an agent of intellectual quackery, first, in two World of Books columns (in 1926
and 1929) in The Nation & The Athenaeum, which he edited, and then, famously, in his
book Quack, Quack! (Hogarth Press, 1935). His reading notes in The Decline of the West,
volumes 1 and 2, now at Washington State University, are complemented by notes in a

copy of Spenglers The Hour of Decision (1934), but, more importantly, by an unsigned
review that Woolf published in the fifth volume, third issue of The Political Quarterly
(1934), repeating his case against this book the following yearin Quack, Quack!to
make rhetorically emphatic there the conclusion of his overall analysis of Spenglers work.
One will find the necessary bibliographic leads to this material in Parts 1, 2, and 3 of the
Annotated Guide (see screenshot, Figure 2).
Figure 2, detail from home page of An Annotated Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard Woolf, 3rd
ed. (rev.), by J. M. Manson and W. K. Chapman (CUDP, 2010).
One will go to Part 1 for the monograph and the signed reviews, Part 2 for the un-
signed review, and Part 3 for the index and location of books within the old Holleyman
and Treacher Catalogue of the Woolf Library as the collection existed at Monks House
and Victoria Square at the time of Leonards death, scarcely to mention links one finds to
the online Short-Title Catalog at WSU and the universitys network catalog of the archive
to which it relates. The name Spengler is really all one needs to search with the computer
Find function (Edit>Find).
Yeats, politically conservative in the 1920s and 1930s, found Spenglers thought
only of qualified use in support of his own account of history in the rewritten, standard
edition of A Vision published by Macmillan in 1937. Politically on the Right almost
as far as Woolf stood on the Left in relation to Italian Fascism, Yeats would read The
Decline of the West quite differently. We know this because all of the direct references to
the book in A Vision were made to serve the same purpose. As a poetindeed the great
poet that Leonards wife discerned and studied from encounters at Lady Ottoline Mor-
rells beginning in late 1930 (D3 329-32; L4 250, 253)Yeats was interested in Spen-
glers symbolism and parallels between Spenglers datings of cultural significance and
the first symbolical map of European history drawn by Mrs. Yeatss spirit guides with
respect to years of crisis and to the juxtaposed cones or gyres familiar to students
today. In acknowledging agreement with his own work, he was confirming evidence
by means of authority not without taint but still reputable in 1937. He suspected his
wifes instructors were acquainted with the German text of 1918 (AV B 11, 18) because
the English translation post-dated his own work by some weeks although not only
were datesgiven the same as [Spenglers] but whole metaphors and symbols (18). He
Oswald Spengler, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats 223
recognized the precursors Vico (261) and Frobenius, who, Yeats noted, Spengler gave as
the authority for the symbolism of the Cavern in the West (259). They did not agree
that this Cavern is time, which was Yeatss view, because, he said, to call it Space, as
Spengler does, is to suffer the modern conception of a finite space always returning to
itself to obsess ones thought (260). The obsession with the Time philosophy of our
day must have made Spengler identify the Faustian soulwith Time; Spengler had
inverted the meaning of his symbols (260). And at another party at Lady Ottolines,
Yeats told Virginia Woolf that he was writing about her novel The Waves, which, with
Joyces Ulysses and Pounds Cantos, suggest a deluge of [mental and physical] experience
breaking over us and within us (qtd. in D4 255n).
So Yeats was interested in Spenglers metaphysics and in Virginia Woolf as a writer
and explorer of the metaphysical, like himself but without the supernatural. His reading
notes in The Decline of the West do not betray much besides what I have already saidnot
to differences that were critical, at any rate.
The Yeats Library offers as manuscripts photocopies made by Anne Yeats and her ar-
chivist some thirty years ago (note the bracketed entries in my Short-title Catalog, screen-
shot Figure 3). In the National Library of Ireland, the two volumes may be examined to
confirm that Yeatss encounter with Spengler was essentially a comparative exercise, with
points marked on scores of pages but with scant comment in the margins. The exceptional
Figure 3, detail from The W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-Title Catalog, Undertaken in Dalkey
and Dublin, Ireland, 1986-2006, by W. K. Chapman (CUDP, 2006).
comment occurs in volume 2, at the foot of p. 419. The sentence it notes (at the middle of
the page) is about the super-personal form taken during the Late Period of [a] Culture:
in about 450 for the Classical and for ourselves about 1700. On this discrepancy with
Yeatss analysis of visual art from 2000 BC to AD 1927, Yeats writes that Spengler Puts great
period of great art and culture too late or ours too early. I put maximum at (say) 1450-1500
but the expression of power incited by attack later. He ignores literature & art. Swift was
conscious of the decay of the form. This transcription is close to the one offered by Edward
OShea (257) but made from personal inspection of Yeatss copy at the NLI.
Fortunately, Yeats took care to inoculate himself against suspicion that he sympathized
with Spenglers Faustian politics in the age of the Third Reich. A corollary paragraph in A
Vision seems aware of the European political climate of 1937: My instructors certainly
expect neither a primitive state nor a return to barbarism as primitivism and barbarism are
ordinarily understood; antithetical revelation is an intellectual influx neither from beyond
mankind nor born of a virgin, but begotten from our spirit and history (AV B 262).
Of course, Leonard Woolf would have considered such hedging an honest instance
of intellectual muddling or, put another way, honest quackery. It might be forgiven of
friends so long as it was harmless. But as a public intellectual and editorand emphati-
cally by 1935he had to denounce Spenglerian historiography as dangerously allied with
barbarism in the betrayal of civilization. Lamenting conditions he and Virginia witnessed
themselves on tour that year, on the surface of Italian life if running deep in Germany,
his Bloomsbury affection for Italy found relief from the hostile Teutonic climate of Nazi
Germany: Italian history has been civilizing the inhabitants of Italy so deeplythat no
savageshave ever been able to make the Italians as uncivilized as the Germans (Down-
hill 194). Some understandable stereotyping does seem inherent in Leonards reaction,
yet he took care to acknowledge the little truth he found in Spenglers opus. For context,
we might remember that the Classically educated Leonard Woolf was, between 1931 and
1939, the author of his own two-volume history, After the Deluge: A Study of Communal
Psychology, which examined the psychology of man as a social animal in the Western
democracies from the French Revolution to about 1918. The study was popular enough
to be reissued, in 1937, as a Pelican Book, a progressive series in the fields of Science,
Economics, History, Sociology, [and] Art published by the budding Penguin Books Ltd.
The Zeitgeist (literally Time-ghost) was incidental to his argument. In 1953, Leonards
magnum opus was capped by Principia Politica, advertised on the dustjacket by Harcourt,
Brace (see Figure 4, below) as The third volume of After the Deluge, and a political auto-
biography, asserting that freedom is stronger than despotism.
Figure 4, dustjacket of Leonard Woolf s Prin- Figure 5, dustjacket of Leonard Woolf s

cipia Politica (Harcourt, Brace, 1953). Quack, Quack! (Hogarth Press, 1937).
Now back to 1935 and Quack, Quack! See Figure 5 (above).

