essays on virginia woolf

8/12/2019 Essays on Virginia Woolf

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ceptional objectivity, there are times when a prophetic undercurrent seems to under-mine the self-imposed detachment of the writer to make a case for the Jewishnessof Joyce. The last sentence in the book is revealing: "For some, Joyce as a 'Jew'may only be an alluring myth, but for others, it is a key to understanding hislife." Ira Nadel hands over this key. It opens many doors.

CORINNA DEL GRECO LOBNER

The University of Tulsa

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Jane Wheare. Virginia Woolf: Dramatic Novelist. New York: St. Martin's, 1989.238 pp. $35.00.

Virginia R. Hyman. '1To The Lighthouse" and Beyond: Transformations in the Narrativesof Virginia Woolf New York: Lang, 1988. 288 pp. $39.10.

Ruth C. Miller. Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life. New York: St. Martin's,1989. 135 pp. $35.00.

Diane Filby Gillespie. The Sisters ' Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolfand Vanessa Bell. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1988. 392 pp. $32.50.

Virginia Woolf. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume II. Ed. Andrew McNeillie.New York: Harcourt, 1988. 448 pp. $22.95.

The most constructive result of reading several books about Virginia Woolf followedby reading one of her volumes of essays is the sense that her essays representmore than a novelist searching for her own system of fiction; they represent away of reading that still seems fresh and exciting. We are ever so much morecareful and ideological, but we often submerge the joy of reading underneath ouracademic concerns for various theoretical schools of thought.

Jane Wheare points out that Virginia Woolfs modernist, experimental bookswere only part of her text; Woolf also wrote three dramatic, realistic novels: TheVoyage Out, Night and Day, and The Years. The modernist novels are about novels;the realistic novels are about society. But even Wheare does not fully believe inthis division: "This is not to deny, however, that in questioning the fictional nar-ratives which we impose upon experience, The Waves makes a point not only aboutthe novel but also about society." In the realistic novels, however, Woolf "putsinto practice her belief that theoretical ideas make the deepest impression whenthey are dramatised through fictional scenes or episodes," creating "the illusionof absence from, her own text" so as to appear dramatic rather than didactic.

Wheare is a good reader; she is adept at finding repetitions and ideas em-

bodied in characters, and although for the most part I accept her particular analysesof the novels, her discussions seem constricted, dry, unattached to the vital VirginiaWoolf I read. Of course a writer makes her themes clear through the actionsand dialogue, but I want Wheare to elucidate Woolfs technique and make mewant to read the novels again.

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Wheare also makes the naive argument about Night and Day that "Woolfsgood-tempered and essentially sympathetic portrayal of the anti-feminists [in thenovel] is considerably more persuasive than a bitter attack upon them would be."To paraphrase Jane Marcus and others, what is wrong with anger against the

patriarchy; why assume A Room of One's Own is a better book than Three Guineasbecause the latter's militancy alienates some readers?

And finally Wheare does not fully explore the issues that her own thesis raises,Just how does Woolf avoid sounding didactic? Wheare often claims that Woolfavoids didacticism in some particular scene but never clearly explains her tech-niques. Wheare too often leaves quotations to do her work, and this is tricky,especially if she wants us to read a passage differently from how we used to readit. Wheare's book seems lifeless and overloaded with example; her conclusionsoften seem unjustified. Perhaps there is not enough of Jane Wheare in this book.

Virginia Hyman attempts to show that most of Woolfs writings were in-

fluenced by her competitive and contradictory and ambivalent feelings about herfamily. Mostly she is convincing, although occasionally she stretches for a point:that Woolf and Leslie Stephen both wrote critical marginalia does not prove thatshe was trying to outdo her father as a reader. Hyman's view of theautobiographical writings as narratives is correct, although in these hypertheoreticaldays she probably should define what she means by narrative. She argues convinc-ingly that rather than reading the narrator of A Sketch of the Past as a "passivetranscriber of events over which she has no control . . . Woolf was [instead] anactive creator of this narrative . . . [who] shaped it according to her ownpsychological needs."

Hyman claims throughout the book that Woolfs narratives are distinguishedby "the indeterminancy of characterization and the multiplicity and variabilityof points of view," although she fails to develop this point fully in the Diary,memoirs, or letters. A Woolfian "ambivalence," a swinging back and forth be-tween extremes, which Hyman persuasively follows, is indeed a major characteristicof Woolf as a writer and evidently as a person. But Woolf fused these oppositesinto new wholes; if she felt ambivalence about her mother (and she certainly did),in Mrs. Ramsay she fused the extremes into an artistic creation, the creator anddestructor in one. Hyman argues that Lily Briscoe may solve the painting bydrawing her line, but she does so by splitting the canvas so that the two sidesare joined as well as separated.