The book was divided in two parts: Quack, Quack in Politics and Intellectual
Quack, Quack. As more than twenty pages in the latter were allotted to Oswald Spen-
gler, this followed devastating analyses of Mussolini and Hitler and associates such as
Herr Wilhelm Kube. Joining Thomas Carlyle in Britain and Henri Bergson in France,
Spengler received the greater share of attention in Part IIone might say a greater share
of the duckbecause of his connection with German quack politics and his considerable
reputation among serious thinkers:
Like Carlyle and Nietszche, he is not an ordinary, stupid quack, quacking for
comfort or profit in the contemporary national chorus; he is not the hack quack
of Nazi propaganda. He is immensely learned in the German style. He has a
streak of originality, understanding, and imagination, which, when controlled
by reason and used ingenuously in a search for truth, can strike out suggestions
and interpretations illuminating obscurities in human history. (QQ 139)
The problem was that his gifts and talents were placed in the service of quackery.
Woolfs review of the nonsensical logic-splitting, question-begging, and bombastic rhetoric
of Spenglers The Decline of the West was a virtual summary of Woolf s conclusions published
in The Nation and The Athenaeum in 1926 and 1929. In the first of these, entitled Got-
terdammerung, he also led with concessions that recognized the authors wide reading
and knowledge of history and a considerable amount of truth that, however, got mixed
up with pretentious generalizations, a pompous style, and the most fantastic metaphysic
and philosophy of history that the clouded brain of learned man has ever devised, Woolf
wrote (558), parodying Spenglerian exaggeration for sake of ridicule. Of the 443 pages and
three tipped-in charts, there were perhaps 100 pages of value. The thesis, though mere
moonshine when not the fog of a muddled mind, might have been stated succinctly, thus:
In the history of the human race organic cultures, with specific principles of
their own, spring up at intervals. They all pass through the same, predetermined
stages, like animal organisms, of childhood, adolescence, middle-age, and old
age. All cultures degenerate into civilizations, the periods of old age and decay.
Thus Western Culture, which sprang into existence about 1000 A.D., became
a civilization and began to decline at the end of the eighteenth century. (558)
The value to Woolf of those 100 hypothetically compressed pages followed from the
attempt to examine history in the light of eternity rather than in that of the span of a
mans life, or even a nations life (558), echoing Yeatss regard for the cosmological dimen-
sion but without Yeatss complaint about Spenglers leaving out art and literature.
Also reminiscent of Yeatss claim that Spenglers obsession with the Time-philoso-
phy of our day resulted in the invertedmeaning of his symbols, Woolf said in Quack,
Quack! that the promotion of intuition over thought was one with Spenglers equating or-
ganic necessity in life with the logic of time, allowing nothing to the necessity of cause and
effect. He was doing for history and politics what . . . others [were] doing for metaphysics
and philosophy; he [was] getting rid of definition (or the necessity of making your meaning
clear), of analysis and proof, of reason (143). In Woolfs critique of volume 2 of The Decline
of the West, which had been rehearsed in a review entitled, simply, Spengler in February
1929, he said that Spenglers notions of life and thought have nothing to do with one an-
other (722). His method is a bewildering mixture of brilliant analysis, reckless assertion,
and dogmatic mysticism, making the whole bookblurred and perverted by mystical
quackery, by what seems to be almost deliberate muddle-headedness, and a deepseated in-
ability to play fair intellectually (722). What results from this appraisal of a mans work is
the portrait of a deeply anti-rationalist man (see Figure 6).
The conclusion of the reviewlike most of the case Woolf
makes against Spengler, thereafter, in Quack, Quack!is that
in the end what [Spengler] calls life and reality turn out to be
simply war (Spengler 722). As a rationalist, Woolf s stance
against war in Europe implied an underpinning of propo-
sitions capable of proof wherein one bore the burden of
persuading other people by proof that the propositions are
both reasonable and true. As Spengler held by intuition that
marching soldiers are the inevitable cosmic beat of history
felt with a deep wordless understanding, then the only way
of settling the matter will be to see which one of us can first
shoot the other up or at least whip him off into a concentra-
Figure 6, Oswald Spengler. tion camp (QQ 144).
As personal as this sounds, Woolf closed off his treatment of The Decline of the West
by making a concession. The remainder of his treatment of Spengleron the embrace of
primitive passions in the extreme forms of practical fascist quackery, on war history as
a reflection of the choice between barbarism and civilization, on the German Nazis and
barbarism as strong race (the beast-of-prey man), and on the cosmic beat of Hitler
relies on another regrettable book. Published in English and vigorously attacked by Woolf
in the Political Quarterly in 1934, The Hour of Decision, subtitled Part One: Germany and
World-Historical Evolution, marked Spenglers overt turn to the service of the Nazi regime.
The Decline of the West is the work of a quack, but Woolf allowed that it at least has the air
of honest and disinterested quackery (QQ 146). His unsigned review compared the other
book with Moeller van der Brucks propagandistic treatment of the regime in Germanys
Third Empire and found little difference to Spenglers credit. The only difference between
Spengler and van der Bruck, according to Woolf, is that Spengler has read more history
and is a more astute man (PQ 456). In essence, beyond that difference,
his outlook and philosophy are the same. There is the same sense of inferiority
and the same Germanic bombast, the same hatred of civilization and reason,
the same reckless disregard of truth. Human historymust always be war
history. (456)
To venture further than this comparison is to go beyond my subject, so I will con-

clude by noting an irony that Leonard Woolf did not endorse. There was no second part of
The Hour of Decision as the authors reservations about Hitler and the permanence of the
Third Reich were detected by the Nazis, who prohibited distribution of Part One after ini-
tial release. In Quack, Quack! Woolf allowed only that official dissatisfactionroused by
one or two passages gives one pause to contemplate with awe their magnificent appetite
for the humiliation of the intellectual (146). Irony embodies the German philosophers
not undeserved reputation. For the student of our history will read [him] with admira-
tion, astonishment, and disgust, the major to all the minor imitators and little quackers
who [then] raise[d] their voice in all the countries of Europe (160).
Works Cited
Chapman, Wayne K. The W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-title Catalog, Undertaken in Dalkey and Dublin,
Ireland, 19862006. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2006. <www.clemson.edu/cedp/
cudp/pubs/YeatsSTC/ index.htm>
Manson, Janet M, and Wayne K. Chapman. An Annotated Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard Woolf. 3rd
edition (revised). Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2010. <www.clemson. edu/cedp/cudp/
pubs/lwguide/index.htm>
OShea, Edward. A Descriptive Catalog of the W. B. Yeats Library. New York: Garland, 1985.
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. 2 vols. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1926, 1928.
. The Hour of Decision. Part One: Germany and World-Historical Evolution. Trans Charles Francis Atkinson.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934. [No more than Part One was published.]
Woolf, Leonard. After the Deluge: A Study of Communal Psychology. 2 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1931, 1939.
[Volume 1 only was reissued as a six-penny Pelican Book in 1937 by Penguin Books Ltd.]
. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1949. London: Hogarth Press, 1967.
. Quack, Quack! London: Hogarth Press, 1935. [Abbreviated as QQ.]
. Unsigned review. The Political Quarterly 5.3 (1934): 454-7.
. The World of Books: Gotterdammerung. The Nation & The Athenaeum, August 14, 1926: 558.
. The World of Books: Spengler. The Nation & The Athenaeum, February 23, 1929: 722.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie. Vols. 3 and
4. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, 1982.
. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 4: 1929-1931. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York
and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Yeats, W. B. A Vision. 1937. London: Macmillan 1962. [Abbreviated AV B.]
. A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon certain Doctrines attributed
to Kusta Ben Luka. London: privately printed for subscribers only by T. Werner Laurie, 1925. [Abbrevi-
ated AV A.]
LISTENING-IN, TUNING OUT:
LEONARD WOOLFS CRITICISM OF THE BBC DURING THE 1930S
by Luke Reader
W
e can think of Leonard Woolf in many different ways: essayist, novelist, pub-
lisher, journalist, Labour Party theorist, international relations scholar, and hus-
band. Yet how often do we consider this polymath a media sensation? Hyperbole
perhaps, but during the 1930s and 1940s, Woolf appeared regularly on British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) radio, lecturing on topics as diverse as the British Empire, democracy,
Jean Jacques Rousseau, and pedagogy. After a silence of 15 years, Woolf re-emerged during
the 1960s as a frequent contributor to radio and television broadcasts in Britain, Austra-
lia, Canada, and Sri Lanka. Woolf contributed to programs regularly, so much so that he
required reassurance about his over-exposure to the public after featuring on the airwaves
twice in a week (Watkins). Conversely, in 1967, he also expressed concern that a program
he was participating in would air on the mainstream television station BBC 1, and not the
highbrow arts service BBC 2, which was of limited interest to many viewers (Woolf, Letter
to Powell). Woolfs desire to use his interpretation of the past to meld the present encour-
aged his re-engagement with broadcast media late in life. Woolf s five autobiographies, pub-
lished during the 1960s, used his prominence as a public intellectualessayist, publisher,
and political theoristto become an architect of perceptions of the Bloomsbury Group,
which was rapidly becoming an object of academic and literary scrutiny. As one prescient
BBC researcher noted in 1967, Woolfs cultural interventions now and then situated him at
the center of a nexus of artistic and literary endeavor (Richardson).
Woolf s television and radio work of the 1960s, however, is significant less for its
literary curatorship than for the connection it provides to his interest in public education,
intellectual development and improvement, and artistic production during the 1930s.
One typical method for examining Woolf s cultural interventions is to consider them
through the terminology he provided us: civilization and barbarity.1 A more effective ap-
proach might be to consider how he engaged with modes of artistic production and in-
terpretation. The act of commemoration is, in this circumstance, an explicitly politicized
act defining how a public consumes and understands literary products. It molds historical
interpretation. Here, the word interpretation appears critical to understanding Woolf s
aim in broadcasting. It connects the nostalgia of the 1960s to his use of radio and jour-
nalism in the 1930s to engage in a cluster of political and cultural debates during this
period. Todd Avery, for example, argues in his monograph Radio Modernism that during
the 1930s radio became a site of ethical struggle, which sought to determine national
direction (8-9). If this is correct, then it is possible to present Woolf s broadcasts and
journalistic expositions on BBC policy as marking an individuals participation in an ethi-
cal struggle to determine cultural, social, and political habits and direction. Yet what was
this struggle? For Woolf it was to determine the intellectual foundations of an idealized
public sphere. It was to create and forge an intellectual environment. The BBC provided
him with a locus for public education that would encourage the development of an im-
Listening-In, Tuning Out 229
proved civic space. Yet as part of an ethical struggle, Woolf s journalism about the BBC
attempted to define how public intellectuals used their cultural capital as journalists, es-
sayists, publishers, and political theorists to disseminate information across a broad public
and construct their vision of the nation.
Woolf s approach towards the BBC appears influenced by Labour Party policy to-
wards that broadcasting institution during the 1920s and 1930s. His approach was one
that suggested broadcasting limited rather than expanded access to information. Historian
Simon Potter suggests in his article Webs, Networks, and Systems that new forms of
communications technologies such as radio, cable technology, and mass circulation news-
papers allowed individual figures to control how people gained knowledge and under-
standing. Capitalist and government control of cable and cheap print technology encour-
aged rigid structures of communication and constructed a system that reinforced elite
control over media and cultural production (Potter 634-635). Another historian, Laura
Beers, connects Potters idea to the 1926 General Strike to argue that this determined
later Labour Party policy towards the BBC. She suggests that the governments attempt
to portray striking mine-workers as agents of Bolshevism received considerable support
from the BBC as well as the Conservative capitalist press (142). This, Beers continues, re-
inforced the attempts of mine-owners to reduce wages and working conditions in the face
of declining profits and productivity and ensured there was no outlet for voices support-
ing Labour or the unions (142). Whilst some in the Labour Party, such as Philip Snowden
and Norman Angell, questioned the credulity of the mass mind and its susceptibility to
patriotic appeals, others, like party leader Ramsay MacDonald, took a different approach;
following the General Strike he urged a national political discourse to provide an outlet
for the interests of the Center Left (Beers 133, 148). This required sustained engagement
with the BBC as an institution of public education and information.
Woolf s work for the BBC during the 1930s reflected both these aspects of Labour
policy. His book After the Deluge (1931) asserted that the government was able to defeat
the striking workers, despite initial middle-class support, by encouraging the BBC to sug-
gest that the strike represented a threat to the interest of the middle class (242-243). The
charter of the BBC, drafted by its Director General Sir John Reith in 1924, argued that
a national broadcaster should act as a tool of enlightenment, with its content defined by
middle and upper class views of acceptability (McDonnell 2, 15). Woolf disagreed. Rath-
er, the aim of the BBC, he charged in an article for the Political Quarterly entitled The
Future of British Broadcasting, was to avoid controversy in its radio output. In a thinly
veiled attack on Reith, he said that constructing policy in this manner amounted to a form
of dictatorship in which listeners-in will not be given all the truth and all opinions, but
only that particular cross-section of truth and opinion which the dictator thinks good for
them (Woolf, The Future 178). He explained that for human society to function ef-
fectively in an era of participatory politics, universal suffrage, and mass-media, its people
should learn knowledge and opinion, for the controlling factor in human society [was]
an educated, informed, tolerant, and rational public opinion (Woolf 175). By avoiding
challenging programming, the BBC monopoly merely homogenized national debate, lim-
ited access to alternative, particularly socialist, opinion, and presented the broadcasting
authority as the sole repository of insight into British and imperial affairs and disengaged
the audience from public discussion (Woolf 175).
Woolf continued this critique in two essays for the New Statesman and Nation. The
first, Educating the Listener-In, was written in the autumn of 1931 to coincide with
Woolf s six talks that marked his participation in a BBC radio lecture series, The Modern
State. Here, Woolf suggested that what concerned him the most was what the BBC chose
to omit from the airwaves. Woolf s lectures considered democracy a communal psychol-
ogy guiding the development of modern Britain and so allowed him to range freely across
an examination of democratic, socialist, communist, and fascist beliefs. Yet as he argued
in Educating the Listener-In, producers for the preceding set of talks, The Modern Di-
lemma, which considered varieties of religious belief, forbade any discussion of atheism or
agnosticism (Woolf 274). Woolf s experience was that the BBC practiced self-censorship.
Like other hosts of radio talks, the BBC required that he submit a draft of his talks for
examination before broadcast (BBC). The consequence, according to Woolf, was that the
BBC appeared unable to escape its didactic impulse, resulting in weak programming,
beholden to a belief amongst BBC directors that all knowledge which can be related to
life is dangerous and that the expression of any opinion, except their own, is immoral
(Woolf, Educating the Listener-In 275). This policy reduced the complexities of public
discourse by determining appropriate modes of conduct regarding discussions of religion
on the radio. The result, Woolf argued in a 1933 New Statesman and Nation essay, Ethe-
real Problems, was that the BBC attempted to manage and define cultural interests and
opinions instead of letting its listening audience establish their own pleasures (Woolf 99).
The consequence of this action was to encourage institutions and public bodies to grant
themselves both presumption of knowledge and the divine authority to impose it upon
other people (Woolf 100). Instead of allowing for intellectual growth through broadcast-
ing, the BBC sought to define how people behaved, thought, and acted.
In one sense, the roots of Woolf s analysis sat within a Marxist framework. BBC
policies alienated both intellectual workers and a broader working population from their
labor. Both sides failed to possess any control over cultural or informational means of pro-
duction, the former because they could broadcast only within strictly defined parameters,
and the latter because debates about what form radio programs should take privileged
middle-class voices only. The broad public was instead the body upon which it was pos-
sible to enact broadcasting policy. Unlike many in the Labour Party, however, Woolf un-
derstood the potential the BBC offered to remake an entire mode of cultural production.
Broadcasting presented the possibility for ending a privileged elites monopoly of knowl-
edge and provided other intellectual, political, and cultural forces with an opportunity to
democratize access to information. It was, he mused in The Future of British Broadcast-
ing, the most revolutionary invention in human history, with the power to change both
public debate and the processes involved with intellectual thought (172).
Woolf had access to the radio and he intended to use it, forging broadcasting into
a rhetorical space through which he could educate a listening audience. A leitmotif for
Woolf s intellectual labor during the interwar period was an attempt to define a com-
munal psychology that shaped British society and culture. Radio allowed him to inform
listeners of his conclusions. In his six radio talks in the autumn of 1931, also printed
in the BBC current affairs periodical, The Listener, Woolf argued that participation in a
democratic society provided a commonality that had determined British society since the
eighteenth century. Democracy, he contended in the first of his talks, Is Democracy Fail-
ing? offered three provisions: the assurance of happiness through government policies;
the treatment of each person, politically, as an individual; and a belief in the liberty and
freedom of that individual (572). The consequence of Woolf s argument was an attempt
to build a society or community through an appeal to an unspecified we or us. Woolf used
broadcasting to educate, not reinforce.
Woolf s six talks provided his listeners with two different services, both of which
were located in the immediate historical context of the period. The first was to inter-
vene directly in contemporary political debates. Woolf s work responded to beliefs that
with Britain mired in decline and facing potential economic and imperial dissolution, the
only solutions lay with the authoritarian right and left (Woolf, Democracy and Equal-
ity 668-669). Since 1918, Britain had suffered from continued high unemployment, a
growing wealth divide between the booming South East of England and the industrial
north, exemplified by the withdrawal of the pound sterling from the Gold Standard in
September 1931, and the gradual adoption of protectionist economic policies to maintain
control and financial stability within the empire (Williamson 290-295). Influential and
popular lower-middle class newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the more up-market
Times responded to these events by expressing approval of Mussolinis Fascist government
as well as the nascent Nazi movement in Germany, and demanded the adoption of Ital-
ian economic and social policies at home. Influential figures on the left such as Beatrice
and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and Harold Laski looked towards Stalinism to
provide a vigorous solution to economic woes (Overy 265-313). Woolf challenged these
views and spoke on democracy to prevent authoritarianism from forging a new national
communal psychology. Woolf argued in his talk Democracy and Equality that while
democratic society built community, all authoritarian government could create was an at-
omistic society that based itself upon competing interests (668). Priorities like education,
or an equitable economic system, the focus of reform in England, remained incompatible
with the need to benefit party cadres and revolutionary vanguards (668). Woolf developed
this idea again in a later discussion, Gods and Bees, suggesting that communist and fas-
cist regimes could only offer strong government by sacrificing individual life and liberty
to the interests of the ruling party and its adherents (767).
Secondly, Woolf deployed a carefully calculated use of logos that sought to educate his
listening audience about a democratic societys ability to improve the life of all of its citi-
zens regardless of class or creed. Only a democratic system of government could transcend
particularistic interests. Woolf s talk Have We the Right to be Happy? educated listeners
about the implications of the expansion of democracy in England. As the franchise ex-
panded through the class structure during the 19th century, so too did legislation regulat-
ing working hours, wages, and mandatory holidays, beginning to balance the interests of
the capitalist with those of the worker (616). Municipal improvements at the turn of the
century provided the public with services such as healthcare, transport, and universal edu-
cation, which served to obfuscate class difference further (616). Only through democratic
governments could one see reforms improving the material conditions of daily existence
and providing the means through which people could enjoy themselves, such as public
parks, libraries, and municipal facilities, regardless of particularistic interest (615-616).
Despite his history lesson for listeners, Woolf generally remained slow to perceive the
cultural value of his talks. The publisher George Allen and Unwin, who printed the BBC
radio series as a book entitled The Modern State, suggested that Woolf write an introduc-
tory essay for his talks that would explain further to his audience the ideas that he was
attempting to argue (Letter to Woolf ). George Allen and Unwin were interested in the
manner by which his talks sat alongside those of Lord Eustace Percy, a Conservative politi-
cian, whose lectures following Woolf s provided a counterargument to Woolf s discussion
of democracy. Although Woolf was initially unwilling to print his talks, the publishing
company convinced him that the publication of his lectures in book form would provide
an opportunity to explain how his arguments encouraged the development and reform
of public debate (Letter to Woolf ). Woolf reluctantly agreed, noting the possibility it
offered for public education (Woolf, Letter to George Allen and Unwin). Woolf grasped
how a popular audience required further education in democracy as a form of national
communal psychology. His thinking followed on from an earlier suggestion to Lord Percy
that it would be useful for the education of the listening public to hear a debate between
the two presenters that explained their divergent positions (Woolf, Letter to Percy).
Woolf presented a further two talks in the 1930s that similarly used the radio as an
ethical and pedagogical tool that would create an educated community. A 1933 broadcast
discussing Jean Jacques Rousseau for the series Some Makers of the Modern Age demon-
strated how his enjoyment of hiking brought him into contact with a broad strata of
society and in doing so undermined a system of privilege and rights based upon social
class (Woolf, Rousseau 277). Here, Woolf informs public intellectuals of the implica-
tions of their role as pedagogues in a manner similar to that found in his expositions on
the writing of history for the World of Books column in the Nation and Athenaeum
and his literary reviews in the New Statesman and Nation. Woolf s view of Rousseau was
Aristotelian. He considered him an intermediary between an elite who possessed exclusive
access to information and an emerging literate bourgeois who demanded knowledge but
required a responsible form of education. Uniting them was the fact that education was no
longer the possession of an elite. It was something portable, easily distributable through
the available mediums of the period, whether the novel in Rousseaus time or radio and
mass-market publishing in the 1930s (Woolf, Rousseau 278). Woolf s concern lay with
mode of dissemination of information. While Rousseau outlined in Emile a pedagogical
method based upon freedom to learn from experience and to develop a natural capacity
for education, Woolf worried that current practices in schools, universities, and institu-
tions sought to police the boundaries of public and private expression (278).
Woolf further explored the question of education and restrictions on knowledge in a
1937 talk entitled Does Education Neutralise Thought? In this discussion Woolf drew
upon the themes of his examination of BBC broadcasting policy in the New Statesman
and Nation and Political Quarterly from the early 1930s, in particular the concern that the
management of opinion was an effort to control and stifle dissent. Following a series of
discussions with radio talk producer Roger Wilson, the BBC invited Woolf to speak on
the subject of thinking. Wilson suggested that Woolf s discussion consider some of the
points raised about impediments to clear thinking in Robert Henry Thoulesss Straight
and Crooked Thinking (1930), an examination of argument style and forms of reasoning,
and Graham Wallass The Art of Thought (1926), which examined the influence of social
environment upon the creative process (Wilson). Woolf seemed to follow through on
Wilsons prompting. The purpose of his talk was to criticize the methods by which figures
who held positions of intellectual or moral authority sought to educate or disseminate