Hyman offers some legitimate correctives when she argues that Woolfs rela-tionship with Leslie Stephen was more positive and that with Julia Stephen less

positive than many critics have believed. Hyman's assertion that Woolf slayedher mother's influence more than her father's in killing the Angel of the Housedeserves particular consideration. She is right to remind us that it was Woolfsfather who told her to read her way through the librarythe opposite of whatthe Angel told her.

Hyman tells us little that is new about the novels, although she is quite good

on the middle section of To the Lighthouse and on "The Absence of the 'Other'in The Waves." The book is most helpful in its treatment of the Diary. Hymanreads these volumes as a narrative like any other, as part of the Woolf text. Whatshe does not do, however, is to define clearly the connections between the genres.Also, analyzing a person through a diary is tricky at best. Intelligent, informed

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biographical speculation of the sort in the chapters on Stephen do not always con-vince us to reach the same conclusions about Woolfs actions that Hyman reaches.Nevertheless, Hyman's book is a clear, straightforward, carefully constructedanalysis only slightly infected by the theoretical jargon so fashionable today.

In her dense, sometimes puzzling book, Ruth C. Miller argues that the frames

("arbitrary conventions required to identify and circumscribe works of art") inWoolfs writings "reveal the extent to which she anticipated the contemporaryinterest in the threat that the marginal poses to the integrity of the centre." Eventhough Miller's book is carefully divided into subheadings, I had some difficultyfollowing the argument; but her work rewards a careful reading.

Miller has three chapters. In the first, "Art and Life," she explains thebackground of Woolf s aesthetics and discusses the opposition between art andlife that Miller sees as central to Woolfs work. In Roger Fry and Woolf, "theframe is perceived as a representative of the ordering powers of art, whether it

is the order that art imposes upon life or design upon vision." The image ofthe circle in The Waves "reveals the need for boundaries in life and the dangersthat exist both within and outside of these boundaries." In her second chapter,"Towards a Defence of the Novel," Miller shows that Woolf was attracted tothe distance from reality novels offer and to the potential for closely exploringreality in novels. So, Miller concludes, "In Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf blursthe boundaries between embedded and framing forms until the reader wonderswhether it is fruitful to distinguish between them at all."

In her final chapter, Miller describes how frames "draw attention to the ar-tifice of the works in which they appear' ' and expose the limitations created by

boundaries in life. Framing creates an outside and an inside, and in calling atten-tion to this, Woolf calls attention to her self as an outsider and "encourage[s]the reader to become an outsider as well." Miller discusses rooms, windows,thresholds, and mirrors as the frames in Woolfs novels. These frames "retainthe advantages of the frame of a painting without its limitations." Miller writesespecially well about thresholds. A threshold does not arrange life but intensifiesit as "the spatial metaphor for the present moment." So Mrs. Ramsay pausesat the threshold before leaving the dinner scene, extending the present momentand ending it by preserving it. This is a good chapter, full of revelations aboutvarious novels, stories, and essays. Miller's thoughtful book is worth re-reading.

We have long needed an informed, serious study of the connections betweenVirginia Woolfs and Vanessa Bell's works. Although we might still wish a writerwith more formal understanding of painting would consider the subject, DianeGillespie puts us well on our way with a readable, interesting book.

Gillespie states her goals in her introduction: "to shift the emphasis in theongoing discussion of Virginia Woolf and the visual arts from Roger Fry to VanessaBell; to shift the emphasis in the discussions of the sisters from the psychologicalto the professional and aesthetic; and, in these contexts, to define and reveal morefully the pervasive role of the visual arts in Woolfs writing." All the while, Gillespie

traces collaboration and inspiration between the sisters.First, Gillespie follows the sisters' growing interests in visual arts and in writing,including an astute analysis of Bell's writing and Woolfs drawing. In "TheCommon Viewer" Gillespie considers Woolfs published writings on painting, argu-ing that, as she does in her literary criticism, Woolf "suggests" but does not dic-



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tte "the proper response" to art and "emphasizes its ability to evoke incidentand character."

Then, Gillespie shows how "the sisters' awareness of each other as profes-sional artists" manifested itself in their collaborative works and in their individual

theories. One of the revelations of this discussion is the close understanding Bellhad of Woolfs writingsboth thematically and formally. Bell's frontispiece forWoolfs "Kew Gardens" suggests the visual dimension of conversation in thestory, and her endpiece suggests the same relationship between humankind andthe natural world as does Woolfs story. The illustrations published in Gillespie's

book now become more and more helpful, although the importance of Bell's choicesof color seem slighted by the black and white reproductions.