opinion. Woolf s discussion scrutinized modes of pedagogical practice in particular, con-
sidering how educational institutions failed to provide individuals with the capability to
think clearly for themselves. This was a fault of their imbrication within their intellectual
surroundings. The result, Woolf argued, was the application of immense pressure upon
us from our earliest years in our homes, our schools, our universities, our libraries, and
our newspapers to prevent us from questioning accepted beliefs and so to prevent us from
acquiring the habit of thinking (Woolf, Does Education Neutralise Thought? 1366).
In order to prevent the acceptance only of what others thought to be true, Woolf argued
that individuals should establish the pursuit of clear thinking by developing patterns of
creative thought, in particular the investigation of ideas and counterarguments (1367-
1368). It was in this form of intellectual engagement that individuals could develop skills
to forestall educations discouragement of thought (1368).
Yet if during the 1930s, radio provided Woolf with a space for oppositional dis-
courses, during the 1940s it provided him with a platform to expound upon constructing
a post-war world. A 1941 talk, The New Democratic Order, printed in The Listener, ex-
amined how planning, led by a cadre of trained experts and intellectuals, would encourage
a renascence of public life after the war (535). An August 1943 talk on the empire, A
Challenge to All of Us, also published by The Listener, encapsulated for a broad listening
audience Woolf s work for the Labour Party Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions
to develop a post-war policy regarding the empire. As with Britain, so with the colonies;
education was key to creating a population that in Woolf s opinion could govern itself
justly (Woolf, Memos to the Labour Party). Woolf situated the empire and the colonial
metropole within the same interpretive plane, suggesting that practices intended to im-
prove public life in Britain could be used to develop its imperial possessions (Woolf, A
Challenge 180). Finally, a memorandum for the Labour Party in the autumn of 1944
considered how an international broadcasting service could function as a tool of interna-
tional peace and cooperation (Woolf and Robson, International Broadcasting 2). Radio
would construct an international post-war society by developing global news program-
ming and cultural programming that would dismantle prejudices about ones supposed
enemies (1-2). Woolf intended this entity to possess its own means of production by
maintaining control of its own transmitters and to remain divorced from national govern-
ments by retaining its management through intellectual figures who would administer
according to the needs of education and improvement rather than chauvinistic aims (3).
Woolf s writings and broadcasts on BBC policies during the 1930s served to redefine
the role of the public intellectual in British cultural life. If radio during this period was
a site of ethical struggle, then Woolf s talks on the BBC and writings about BBC policy
provided a sustained intervention within this debate. His work attempted to manage
how people received information and gained knowledge, and in reality, it is possible to
understand how both the BBC and Woolf shared a vision of broadcasting as a form of
education. The question was to its purpose. Both Woolf and the BBC offered two equally
hegemonic views of society. Broadcasting, for the BBC, functioned as a reflection of the
nations conscience (McDonnell 15). Woolf s writings on broadcasting policies presented
a methodology for public intellectuals to follow in managing emerging forms of mass
media. His broadcasts served to place him within a system of cultural production and
allowed for his participation in the very processes he sought to decry. Radio allowed him
to educate a broad listenership about democracy at a moment in which it appeared im-
periled. Yet it also served to validate his credentials as an individual able to participate in a
discourse determining national direction. By inserting himself into this debate, Woolf di-
rected his cultural capitalas political theorist, essayist, novelist, and publishertowards
managing the consumption of and participation in a range of cultural, social, and political
practices and activities. Listeners were a body of people upon whom it was possible to
enact policy, experiments, and conjecture surrounding cultural, economic, and political
organization. Woolf wrote and broadcast in order to forge a community. He presented an
us, but this was a binary in which one side suffered from a lackin this case the correct
education regarding cultural modelsthat only the other could provide. The difference
was that Woolf, unlike the BBC, did not underestimate the receptiveness of the audience
to this message.
Notes
1. For scholarly discussions of Woolf s writings as an attempt to define a struggle between civilization and
barbarity see Yasmine Gooneratne 1-3; Simon Joyce 633-641; Selma Meyerowitz 198-199; and Amindo
Roy 146-151, 174, 177.
Works Cited
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Journal of British Studies 48.1 (2009): 129-152.
British Broadcasting Corporation. Letter to Leonard Woolf. 26 August 1931. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers.
University of Sussex, Falmer.
George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Letter to Leonard Woolf. 20 April 1932. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers. Univer-
sity of Sussex, Falmer.
Gooneratne, Yamsine. Leonard Woolf in Ceylon 1904-1911. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.3
(2004): 1-3.
Joyce, Simon. On or About 1901: The Bloomsbury Group Looks Back at the Victorians. Victorian Studies
46.4 (2004): 631-654.
McDonnell, James. Public Service Broadcasting: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Meyerowitz, Selma. Leonard Woolf: A Biography. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
Overy, Richard. The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars. New York: Viking-Penguin, 2009.
Potter, Simon. Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth and Twen-
tieth Century British Empire. Journal of British Studies 46.3 (2007): 621-646.
Richardson, Joanna. Letter to Leonard Woolf. 15 March 1967. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers. University of
Sussex, Falmer.
Roy, Amindo. Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India 1822-1922. London: Routledge,
2005.
Watkins, Gordon. Letter to Leonard Woolf. 13 January 1967. MS. Leonard Woolf Papers. University of
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1926-1932. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
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. After the Deluge: A Study in Communal Psychology. London: Pelican Books, 1937.
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. Is Democracy Failing? The Listener 7 Oct. 1931: 571-572.
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Notes on Contributors
Xiaoqin Cao teaches English literature at North University of China. She got her MPhil
in European Modernisms at the University of Birmingham, UK in 2006 and has pub-
lished articles on Virginia Woolf and China, reception and media. Her current interest
is a postcolonial interpretation of Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group and the East.
Wayne Chapman is Professor of English at Clemson University, editor of The South Carolina
Review, and executive editor of Clemson University Digital Press. His most recent book is Yeatss
Poetry in the Making: Sing Whatever Is Well Made (Palgrave Macmillan 2010). He has written
two other books on Yeats and edited three more. With Janet M. Manson, he is the co-author of
An Annotated Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard Woolf (2006) and co-editor of Women in
the Milieu of Leonard and Virginia Woolf: Peace, Politics, and Education (1998).
Beth Rigel Daugherty, Professor of English at Otterbein University, is working on a book
manuscript entitled Virginia Woolf s Apprenticeship: The Education of a Woman Writer. She
recently published an essay on Virginia Stephens reviewing practice in Virginia Woolf and
the Literary Marketplace, edited by Jeanne Dubino.
Jeanne Dubino is Professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North
Carolina. With Beth C. Rosenberg she co-edited Virginia Woolf and the Essay (St. Martins
1997), and she most recently edited Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace (Palgrave
MacMillan 2010). She has published essays and articles on Woolf, travel literature, popu-
lar culture, and postcolonial writers.
Diane F. Gillespie, Professor Emeritus of English at Washington State University, is author of The
Sisters Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and of numerous essays,
most recently chapters for Bonnie Kime Scotts Gender in Modernism, Maggie Humms Edinburgh
Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, and Helen Southworths Virginia and Leonard Woolf: The
Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism. She is editor of Woolfs Roger Fry: A Biography and
of The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf as well as co-editor of Julia Stephens writings, the selected
papers volume Virginia Woolf and the Arts, and Cicely Hamiltons Diana of Dobsons.
Jane Goldman is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is a Gen-
eral Editor of the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Writings of Virginia Woolf
and author of The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and
the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge UP 1998), Modernism, 1910-1945: Image to Apoca-
lypse (Palgrave, 2004) and The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge UP
2006). She is editing Woolf s To the Lighthouse for Cambridge, and is currently writing a
book, Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog.
Emily M. Hinnov is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Southern New Hamp-
shire, where she teaches composition and British and World Literature. She has published
a book, Encountering Choran Community: Literary Modernism, Visual Culture, and Political
Aesthetics in the Interwar Years (Susquehanna University Press 2009) as well as other pieces on
Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Her forthcoming
publications focus on subjects ranging from being a Generation X academic to the essays of
Harlem Renaissance era writers Elise Johnson McDougald and Marita O. Bonner.
Catherine W. Hollis received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and currently teaches in
Berkeleys Fall Program for Freshmen. Her monograph Leslie Stephen as Mountaineer
(2010) is available from Cecil Woolf s Bloomsbury Heritage series.
Jane Lilienfeld is a Professor of English at Lincoln University, an historically Black college
in Jefferson City, MO, the location of the Third Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf in
Notes on Contributors 237
1993. In 2000 Jane Lilienfelds book Reading Alcoholisms: Theorizing Character and Nar-
rative in Selected Novels of Thomas Hardy, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf won a CHOICE
award from the American Library Association. Janes scholarly essays have appeared in
Woolf Studies Annual, Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Twen-
tieth Century Literature, and in numerous anthologies, including the essay, Could They
Tell One What They Knew?: Modes of Disclosure in To the Lighthouse in Virginia Woolf:
Embodied Texts, edited by Suzette Henke and David Eberly. Currently Jane is working on
an essay entitled Virginia Woolf, War and Peace.
Barbara Lonnquist is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Chestnut Hill College
in Philadelphia, PA, where she teaches modern Irish and British literature. Her publica-
tions include a co-authored essay on Joyces Clay; the Easter Rising in Yeats, Joyce, and
Edna OBrien; and Cleopatra as precursor to the female vampire in British literature. Her
current research is on Woolf and modernist travel narratives.
Alice Lowe is a freelance writer in San Diego, California. Her Woolf publications include
Beyond the Icon: Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, a 2010 monograph in the Blooms-
bury Heritage series from Cecil Woolf Publishers.
Gill Lowe is Senior Lecturer in English at University Campus Suffolk, Ipswich, UK. Her
specialist areas are auto/biography, issues of adaptation and reading and writing short
fiction. She edited the first edition of Hyde Park Gate News, the journals of the Stephen
children, which was published in 2005.
Laci Mattison is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University studying Modernism and
critical theory. Currently, her work examines the creative intersections between Henri Berg-
sons philosophy and modernist literature and the later ways in which Bergson and modern-
ist writers such as Woolf and Samuel Beckett influenced Gilles Deleuzes thought.
Rebecca McNeer is a retired Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean Emerita at
the Southern campus of Ohio University. Her doctoral dissertation subject was Virginia
Woolf s Orlando, and she has published articles on Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and Aus-
tralian writers.
Patrizia A. Muscogiuri received her Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studieswith a the-
sis on radical inscriptions of sea metaphors including a chapter on Virginia Woolffrom
the University of Salford, where she currently teaches Translation Studies. She has pub-
lished research on film and cultural studies and is currently preparing for publication her
Sea and coast between metaphor and history in Virginia Woolf s writing (forthcoming
in Navigating Cultural Spaces: Images of Coast and Sea, edited by A. Horatschek, Y. Rosen-
berg and D. Schbler) and an essay on the poet H.D.
Vara Neverow is a professor of English and Womens Studies at Southern Connecticut State Uni-
versity. Her recent publications include the Introduction and annotations to the 2008 Harcourt
edition of Jacobs Room as well as Virginia Woolf and City Aesthetics in Maggie Humms Vir-
ginia Woolf and the Arts (2010) and Woolfs Editorial Self-Censorship and Risk-Taking in Jacobs
Room in Jeanne Dubinos Virginia Woolf and the Literary Marketplace (2010).
Erin Kay Penner is a doctoral candidate in English at Cornell University, with interests in
British and American modernism, literature of the American South, and the elegiac tradi-
tion. In her dissertation, Characterizing the Modern Elegy in the Novels of Faulkner and
Woolf, she reads the two authors as engaging in an extended rewriting of the poetic elegy, as
they use the heteroglossic novel to make room for the voice of the elegiac subject.
Luke Reader is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of California, Irvine. He

is working on a dissertation about Leonard Woolf s work for the Labour Party Advisory
Committee on Imperial Questions.
Carrie Rohman teaches at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, and her research interests include
animal studies, modernism, and posthumanism. Her essays on writers such as Djuna Barnes, D.
H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, and Italo Calvino have appeared in such journals as American Litera-
ture, Criticism, and Mosaic, and in a number of essay collections. Her book, Stalking the Subject:
Modernism and the Animal, was published in 2009 by Columbia University Press.
Diana Royer is Professor and Coordinator of English on Miami Universitys Hamilton
Campus. She is co-author (with Carl Royer) of The Spectacle of Isolation in Horror Films:
Dark Parades (Haworth 2005) and author of A Critical Study of the Works of Nawal El
Saadawi, Egyptian Author and Activist (Edwin Mellen 2001).
Derek Ryan is a Ph.D. student at the University of Glasgow. His thesis explores
the relationship between Virginia Woolf s writings and contemporary theories of
subjectivity,focusing in particularonquestions ofsexual difference,materialism and post-
humanism. His essay on Woolf and contemporary philosophy will be published in the
upcoming volume Woolf in Context (Cambridge University Press), and he is also part of
the organizing team for the2011 Woolf conference.
Dominic Scheck is an undergraduate studying English at the University of Minnesota Mor-
ris, where he works as a writing tutor and community adviser. His research interests include
British literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of the English lan-
guage, critical theory, and composition studies. An etymological descendant of *dem, the
Proto-Indo-European word for house, Dominic, as a rhetorically constructed textual per-
sona, enjoys the play between sign and referent in this sentence in this book.
Bonnie Kime Scott is Professor and Chair of Womens Studies at San Diego State Uni-
versity. She is a former President of the International Virginia Woolf Society. Her earliest
writing helped set the Irish political and literary contexts of James Joyce, including the
feminism of his day, as found in Joyce and Feminism (1984). The feminist re-vision of liter-
ary modernism has been at the heart of her research for decades. The collaborative critical
anthology, Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007), serves as
a sequel to The Gender of Modernism (1990), her ground breaking work in this area. Woolf
is one of three women authors investigated in her two-volume study, Re-Figuring Modern-
ism (1995). Recently she has pursued a lifelong interest in the environment. She teaches
a course on Women and the Environment and recently completed the manuscript of
Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature: in the hollow of the wave.
Kate Sedon received her B.A. from John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, and is cur-
rently pursuing an M.A. in literary and cultural studies at the University of Pittsburgh. As
the recipient of the University of Pittsburghs Scottish Room Nationality Scholarship, she
looks forward to a lovely summer of researching the poetry of Edwin Morgan.
Kathryn Simpson is Senior Lecturer in English at The University of Birmingham, UK.
Her recent research has focused on Virginia Woolf s engagement with economies and her
book, Gifts, Markets and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf (Palgrave 2008) explores
this in detail. Her research interests include the work of other modernist writers, H.D.,
Gertrude Stein and Katherine Mansfield, and most recently contemporary writers, such
as Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters and David Mitchell.
Notes on Contributors 239
Elisa K. Sparks is an associate professor of English at Clemson University in South Carolina