In the second half of her book, Gillespie shifts the focus to the specific kindsof paintings Vanessa Bell produced and their "many uses in Virginia Woolfsthinking and writing." As did many of her contemporaries, in portraits Bell often

subordinated the human figure "to her interests in light, color, and overall com-position." Bell's faceless people suggest "a transcendence of the individual to thecommunal and possibly to some eternal principles of order." Gillespie tries tochange the usual reading of Lily Briscoe as a portrayal of Woolf to a revealinganalysis of Bell. Covering some of the same ground as Miller, Gillespie discussesthe framing imagery and use of portraits in Woolfs books; juxtaposed with herdiscussion of Bell's paintings, Gillespie's analysis is clearer and more convincingand more relevant.

Gillespie's study produces some important connections. "Both sisters lookedfor formal structures that gave coherence to seemingly chaotic and continual change,

whether in the natural world or in the mind." Many of Bell's landscapes areviewed through a window; many of Woolf s characters withdraw to rooms in whichthey can "scrutinize themselves more closely" and study other people from itswindows or doorways.

Gillespie's book is an important contribution to Woolf studies as well as aninteresting discussion of the relationship between arts and between collaborativeartists. One is not completely satisfied, however. What, for instance, is the con-nection between Woolfs narrative and descriptive techniques and the modernistpainter's cropping that radically alters the viewer's perspective and that is oftenseen in the paintings represented in the book? Between Woolfs descriptive passagesand Bell's decorative patterns? And to say, as Gillespie does, that Lily Briscoe's

post-Impressionist painting cannot portray the artist's "struggle that went intoits own creation" is to misunderstand the formal traits of the paintings Woolfsaw in Fry's exhibits or in Bell's studio. Any number of the paintings in TheSisters' Arts fully preservein visible paint strokes at leastthe artist's struggleand personality. But these are minor quibbles about an intriguing study.

Quibbles are even less often necessary about the second volume of Woolfsessays. Most of the works here, admirably edited by Andrew McNeillie, are shortreviews for TLS. Woolf comments in her Diary that she learned to write with

a pen in her hand while working on the many essays she wrote for this journal;she also later criticized her own essay voice for being too gratuitous, too eagerto please, too much like tea-table chitchat. The essays in this volume (1912-1918)illustrate the truth of both comments. She reads closely, following specifics froma book by her own reactions, but her voice is constrictedperhaps by TLS

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restraintswithout the freshness and individuality of the Common Reader essays.Woolf has not yet hit her stride as an essayist, not yet found the voice of "ModernFiction" or "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" or A Room of One's Own. Never-theless, McNeillie's footnotes are reminders of the erudition and of the diligenceof a major woman of letters.

One quality of the essays that struck me after reading the four books abouther is how little of what we look for in Woolf she looked for in the books she

read. Much of this difference is methodological, our academic backgrounds leadingus to search for images of thresholds and so on. Woolf, on the other hand, wanteda sense of the human being when she read his or her words. We should not dismissthis as impressionistic and quaintly archaic, therefore unworthy of our analysis.Woolf began a book as a reader, searching for uniqueness in the bock. The publica-tion of this last part of Woolfs prodigious life's work clearly shows that the criticalwork on Woolf as an essayist has not yet really begun.

Woolfs technique is "to open the mind as widely as possible to see whateach writer is trying to do, and in interpreting him only to frame rules whichspring directly from our impression of the work itself." When she reviews literarycritical books she does not analyze the critic's methodology; she speaks familiarlyabout the original works under consideration and compares the critic's experienceof reading with her own. (Ironically, she expresses surprise that three books aboutJane Austen have appeared in one year. What would she think of the bibliographyof critical analyses of her own work?) When she reviews a biography, she speaksabout the subjects as if she had visited or known them.

And when she reviews novels, she does not have a rigid agenda, a concise

theoretical approach. She reads a novel as a separate entity and asks the ques-tions that it raises rather than the questions a theory would demand. So she readsH. G. Wells' Joan and Peter as a dogmatic book successfully peopled with fleshand blood characters; his is the "power of visualising a world for his latest ideato grow in." All of Charlotte Bronte's books are gestures of "defiance, biddingher torturers depart and leave her queen of a splendid island of imagination."

While reading Woolfs kindly, honest, informed, and, above all, intelligentcomments upon so many different writers and topics, one cannot help wonderingwhat a contemporary editor would think of her graceful, careful, subtle prose.We continue to find in Virginia Woolfs text such depth and quality of human

expression that we can only regret that soon, with the completion of the publica-tion of her essays, little that is unknown from her pen will appear. But obviouslywe will continue listening to her voices.

STEVE FEREBEE

North Carolina Wesleyan College

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