where she also directs the Womens Studies program. She has published a series of articles
on parks, gardens, and flowers in Virginia Woolfs life and work (and produced a number
of woodblock prints) as well as several articles exploring connections between the works of
Woolf and the American Modernist painter Georgia OKeeffe. An active participant in both
the American and British Virginia Woolf Societies, she co-edited the Selected Papers from the
2005 International Woolf Conference at Lewis and Clark College.
Verita Sriratana is the 2006 recipient of the Anandamahidol Foundation Scholarship
under Royal Patronage of HM the King of Thailand. She gained her B.A. (First-Class
Honors with highest marks) in English Literature from Chulalongkorn University and
M.A. (Distinction) in Colonial/Postcolonial Literature in English from the University of
Warwick. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of St. Andrews.
Diana L. Swanson is associate professor of womens studies and English at Northern
Illinois University, where she has taught courses on women, gender, nature and the en-
vironment as well as served as the founding coordinator of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Transgender Studies Program. She has published essays on Woolf in Woolf Studies An-
nual, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Creating Safe Space: Violence and Womens Writing (SUNY
Press), and several volumes of the Selected Papers.
Elise Swinford is a doctoral student in English Literature and Women, Gender, and Sexu-
ality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also teaches courses in
gender and literature. Her research is focused on transnational modernisms and subversive
gender performances during the interwar period.
Cecil Woolf is the nephew of Leonard Woolf by Leonards youngest brother, Philip. He
was fourteen when his Aunt Virginia died and had paidmany visits to his uncle and aunt
in the country and in London. Following in the steps of Leonard and Virginia, he set up
his own independent literary publishing house in 1960. Cecil Woolf Publishers have pub-
lished, among many publications, the Bloomsbury Heritage monographs, which celebrate
the life, work and times of the members of the Bloomsbury Group. He is married to the
acclaimed biographer, Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Rachel Zlatkin is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati and teaches Brit-
ish literature and writing courses at the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky
University. She is currently working on a critical dissertation, Social Relations and Rep-
resentations of the Maternal in Early Modern Literature, an object-relations study of the
dynamic social relations between subjects and their surrounding environment.
Conference Program
THURSDAY, JUNE 3
FEATURED PANEL 1:15-3:00

The Other Sides of the Fence: Borders and Boundaries
Chair: Jeanne Dubino (Appalachian State University)
Judith Allen (University of Pennsylvania): Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Grass
Jody Rosen (New York City College of Technology): Vacillation and Mixture: Orlando, Nature,
and Gender in Orlando: A Biography
Gill Lowe (University Campus Suffolk): Wild Swimming
Georgia Johnston (Saint Louis University): Woolf s Natural Iteration
FEATURE PRESENTATION 3:30-4:30

Elisa K. Sparks (Clemson University): Virginia Woolf s Literary and Quotidian Flowers: A Bar-
Graphical Approach
4:30-4:45 Free Time
OPENING KEYNOTE 4:45-6:15

Welcome, Bill T. Crouch, President of Georgetown College
Rosemary Allen, Provost of Georgetown College
Bonnie Kime Scott (San Diego State University): Ecofeminism, Holism, and the Search for
Natural Order in Woolf
OPENING RECEPTION, Art and Rare Book Exhibit 6:30-8:30

Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Gallery
8:40-9:30 Life in the Country: A Dramatic Reading for Five Voices

by Roberta Palumbo (Holy Name University) and Ruth Pearce
Wilson Lab Theatre
FRIDAY, JUNE 4
Session 1 Friday 8:30-10:00 a.m.
1A: Philosophy and The Waves

Chair: Barbara Lonnquist, Chestnut Hill College
Irene Klosko (Bucks County Community College): No Fin Breaks the Waste of this Immeasurable
Sea: Bernards Existential Vision in The Waves
Laci Mattison (Florida State University): The Metaphysics of Flowers in The Waves: Virginia Woolf s
Seven-Sided Flower and Henri Bergsons Intuition
Tiffany McCormack (Southern Oregon University): The Sublime Nature of Virginia Woolf s To
the Lighthouse and The Waves
1B: Failure and Functionality in Woolf s Natural Orders

Chair: Brook Miller, University of Minnesota, Morris
KT Engdahl (University of Minnesota, Morris): The Nature of the Sexes: Androgyny and
Communication in Woolf s Kew Gardens
Joshua Johnson (University of Minnesota, Morris): The meaning of my life: Partial Signifiers and
the Pursuit of the Essential Self in Woolf s The Waves
Dominic Scheck (University of Minnesota, Morris): Sundered Waters: Isolated Consciousness and
Conference Program 241
Ostensible Communion in Woolf s Narration
1C: Woolf and Ecocritical Perspectives

Chair: Emily Kopley, Stanford University
Sarah Dunlap (Ohio State University): Root and Blossom: Plants in The Waves
Rachel Zlatkin (University of Cincinnati): The Flesh of Citizenship: Red Flowers Grew
Kelly Sultzbach (University of Oregon): Virginia Woolf as an Ecocritical Reader
1D: Uncanny Proximity: The Human and Nonhuman in Woolf

Chair: Christine W. Sizemore, Spelman College
Justyna Kostkowska (Middle Tennessee State University): Diversity in Relationship: Ecological
Form in The Waves
Vicki Tromanhauser (SUNY New Paltz): What she liked was simply life: Mrs. Dalloways
Posthumanism
Mayuko Nakazawa (Chukyo University): A Million Atoms: Virginia Woolf s Primeval Trees in
The Waves
1E: Woolfian Landscapes

Chair: Keri Barber, University of California, Riverside
Xiaoqin Cao (North University of China): Walking over the bridge in a willow pattern plate:
Virginia Woolf and the Exotic Landscapes
Lolly Ockerstrom (Park University): Landscapes, Longing, and Cornwall: Virginia Woolf and A.L. Rowse
Renee Dickinson (Radford University): Writing the Land
Session 2 Friday 10:30-12:00
2A: Victoriana in Mrs. Dalloway

Chair: Lolly Ockerstrom, Park University
Anjanette Rodgers (Independent Scholar):The Language of Flowers in Mrs. Dalloway
Christine W. Sizemore (Spelman College): House and Garden in Mrs. Dalloway: Patriarchal and
Heterotopic Spaces
Ann Marie Lindsey (CUNY Graduate Center): Mrs. Dalloways Flowers and Molly Gibsons
Gardens: The Floral Imagery of the Victorian Domestic Novel in Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway
2B: Nature, Technology, and Scientific Discovery

Chair: Diana Royer, Miami University Hamilton
Emily Kopley (Stanford University): Woolf s Anxiety About Nature and Audens The Age of Anxiety
Sara Bryant (University of Virginia): Woolf s Animalistic Technology
Derek James Ryan (University of Glasgow): Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon
us: Digging Granite and Chasing Rainbows with Virginia Woolf
2C: Painting Woolf

Chair: Jody Rosen, New York City College of Technology
Suzanne Bellamy (The University of Sydney): Painting the Natural World: Visual Composition in
Woolf s Texts
Cara Lewis (University of Virginia): Nature Morte in To the Lighthouse
Marty Epp-Carter (Clemson University): Contemporary Graphic Design Creates a Visual
Interpretation of Virginia Woolf s Kew Gardens
2D: Natures Eternal Return: Rural and Urban Controversies

Chair: Melissa Wisner, Yale University
Teresa Boyer (Claremont Graduate University): Red Asters and Purple Heather: The Battered Old
Woman in Mrs. Dalloway
Tonya Krouse (Northern Kentucky University): The Politics of Nature in the Domestic and Urban
Landscapes of Woolf s The Years
Mark Hussey (Pace University): Id make it penal, leaving litter: Rural Preservation in Between the Acts
2E: Breaking Boundaries: Geographical, Psychological, Biographical

Chair: Laci Mattison, Florida State University
Barbara Lonnquist (Chestnut Hill College): Woolf s Solitary Trampings in Cornwall
Christopher Brown (California State Polytechnic University, Pomona): rebours: Nature Fetishism
as Death-Drive in To the Lighthouse
Lisbeth Larsson (Gothenburg University): Doggraphy as ultimate biography
Lunch 12:00-1:30
IVWS Business Meeting and Virginia Woolf Miscellany Meeting
Session 3 Friday 1:30-3:00
3A: Of Cities, Horses, and the Historical Moment in Jacobs Room

Chair: Kate Sedon, Independent Scholar
Vara Neverow (Southern Connecticut State University): The Woolf, the Horse and the Fox in Jacobs
Room and Orlando
Keri Barber (University of California, Riverside): Virginia Woolf and Horses: Jacobs Unnatural
Death in Jacobs Room
3B: Nature, War, and Mrs. Dalloway

Chair: Irene Klosko, Holy Family University
Molly Hoff (Independent Scholar): It Was a Very Nice Place
Brenna McLaughlin (Independent Scholar): Death and Life Amongst the Trees: Culpability in
Mrs. Dalloway
Jane Lilienfeld (Lincoln University): The Besieged Garden: Nature in Virginia Woolf s Mrs.
Dalloway and Willa Cathers One of Ours
3C: Leonard Woolf and the Intellectual Environment

Chair: Wayne Chapman, Clemson University
Luke Reader (University of California, Irvine): Listening In, Tuning Out: Leonard Woolf s
Criticism of the BBC During the 1930s
Wayne Chapman (Clemson University): The Decline of the West and Intellectual Quackery:
Checking the Climate with Leonard Woolf and W.B. Yeats
Janet Manson (Clemson University): An Annotated Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard
Woolf: The Revised Third Edition
3D: Water in Woolf

Chair: Catherine Hollis, UC Berkeley Extension
Hongling Lu (Nanjing Normal University): The Ecological Significance of Water Images in The Waves
Patrizia Muscogiuri (Independent Scholar): This, I fancy, must be the sea: Thalassic Aesthetics
in Virginia Woolf s Writing
Melissa Wisner (Yale University): Mermaids, Salmon, and Pirates: Aqueous Imagery in Mrs.
Dalloway
3E: The Nature of Patriarchy

Chair: Cara Lewis, University of Virginia
Kimberly Coates (Bowling Green State University): Volatile Beauty: Virginia Woolf, War, and the
Natural World
Megan Branch (Fordham University): The hour, irrevocable: Time and Patriarchy in Virginia
Woolf
Austin Riede (University of Illionois at Urbana-Champaign): Human Nature? Mrs. Dalloway,
Shell-shock, and the Man of the Forest

Virginia Woolf and the Horse Capital of the World: Closer Than We Thought
Chair: Renee Dickinson, Radford University
Beth Rigel Daugherty (Otterbein College): Taking Her Fences: The Equestrian Virginia Woolf
Emily Bingham (Independent Scholar): Kentucky in Bloomsbury: Henrietta Bingham, Black
Culture, and the Southern Gothic in Jazz-Age London
SPECIAL PRESENTATION 4:45-5:45

Cecil Woolf (Cecil Woolf Publishers): As I Remember Them: Virginia and Leonard
SATURDAY, JUNE 5
Session 4 Saturday 9:00-10:30

4A: Environmental Extremes
Chair: Gill Lowe, University Campus Suffolk
Rebecca McNeer (Ohio University Southern): Virginia Woolf: Natural Olympian: Swimming and
Diving as Metaphors for Writing
Charley Mull (University of Massachusetts Boston): Environmental Excess in Virginia Woolf s
Between the Acts
Ann Gibaldi Campbell (Independent Scholar): Virginia Woolf and the Explosive Silence of Dogs,
Rabbits, and Other Beasts
4B: A planet full of scraps: Things and the Spaces Between in Woolf s Later Works
Chair: Patricia Morgne Cramer (University of Connecticut)
Meghan Fox (SUNY, Stony Brook): Between Nature and Nation: Possibility in the Liminal Spaces
of Between the Acts
Sarah Cornish (Fordham University): Imagined Ineffable Space: Woolf s Architectural Release in
America, Which I Have Never Seen
Kate Nash (Fordham University): Natural Birth, Capital Death: Rubbish in Woolfs The London Scene
4C: Natures Scars: Critiquing Nationalism and Imperialism

Chair: Joanne Tidwell, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Amy Jones (Wright State University): Nature Knows No Borders: Woolf s Critique of Nationalism
in To the Lighthouse
Kate Merz (University of Wisconsin-Madison): Decolonizing the Metropole: Woolf s Empire-
Ecologies Unburied
Erica Delsandro (Bucknell University & Washington University in St. Louis): Woolf s Heart of
Darkness: Nature and National History in Between the Acts
4D: The Personal is Political

Chair: Erik Fuhrer, Independent Scholar
Kathryn Simpson (University of Birmingham): Lappin and Lapinova: A Woolf in Hares
Clothing?
Erin Penner (Cornell University): Crowding Clarissas Garden
Rita Kondrath (Duquesne University): Perhaps she wasnt altogether a lady?: Female Wartime
Self-Definition in Between the Acts
5A: Multifaceted Woolf: Essays, the Academy, and the Hogarth Press
Chair: Pat Collier, Ball State University
Pat Collier (Ball State University): Contextualizing the Common Readers
Beth Rigel Daugherty (Otterbein University): Virginia Woolf and the Teaching of English
Literature
John Young (Marshall University): Woolf s Bibliographical Environment: Toward a Philosophy of
Hogarth Fiction
5B: Cornwall and St. Ives: Images and Influences

Chair: Erica Delsandro (Bucknell University & Washington University in St. Louis)
Keiko Okaya Tanaka (Shizuoka Sangyo University): Why was the Ramsays Summer House in the
Isle of Skye?
Drew Shannon (College of Mount St. Joseph): The lifeboat in the storm: St. Ives, Virginia
Woolf s To the Lighthouse, and Jill Paton Walshs Goldengrove and Unleaving
Vanessa Underwood (Actress/Lecturer): To the Hebridean Lighthouse
5C: Creative Writers Reading Their Work

Chair: Teresa Boyer (Claremont Graduate University)
Laura Pimienta (Indiana University South Bend): Seora Diaz (fiction)
George Ella Lyon: Vision Given Voices: Poems for Virginia Woolf
5D: The Natural World and Woolf s Short Works

Chair: Christopher Brown, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Jennifer A. Williams (University of Maryland): To Seize the Splendor: the role of the Lyric in
Virginia Woolf s The Mark on the Wall
Qinghong Wu (Jiangsu University): A Chinese Interpretation of The Death of the Moth
Catherine W. Hollis (UC Berkeley Extension): The real problem is to climb to the top of the
mountain: Virginia Woolf as Mountaineer
5E: Undergraduate Roundtable

Studying Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group: Seven-minute presentations followed by
discussion.
Chair: Kristin Czarnecki (Georgetown College)
Kelsey Kallhoff (Morningside College)
Becca Anderson (Morningside College)
Whitley Arens (Georgetown College)
Cortney Thorn (Georgetown College)
Kyle Huskin (Georgetown College)
Josh Slone (Georgetown College)
Ashlyn Anderson-Keelin (Georgetown College)
12:30-2:00 p.m.Lunch
Pedagogy Workshop 12:45-1:45

Leslie Werden (Morningside College): Prolific & Proficient: Writing with Students and Virginia
Woolf
Planning Committee Meeting 12:45-1:45, for 2011 Conference
6A: Woolf and Nature: New Visual and Verbal Contexts

Chair: Elisa K. Sparks (Clemson University)
Diane Gillespie (Washington State University): The Birds the Word: Virginia Woolf and W.H.
Hudson, Visionary Ornithologist
Leslie Kathleen Hankins (Cornell College): Seascapes, Treescapes, Wordscapes: Virginia Woolf
and the Artists of St. Ives
Jane Goldman (University of Glasgow): The Dogs that Therefore Woolf Follows: Some Canine
Sources for A Room of Ones Own in Nature and Art
6B: Nature in the City

Chair: Tonya Krause (Northern Kentucky University)
Jessica Glennon-Zukoff (Mills College): Out to Sea and Alone: Microcosm of the Protagonist in
Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway
Joanne Tidwell (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): Nature in Virginia Woolf s Mrs.
Dalloway and Ian McEwans Saturday
Zachary Hacker (College of Mount St. Joseph): The Scars: Virginia Woolf s and Charles Dickens
English Landscapes of Potential
6C: The Waves: Primeval, Cosmic, Biblical

Chair: Charley Mull (University of Massachusetts Boston)
Margaret Sullivan (Saint Louis University): Let There be Rose Leaves: Lesbian Subjectivity and
Religious Discourse in Woolf s The Waves
Erik Fuhrer (Independent Scholar): The Waves: (re)Cycling Biblical Narrative
Emily Hinnov (BGSU Firelands College): To give the moment whole: The Nature of Time and
Cosmic Unity in Virginia Woolf s The Waves
6D: Theories of Nature

Chair: Ann Marie Lindsey (CUNY Graduate Center)
Benjamin Hagen (University of Rhode Island): It Is Almost Impossible That I Should Be Here:
Wordsworthian Nature and an Ethics of Self-Writing in Virginia Woolf s A Sketch of the Past
Diana Royer (Miami University Hamilton): Mining With the Head: Virginia Woolf, Henry David
Thoreau, and Exploring the Self Through Nature
Deborah Gerrard (De Montfort University): The Influence of Edward Carpenters Back-to-
Nature Philosophy on Woolf s The Voyage Out (1915) and Jacobs Room (1922)
KEYNOTE 4:00-5:30
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette College)

Suzanne Bellamy (The University of Sydney): Tribute to Isota Tucker Epes
BANQUET 7:00
Virginia Woolf Players
The Great Frost (20-minute animated film, scenes from Orlando)
SUNDAY, JUNE 6
Session 7 Sunday 8:30-10:00
7A: Transformative/Transforming Nature: Fantasy and Myth in Orlando

Chair: Kimberly Coates (Bowling Green State University)
Elise Swinford (University of Massachusetts Amherst): Trans(gendered)formation: Orlando as Elegy
Erin Douglas (Miami University, Ohio): Scripts of Femininity Queered: Femininity, Pleasure, and
Orlandos Floral Transformation
Lynn Hall (Miami University, Ohio): [H]er God was Nature: The Natural and the Fantastic in
Virginia Woolf s Orlando
7B: Bodily Woolf: Food, Illness, Aging

Chair: Austin Riede (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Alice Lowe (Independent Scholar): A Certain Hold on Haddock and Sausage: Dining Well in
Virginia Woolf s Life and Work
Katie Rapier (Georgetown College): The Convoluted Consciousness of Virginia Woolf
Kate Sedon (Independent Scholar): Moments of Aging: Revising Mother Nature in Virginia
Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway
7C: Animals, Social Deviants, and Evolution

Chair: Megan Fox (SUNY, Stony Brook)
Elizabeth Mathews (Mills College): Impaled by a Birds Sharp Beak: Lust and Violence in Woolf
Sara Henning-Stout (University of St. Andrews): Natural Autobiography: Birds as Social Deviants
in Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway
Jeanne Dubino (Appalachian State University): Woolf, Darwin, and Flush; or, The Origin of
Spaniels
7D: Weather in Woolf

Chair: Sara Bryant (University of Virginia)
Verita Sriratana (University of St. Andrews): It was an uncertain spring: Reading the Weather in
The Years
Paula Maggio (The University of Akron): Woolf and Weather: Natures Revelation of the essential
thing
Shuttles to Main Campus

Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Gallery 10:30
CLOSING KEYNOTE 11:00-12:30

Diana Swanson (Northern Illinois University): Virginia Woolf and Ecofeminism

Virginia Woolf & The Natural World Book

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Clemson University

Virginia Woolf & the Natural World

Follow this and additional works at: http://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cudp_woolfe

Edited by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman

Copyright 2011 by Clemson University

Editorial Assistants: Emily Kudeviz and Christina Cook.

Cover design by Christina Cook.

Notes on Contributors .............................................................................................. 236

by Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman

AHH A Haunted House

by Bonnie Kime Scott

Cultural and Radical Ecofeminisms

understood in terms of intention or representation. Rather, as Grosz explains, he suggests

I: ECOFEMINISM AND WOOLFS FEMINISM

However, interestingly, Le Guin describes home as another, larger kind of pouch or

counter-hegemonic ecological standpoint and we can extend that challenge to all of us to

II: THE REALITY AND SUBJECTIVITIES OF OTHER-THAN-HUMAN BEINGS

2. So we come to my second question: the question of how to see, how to reimag-

human beings. np.

And again we hear bits and pieces of human conversation.

And they want to know what we talked about

by Elisa Kay Sparks

VIOLET DICKINSON AND FRIENDS

THE VOYAGE OUT (1915)

NIGHT AND DAY (1919)

MONDAY OR TUESDAY (1921)

JACOBS ROOM (1922)

MRS. DALLOWAY (1925)

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927)

THE WAVES (1931)

THE YEARS (1937)

Fig. 1: Ordinance Survey of Talland House

BETWEEN THE ACTS (1941)

Fig. 2: Design for a Potential Virginia Woolf Garden

Digest of Flower Symbolism from

8 Garden Anemone . . . Forsaken Laurel . . . Glory

APPENDIX III: FLOWER TOTALS

APPENDIX IV: ROSES

Variety of Total Plants

Flags (yellow Iris)

a reading by Beth Rigel Daugherty

Tomorrow we go down to Asheham, where we have first to survive a visit from

by Erin Kay Penner

What there is is a whole architecture, a whole complex of phenomena in tiers,

1. A special thanks to Elisa Sparks for reminding me of this passage.

distinctive, eclectic political implications emerging from, and simultaneously channelling,

Rupert Brooke, 1913 NPG P101(b) by Sherrill Schell, glass

caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

indulgence in drunkenness and rape, characteristics that manifest themselves in milder

Foxhunting: Will the Ban on Hunting Affect Fox Numbers? <http://www.thefoxwebsite.org/foxhunting/hunt-

explanation of concept by means of metaphor, by prowling around animal language, and

Words cannot picture her; []

Must I, as Ruskin dictates, change this last into,

With the keen wolf-hound sleeping undistraught(a villainous make

Quiller-Couch to describe the impossibility of writing poetry in poverty as evidenced by the

impressions of a Flemish fairground curiosity, one of a number of unusual objects who

PART I: I WISH I HAD SEEN HIM.V. WOOLF (L2: 549)

PART II: THAT MYSTERIOUS SPIRIT [] IN ALL NATURE, BUT IN BIRDS

PART III: A TENDER SPIRITUAL MUSICA LANGUAGE WITHOUT WORDS

Although in Green Mansions Hudson reflects patriarchal identifications of women with

DARWINISM AND THE STORY OF CREATION

Historical accounts have traditionally served to provide legitimacy and to secure